When you get into a disagreeable situation where you see no opening
When you get into a disagreeable situation where you see no opening, no direct path, you assume that you are quite alone with yourself.
Here again is a fact of which one is usually not aware: when you get into a disagreeable situation where you see no opening, no direct path, you assume that you are quite alone with yourself.
In a way it is a very good thing that you think so; otherwise you would never make up your mind, you would remain merely a child.
You must believe that you are practically alone.
But you may find yourself in a really tight place where you can’t get out, where you are helpless.
Then you recognize that you are not alone, because such an absolute impasse is an archetypal situation, and an archetypal figure becomes constellated, a fact in your psychology, a potential, and so you are up to the situation.
This has repeated itself innumerable times in history, man has again and again passed through such situations and has a psychological method of adapting, the thing to do in such a case.
For by his consciousness alone, particularly the dim consciousness of early ages, man was quite unable to in- vent such a thing; to primitive man everything was revealed, he invented absolutely nothing, he could not think, it thought.
So it is the totality of the psyche that functions in that way; the psyche produces a double, it brings up an- other figure; that is a psychological fact.
The psychopompos is this second figure; you can call it the daimon [divine manifestation], or the shadow, or a god, or an ancestor spirit; it does not matter what name you give it, it is simply a figure; it might even be an animal.
For in such a predicament we are dépossèdés [dispossessed], we lose the power of our ego, we lose our self- confidence.
Until that moment, we were willful or arbitrary, we had made our own choice, we had found out a way, we had proceeded as far as this particular place.
Then suddenly we are in an impasse, we lose faith in ourselves, and it is just as if all of our energy became regressive.
And then our psyche reacts by constellating that double, which has the effect of leading us out of the situation. Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 385
Carl Jung on apparently hopeless situations.
Seminar on Dream Analysis. C.G. Jung
[Carl Jung on apparently hopeless situations.]
Often we are led to a wall, it is too high, we cannot get over it and we stand there and stare at it.
Rationalism says, “There is no getting over it, just go away.”
Yet natural development has led the patient up to an almost impossible situation to show him that this is the end of his rational solutions.
It is meant that he should get there, and perhaps stay there, make roots and grow like a tree; in time overcome the obstacle, grow over the wall.
There are things in our psychology that cannot be answered today.
You may be up against a stone wall but you should stay there and grow, and in six weeks or a year you have grown over it.
The I Ching expresses that beautifully.
A similar situation which looks quite hopeless is depicted thus: “a goat butts against a hedge and gets its horns entangled.”
But in the next line: “The hedge opens; there is no entanglement/ Power depends upon the axle of a big cart.”
So if you could stop butting against the fence you would not get your horns entangles, and presently you would have the power of a cart with four wheels.
There is another way in nature, the way of a tree…The tree stands still and grows and makes roots and eventually overcomes the obstacle. C.G. Jung. The Seminars. Volume One, Dream Analysis: Notes of the seminar given in 1928-30. p.249
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