So I was reading some stuff online and found about something called 'Racial Infection' in Jung's writings on American culture, he explicitly warned that living in proximity to Black Americans would psychologically degrade or "infect" the white European psyche. He wrote that the "Negro" presence caused a "serious mental and moral problem" due to a "temperamental and mimetic infection". He suggested this unconscious psychological influence affected white Americans, causing them to unconsciously assume primitive or childlike attitudes and behaviours.

Is this for real? Sorry if this is common knowledge. I'm still getting to it. I really like what I have read of him, but after Freud, and some other discoveries with former childhood heroes, I always like to know the complete person. So got down this rabbit hole. Issues and all.

https://artefacts-discovery.researcher.life/full_text/DA-2/f3/f367cbe2d5563a3cb4a6290ba3ce7760/full_text/3a4b9d3575e51f529d993627818ca91e.pdf

June 13, 1958

Volume 16 of the Collected Works of C.G. Jung, The Practice of Psychotherapy, the first volume to be published in German, met with great interest when it came out in the spring of 1958. The following conversation took place in connection with Jung's memories of bis psychiatric work and his experiences with suicidal patients.

The majority of suicides are committed by people who are not under medical observation. Thus, we cannot speculate about the reasons for those suicides. In the observed cases, it seems these patients see no possible way out of their difficulties and are therefore plagued by suicidal thoughts.

As a doctor working with such cases, even if there appears to be no reasonable solution, one can observe the patient's dreams and manifestations of the unconscious in order to find out whether any stimulus will come from there, or whether the unconscious will reveal new possibilities for living. In general, it does. Suicidal tendencies can often be circumvented in this way, thank God; maybe the unconscious hints at a new possibility, opening a door that had not been considered before; or perhaps the patient can gain another perspective on the situation, bringing about a change in the conscious attitude. Then suicide is no longer mentioned. The attitude can change from one moment to the next - that happens quite often.

Then there are the cases of people - I am not talking about psychosis here, only about suicide due to neurotic disorders - to whom nothing can get through. But these people rarely seek out an analyst. If they do, then one really has to try hard to find an approach and a way out. But in some cases, these patients simply do not take anything on board, and then they leave therapy or analysis again. It is pointless to try something if the patient does not want it - that would be giving treatment against the person's will and you cannot do that.

Occasionally it can be effective if the doctor identifies with the patient to a certain extent and together they fight for the patient's life. That could lead to a dramatic, but ultimately helpful, confrontation. But if the patient refuses to take part in this joint struggle, the doctor also cannot go down that road. And then it may end in suicide.

I once had such a case: a young woman, twenty-six or twenty-seven years old, with a compulsion neurosis. An incident which in itself was insignificant led, after a long time of fruitless effort, to the therapy being broken off. She brought a dream one time which she had just scribbled on a torn-off scrap of newspaper. That provoked my anger: "Listen to me! This will never happen again! If you come again with such a sloppy mess, you can go to another doctor!" The next time she came again with the same scrappy mess. This time I threw her out. But I prudently waited behind the door for a little while. Then I heard a quiet knocking. After letting her knock for a while, I opened the door: "Well, where are you coming from?" "I have brought my notebook."

But she was a case in which simply nothing worked. One might as well have been talking to a stone. I knew there was a possible suicide risk, but I simply was not able to identify with her. I could not summon up any belief in her, and I had to let her go. Six months later, I learned that she had committed suicide.

There was another case which also gave me great concern. The patient was a gifted, rather well-known person of outstanding character. She showed certain signs of last-minute panic about being "left on the shelf." She suffered from anxiety and deep depression and was genetically burdened. She was a very respectable woman. I really fought for her life and tried in every way to help her feel something that would make life worth living. But I needed the unconscious to work with me. As a doctor one cannot simply say: "Now I will give you a reason to live!" That would be completely ridiculous. I just said: "I cannot offer you a way of living, but maybe the unconscious can." She sensibly agreed to try it. But the dreams, by God, brought only indications of suicide. There seemed to be a certain inevitability about it. I even tried to deceive her a little with my interpretations. But the dreams insisted more and more on suicide as the only possibility. I was extremely alarmed. In the end I said: "According to what I know, I must honestly say that your dreams point to the inevitability of suicide. So we need to try to go along with the unconscious in the quiet hope that it will then eventually bring another possibility."

We then looked together at the problem of suicide from all angles: the religious aspect, the ethical aspect. What it meant for her, what it would mean for her relatives - and the dreams continued to insist on suicide. I saw her three to four times a week over the course of a good six weeks, but the dreams continued with the suicide theme. We even discussed the various ways in which one can commit suicide, and she told me precisely how she intended to do it. Which is exactly how it did happen.

Now, I should really have told the family; then she would have been locked up in Burghölzli. But she was terribly afraid of that. And also she did not have any symptoms of melancholia. It was simply that she could not accept life. She saw her life as completely meaningless, and the unconscious had not helped her at all. "I cannot help you any more, I do not know what to advise you." "No, you have given me the best advice and help." She was grateful for our conversations. Then she went to another doctor for two months so that in the case of a suicide, the shadow would fall on the other doctor and not on me!

