Why should he learn about the unconscious, the mother of the future?
To Cary F. Baynes
Dear Cary,
X.’s shyness in touching upon the psychological problem is a fact well known to me.
I have seen it in many cases.
You rarely find a similar attitude in women though.
It is just as if women knew less of its implications, as they know psychology chiefly as a means to an end, while a man has an incomparably more complete intuition about it although he knows very much less of it than a woman.
A woman thinks she is moving in a sphere of more or less known factors, while a man is terrified by the certainty of having to deal with the well-known “Unknowns,” as Wagner says in Faust: “Berufe nicht die wohlbekannte Schar! ”
The ” Unknowns” are a very definite factor in a man’s life.
He knows them quite well, so well in fact that he keeps on assuring himself and others that there is no such thing.
He even builds up a lamentable superiority in this respect.
This is the average man, and he is right in his anxiousness, because it is a matter of the fathers and mothers of all the terrors he is bringing to this world in the form of Communism and H-bombs, and last but not least by his fertility and the inevitable overpopulation.
He still thinks in terms of mass-hygiene and has nightmares about mass killing.
Why should he learn about the unconscious, the mother of the future?!
Man still hopes, in a primitive way, that not knowing,not naming, not seeing a danger would remove it.
Why should he bother with psychology, that is meant to help him in a situation which is declared to be invisible?
X.’s psychology in this respect is just every man’s behaviour,and I am the fool speaking about bad weather while the sun shines.
Cordially yours,
C.G. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 496-497
