Carl Jung on Drugs and America
C. G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters (Bollingen Series XCVII
Dr. Evans: Have you actually seen any patients or had any contact with individuals who have been taking these particular drugs, these
tranquilizers?
Dr. Jung: I can’t say. You see, with us there are very few. In America there are all the little powders and the tablets.
Happily enough, we are not yet so far.
You see, American life is in a subtle way so one-sided and so uprooted that you must have something with which to compensate the real nature of man.
You have to pacify your unconscious all along the line because it is in absolute uproar; so at the slightest provocation you have a big moral rebellion in America.
Look at the rebellion of modern youth in America, the sexual rebellion, and all that.
These rebellions occur because the real, natural man is just in open rebellion against the utterly inhuman form of American life.
Americans are absolutely divorced from nature in a way, and that accounts for that drug abuse. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 35.
