If a man is lost in the desert or quite alone on a glacier.
Carl Jung Depth Psychology Facebook Group
In the case of psychological suffering, which always isolates the individual from the herd of so-called normal people, it is also of the greatest importance to understand that the conflict is not a personal failure only, but at the same time a suffering common to all and a problem with which the whole epoch is burdened. This general point of view lifts the individual out of himself and connects him with humanity.
The suffering does not even have to be a neurosis; we have the same feeling in very ordinary circumstances.
If for instance you live in a well-to-do community, and you suddenly lose all your money, your natural reaction will be to think that it is terrible and shameful and that you are the only one who is such an ass as to lose his money.
But if everybody loses his money it is quite another matter and you feel reconciled to it.
When other people are in the same hole as I am I feel much better.
If a man is lost in the desert or quite alone on a glacier, or if he is the responsible leader of a group of men in a precarious situation, he will feel terrible.
But when he is a soldier in a whole battalion that is lost, he will join the rest in cheering and making jokes, and will not realize the danger.
The danger is not less, but the individual feels quite differently about it in a group than when he has to face it alone. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 232
