Our souls as well as our bodies are composed of individual elements.
Our souls as well as our bodies are composed of individual elements which were all already present in the ranks of our ancestors.
The “newness” in the individual psyche is an endlessly varied recombination of age-old components.
Body and soul therefore have an intensely historical character and find no proper place in what is new, in things that have just come into being.
That is to say, our ancestral components are only partly at home in such things.
We are very far from having finished completely with the Middle Ages, classical antiquity, and primitivity, as our modern psyches pretend. Nevertheless, we have plunged down a cataract of progress which sweeps us on into the future with ever wilder violence the farther it takes us from our roots.
Once the past has been breached, it is usually annihilated, and there is no stopping the forward motion.
But it is precisely the loss of connection with the past, our uprootedness, which has given rise to the “discontents” of civilization and to such a flurry and haste that we live more in the future and its chimerical promises of a golden age than in the present, with which our whole evolutionary background has not yet caught up.
We rush impetuously into novelty, driven by a mounting sense of insufficiency, dissatisfaction, and restlessness.” ~Carl G. Jung – Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Pages 158-159
Carl Jung Depth Psychology Blog