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The modern man risks waking up one day to find he has slept through half his life. This lecture from Academy of Ideas turns to Carl Jung for a drug-free path back. Jung’s first prescription was honesty: life is hard, and difficulty is necessary for health. His second was to face the shadow — the denied parts of ourselves that grow darker the more we hide them. And his deepest medicine was meaning: find the role that makes your existence matter, the way the Pueblo people believed they helped the sun rise each day.
Full Video Transcript
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This is precisely the risk modern man runs.
He may wake up one day to find that he has missed half his life.
Psychotropic drugs have become one of the most common forms of treatment for anxiety disorders and depression.
But these drugs are not very good at curing people, and often they just become crutches for lifelong psychological cripples.
Fortunately, there are alternative ways to treat anxiety and depression.
In this video, we are going to turn to Carl Jung, one of history’s greatest psychiatrists,
for drug-free advice on how to find a cure to these psychological disorders.
The elite, wrote Jung, still cling firmly to the notion that anxiety disorders originate
in alterations within the brain.
Unfortunately, many run-of-the-mill doctors still swear by this gospel to the detriment
of their patients, whom our age produces in swarms.
Nearly all these patients have been convinced by the medical dogma that their sickness is
of a physical nature.
Jung believed that most cases of anxiety and depression are not the product of a faulty
brain, but of a faulty way of life.
The first step in Jung’s method of treatment, therefore, was not a drug prescription, but
a dose of psychological insight.
regarding what to expect from life and insight into what it takes to change. With respect to
the former, Jung noted that many people believe that life should be easy, suffering kept to a
minimum and difficulties avoided. But Jung would be blunt with his patients, telling them that life
is not easy, and comfort and peace are not our natural state. Or as Jung wrote,
In the last resort it is highly improbable that there could ever be a therapy that got
rid of all difficulties. Man needs difficulty, they are necessary for health. What concerns us
here is only an excessive amount of them. Accepting that difficulties are inevitable
and nothing worth achieving comes easy, places us on the firm ground of reality from which to change.
For when we accept that life is hard, we will also realize that only through a strength into
character do we have any chance of living a good life. If, on the other hand, we remain caught in
the delusion that life should be easy, we will be less motivated to overcome a weak character,
as we will falsely hope that if we just give it time, life will get easier.
Life is a battleground, wrote Jung, it always has been and always will be, and if it were not so,
existence would come to an end. There is another piece of psychological insight that Jung saw as
crucial for his patients to understand, namely, that our problems exist in the present and that
present problems are not solved by digging into our past. Many people like to believe that only
when they have determined why they are the way they are, can they move forward in life. But Jung
believed that an excessive fixation on the past was merely an avoidance tactic used to evade the
difficult task of facing up to what needs to be done now. People should know, he wrote, that not
only the neurotic, but everyone, naturally prefers never to seek the causes of any inconvenience in
himself, but to push them as far away from himself as possible in space and time. Otherwise, he would
run the risk of having to make a change for the better. Compared with this odious risk, it seems
infinitely more advantageous either to put the blame onto somebody else or, if the fault lies
undeniably with oneself, at least to assume that it somehow arose of its own accord in early infancy.
With these doses of psychological insight, Jung would turn to the first actionable step
in his method of treatment, and this was to help his patients face up to what he called
the shadow.
For as Jung writes,
The shadow is Jung’s term for the elements of our character that we deny and force into
the unconscious, due to shame, insecurity, or censure.
It is, in other words, the side of our personality we wish to hide from others as well as from ourselves.
There can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants himself to be.
Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.
Jung believed that facing up to the shadow was crucial in the process of self-change for several reasons.
Firstly, we do ourselves no favors by denying the inferior parts of our personality.
We merely lose control of how and when these traits emerge.
If, on the other hand, we acknowledge a character flaw,
we can learn how to control its expression and so minimize the damage it does in our life.
Or as Jung explains,
Anything conscious can be corrected,
but anything that slips away into the unconscious is beyond the reach of correction
and, its rank growth, undisturbed, is subject to increasing degeneration, happily, nature sees to
it that the unconscious contents will erupt into consciousness sooner or later and create the
necessary confusion. But the shadow is not only made up of weakness, rather, some elements of it
are strengths which we repressed in our youth because our peers, family members, or society at
large, gave us the false impression that these traits were bad.
Some people, for example, repress the ability to express anger or the ability to stand up
for themselves.
Another benefit of becoming conscious of the shadow, therefore, is that we gain access
to life-promoting character traits, or as Jung writes,
The shadow is merely somewhat inferior, primitive, unadapted, and awkward, not wholly bad.
It even contains qualities which would in a way vitalize and embellish human existence,
but convention forbids.
