Carl Gustav Jung

“ Here the tables are ever laden, and a thousand feasts are celebrated in golden palaces. The patient can only spare a few mysterious symbols for the gloomy dim shores of reality; they need not be understood, for our understanding has not been necessary for her for this long time. ”

“ But if we would approach to an understanding of psychological things we must remember the fact of the subjective conditioning of all knowledge. The world is as we see it and not simply objective; this holds true even more of the mind. Of course it is possible to look at the mind objectively, just as at Faust, or a Gothic Cathedral. In this objective conception there is comprised the whole worth and worthlessness of current experimental psychology and psychoanalysis. The scientific mind, thinking causally, is incapable of understanding what is ahead ”

“ At first she postponed the marriage, becoming more and more worried, and then the eccentricities began. To understand these we must immerse ourselves in the psychology of a naïve soul. If we have to disclose some painful secret to a beloved person, we try first to strengthen his love in order to obtain beforehand a guarantee of his forgiveness. We do it by flattery or by caresses, or we try to impress the value of our own personality in order to raise it in the eyes of the other. Our patient decked herself out with beautiful feathers, which to her simple taste seemed precious. ”

“ When he fell ill he suddenly lost the well-regulated world and found himself in the chaos of an overmastering dream, a sea of blood and fire; the world was out of joint; everywhere conflagration, volcanic outbreaks, earthquakes, mountains fell in, followed by enormous battles where the peoples fell upon one another; he became involved more and more in the battle of nature, he was right in the midst of those fighting, wrestling, defending himself, enduring unutterable misery and pain ”

“ To-day we can say that the pathological images dominate the interests of the patient so completely, because they are simply derivatives of the most important questions that used to occupy the person when normal—what in insanity is now an incomprehensible maze of symptoms, used to be fields of vital interest to the former personality. I will cite as an example a patient who was twenty years in the asylum. She was always a puzzle to the physicians, for the absurdity of her delusions exceeded anything that the boldest imagination could create. ”

“ Subjective speculation lays no claim to universal validity, it is identical with constructive understanding. It is a subjective creation, which, looked at externally, easily seems to be a so-called infantile phantasy, or at least an unmistakable derivative of it; from an objective standpoint it must be judged as such, in so far as objective is regarded as identical with scientific or causal. Looked at from within, however, constructive understanding means redemption.
“Creation—that is the great redemption from suffering and easiness of living.” ”

“ They are lost in the maze of a magic garden where the same old story is repeated again and again in a timeless present. For patients the hands of the clock of the world remain stationary; there is no time, no further development. It makes no difference to them whether they dream for two days or thirty years. I had a patient in my ward who was five years without uttering a word, in bed, and entirely buried in himself. ”

“ However far we are from being able to understand fully the concatenations of that obscure world, at least we may maintain, with complete assurance, that in dementia praecox there is no symptom which can be described as psychologically baseless and meaningless. The most absurd things are in reality symbols of ideas which are not only generally understandable, but also universally operative in the human heart. In insanity we do not discover anything new and unknown, but we look at the foundation of our own being, the source of those life-problems in which we are all engaged. ”

“ We should be indeed depreciating a work like Faust if we were only to regard it as something that has been perfected and finished; it is only understood when conceived as a becoming and as an ever new-experiencing.
Thus we must regard the human psyche. Only on one side is the mind a Has Been, and as such subordinate to the causal principle. ”

“ Undoubtedly there are innumerable persons who are capable of adaptation without creating any preliminary philosophy. If they ever arrive at any general theory of the world it is always subsequently. But, on the other hand, there are just as many who are only able to adapt themselves by way of a preliminary intellectual formulation. To all they do not understand they are unable to adapt themselves. ”

“ This statement is valid for psychology in general. To understand the psyche causally, means to understand but half of it. The causal understanding of Faust enlightens us as to how it became a finished work of art, but reveals nothing of the living meaning of the poet. That meaning only lives if we experience it, in and through ourselves. In so far as our actual present life is for us something essentially new and not a repetition of all that has gone before, the great value of such a work is to be seen, not in its causal development, but in its living reality for our own lives. ”

