Carl Jung: In our sleep we consult the 2,000,000-year-old man which each of us represents.

Before I came here I had the impression one might get from Europe that he [Roosevelt] was an opportunist, perhaps even an erratic mind.

Now that I have seen him and heard him when he talked at Harvard, however, I am convinced that here is a strong man, a man who is really great.

Perhaps that’s why many people do not like him.

[Dr. Jung paid his respects to dictators, explaining their rise as due to the effort of peoples to delegate to others the complicated task of managing their collective existence so that individuals might be free to engage in “individuation.” He defined the term as the development by each person of his own inherent pattern of existence.]

People have been bewildered by the war, by what has occurred in Russia, Italy, Germany, Spain.

These things take their breath away.

They wonder if it is worth while living because they have lost their beliefs, their philosophy.

They ask if civilization has made any progress at all. I would call it progress that in the 2,000,000 years we have existed on earth we have developed a chin and a decent sort of brain. Historically what we call progress is, after all, just a mushroom growth of coal and oil.

Otherwise we are not any more intelligent than the old Greeks or Romans.

As to the present troubles, it is important simply to remember that mankind has been through such things more than once and has given evidence of a great adaptive system stored away in our unconscious mind.

[It is to this great adaptive system in every individual that he addresses himself, he explained, when a patient comes to him, broken down by his struggles with the problems of his individual existence.]

Together the patient and I address ourselves to the 2,000,000-year-old man that is in all of us.

In the last analysis, most of our difficulties come from losing contact with our instincts, with the age-old unforgotten wisdom stored up in us.’ And where do we make contact with this old man in us?

In our dreams,they are the clear manifestations of our unconscious mind.

They are the rendezvous of the racial history and of our current external problems.

In our sleep we consult the 2,000,000-year-old man which each of us represents.

We struggle with him in various manifestations of fantasy.

That is why I ask a patient to write up his dreams.

Usually they point the way for him as an individual.

[Dr. Jung said we dream all the time—it is normal to dream.

Those who say they have a dreamless sleep, he insisted, merely forget their dreams immediately on waking.

In all languages, he pointed out, there is a proverb recording the wisdom of sleeping on any difficult problem. . . .

Even when awake, Dr. Jung concluded, we dream; unbidden fantasies flit through the background of our minds and occasionally
come to notice when our attention to immediate external problems is lowered by fatigue or reverie.

There is hope of repairing a breakdown whenever a patient has neurotic symptoms.

They indicate that he is not at one with himself and the neurotic symptoms themselves usually diagnose what is wrong.

Those who have no neurotic symptoms are probably beyond help by any one. ~New York Times interview October 4, 1936 as found in C.G. Jung Speaking [Pages 88-90. Carl

Carl Jung on "Isms"

[Carl Jung on “Isms”]

Special to The New York Times

New Haven, Conn., Oct. 20.–Dr. C. G. Jung of Zurich said today in opening the Terry lectures at Yale University before more than 2,000 persons in Woolsey Hall that the great mental epidemics of our days, called “isms,” showed that the majority of human beings were exposed to the possibility of being dominated by irrational ideas.

“Such ideas are based upon unconscious motive-powers,” he added. “The most efficient method of exploring the causality and the meaning of such phenomena is the analysis of dreams.”

Dr. Jung crossed the ocean to appear for the Dwight H. Terry Foundation which was established for lectures on “Religion in the Light of Science and Philosophy.” He was introduced by President Seymour.

Speaking on the topic “Applied Psychology and Religion,” he said:

“There are any amount of creeds and ceremonies for the sole purpose of forming a defense against the unexpected dangerous tendencies of the unconscious. The peculiar fact that the dream is the divine voice and messenger and yet an unending source of trouble does not disturb the primitive mind. Since the dawn of mankind there has been a marked tendency to delimit the unruly and arbitrary ‘supernatural’ influence by definite forms and laws. And this process has gone on in history by the multiplication of rites, institutions and creeds.

“In the last 2,000 years we find the institution of the Christian Church assuming a mediating and protective function between these influences and man. It is not denied in medieval ecclesiastical writings that a divine influx could take place in dreams, for instance, but this view is not exactly encouraged and the church reserves her right to decide whether a revelation is to be considered as authentic or not.”

In his discussion of dreams, Dr. Jung stated that he “takes dreams for granted and not as a ‘mere facade behind which something has been carefully hidden.'” In this he disagrees with Freud.

“Freud has made a courageous effort to elucidate the intricacies of dream psychology by the aid of views which he has gathered in the field of psychopathology,” said Dr. Jung. “Much as I admire the boldness of his attempt, I cannot agree with his method and its results.

“I am doubtful whether we can assume a dream is something else than it appears to be. I am rather inclined to quote another Jewish authority, the Talmud, which says: “The dream is its own interpretation.’

“The dream is a natural event and there is no reason under the sun why we should assume that it is a crafty device to lead us astray.”

Image: The Blind Leading the Blind ~ Pieter Bruegel the Elder

‘Shadow’ Carried by All, Says Jung

October 22, 1937

‘Shadow’ Carried by All, Says Jung

Special to The New York Times

New Haven, Oct. 22–Dr. Carl G. Jung, Professor of Analytic Psychology at Zurich, said today in the third and last of the annual Terry lectures at Yale University that not only is there an authentic religious function in the unconscious mind, but the manifestations of it have followed the same pattern for more than 2,000 years.

Man’s struggles with anti-social tendencies were vividly illustrated by Dr. Jung as suppression, a conscious moral choice, or repression, a sort of half-hearted letting go of things.

“To live with a saint,” he said, “might cause an inferiority complex or even wild outburst of immorality in individuals less morally gifted. You cannot pump morality into a system where it is not indigenous, though you may spoil it.

“Unfortunately there is no doubt about the fact that man is, as a whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Every one carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. If an inferiority is conscious, one has always a chance to correct it.

Furthermore, it is constantly in contact with other interests, so that it is steadily subjected to modifications. But if it is repressed and isolated from consciousness, it never gets corrected. It is, moreover, liable to burst forth in a moment of unawareness. At all events, it forms an unconscious snag, blocking the most recent attempts.

“We carry our past with us, viz: the primitive and inferior man with his desires and emotions, and it is only by a considerable effort that we can detach ourselves from this burden. If it comes to a neurosis, we have invariably to deal with a considerably intensified shadow. And if such a case wants to be cured it is necessary to find a way in which man’s conscious personality and his shadow can live together.

“This is a very serious problem for all those who are either themselves in such a predicament, or who have to help other people to live. A mere suppression of the shadow is just as little of a remedy as beheading against headache. To destroy a man’s morality does not help either because it would kill his better self, without which even the shadow makes no sense.

“The reconciliation of these opposites is a major problem. It is natural that the more robust mentality of the fathers could not appreciate the delicacy and the merit of this subtle and, from a modern point of view, immensely practical argument. It was also dangerous, and it is still the most vital and yet the most ticklish problem of a civilization that has forgotten why man’s life should be sacrificial, that means, offered up to an idea greater than man.”

Applying the struggle to European upheavals, Dr. Jung stated that the mental effort has gone on until now there is no civilized country where the lower strata are not in a state of unrest, and that in some European nations such a condition is overtaking the upper strata, too.

“This state of affairs,” he declared, “is the demonstration of our psychological program in a gigantic state. Such problems can only be solved by a general change of attitude. It begins with a change in individuals. The accumulation of such individual changes only will produce a collective solution.”

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/09/21/reviews/jung-lecture2.html