People who know nothing about nature are of course neurotic.
People who know nothing about nature are of course neurotic, for they are not adapted to reality.
They are too naive like children, and it is necessary to tell them the facts of life, so to speak–to make it plain to them that they are human beings like all others.
Not that such enlightenment will cure neurotics; they can only regain their health when they climb up out the mud of the commonplace.
But they are only too fond of lingering in what they have earlier repressed. How are they ever to emerge if analysis does not make them aware of something different and better, when even theory holds them fast in it and offers them nothing more than the rational or “reasonable injunction to abandon such childishness?
That is precisely what they cannot do, and how should they be able to if they do not discover something to stand on?
One form of life cannot simply be abandoned unless it is exchanged for another.
As for a rational approach to life, that is, as experience shows, impossible, especially when a person is by nature as unreasonable as a neurotic. ~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections
The causes of a neurosis lie in the present as much as in the past, and only a cause actually existing in the present can keep a neurosis active.
“If we closely examine an individual case of this sort( a neurosis ), we do discover peculiar disturbances in the sexual sphere as well as in the sphere of unconscious impulses in general. Freud sees in the presence of these disturbances an explanation of the psychic disturbance as a whole; he is interested only in the causal interpretation of the sexual symptoms.
He completely overlooks the fact that, in certain cases, the supposed causes of the neurosis were always present, but had no pathological effect until a disturbance of the conscious attitude set in and led to a neurotic upset.
It is as though, when a ship was sinking because of a leak, the crew interested itself in the chemical constitution of the water that was pouring in, instead of stopping the leak. The disturbance of the instinctual sphere is not a primary but a secondary phenomenon.
When conscious life has lost its meaning and promise, it is as though a panic had broken loose: “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die!” It is this mood, born of the meaninglessness of life, that causes the disturbance in the unconscious and provokes the painfully curbed instincts to break out anew.
The causes of a neurosis lie in the present as much as in the past, and only a cause actually existing in the present can keep a neurosis active.
A man is not tubercular because he was infected twenty years ago with bacilli, but because active foci of infection are present now.
The questions when and how the infection occurred are totally irrelevant.
Even the most accurate knowledge of the previous history cannot cure the tuberculosis. And the same holds true of the neuroses.” ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 517
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