“ Psychiatry is the stepchild of medicine. All the other branches of medicine have one great advantage over it—the scientific methods can be applied; there are things to be seen, and felt, physical and chemical methods of investigation to be followed: the microscope shows the dreaded bacillus, the surgeon’s knife halts at no difficulty and gives us glimpses of most inaccessible organs of vital importance. ”

“ The psychological gulf, however, between the creation of the artist and the insane person remains great. The world of the artist is one of solved problems; the world of reality, that of unsolved problems. The mental patient is a faithful image of this reality. His solutions are unsatisfying illusions, his cure a temporary giving up of the problem, which yet goes on working in the depths of the unconscious, and at the appointed time again rises to the surface and creates new illusions with new scenery ”

“ A little later Esquirol and Bayle discovered that certain forms of insanity ended in death, after a relatively short time, and that certain constant changes in the brain could be demonstrated post mortem. Esquirol had described as an entity general paralysis of the insane, or as it was popularly called “softening of the brain,” a disease which is always bound up with chronic inflammatory degeneration of the cerebral matter. Thus was laid the foundation of the dogma which you will find repeated in every text-book of psychiatry, viz. “diseases of the mind are diseases of the brain.” ”

“ Function has become the dependent accessory of its organs, the mind the dependent accessory of the brain. In modern mental therapy the mind has been the loser, whilst great progress has been made in cerebral anatomy; of the mind we know less than nothing. Current psychiatry behaves like a man who thinks he can unriddle the meaning and importance of a building by a mineralogical investigation of its stones. Let us attempt to realise which mental diseases show obvious changes in the brain, and what is their proportion. ”

“ But every one has a world-philosophy though not every one knows he has. And those who do not know it have simply an unconscious and therefore inadequate and archaic philosophy. But everything psychological that is allowed to remain in the mind neglected and not developed, remains in a primitive state. A striking instance of how universal theories are influenced by unconscious archaic points of view has been furnished by a famous German historian whose name matters to us not at all. ”

“ But the patient remains stationary at this transitory stage and assumes his subjective view is the world’s, hence he remains ill. He cannot free himself from his subjectivism, and does not find the link to objective thinking, i.e. to society. He does not reach the real summit of self-understanding, for he remains with a merely subjective understanding of himself. But a mere subjective understanding is not real and adequate. As Feuerbach says: Understanding is only real when it is in accord with that of some other rational beings. ”

“ Insanity grants the upper hand to this something. When once it is uppermost, reality is more or less quickly driven out. It becomes a distant dream, and the dream which enchains the patient wholly or in part, and often for life, has now the attributes of reality. We normal persons, who have to do entirely with reality, see only the products of disordered fancy, but not the wealth of that side of the mind which is turned away from us. ”

“ The constructive standpoint absolutely denies the conception that the subjective phantasycreation is merely an infantile wish, symbolically veiled; or that it is merely that in a higher degree; it denies that it is a convulsive and egoistic adhesion to the fiction of its own superiority, in so far as these are to be regarded as finalistic explanations. The subjective activity of the mind can be judged from without, just as one can, in the end, so judge everything. But this judgment is inadequate, because it is the very essence of the subjective that it cannot be judged objectively. ”

“ On the other side the mind is a Becoming that can only be grasped synthetically or constructively. The causal standpoint asks how it is this actual mind has become what it appears to-day? The constructive standpoint asks how a bridge can be built from this actual psyche to its own future?
Just as the causal method finally reaches the general principles of human psychology by the analysis and reduction of individual events, so does the constructive standpoint reach aims that are general by the synthesis of individual tendencies. ”

“ If we apply this method to our “Faust” it must become clear that something more is required for a true understanding. It will even seem to us that we have not gathered the poet’s deepest meaning if we only see in it universal foregone human conclusions. What we really want to find out is how this man has redeemed himself as an individual, and when we arrive at this comprehension then we shall also understand the symbol given by Goethe. It is true we may then fall into the error that we understand Goethe himself. ”

