The psychic cause of a car accident
Letters of C. G. Jung: Volume 2, 1951-1961
To Philip Metman
Dear Mr. Metman, 27 March 1954
Many thanks for your kind letter, which interested me very much.
I gather with great concern that you have had a hair-breadth escape from a car accident.
The accident has affected only the outer shell, but evidently you and your wife were not affected physically by this broad hint.
Naturally this may have an inner connection with what you are writing, for experience shows that accidents of this sort are very often connected with creative energy which turns against us because somehow it is not given due heed.
This may easily happen, for we always judge by what we already know and very seldom listen to what we don’t yet know.
Therefore we can easily take a step in the wrong direction or continue too long on the right path until it becomes the wrong one.
Then it may happen that in this rather ungentle way we are forced to change our attitude.
I shall soon turn to your manuscript for just now I am once again preoccupied willy-nilly with the question of synchronicity and astrology.
I have had to suppress the chapter on astrology altogether in the English edition, since apparently no one can understand it.
I am now reducing it to a few pages without any tables.
Maybe I shall succeed this time in making the risque joke of an acausal arrangement accessible to my public.
Meanwhile with best regards,
Yours sincerely,
C.G. Jung
P.S. I would be glad to welcome you here on October 10th, but you know how it is in old age:
one promises something and knows that everything is only provisional. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 161-162.