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The farmer and his son
The farmer and his son: One day in late summer, an old farmer was working in his field with his old sick horse. The farmer felt compassion for the horse and desired to lift its burden. So he left his horse loose to go the mountains and live out the rest of its life.
Soon after, neighbors from the nearby village visited, offering their condolences and said, “What a shame. Now your only horse is gone. How unfortunate you are!. You must be very sad. How will you live, work the land, and prosper?” The farmer replied: “Who knows? We shall see”.
Two days later the old horse came back now rejuvenated after meandering in the mountainsides while eating the wild grasses. He came back with twelve new younger and healthy horses which followed the old horse into the corral.
Word got out in the village of the old farmer’s good fortune and it wasn’t long before people stopped by to congratulate the farmer on his good luck. “How fortunate you are!” they exclaimed. You must be very happy!” Again, the farmer softly said, “Who knows? We shall see.”
At daybreak on the next morning, the farmer’s only son set off to attempt to train the new wild horses, but the farmer’s son was thrown to the ground and broke his leg. One by one villagers arrived during the day to bemoan the farmer’s latest misfortune. “Oh, what a tragedy! Your son won’t be able to help you farm with a broken leg. You’ll have to do all the work yourself, How will you survive? You must be very sad”. they said. Calmly going about his usual business the farmer answered, “Who knows? We shall see”
Several days later a war broke out. The Emperor’s men arrived in the village demanding that young men come with them to be conscripted into the Emperor’s army. As it happened the farmer’s son was deemed unfit because of his broken leg. “What very good fortune you have!!” the villagers exclaimed as their own young sons were marched away. “You must be very happy.” “Who knows? We shall see!”, replied the old farmer as he headed off to work his field alone.
As time went on the broken leg healed but the son was left with a slight limp. Again the neighbors came to pay their condolences. “Oh what bad luck. Too bad for you”! But the old farmer simply replied; “Who knows? We shall see.”
As it turned out the other young village boys had died in the war and the old farmer and his son were the only able bodied men capable of working the village lands. The old farmer became wealthy and was very generous to the villagers. They said: “Oh how fortunate we are, you must be very happy”, to which the old farmer replied, “Who knows? We shall see!” — Probably an old Chinese tale
neurosis
A man is ill, but the illness is nature’s attempt to heal him. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 361
We should not try to “get rid” of a neurosis, but rather to experience what it means, what it has to teach, what its purpose is.
We should even learn to be thankful for it, otherwise we pass it by and miss the opportunity of getting to know ourselves as we really are.
A neurosis is truly removed only when it has removed the false attitude of the ego.
We do not cure it—it cures us.
A man is ill, but the illness is nature’s attempt to heal him.
From the illness itself we can learn so much for our recovery, and what the neurotic flings away as absolutely worthless contains the true gold we should never have found elsewhere.
The psychoanalyst’s every second word is “nothing but”—just what a dealer would say of an article he wanted to buy on the cheap.
In this case it is man’s soul, his hope, his boldest flight, his finest adventure. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 179
separating
“If you, as his intimate, wish to sever your relationship with the narcissist, disagree with his views. Belittle him, reduce him to size, compare him to others, tell him he is not unique, criticize him, give unsolicited advice, and offer him help. In short, deprive him of the grandiose and fantastic illusions, which holds his personality together.
The narcissist is a delicately attuned piece of equipment. At the first sign of danger to his inflated False Self, he will quit and disappear on you.”
― Sam Vaknin, Malignant Self Love: Narcissism Revisited
false modesty
“The narcissist has to defend himself against his own premonitions, his internal sempiternal trial, his guilt, shame, and anxiety. One of the more efficacious defense mechanisms at his disposal is false modesty.
The narcissist publicly chastises himself for being unworthy, unfit, lacking, not trained and not (formally) schooled, not objective, cognizant of his own shortcomings, and vain. This way, if (or, rather, when) exposed for what he is, he can always say: “But I told you so in the first place, haven’t I?” False modesty is, thus, an insurance policy. The narcissist “hedges his bets” by placing a side bet on his own fallibility…
Yet another function is to extract Narcissistic Supply from the listener. By contrasting his own self-deprecation with a brilliant, dazzling display of ingenuity, wit, intellect, knowledge, or beauty, the narcissist aims to secure .. protestation from the listener.”
