With this realization the doctor sets foot on territory which he enters with the greatest caution.
Ordinary reasonableness, sound human judgment, science as a compendium of common sense, these certainly help us over a good part of the road, but they never take us beyond the frontiers of life’s most commonplace realities, beyond the merely average and normal.
They afford no answer to the question of psychic suffering and its profound significance.
A psychoneurosis must be understood, ultimately, as the suffering of a soul which has not discovered its meaning.
But all creativeness in the realm of the spirit as well as every psychic advance of man arises from the suffering of the soul, and the cause of the suffering is spiritual stagnation, or psychic sterility.
With this realization the doctor sets foot on territory which he enters with the greatest caution.
He is now confronted with the necessity of conveying to his patient the healing fiction, the meaning that quickens—for it is this that the sick person longs for, over and above everything that reason and science can give him.
He is looking for something that will take possession of him and give meaning and form, to the confusion of his neurotic soul. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 597-598