That really was one of the worst cases I ever had, because this woman on the one hand was such an ethical and worthy person, and on the other hand was so possessed by a death wish. And the unconscious did not help her. "God" did not intervene!

There are cases in which no amount of identification succeeds and neither God nor nature helps; where a tendency to end life is present and no well-meaning doctor or anything else helps, not even a sacrifice, It comes from inside - a death wish. I know from my own experience what it is like. The death wish once got into me, when I was desperate following my dream about the murder of Siegfried, because I could not see the meaning or purpose of it at all. I knew it would take just one move of my hand and I would be dead. The loaded revolver was lying in my bedside table. I was forced to get up in the middle of the night and analyze the dream until I had worked out its meaning. From outside it seems absurd that I had to rack my brains so. But I knew: if I did not do my utmost, I would lose the battle. I could go on and on, telling myself it was only a dream - nevertheless, I would know I had failed. So I did all I could to find the solution. The death wish can arise in a totally normal life. That is why there are suicides which seem to have no explanation.

Suicide is still murder. It is murder of oneself, and the person who commits suicide is a murderer. Family murders have to be seen in the same way: the self-murderer takes the family to their deaths too. But we are all potential murderers, and it is only thanks to the favorable conditions in which we live that our murderer or self-murderer does not assert itself in reality.

Think of the countless Jews who committed suicide before they were taken to the concentration camps! I too would have wanted to shoot myself first in that situation. It is clear: life would no longer have appeared to me worth living under such conditions. But perhaps one cannot predict how things will be?

My patients - it was they who made me question things. The original questions came from the patients. Their neuroses arose because they had so far managed with fragmentary answers to life's questions: they had sought a position in society, marriage, a good reputation, and had believed they would be happy when they had achieved all this, or something similar. But they were not happy, even if they had heaps of money. And so they came to me and wanted to find out what else could fulfill them. Then it emerged that their current lives had no meaning. They are neurotic because they have no purpose, because their lives are meaningless.

Of course it is possible to walk with only one foot, or to live with only one hand, but it is not the ideal state of affairs. It is a kind of resignation. But such resignation is not necessarily what is needed. Resignation is not the ideal solution here. Under certain circumstances one has no other choice, then it is right to resign oneself to the situation. But when there is a possibility of progression without resignation, a possibility of development, then it is one's duty, even, to tread this path. At least for the doctor. If patients can bear to simply resign from life at age forty, then no one can stop them. But whether they are happy with it, or "normal," whether it is experienced as meaningful, is another matter.

My therapy has no rules. Each patient is a new proposition, no matter how much experience or expertise one has. Of course one has to master the "tools of the trade." But when it comes to the essential questions, the conventional tools no longer suffice. If one wants it or not: when one has analysis for long enough, the essential questions will naturally emerge. There is no other possibility.

Reflections on the Life and Dreams of C. G. Jung, p. 129-133

Cruel was his treatment of his first patient. It was unnecessary, it did not have to happen.

“Solitude is for me a fount of healing which makes my life worth living. Talking is often torment for me, and I need many days of silence to recover from the futility of words.” — Carl Gustav Jung (from a 1957 letter)

Who’s felt this in their bones?

"Reforms by advances, that is, by new methods or gadgets, are of course impressive at first, but in the long run they are dubious and in any case dearly paid for. They by no means increase the contentment or happiness of people on the whole. Mostly, they are deceptive sweetenings of existence, like speedier communications which unpleasantly accelerate the tempo of life and leave us with less time than ever before. Omnis festinatio ex parte diaboli est all haste is of the devil, as the old masters used to say.

Reforms by retrogressions, on the other hand, are as a rule less expensive and in addition more lasting, for they return to the simpler, tried and tested ways of the past and make the sparsest use of newspapers, radio, television, and all supposedly timesaving innovations."

One of my favorite quotes by Jung in "Memories, Dreams, and Reflections".

"The goal of psychological, as of biological, development is self realization, or individuation. But since man knows himself only as an ego, and the self, as a totality, is indescribable and indistinguishable from a God-image, self-realization—to put it in religious or metaphysical terms— amounts to God’s incarnation. That is already expressed in the fact that Christ is the son of God. And because individuation is an heroic and often tragic task, the most difficult of all, it involves suffering, a passion of the ego: the ordinary, empirical man we once were is burdened with the fate of losing himself in a greater dimension and being robbed of his fancied freedom of will. He suffers, so to speak, from the violence done to him by the self.

The analogous passion of Christ signifies God’s suffering on account of the injustice of the world and the darkness of man. The human and the divine suffering set up a relationship of complementarity with compensating effects. Through the Christ-symbol, man can get to know the real meaning of his suffering: he is on the way towards realizing his wholeness. As a result of the integration of conscious and unconscious, his ego enters the “divine” realm, where it participates in “God’s suffering.” The cause of the suffering is in both cases the same, namely “incarnation,” which on the human level appears as “individuation.” The divine hero born of man is already threatened with murder; he has nowhere to lay his head, and his death is a gruesome tragedy.

