Carl Jung on “The Rules of Life”
In reply to your kind enquiry about “rules of life,”
I would like to remark that I have had so much to do with people that I have always endeavoured to live by no rules as far as possible.
Non-observance of rules requires, of course, far less effort, for usually one makes a rule in order to repress the tendency in oneself not to follow it.
In psychology, above all, rules are valid only when they can be reversed.
Also, they are not without their dangers, since they consist of words and our civilization is largely founded on a superstitious belief in words.
One of the supreme religious assumptions is actually the “Word.”
Words can take the place of men and things.
This has its advantages but it is also a menace.
One can then spare oneself the trouble of thinking for oneself or making any effort, to one’s own advantage or disadvantage and that of one’s fellows.
I have, for instance, a tendency to make a principle of doing what I want to do or should do as soon as possible.
This can be very unwise and even stupid.
The same applies to practically all adages and “rules of life.”
Take, for example, the saying, “Quidquid id est, prudenter agas et respice finem” (Whatever it be, act prudently and consider the end).
But in this way, however praiseworthy the principle is, you can let a vitally important decision of the moment slip through your fingers.
No rules can cope with the paradoxes of life.
Moral law, like natural law, represents only one aspect of reality.
It does not prevent one from following certain “regular” habits unconsciously—habits which one does not notice oneself but can only discover by making careful inquiries among one’s fellows.
But people seldom enjoy having what they don’t know about themselves pointed out to them by others, and so they prefer to lay down rules which are the exact opposite of what they are doing in reality. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 625
The Creative Phases in Jung’s Life
At the age of seventy Jung responded in a letter to the question of phases in the life of a man:
”It is exceedingly difficult to write anything definite or descriptive about the progression of psychological states. It always seemed to me as if the real milestones were certain symbolic events characterized by a strong emotional tone.”
A presentation of the creative phases in Jung’s life will therefore deal with such milestones, reporting- those events-which were matched-by a strong emotionai
tone, then briefly indicating the resultant changes in his intellectual outlook or his attitude toward life.
The work of a creative person has a long history.
It does not step into the light of day suddenly, without motivation; inner, and sometimes also outer, events prepare its emergence long beforehand.
The stream of creatiyity digs its bed underground for long stretches of the way and then quite unpredictably breaks through to the surface.
Usually the underground course cannot be traced afterwards, or only by intuition, for the necessary information is lacking.
With Jung it is different.
I. The letter was written in English (28 August 1945); the translation from Aniela Jaffcf’s German version, which helps understand its meaning, would read:
In his memoirs he describes early childhood experiences, dreams, unusual games, frightening experiences; these can be understood as preparations for the later creative phases of his life.
They are the first indications of the genius that was struggling to incarnate itself in him, and they reveal the inner law that shaped his destiny.
Yet, until the decisive moment, it remains an unanswerable question whether the breakthrough will succeed or not, whether the man will withstand the onslaught of creative genius or break under it.
I want to cite one of Jung’s childhood dreams because it allows a glimpse of the hidden daimon of creativity and presages a destiny.
It occurs in the fourth or fifth year of his life, a phase which, like puberty, middle life, and the time before death, is marked byjntenseactivity of the unconscious and an increased number of ”big” dreams.
The boy discovers a hole in the ground with steps leading downward into the depths.
Hesitantly and afraid he goes down and comes to a green curtain which blocks his view.
He is curious and pushes it aside, and behind it finds a wonderful golden throne at the end of a long room.
On the throne sits a gigantic thing like a tree trunk, reaching nearly to the ceiling.
It consists of skin and living flesh and has a cone-shaped head but no face or hair.
On its skull is a single eye that gazes steadily upward.
Around its head is a glow of light that illuminates the entire room.
The boy has the feeling that ”this thing” is about to descend from the throne and crawl toward him.
He is paralyzed with terror.
“At that moment I heard from outside and above me my mother’s voice. She called
out, ‘Yes, just look at him. That is the man-eater!’ That intensified my terror still more, and I awoke sweating and scared to death.‘ ‘2
The underground setting of the dream points to an event that is still completely unconscious.
Power, majesty, and numinosity all reside in this phallic daimon, a tremendum the
very sight of which paralyzes the child with terror.
But this dream image also has an entirely different, very positive aspect: the shape of the daimon, as also the light radiating from it and the upward-gazing eye,3 characterizes it as a living, creative, and perceiving spirit dwelling in the dark recesses of the psyche.
The dream image of the mother is equally ambivalent.
She herself remains invisible; only her voice is heard, inviting the boy to observe the creature more closely.
But she takes back the invitation, as though mockingly, by pointing out its
murderous qualities, and actually tempts the boy to flee.
Her call seems to have the secret design of preventing her son’s fateful encounter with the daimon.
Were the boy to yield to this maternal temptation, a perilous venture would not be undertaken, a destiny go unfulfilled.
Thus the kind, understanding, and adored mother presents as deadly a danger as her liost:ife~cm.iiiierpart.
Moreover, we know from the laws of dream events that the phallic daimon shows itself so threatening and terrifying only because it is denied, and not the other
way round.
Seen in the light of depth psychology, a man’s destiny is always shaped at the point where his fear lies.
Jung recalls in his memoirs that he experienced the phallic figure as a “subterranean God ‘not to be named’,” who appeared to him throughout his youth as the antagonist of the trusted, bright Lord Jesus.
It was “an unsought-after, frightful revelation,” an ”initiation into the realm of darkness.”
Jung concludes his description of this dream: “My intellectual life had its unconscious beginnings at that time.”
In point of fact, the ambiguity of both dream figures and the tension between them express the fundamental motif of his work:
Man is suspended between the opposites.
The boy experienced the opposites as Christ/Lucifer, light/darkness, which means also good/evil or conscious/unconscious.
A few years later the dream came true: Jung fell into a neurotic conflict between creativity and inertia.
We shall return to this point later.
One can say, however, from a survey of his development as a whole, that the ithyphallic light giving daimon, this symbol of a spiritual impulse slumbering in the unconscious of the child, completely mastered him after he had overcome the neurotic crisis, that everything else had to retreat before its advance, and that Jung survived because he obeyed.
At the age of eighty-two he wrote:
I have had much trouble getting along with my ideas. There was a daimon in me, and in the end its presence proved decisive. It overpowered me …. I had to obey an inner law which was imposed on me and left me no freedom of choice . . . . A creative person has little power over his own life. He is not free. He is captive and driven by his daimon …. This lack of freedom has been a great sorrow to me. 4
From the ”initiation into the realm of darkness” it would appear to have been decreed by fate that Jung’s creative impulse should tend toward the negative pole of the psychic opposites.
From the beginning the content of his research and writing is characterized by a preponderance of the dark aspects of the psyche.
But this does not mean world-negation or nihilism, for he always remembered the vision of light in the darkness which he saw for the first time in his childhood dream.
He wanted to illuminate the dark, unknown, rejected side of their psyche.
In the imagery of a different culture, one could say that he was drawn to the core of light in Yin and the core of darkness in Yang. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years and Other Essays, Page 138-141
