Carl Jung: I am sorry you knocked at my door in vain
To Ralf Winkler
Dear Herr Winkler, 5 June 1957
I am sorry you knocked at my door in vain, and that my secretary may not have made the true state of affairs sufficiently clear to you.
I understand your need for people very well, also your wish to make contact with people who really have something to say.
At the age of nearly 82 perhaps I may say without being presumptuous that in my long life I have seen so many people, and also helped them, that my present seclusion seems to me well-earned and ought not to be grudged.
The obligation to be there for others must now be taken over by others who have more strength.
This has nothing to do with “lack of humanity” on my part, rather I appeal to your humanity to understand my situation.
Perhaps you also will one day understand that it is only the man who is really capable of being alone, and without bitterness, who attracts other people.
Then he doesn’t need to seek them anymore, they come all by themselves, among them the very ones whom he himself needs.
With my best wishes,
Yours,
C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 366-367
Marion Woodman: The door thuds, leaving them bitter or resigned.
The undercurrent of despair in our society is epitomized in a German word that first appeared in English in 1963, and is now incorporated into the Oxford English Dictionary.
It is torschlusspanik, (pronounced torshlusspanic), defined as “panic at the thought that a door between oneself and life’s opportunities has shut.”
The doors that were once opened through initiation rites are still crucial thresholds in the human psyche, and when those doors do not open, or when they are not recognized for what they are, life shrinks into a series of rejections fraught with torschlusspanik. Torschlusspanik is now a part of our culture because there are so few rites to which individuals will submit in order to transcend their own selfish drives.
Without the broader perspective, they see no meaning in the rejection.
The door thuds, leaving them bitter or resigned.
If, instead, they could temper themselves to a point of total concentration, a bursting point where they could either pass over or fall back as in a rite of passage, then they could test who they are.
Their passion would be spent in an all-out positive effort, instead of deteriorating into disillusionment and despair.
The terror behind that word torschlusspanik is what drives many people into analysis—the last door has shut, the last rejection has taken place.
No door will ever open again. Nothing means anything. ― Marion Woodman, The Pregnant Virgin: A Process of Psychological Transformation, Page 16-17
The dream is a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses
Visions Seminar
With Faustian indignation my patient will cry out:
This witch’s quackery disgusts my soul!
Is this your promise then, that I be healed
By crooked counsel in this crazy hole,
In truth by some decrepit dame revealed?
Cannot you brew an ichor of your own?
To which I shall reply:
“Haven’t you tried one remedy after another? Haven’t you seen for yourself that all your efforts have only led you round in a circle, back to the confusion of your present life? So where will you get that other point of view from, if it cannot be found anywhere in your world?”
Here Mephistopheles murmurs approvingly, “That’s where the witch comes in,” thus giving his own devilish twist to Nature’s secret and perverting the truth that the dream is an inner vision, “mysterious still in open light of day.”
The dream is a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses of the soul, opening into that cosmic night which was psyche long before there was any ego-consciousness, and which will remain psyche no matter how far our ego-consciousness extends.
For all ego-consciousness is isolated; because it separates and discriminates, it knows only particulars, and it sees only those that can be related to the ego. Its essence is limitation, even though it reach to the farthest nebulae among the stars.
All consciousness separates; but in dreams we put on the likeness of that more universal, truer, more eternal man dwelling in the darkness of primordial night.
There he is still the whole, and the whole is in him, indistinguishable from nature and bare of all ego-hood. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 304
The descent into the world, whether it is at the beginning of the existence of the human being, or whether it happens in the course of life after a phase of life in the unconscious, is always characterized by sacrifice.
Therefore people, when they are leaving analysis for a while often cling to certain things which they had better not cling to.
You know, one of the ordinary prejudices of people who have gone through a period of analysis is to think that the relation to the world and people consists in psychologizing things, they think that everything ought to be analyzed; whether they are going to a concert or taking a trip, they must have a dream about it.
But we analyze dreams not in order to learn about particular matters, but to learn about the relationship of the unconscious to these matters, namely, to learn whether certain conscious developments coincide with the collective unconscious, or what the reasons are for certain disturbances in the conscious.
It is not meant that you should live your whole life in a sort of superstitious dread of what the dream says about things, so that you cannot move unless the dream tells you to, that you must wait for a dream to tell you when to balance your household account, for instance.
I have seen the most amazing things in that line.
“But why the devil don’t you do it?” “I have had no dream about it.”
Such nonsense!
It is the same thing, you see, one clings to certain ideas and is completely lost without them.
That does not mean, however, that one should throw the whole thing out of the window, that would be quite wrong, for there are plenty of circumstances in life where one had better consider the dream, really problematical situations where the dream is needed.
But whether you should scrub your floor or buy a pair of new shoes when you need them are not problems.
People who upon leaving cling to the analytical style, insisting upon everything being discussed and analyzed, become exceedingly clumsy and boring.
This must be sacrificed, it is quite clear; this style is good for analysis but not for life.
And then it looks like a terrible sacrifice, inasmuch as people are inclined to think they have then entirely lost contact with the unconscious.
You must be able to lose contact, you can never gain anything new without losing something. So risk losing the unconscious.
You see it is quite ridiculous-to put it mildly-to be afraid that you could lose your unconscious; that clings to you so tightly that you may be just glad if you can sometimes cherish the illusion of having lost it.
The unconscious clings to you so tightly that you cannot get rid of it; no fear of losing contact with it, that is all illusion.
But it looks like that; the transition from a psychological atmosphere into the collective atmosphere of the world is a most painful procedure, no doubt, and a painful contrast, and therefore it is quite justified to symbolize it by a lot of sacrificial blood. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Pages 1356-1357
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