― Sam Vaknin, Malignant Self Love: Narcissism Revisited
abusers
“[Abusers] blame the world – circumstances, other people – for their defeats, misfortune, misconduct, and failures. The abuser firmly believes that his life is swayed by currents and persons over which he has no influence whatsoever (he has an external locus of control).
But there are even subtler variants of this psychological defense mechanism. Not infrequently an abuser will say: “I made a mistake because I am stupid”, implying that his deficiencies and inadequacy are things he cannot help having and cannot change. This is also an alloplastic defense because it abrogates responsibility.
Many abusers exclaim: “I misbehaved because I completely lost my temper.” On the surface, this appears to be an autoplastic defense with the abuser assuming responsibility for his misconduct. But it could be interpreted as an alloplastic defense, depending on whether the abuser believes that he can control his temper.”
― Sam Vaknin, Malignant Self Love: Narcissism Revisited
the infinite
Only analysts who’ve experienced the infinite in their own life are effective :
“From the standpoint of modern depth psychology, [a] shamanic experience amounts to undergoing an invasion of the collective unconscious and dealing with it successfully. When the training analysis of a future analyst remains hung up in discussion of personal problems, in my experience, that person never turns out to be an effective analyst later on. Only when he has experienced the infinite in his own life, as Jung formulated it, has his life found a meaning. Otherwise it loses itself in superficialities. And, we might add, then such a person can only offer others something superficial: good advice, intellectual interpretations, well-meaning recommendations for normalization. It is important that the analyst dwell inwardly in what is essential; then he can lead the analysand to his own inner center. A shaman said aptly to a piece of wood which he wanted to turn into a drum: ‘Make your mind free from quarrelsomeness and discord, larch, you’re going to become a drum.'” Marie-Louise von Franz, Psychotherapy
[Carl Jung on “Therapist” from: Lewis Lafontaine]
From: Lewis Lafontaine to Carl Jung Depth Psychology
Wisdom never forgets that all things have two sides, and it would also know how to avoid such calamities if ever it had any power. ~Carl Jung, Mysterium Conjunctionis, Para 135
As therapists we are subject to the unavoidable destinies of our patients. ~Carl Jung; Conversations with C.G. Jung, Psychotherapy, Page 113.
Dreams are often anticipatory and would lose their specific meaning on a purely causalistic view. They afford unmistakable information about the analytical situation, the correct understanding of which is of the greatest therapeutic importance. ~Carl Jung; “The Practical Use of Dream Analysis” CW 16: The Practice of Psychotherapy; Page 312.
There are analysts who believe that they can get along without self-analysis. This is Munchausen psychology, and they will certainly remain stuck. They forget that one of the most important therapeutically effective factors is subjecting you to the objective judgment of another. As regards ourselves we remain blind, despite everything and everybody. Carl Jung; “The Theory of Psychoanalysis”; CW 4: Freud and Psychoanalysis; Page 449.
All religions are therapies for the sorrows and disorders of the soul.” ~Carl Jung; “Commentary to The Secret of the Golden Flower”, 1929.
One has to remind oneself again and again that in therapy it is more important for the patient to understand than for the analyst’s theoretical expectations to be satisfied. The patient’s resistance to the analyst is not necessarily wrong; it is rather a sign that something does not “click.” Either the patient is not yet at a point where he would be able to understand, or the interpretation does not fit. ~Carl Jung; Man and His Symbols. (1964) Essay retitled “Symbols and the Interpretation of Dreams” In CW 18: P.61
The new attitude gained in the course of analysis tends sooner or later to become inadequate in one way or another, and necessarily so, because the flow of life again and again demands fresh adaptation. Adaptation is never achieved once and for all.…In the last resort it is highly improbable that there could ever be a therapy which got rid of all difficulties. Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health. What concerns us here is only an excessive amount of them. ~Carl Jung; CW 9; The Transcendent Function.
When I was working on the stone tablets, I became aware of the fateful links between me and my ancestors. I feel very strongly that I am under the influence of things or questions which were left incomplete and unanswered by my parents and grandparents and more distant ancestors. It often seems as if there were an impersonal karma within a family, which is passed on from parents to children. It has always seemed to me that I had to answer questions which fate had posed to my forefathers, and which had not yet been answered, or as if I had to complete, or perhaps continue, things which previous ages had left unfinished. It is difficult to determine whether these questions are more of a personal or more of a general (collective) nature. It seems to me that the latter is the case. A collective problem, if not recognized as such, always appears as a personal problem, and in individual cases may give the impression that something is out of order in the realm of the personal psyche. The personal sphere is indeed disturbed, but such disturbances need not be primary; they may well be secondary, the consequence of an insupportable change in the social atmosphere. The cause of disturbance is, therefore, not to be sought in the personal surroundings, but rather in the collective situation. Psychotherapy has hitherto taken this matter far too little into account. ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams, Reflections; Pages 233-234.
