Old age and illness released me at
last from my professional duties and gave me the necessary time
to contemplate the sins of my youth.
FOREWORD TO THE FOURTH SWISS EDITION
I have long been conscious of the fact that this book, which was written thirty-seven years ago, stood in urgent need of revision, but my professional obligations and my scientific work never left me sufficient leisure to settle down in comfort to this
unpleasant and difficult task.
Old age and illness released me at last from my professional duties and gave me the necessary time to contemplate the sins of my youth.
I have never felt happy about this book, much less satisfied with it: it was written at top speed, amid the rush and press of my medical practice, without regard to time or method.
I had to fling my material hastily together, just as I found it.
There was no opportunity to let my thoughts mature.
The whole thing came upon me like a landslide that cannot be stopped.
The urgency that lay behind it became clear to me only later: it was the explosion of all those psychic contents which could find no room, no breathingspace, in the constricting atmosphere of Freudian psychology and its narrow outlook.
I have no wish to denigrate Freud, or to detract from the extraordinary merits of his investigation of the individual psyche.
But the conceptual framework into which he fitted the psychic phenomenon seemed to me unendurably narrow.
I am not thinking here of his theory of neurosis, which can be as narrow as it pleases if only it is adequate to the empirical facts, or of his theory of dreams, about which different views may be held in all good faith; I am thinking more of the
reductive causalism of his whole outlook, and the almost complete disregard of the teleological directedness which is so characteristic of everything psychic.
Although Freud’s book The Future of an Illusion dates from his later years, it gives the best possible account of his earlier views, which move within the confines of the outmoded rationalism and scientific materialism of the late nineteenth century.
As might be expected, my book, born under such conditions, consisted of larger or smaller fragments which I could only string together in an unsatisfying manner.
It was an attempt, only partially successful, to create a wider setting for medical
psychology and to bring the whole of the psychic phenomenon within its purview.
One of my principal aims was to free medical psychology from the subjective and personalistic bias that characterized its outlook at that time, and to make it possible to understand the unconscious as an objective and collective psyche.
The personalism in the views of Freud and Adler that went hand in hand with the individualism of the nineteenth century failed to satisfy me because, except in the case of instinctive dynamisms (which actually have too little place in Adler), it left no room for objective, impersonal facts.
Freud, accordingly, could see no objective justification for my attempt, but
suspected personal motives.
Thus this book became a landmark, set up on the spot where two ways divided. Because of its imperfections and its incompleteness it laid down the programme to be followed for the next few decades of my life.
Hardly had I finished the manuscript when it struck me what it means to live with a myth, and what it means to live without one.
Myth, says a Church Father, is “what is believed always, everywhere, by everybody”; hence the man who thinks he can live without myth, or outside it, is an exception.
He is like one uprooted, having no true link either with the past, or with the ancestral life which continues within him, or yet with contemporary human society.
He does not live in a house like other men, does not eat and drink like other men, but lives a life of his own, sunk in a subjective mania of his own devising, which he believes to be the newly discovered truth.
This plaything of his reason never grips his vitals.
It may occasionally lie heavy on his stomach, for that organ is apt to reject the products of reason as indigestible.
The psyche is not of today; its ancestry goes back many millions of years. Individual consciousness is only the flower and the fruit of a season, sprung from the perennial rhizome beneath the earth; and it would find itself in better accord with the truth if
it took the existence of the rhizome into its calculations.
For the root matter is the mother of all things.
So I suspected that myth had a meaning which I was sure to
miss if I lived outside it in the haze of my own speculations.
I was driven to ask myself in all seriousness: “What is the myth you are living?”
I found no answer to this question, and had to admit that I was not living with a myth, or even in a myth, but rather in an uncertain cloud of theoretical possibilities which I was beginning to regard with increasing distrust
. I did not know that I was living a myth, and even if I had known it, I would not have known what sort of myth was ordering my life without my knowledge.
So, in the most natural way, I took it upon myself to get to know “my” myth, and I regarded this as the task of tasks, for—so I told myself—how could I, when treating
my patients, make due allowance for the personal factor, for my personal equation, which is yet so necessary for a knowledge of the other person, if I was unconscious of it?
I simply had to know what unconscious or preconscious myth was forming me, from what rhizome I sprang.
This resolve led me to devote many years of my life to investigating the subjective contents which are the products of unconscious processes, and to work out methods which would enable us, or at any rate help us, to explore the manifestations of the unconscious.
Here I discovered, bit by bit, the connecting links that I should have known about before if I was to join up the fragments of my book.
I do not know whether I have succeeded in this task now, after a lapse of thirty-seven years.
Much pruning had to be done, many gaps filled.
It has proved impossible to preserve the style of 1912, for I had to incorporate many things that I found out only many years later.
Nevertheless I have tried, despite a number of radical interventions, to leave as much of the original edifice standing as possible, for the sake of continuity with previous editions.
And although the alterations are considerable, I do not think one could say that it has turned into a different book.
There can be no question of that because the whole thing is really only an extended commentary on a practical analysis of the prodromal stages of schizophrenia.
The symptoms of the case form the Ariadne thread to guide us through the labyrinth of symbolistic parallels, that is, through the amplifications which
are absolutely essential if we wish to establish the meaning of the archetypal context.
As soon as these parallels come to be worked out they take up an incredible amount of space, which is why expositions of case histories are such an arduous task.
But that is only to be expected: the deeper you go, the broader the base becomes. It certainly does not become narrower, and it never by any chance ends in a point—in a psychic trauma, for instance.
Any such theory presupposes a knowledge of the traumatically affected psyche which no human being possesses, and which can only be laboriously acquired by investigating the workings of the unconscious.
For this a great deal of comparative aterial is needed, and it cannot be dispensed with any more than in comparative anatomy.
Knowledge of the subjective contents of consciousness means very little, for it tells us next to nothing about the real, subterranean life of the psyche.
In psychology as in every science a fairly wide knowledge of other subjects is among the requisites for research work.
A nodding acquaintance with the theory and pathology of neurosis is totally inadequate, because medical knowledge of this kind is merely information about an illness, but not knowledge of the soul that is ill.
I wanted, so far as lay within my power, to redress that evil with this book—then as now.
This book was written in 1911, in my thirty-sixth year.
The time is a critical one, for it marks the beginning of the second half of life, when a metanoia, a mental transformation, not infrequently occurs.
I was acutely conscious, then, of the loss of friendly relations with Freud and of the lost comradeship of our work together.
The practical and moral support which my wife gave me at that difficult period is something I shall always hold in grateful remembrance. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Page xxi-xxvi
