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Therapy loves to dig through yesterday — but Carl Jung called that a false track. This lecture from Academy of Ideas explains his contrarian view. The neurotic’s problem is not buried in childhood; it is alive right now, in the avoidance, excuses, and habits of the present. Memory is not a clean record either — mood distorts what we recall, and distress can even manufacture false memories to justify our failures. The cure, Jung insisted, is forward-facing: bold goals, wholeness, and new habits, because it is only in the today that a neurosis can be healed.
Full Video Transcript
We should not forget that every neurosis entails a corresponding amount of demoralization.
If a man is neurotic, he has lost confidence in himself. A neurosis is a humiliating defeat
and is felt as such by people who are not entirely unconscious of their own psychology.
In the modern day, many people are plagued by a fear of life. Instead of facing up to life’s
challenges, they shrink from them and allow anxiety to limit their experience and cowardice
to limit their potential. Carl Jung believed that those who evade life’s challenges and who suffer
from anxiety, depression, guilt, and shame as a result are neurotic, and he saw their neurotic
illness as extremely prevalent in the West. Jung also recognized that many neurotics justify their
errant ways by blaming events of their past, and this is often encouraged by therapists who believe
that talking about the past, and in particular one’s childhood, can promote healing.
In this video we explore why Jung believed that turning backwards in examining the past
is a wrong turn and how overcoming a neurotic illness is best accomplished by focusing on
the present and looking to the future.
There is scarcely a neurotic, wrote Jung, who does not love to dwell upon the evils
of the past and to wallow in self-commiserating memories.
Very often his neurosis consists precisely in his hanging back and constantly excusing
himself on account of the past.
If asked to account for the origins of their distress, most neurotics will point to their
childhood and for good reason.
Being raised in a dysfunctional household, having poor role models, parents who do not
provide adequate support, or who are neurotic themselves, greatly increases the chance of
developing a neurosis.
Jung went as far as to suggest that if a child is neurotic, blame can usually be placed solely
on the parents, or as he wrote,
Neuroses in children are more symptoms of the mental condition of the parents than a
genuine illness of the child.
Only a very little of the child’s psychic life is its own.
For the most part it is still dependent on that of the parents.
Parents should always be conscious of the fact that they themselves are the principal
cause of neurosis in their children.
And while parents are often to blame for the neurosis of a child, as a neurotic child develops
into a neurotic adult, responsibility shifts away from the parents and toward the individual
suffering from the neurosis.
Or as Jung writes, The real therapy only begins when the patient
sees that it is no longer father and mother who are standing in his way, but himself.
A middle-aged man, for example, is not neurotic because he had neurotic parents.
He is neurotic because he has failed to take responsibility for his life, and failed to
cultivate the courage to deal with the problems in the present that are keeping him neurotic.
Or as Jung explains, 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.
To effectuate a cure from a neurosis many therapists encourage their patients to explore
their childhood and to pontificate on why they have become neurotic.
This is called a reductive therapeutic approach, as it attempts to narrow down from the great
complex of past events the ones that triggered the neurotic illness.
Understanding the sources of our distress, it is maintained, can help us realize that
we are not to blame for our suffering, and this can promote the self-acceptance that
facilitates healing.
Jung, however, believed that while self-acceptance is important, attempting to understand the
specific causes of our suffering is often counterproductive and not necessary for the
acceptance that leads to change. Whereas he wrote,
It is very suspicious that patients often have a pronounced tendency to account for their ailments
by some long-past experience, ingeniously drawing the analyst’s attention away from the present
to some false track in the past. A desire to dwell on the past is counterproductive
for several reasons. Firstly, excessive self-analysis, whether it takes the form
of dwelling on the past, ruminating on the future, or over-scrutinizing the self,
can make one miserable. The great 18th century philosopher Immanuel Kant went as far as to
suggest that too much self-analysis can dispose one to mental illness. Or as he wrote,
To wish to play the spy upon oneself is to reverse the natural order of the cognitive powers.
The desire for self-investigation is either already a disease of the mind
or will lead to such a disease and ultimately to the madhouse.
Self-analysis that takes the form of dwelling on the past is particularly
pathological and rarely produces positive results. Jung suggests that the neurotic
who constantly tries to figure out what went wrong with his life, is like a man who fixates
on trying to determine how he caught a bacterial illness. In each case, the cause is not what is
most important. What is important is taking the steps to get well in the present. Or as Jung
writes, a man is not tubercular because he was infected 20 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. Another major flaw of the reductive
therapeutic approach is that often we go astray in our attempt to account for what caused our
suffering. When we look back on our life, we do so through a series of interpretive filters which
makes an objective account of our history a practical impossibility. How we feel about our
life now, influences what events we remember, and how we remember them.