“ The absolute credit which the constructive standpoint confers upon the subjective, naturally seems to the “scientific” spirit as an utter violation of reason. But this scientific spirit can only take up arms against it so long as the constructive is not avowedly subjective. The constructive comprehension also analyses, but it does not reduce. It decomposes the delusion into typical components. ”

“ This theory is wholly based upon his still unconscious belief in Adam and Eve as the first and only parents of mankind. It is on the whole better to discover for oneself a modern world-philosophy, or at least to make use of some decent system which will prevent any errors of that kind.
One could put up with being despised as the possessor of a world-philosophy; but there is a greater danger. The public may come to believe the philosophy, beaten out by the constructive method, is to be regarded as a theoretical and objectively valid insight into the meaning of the world in general. ”

“ I must now again point out that it is an obstinate, scholastic misunderstanding not to be able to distinguish between a world-philosophy which is only psychological, and an extra-psychological theory, which concerns the objective thing. It is absolutely essential that the student of the results of the constructive method should be able to draw this distinction. In its first results the constructive method does not produce anything that could be called a scientific theory ”

“ The morphologically-minded psychiatrist would say: This is just a typical case of dementia praecox; it is the essence of insanity, of madness, to talk of nothing but mysteries; the standpoint of the diseased mind towards the world is displaced, is “mad.” What is no sin for the normal, the patient finds a sin. ”

“ The old view that every misfortune was the revenge of the offended gods returned new-clothed to fit the times. Just as physical diseases can, in many cases, be regarded as self-inflicted on account of negligence, mental diseases were likewise considered to be due to some moral injury, or sin. Behind this conception the angry godhead also stood. Such views played a great rôle, right up to the beginning of last century, especially in Germany. In France, however, about the same time a new idea was appearing, destined to sway psychiatry for a hundred years. ”

“ The introverted type is characterised by the fact that his libido is turned towards his own personality to a certain extent—he finds within himself the unconditioned value. The extraverted type has his libido to a certain extent externally; he finds the unconditioned value outside himself. The introvert regards everything from the aspect of his own personality; the extravert is dependent upon the value of his object. I must emphasise the statement that this question of types is the question of our psychology, and that every further advance must probably proceed by way of this question. ”

“ These figures offer the best possible proof that the purely morphological view-point of modern psychiatry leads only very indirectly, if at all, to the understanding of the mental disorder, which is our aim. We must take into account the fact that those mental diseases which show the most marked disturbances of the brain end in death; for this reason the chronic inmates of the asylum form its real population, consisting of some 70 to 80 per cent, of cases of dementia praecox, that is, of patients in whom anatomical changes are practically non-existent. ”

“ Nor is this patient at all unique. She is one of a type. Similar phantasies are always found in patients of this kind, though not always in such profusion.
The parallels with Hauptmann’s Hannele show that here likewise the artist has shown us the way with the free creation of his own phantasy. From this coincidence, which is not accidental, we may conclude that there is something common both to the artist and the insane and not to them alone. Every human being has also within himself that restless creative phantasy which is ever engaged in assuaging the harshness of reality. ”

“ Psychological analysis is far from being able to explain in complete and illuminating fashion all cases of the disease with which we are here concerned. On the contrary, the majority remain obscure and difficult to understand, and chiefly because only a certain proportion of patients recover. Our last patient is noteworthy because his return to a normal state afforded us a survey of the period of his illness. Unfortunately the advantage of this standpoint is not always possible to us, for a great number of persons never find their way back from their dreams. ”

“ I am convinced that not a few will raise the objection that in the first place the psychological process of adaptation does not proceed by the method of first creating a world-philosophy; secondly, that it is in itself a sign of unhealthy mental disposition even to make the attempt to adapt oneself by way of a “world-philosophy.” ”