Carl Jung: Psychological treatment cannot rid you of the basic facts of your nature.
Letters of C. G. Jung: Volume I, 1906-1950 (Vol 1)
Dear Fraulein N., 23 January 1941
There is much that I do not understand in your letter.
If you are suffering from an inferior extraversion, then that is a fact which is nobody’s fault and for which you can hold nobody responsible.
It is a difficulty which is rooted in your own nature and which you can only acknowledge in an attempt to do the best you can with it.
Nor does it matter at all whether I have a high or a low opinion of you. The only thing that matters is what you do yourself. Nobody can “fence you in,” a s you put it.
But people who have no money, for instance, are fenced in by that very fact without being able to hold anybody else responsible.
There are a whole lot of facts in your letter which you’ll just have to face up to instead of tracing them back to the faulty behaviour of other people.
Psychological treatment cannot rid you of the basic facts of your nature; it can only give you the necessary insight, and only to the extent that you are capable of it.
There are countless people with an inferior extraversion or with too much introversion or with too little money who in God’s name must plod along through life under such conditions.
These conditions are not diseases but normal difficulties of life.
If you blame me for your psychological difficulties it won’t help you at all, for it is not my fault you have them.
It’s nobody’s fault. I can’t take these difficulties away from you, but have merely tried to make you aware of what you need in order to cope with them.
If you could stop blaming other people and external circumstances for your own inner difficulties you would have gained an infinite amount.
But if you go on making others responsible, no one will have any desire to stand by you with advice.
Yours sincerely,
C.G. Jung [Letters Volume 1, Page 292.]
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