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Carl Jung on mental illness Monday, December 3, 2007

Filed under: fractally weird — jhorna @ 9:59 am
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Carl Jung’s words: “The foundation of all mental illness is an unwillingness to experience legitimate suffering.”

I’m not really sure how I feel about this…

 

6 Responses to “Carl Jung on mental illness”

  1. Michael Says:
    Sunday, December 9, 2007 at 11:52 am

    Jung felt that our suffering through a mental crisis is a natural course our body needs to take in order to have the problem that caused the illness resolved. I have stopped my meds twice over the past 15 years, and the only thing that got resolved was I thought I was going to die. I’ll bet the Carl never suffered from a mental illness.

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  2. jhorna Says:
    Sunday, December 9, 2007 at 12:10 pm

    Thanks for your thoughts.

    I know some people have Carl’s experience with suffering, and others have your experience. I would argue that Jung’s statement has some merit… I think a lot of people don’t know how to get through hard times, and just sort of refuse to rise to meet the challenge.

    BUT – I do NOT think that that’s what mental illness is: a challenge someone is refusing to work through.

    I think that Jung’s statement is valuable when it’s interpreted as not so much about mental illness as just… people unwilling to experience hardship in life. Especially my generation – who have confused “a bad day at work” with “a hard day at work” and would often rather move to a new business than weather a storm or strive to learn something in a challenging environment.

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  3. jhorna Says:
    Sunday, December 9, 2007 at 12:37 pm

    But! There are other reasons that Carl’s words really struck me.

    I’m curious as to what you would say to this… but what about people who never quite learned what levels of suffering they CAN survive? I mean… I’m talking about people whose natural keel is not even, and they will dip very low down in the water – nearing capsize – before their brain kicks in and puts them back up? When is that a normal experience, and when is it something that requires medication?

    I mean, for me if I don’t allow myself to go to that low place, I won’t ever get back up to the high place – do you know what I mean? That’s why it’s sometimes difficult for me to empathize with people who take medications to stop themselves from going “down”. But… maybe my “low” place isn’t as low as someone who needs to take meds, or maybe I don’t stay there for very long as compared to them, or maybe the reasons some people dip down are totally nonexistent, as opposed to my reasons which are just regular old life struggles. Eh?

    And then there are people who get confused about the daily ups and downs that constitute life and they self-medicate in order to artificially even things out. That scares the shit out of me! Sometimes life is just hard! Sometimes you will be sad! It’s ok!

    But really in the end I mostly feel like it’s not something that I have ever experienced, and so it is not something I can ever really understand.

    I only hope that I can be sensitive to the experience that another human being has, even if it makes no sense to me.

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  4. bob k Says:
    Friday, July 17, 2009 at 12:30 am

    Michael, you are going to die. This is what we discover by legitimate suffering. We develop the capacity to experience the fullness of life—its sorrow and its joy. If we escape from reality we live in an illusion, actually we never really live. I sat through a five month period of grieving for failures, losses, and betrayals that are common to life in a pathological system. The capacity to experience pain widens are view of ourselves, others, and the world around us. Fear is foundation of a personality designed to escape reality. Legitimate suffering reduces personality dominance over our lives allowing the emotional and intuitive centers to function apprehending the complexity of the world around us. It is an incredile journey to decide to suffer no matter the depth or time we must experience to live before death.

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  5. Nat Lopes Says:
    Thursday, November 12, 2009 at 8:23 pm

    Jung also felt black people were savages compared to whites. His theories are racist and his ponderings about dreams are stupid.

    See here:

    http://pdfcast.org/pdf/the-racism-of-jung

    Reply

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