Often people come for analysis who wish to be prepared to meet death.
Often people come for analysis who wish to be prepared to meet death.
They can make astonishingly good progress in a short time and then die peacefully. Inner development can advance enormously if there is knowledge of the nearness of the end.
It seems as if a further step in consciousness has to be reached before the end of life.
Psychology is a preparation for death.
We have an urge to leave life at a higher level than the one at which we entered. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 16.
From this attitude of Freud’s I felt more than ever convinced that his idea of God was placed in sexuality, and that libido is to him only an urge in one direction.
As a matter of fact, however, I think it can be shown that there is a will to die as well as a will to live.
We prepare ourselves for death when we reach the summit of life; or, to put it in another way, after the age of thirty-five, let us say, we begin to know that cooler winds are blowing—at first we don’t understand, but later we cannot escape the meaning. ~Carl Jung, Seminar 1925, Page 25.
Death: His personal transformation, his individuation, was a preparation for death.
In the Black Books in the 1920s, one finds the lengthening shadows of death, commencing with Jung’s grief at his mother’s death, followed by the premature deaths of close friends (Hermann Sigg in 1927, and Hans Schmid in 1932) and patients (George Porter and Jerome Schloss in 1927).339 In an entry of 1927,
Jung referred to thoughts regarding the death of his wife and himself.
Jung’s father had died at the age of fifty-four; in 1929, Jung himself reached this age.
The proximity of mortality brought with it intimations of immortality.
That year, he wrote in his “Commentary on The Secret of the Golden Flower” that as a physician he attempted to “strengthen the conviction of immortality,” especially with older patients.
Death, he argued, should be seen as a goal rather than an end, and he designated the latter part of life as “life toward death.”
Two years later, in his paper “The Turning Point of Life,” he elaborated on this theme, characterizing the psychological transformations of the midlife transition.
He noted that the notion of life after dea1h was a primordial image, and that it made sense to live in accordance with this.
From the perspective of a doctor of souls, he argued, it made sense to regard dea1h as only a transition.
Three years later, he wrote a paper on “Soul and dea1h,” characterizing religions as systems for the preparation for dea1h.
He argued that, given the collective soul of humanity, death might be regarded as the fulfilment of life’s meaning.
Belief in an afterlife was anthropologically normative, and it was rather secular materialism that viewed death as a pure cessation.
This was an aberrant development, viewed from a historical and cross-cultural perspective.
The issue of dea1h became particularly acute at midlife.
From then, “only those remain living who are willing to die with life.
Since what happens in the secret hour of the midday of life is the reversal of the parabola, the birth of dea1h.”
The Black Books chart how Jung negotiated the “reversal of the parabola.”
Seen from this perspective, his personal transformation, his individuation, was a preparation for dea1h.
~The Black Books, Vol. I, Page 103-104