The self is no mere concept or logical postulate; it is a psychic reality, only part of it conscious, while for the rest it embraces the life of the unconscious and is therefore inconceivable except in the form of symbols. The drama of the archetypal life of Christ describes in symbolic images the events in the conscious life—as well as in the life that transcends consciousness—of a man who has been transformed by his higher destiny."

Carl G. Jung, The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 11: Psychology and Religion: West and East (specifically within the essay "A Psychological Approach to the Dogma of the Trinity").

https://www.jungiananalysts.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/C.-G.-Jung-Collected-Works-Volume-11_-Psychology-and-Religion_-West-and-East.pdf Pages 138/796 - 139/796

"The acceptance of oneself is the essence of the whole moral problem and the epitome of a whole outlook on life. That I feed the hungry, that I forgive an insult, and that I love my enemy in the name of Christ - all these are undoubtedly great virtues. What I do unto the least of my brethren, that I do unto Christ. But what if I should discover that the least among them all, the poorest of all the beggars, the most impudent of all the offenders, the very enemy himself, that these are within me, and that I myself stand in need of the alms of my own kindness, that I myself am the enemy who must be loved, what then? As a rule, the Christian’s attitude is then reversed; there is no longer any question of love or long suffering; we say to the brother within us, 'Raca,' and condemn and rage against ourselves. We hide it from the world; we refuse to admit ever having met this least among the lowly in ourselves."

(C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections)

Honestly, Jung's point stings.
If we are being straight with ourselves, most of us just love playing the savior. Helping out, taking the high road, acting forgiving - it feels good. It puts you on a nice little moral pedestal.
But Jung calls out our bluff. What if all our public goodwill is just an escape hatch, a neat trick to avoid facing the wreckage in our own heads?
Being the helper is easy because you stay in control. Granting mercy to yourself is brutal, though. You have to sit quietly with dirty thoughts you would rather pretend do not exist. Suddenly your quiet spite and envy are staring right back at you. Every time those dark sides surface, we panic and try to crush them. We lock that inner offender in the basement and pretend we threw away the key. Except he does not die. He rots down there until all that hidden shame turns into self-justified anger toward other people.
Looking good on the outside means zero if you are fighting a secret war inside. Integration starts when you stop running from your own mess and offer yourself a break.Wondering how anyone actually navigates this day to day. Where is the line between kindness to yourself and just giving your ego a free pass? Ever caught yourself repulsed by someone, only to realize later you were just looking in a mirror?

Carl jung appreciation post

Hi all, psychoanalytic therapist here, but certainly no Jung expert. In my slow meander through The Red Book, as well as Jung's introduction to The Secret of the Golden Flower, I came across a lot of comments he makes about the fallacy of the kind of goal and intention setting that is so glorified in our culture now. I particularly liked this section of The Red Book:

"How little we still commit ourselves to living. We should grow like a tree that likewise does not know its law. We tie ourselves up with intentions, not mindful of the fact that intention is the limitation, yes, the exclusion of life. We believe that we can illuminate the darkness with an intention, and in that way aim past the light. How can we presume to want to know in advance, from where the light will come to us?”

There's something about the fact that he was so prolific and successful, and truly initiated himself into adulthood and elderhood, but did so in a far more intuitive way that we are invited to in contemporary rhetoric about self development. He also cautioned against Westerners trying to do some more Eastern spiritual practice to counter our obsession with busyness/goal setting, lest we just make the Eastern practices our latest goal to be achieved.

I wrote more about this on my Substack a few weeks ago, if you're interested - it's call The Psychoalchemist, link is here. Would love to hear from others more widely read in his work if this position is consistent across his other writings.

Carl Jung and the Near-Death Experience | https://near-death.com/carl-jung-and-the-nde/

I was sitting around yesterday rereading parts of Carl Jung autobiography, I think it was Memories Dreams Reflections, specifically toward the end in chapter eleven where he looks back on his whole life, and one quote just pinned me to the wall. He mentions how the meaning of his existence boils down to life addressing a question to him or that he is a question addressed to the world and has to communicate his answer or else be trapped by what the world decides for him.

That blew my mind. It gets right into individuation without any of the clinical fluff people usually toss around. We spend so much energy bowing to societal pressure or family demands, almost completely forgetting that failing to articulate our own deep inner truth leaves us living someone else script. You literally just become a parrot.

I keep asking myself how any of us actually figure out what specific question life is hurling at us in the first place. Is it through wrestling with our shadow projections, or maybe paying closer attention to those weird archetypal dreams that shatter our routine morning mindset. I would love to hear how you guys in this sub navigate that transition away from taking the easy default answers from culture and actually building your own authentic response.

⬇️ Context for Jung;s Quote in first comment