Carl Jung Depth Psychology Facebook Group
The philosophical discussion is a task which psychotherapy necessarily sets itself, though not every patient will come down to basic principles.
The question of the measuring rod with which to measure, of the ethical criteria which are to determine our actions, must be answered somehow, for the patient may quite possibly expect us to account for our judgments and decisions.
Not all patients allow themselves to be condemned to infantile inferiority because of our refusal to render such an account, quite apart from the fact that a therapeutic blunder of this kind would be sawing off the branch on which we sit. In other words the art of psychotherapy requires that the therapist be in possession of avowable,
credible, and defensible convictions which have proved their viability either by having resolved any neurotic dissociations of his own or by preventing them from arising.
A therapist with a neurosis is a contradiction in terms.
One cannot help any patient advance further than one has advanced oneself. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 179