Carl Jung and Self Education
What was formerly a method of medical treatment now becomes a method of self-education, and with this the horizon of our psychology is immeasurably widened.
The crucial thing is no longer the medical diploma, but the human quality.
This is a significant turn of events, for it places all the implements of the psychotherapeutic art that were developed in clinical practice, and then refined and systematized, at the service of our self-education and self-perfection, with the result that analytical psychology has burst the bonds which till then had bound it to the consulting-room of the doctor.
It goes beyond itself to fill the hiatus that has hitherto put Western civilization at a psychic disadvantage as compared with the civilizations of the East.
We Westerners knew only how to tame and subdue the psyche; we knew nothing about its methodical development and its functions.
Our civilization is still young, and young civilizations need all the arts of the animal-tamer to make the defiant barbarian and the savage in us more or less tractable.
But at a higher cultural level we must forgo compulsion and turn to self-development. For this we must have a way, a method, which, as I said, has so far been lacking.
It seems to me that the findings and experiences of analytical psychology can at least provide a foundation, for as soon as psychotherapy takes the doctor himself for its subject, it transcends its medical origins and ceases to be merely a method for treating the sick.
It now treats the healthy or such as have a moral right to psychic health, whose sickness is at most the suffering that torments us all.
For this reason analytical psychology can claim to serve the common weal more so even than the previous stages which are each the bearer of a general truth.
But between this claim and present-day reality there lies a gulf, with no bridge leading across.
We have yet to build that bridge stone by stone. ~Carl Jung, Problems of Psychotherapy, Page 75.