If we are depressed, for example, we will likely see our childhood as full of miseries
and disappointments, as our depressive state will lead us to focus only on the negatives
of the past and to overlook all that was good about it.
If on the other hand, we are content with our life, we may look back on the exact same
past with fond memories, and even see the bad events as important learning experiences
that were necessary to sculpt us into the person we are now. But it is not only that
our current life conditions skew how we perceive the past. They can also lead us to create
false memories in order to justify our current failings. Or as Carol Tavares and Elliot Aronson
write in Mistakes Were Made, but not by me, false memories allow people to forgive themselves
and justify their mistakes, but sometimes at a high price. An inability to take responsibility
for their lives. An appreciation of the distortions of memory, a realization that even deeply felt
memories might be wrong, might encourage people to hold their memories more lightly, drop the
certainty that their memories are always accurate, and to let go of the appealing impulse to use the
past to justify problems of the present. We’re told to be careful what we wish for because it
might come true. But we must also be careful which memories we select to justify our lives,
because we will have to live by them. Some people will argue that one benefit of digging into the
past is that we may unearth repressed traumas that we have failed to process. However, research
suggests that people rarely forget or successfully repress traumatic experiences. The problem with
trauma is typically an inability to stop thinking about the event and to prevent the memories from
intruding when one wishes to forget. Or as the clinical psychologist Richard McNally
wrote in his book Remembering Trauma, the notion that the mind protects itself by repressing
or dissociating memories of trauma, rendering them inaccessible to awareness, is a piece
of psychiatric folklore devoid of convincing empirical support.
Due to the problems with the reductive therapeutic approach, Jung adopted what he called a constructive
approach to heal from a neurosis. The constructive approach does away with the need to delve
into the past, and instead focuses on the problems of the present that are preventing
us from actualizing a better future. Or as Jung writes,
The constructive standpoint asks how, out of this present psyche, a bridge can be built
into its own future. A constructive approach is teleological, as it looks forward toward
an end or goal, in the realization that the ends we aim at can be more influential in
shaping our mindset and the state of our character than the events of our past.
Jung believed that to heal from a neurosis our overarching goal should be the development
of our personality toward the state of psychological wholeness.
Psychological wholeness is attained when we actualize all our latent potentials, and in
brevity of human life, this state is only ever approached, never fully realized. Those who are
moving toward this ideal are participating in what Jung called the process of individuation,
a process that contributes to health in body and mind. The problem that most neurotics face
is that they are stuck in the confines of a stagnant comfort zone and have long since
stopped moving along the path of individuation.
And so as Jung writes, The treatment of neurosis is a renewal of
the personality, working in every direction and penetrating every sphere of life.
While psychological wholeness is the overarching goal that we should aim for, to move toward
this ideal necessitates the selection of a series of more practical goals, be it in the
realm of our career, religious pursuits, interpersonal relations, or the cultivation of life skills.
The goals we select should be bold enough to force us out of our comfort zone and to
break us free from the errant ways of our past.
For as Jung noted in a passage in Volume 7 of his Collected Works,
Often a liberation from the past and a beckoning toward a future rich in possibilities is sufficient
to break a neurosis.
For young people, Jung writes, a liberation from the past may be enough.
A beckoning future lies ahead, rich in possibilities.
It is sufficient to break a few bonds.
The life urge will do the rest.
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Now back to the video.
Another practical tip Jung offers that can help one overcome a neurosis is to focus on
our habits.
Habits are foundational to the quality of our life and neurotics tend to be plagued
by a pernicious set of bad habits that contribute to a chronic avoidance of life’s challenges
and an inability to accomplish life-changing goals.
It is obviously not enough for a neurotic to know how his illness arose and whence it
came, for we seldom get rid of an evil merely by understanding its causes.
Nor should it be forgotten that the crooked paths of a neurosis lead to as many obstinate
habits, and that for all our insights these do not disappear until replaced by other habits.
Habits are won only by exercise.
The patient must be drawn out of himself into other paths.
we can adopt the constructive approach to healing from a neurosis without understanding
what caused us to become neurotic in the first place. We don’t need to try and untangle
the complicated web of our past to aim for new goals or to begin addressing our problems
in the here and now. Dwelling on the past may provide us with excuses for our neurotic
ways, and it may satisfy our need to justify our cowardice. But these excuses and justifications
will not cure us, for as Jung wrote, it is only in the today, not in our yesterdays,
that the neurosis can be cured, because the neurotic conflict has to be fought today,
and historical deviation is a detour, if not actually a wrong turning.
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Source: Academy of Ideas