He [the psychotherapist] is not just working for this particular patient, who may be quite insignificant, but for himself as well and his own soul, and in so doing he is perhaps laying an infinitesimal grain in the scales of humanity’s soul. Small and invisible as this contribution may be, it is yet an opus magnum. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, par. 449.
…as a psychotherapist I do not by any means try to deliver my patients from fear. Rather, I lead them to the reason for their fear, and then it becomes clear that it is justified. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 398-400.
I think that if you immerse yourself in my thought-processes without regarding them as a new gospel, a light will gradually go up for you about the nature of psychotherapy. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 455-456.
The psychotherapist must be a philosopher in the old sense of the word. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 455-456.
It is of course essential for the psychotherapist to have a fair knowledge of himself, for anyone who does not understand himself cannot understand others and can never be psychotherapeutically effective unless he has first treated himself with the same medicine. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 455-456.
The psychiatrist understands nothing of psychotherapy in principle because he is never in the position of having to practice it. One could just as well subordinate internal medicine to surgery. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 163.
To the psychotherapist an old man who cannot bid farewell to life appears as feeble and sickly as a young man who is unable to embrace it. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Pages 399-403.
There were and there are simply not enough doctors who have any reliable training in psychotherapy. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 542-544.
Hence I am all for the psychotherapist calmly acknowledging that he treats and cures neither with diet nor pills nor with the surgeon’s knife. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 178-180.
He[A patient being referred] is desperate for therapy, and needs it too—as he basically consists of an intellectual halo wandering lonely and footless through the world. ~Carl Jung to Erich Neumann, 11Sept1933.
Music is dealing with such deep archetypal material with boots as swift as and those who play don’t realize this. Yet, used therapeutically from this level music should be an essential part of every analysis ~Carl Jung, J.E.T., Page 126.
Music is dealing with such deep archetypal material and those who play don’t realize this. Yet, used therapeutically from this level music should be an essential part of every analysis. ~C.G. Jung Speaking, Page 89.
I maintained that psychiatry, in the broadest sense, is a dialogue between the sick psyche and the psyche of the doctor, which is presumed to be ‘normal.’ It is a coming to terms between the sick personality and that of the therapist, both in principle equally subjective. ~Carl Jung, MDR, Page 110.
In therapy the problem is always the whole person, never the symptom alone. We must ask questions which challenge the whole personality. ~Carl Jung, MDR, Page 117.
One has to remind oneself again and again that in therapy it is more important for the patient to understand than for the analyst’s theoretical expectations to be satisfied. ~Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols, Page 61.
I practice psychology in the first place as a science, in the second place as an instrument of psychotherapy. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 56-57.
I have had a number of TB patients in my time and some really excellent results with psychotherapy, but it is true that the average somatic case generally has a resistance to a psychological approach, particularly the TB patients, since TB is, in a way a “pneumatic” disease, that is, affecting the life-giving breath. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 100-101
Altogether, you are practising on me an extremely beneficial Psychotherapy of a special kind, giving me the valuable experience of what I can only call “meaningful collaboration,” a working together in spirit and in deed. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 360.