One way to become conscious of the shadow is to observe the weaknesses, flaws, and insecurities
of those close to us.
For not only do most of us repress similar character traits, but we also tend to project
elements of our shadow onto other people.
If therefore, we pay attention to which character traits of our friends and family bother us,
We may also gain a glimpse of our own shadow.
In addition to observing others, another way to bring the shadow into the light of consciousness
is to reflect on the motives for our actions, especially actions we are ashamed of, and
to be open to self-criticism when it is warranted.
For as Jung notes, often the only thing that is preventing us from seeing our shadow is
the ability to be honest with ourselves.
With a little self-criticism, one can see through the shadow.
Along with becoming more conscious of the shadow, another integral aspect of Jung’s
method of treatment was helping his patients find a meaning to their lives.
For Jung believed that when stuck in a deep depression or consumed by an anxiety disorder,
to be cured necessitates discovering a role as one of the actors in the divine drama of
life.
To understand what was meant by this, we can turn to an encounter Jung had with a chief
of the Pueblo tribe in the first half of the 20th century.
Jung was discussing with this man the traditions of his tribe when the chief made the following
remark. Yes, we are a small tribe, and these Americans, they want to interfere with our
religion. They should not do it. Because we are the sons of the Father, the Son, he who goes there,
pointing to the Son. That is our Father. We must help him daily to rise over the horizon and to
walk over heaven. And we don’t do it for ourselves only. We do it for America. We do it for the whole
world. Jung understood that to many in the modern day this statement would sound crazy and archaic,
but as he further notes the members of this tribe did not suffer like we suffer.
They were not infected by neuroses, anxiety disorders or depression. They did not fill
themselves with pills each day, and they were not debilitated by addictions. Rather,
this tribe was composed of highly functioning individuals who saw themselves as fulfilling
their duty as an actor in the divine drama of life, and their lives were rich in meaning
and purpose. Or as Jung wrote, These people have no problems. They have their daily life,
their symbolic life. They get up in the morning with a feeling of their great and divine
responsibility. They are the sons of the Son, the Father. And their daily duty is to help the
Father over the horizon, not for themselves alone but for the whole world. You should see these
fellows. They have a natural, fulfilled dignity. Jung contrasts this way of life with a western
woman he met. This lady, as Jung notes, was a compulsive traveller, always running from one
place to the next, always seeking, but never really finding what she was looking for.
I was amazed when I looked into her eyes, wrote Jung. The eyes of a hunted, a cornered animal.
Seeking, seeking, always in the hope of something. She is possessed. And why is she possessed?
Because she does not live the life that makes sense. Hers is a life utterly, grotesquely
banal, with no point in it at all. If she dies today, nothing has happened, nothing
has vanished. Because she was nothing. This compulsive seeking infects many in the Western
world. Some run from one destination to another. Some chase romantic partners. Others are compulsive
seekers of money, prestige, fame, or recognition on social media. But whatever the outward
form it takes, the underlying motivation is the same. The seeker is trying to run away
from the banality of their existence. They are seeking to fill the void of emptiness
that comes from living a meaningless life. But as Jung explains this void cannot be filled
with things or even experiences. What fills this void is knowing that we are living in
a way that makes a difference, or as he writes concerning the woman he met. But if she could
say, I am the daughter of the moon, every night I must help the moon, my mother, over
the horizon, ah, that is something else. Then she lives. Then her life makes sense and makes
sense in all continuity and for the whole of humanity. That gives peace. When people
feel that they are living as actors in the divine drama. That gives the only meaning
to human life. Everything else is banal and you can dismiss it. A career, producing of
children, are all maya compared with that one thing, that your life is meaningful.
Jung was not suggesting that we all adopt the Puebloan mythology. Rather, his point
is that many people suffer because their life makes no sense. And the task for those who
want to be free of anxiety or depression is to discover this sense.
We must, in other words, find a way to justify our existence, so that we, like the Puebloan,
can believe that our life is meaningful.
For some this can be accomplished through religion, for others by contributing in a
substantial way to the promotion of values such as justice, freedom, or community, while
others will find it through the creative act.
But for those of us in the modern West, where we lack a dominant mythology, it is up to
us and us alone to discover how we can play a meaningful role in the divine drama of life.
For the few who accomplish this task, a fulfilling life will define their future.
For the many who don’t, years or decades of pointless suffering and compulsive seeking
will be their fate.
I am only concerned with the fulfillment of that which is in every individual, wrote Jung.
That is the whole problem, that is the problem of the true Pueblo, that I do today everything
that is necessary so that my Father can rise over the horizon.”
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Source: Academy of Ideas