The 2,000,000 Year Old Man
Before I came here I had the impression one might get from Europe that he [Roosevelt] was an opportunist, perhaps even an erratic mind.
Now that I have seen him and heard him when he talked at Harvard, however, I am convinced that here is a strong man, a man who is really great.
Perhaps that’s why many people do not like him.
[Dr. Jung paid his respects to dictators, explaining their rise as due to the effort of peoples to delegate to others the complicated task of managing their collective existence so that individuals might be free to engage in “individuation.” He defined the term as the development by each person of his own inherent pattern of existence.]
People have been bewildered by the war, by what has occurred in Russia, Italy, Germany, Spain.
These things take their breath away.
They wonder if it is worth while living because they have lost their beliefs, their philosophy.
They ask if civilization has made any progress at all. I would call it progress that in the 2,000,000 years we have existed on earth we have developed a chin and a decent sort of brain. Historically what we call progress is, after all, just a mushroom growth of coal and oil.
Otherwise we are not any more intelligent than the old Greeks or Romans.
As to the present troubles, it is important simply to remember that mankind has been through such things more than once and has given evidence of a great adaptive system stored away in our unconscious mind.
[It is to this great adaptive system in every individual that he addresses himself, he explained, when a patient comes to him, broken down by his struggles with the problems of his individual existence.]
Together the patient and I address ourselves to the 2,000,000-year-old man that is in all of us.
In the last analysis, most of our difficulties come from losing contact with our instincts, with the age-old unforgotten wisdom stored up in us.’ And where do we make contact with this old man in us?
In our dreams,they are the clear manifestations of our unconscious mind.
They are the rendezvous of the racial history and of our current external problems.
In our sleep we consult the 2,000,000-year-old man which each of us represents.
We struggle with him in various manifestations of fantasy.
That is why I ask a patient to write up his dreams.
Usually they point the way for him as an individual.
[Dr. Jung said we dream all the time—it is normal to dream.
Those who say they have a dreamless sleep, he insisted, merely forget their dreams immediately on waking.
In all languages, he pointed out, there is a proverb recording the wisdom of sleeping on any difficult problem. . . .
Even when awake, Dr. Jung concluded, we dream; unbidden fantasies flit through the background of our minds and occasionally
come to notice when our attention to immediate external problems is lowered by fatigue or reverie.
There is hope of repairing a breakdown whenever a patient has neurotic symptoms.
They indicate that he is not at one with himself and the neurotic symptoms themselves usually diagnose what is wrong.
Those who have no neurotic symptoms are probably beyond help by any one. ~New York Times interview October 4, 1936 as found in C.G. Jung Speaking [Pages 88-90.
Carl Jung on Old Age.
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Letters of C. G. Jung: Volume 2, 1951-1961
Old age is only half as funny as one is inclined to think.
It is at all events the gradual breaking down of the foolishness identifies as ourselves. bodily machine, with which foolishness identifies as ourselves.
It is indeed a major effort– the magnum opus in fact– to escape in time from the narrowness of its embrace and to liberate our mind to the vision of the immensity of the world, of which we form an infinitesimal part.
In spite of the enormity of our scientific cognition we are yet hardly at the bottom of the ladder, but we are at least so far that we are able to recognize the smallness of our knowledge.
The older I grow the more impressed I am by the frailty and uncertainty of our understanding, and all the more I take recourse to the simplicity of immediate experience so as not to lose contact with the essentials, namely the dominants which rule human existence throughout the millenniums. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 2, Page 580.
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