In some cases of psychotherapeutic treatment, contact with the sphere of the archetypes can produce the kind of constellation that underlies synchronicity. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 498-500
I also observed that a large number of my neurotic patients who were tubercular were “freed” from their complexes under psychotherapeutic treatment, learnt to breathe properly again and in the end were cured. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 533-534
I don’t see where you get the impression that I might be discouraged in this respect, since I was the first to emphasize the enormous role religion plays particularly in the individuation process, as I was the first to raise the question of the relation between psychotherapy and religion in its practical aspects. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 566
It was actually through my therapeutic work that I began to understand the essence of the Christian faith. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 631-632
The theologian, the only person besides the psychotherapist to declare himself responsible for the cura animarum, is afraid of having to think psychologically about the objects of his belief. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 628-630
It [Individuation] is not a therapy. Is it therapy when a cat becomes a cat? It is a natural process. Individuation is a natural process. It is what makes a tree turn into a tree; if it is interfered with, then it becomes sick and cannot function as a tree, but left to itself it develops into a tree. That is individuation. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking; Interviews and Encounters, Pages 205-218
But the fact is that the approach to the numinous is the real therapy and in as much as you attain to the numinous experiences you are released from the curse of pathology. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 377
On the contrary, when I began my career as a psychiatrist and psychotherapist, I was completely ignorant of Chinese philosophy, and only later did my professional experience show me that in my technique I had been unconsciously following that secret way which for centuries had been the preoccupation of the best minds of the East. ~Carl Jung, CW 13, Para 10
Freud rightly recognized that this bond is of greatest therapeutic importance in that it gives rise to a mixtum compositum [composite mixture] of the doctor’s own mental health and the patient’s maladjustment. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 358.
The therapist must be guided by the patient’s own irrationalities. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 82.
A therapist with a neurosis is a contradiction in terms. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 179
The great healing factor in psychotherapy is the doctor’s personality. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 198.
Therefore our Lord himself is a healer; he is a doctor; he heals the sick and he deals with the troubles of the soul; and that is exactly what we call psychotherapy. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 370
Hence the optimistic assumption of psychotherapy that conscious realization accentuates the good more than the overshadowing evil. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 253-254.
Depending on the peculiar nature of the case the most primitive therapeutic methods can achieve even better results than the most refined. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 324
But the task of the Church is not the same as that of psychotherapy. The Church means serving the community, therapy serves the individual. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 235
From: Lewis Lafontaine to Carl Jung Depth Psychology
Jung on Kierkegaard
To Rudolf Pannwitz
Dear Dr. Pannwitz, 27 March 1937
That you find Kierkegaard “frightful” has warmed the cockles of my heart.
I find him simply insupportable and cannot understand, or rather, I understand only too well, why the theological neurosis of our time has made such a fuss over him.
You are quite right when you say that the pathological is never valuable.
It does, however, cause us the greatest difficulties and for this reason we learn the most from it.
Moreover hysteria presents certain peculiarities of the normal person in such exaggerated form that even in their blindness the doctors, who as a rule know the least about psychology, could not
help stumbling upon them.
I therefore chalk up the symptomatology of the neuroses as an involuntary achievement to man’s credit, for which I am indeed grateful in my fashion.
I also agree with you that the normal person is infinitely more interesting and valuable.
Hence I have endeavoured to remove our “complex” psychology as quickly and completely as possible out of the realm of pathology.
However, as you have rightly seen, I have landed myself in enormous difficulties by framing general formulations which are intended to explain the whole field of human experience.
I had to keep to experiences that were directly accessible to me and compare them with data drawn from the whole history of the mind.
This gives rise to some degree of inexactitude which makes my efforts appear provisional.
It is perfectly clear to me that everything I do is pioneer work which has still to be followed by a real laying of foundations, but there are gratifying signs that others are beginning to make forays into this territory.
I enclose a little offprint which is of no further interest but only an attempt such as one might make to explain things to a doctor.
It is an essay included in the Eranos-Jahrbuch 1934 (Rhein Verlag, Zurich, 1935).
My letter is unfortunately overdue.
Illness and inordinate pressure of work have prevented me from writing until now.
Yours sincerely,
C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 231-232
saboteurs
There are two types of saboteurs: a) the stupid and b) the malicious. I much prefer dealing with the malicious, because they are much easier to avoid and redirect due to the likelihood that they know what they want and they go after it. The stupid are much more dangerous. They have nothing better to do than cajole, whine, beg and then tempt you with the latest vice they hooked you with during your previous encounter. They are only living for the moment, they have no vision, no personal sense of future, for them, the pleasure of now is all. Artists, therefore, are much crueler than sages because they have ambition. When an artist looks into somebody’s soul, the evil that they see is kaleidoscopic. For the sage, the shadow is merely thick, and hence, a sage is less likely to underestimate the power of evil. The artist however is more liable to be surprised, not just by stupidity, but also by malice. And hence, the artist is more liable to have his back up against the wall. And what is a sadist other than someone with his back up against the wall? The stupid person, however, sees virtually no shadow at all…. blissfully unaware and oh so gullible.
Patrick Watts 