JUNG: STRIVING TOWARD WHOLENESS

Today many psychologists dedicated to the idea of adult growth are turning for inspiration to Swiss psychiatrist C. G. Jung. Long forgotten or ignored, Jung, unlike Freud, saw life as a continuing series of metamorphoses.
"Personality is a seed that can only develop by slow stages throughout life," Jung stated. "And it is not the child, but only the adult, who can achieve personality as the fruit of a full life directed to this end." Such an achievement, he insisted, is both an ideal to strive for and a task requiring effort and courage,
Jung believed that the roots of neurosis arc found in present situations rather than in the remote past. He and Freud differed radically in other ways as well. For example, Jung did not accept the equation of libido with sexual drive, nor the concept of the Oedipus complex. And he regarded the unconscious as the scat of universal primordial images, or archetypes.
The central archetype is the Self. Jung viewed the Self not merely as the conscious ego, however, but as a psychic totality that comes from unification of the conscious and the unconscious. This unification is achieved by "individuation," he said: a process that leads a person toward wholeness, toward becoming more fully what he really is, over the course of an entire life.
Jung described forty as the "noon" of life, and he considered this period "a time of enormous psychological importance." In fact, he referred to this mid-life period as "the moment of greatest unfolding." But he also warned that embarking on the second half of life is painful, a warning that came from his own personal experience.
In 1913, when Jung was thirty-eight, he entered a six-year period of decisive change: He broke with Freud, whose devoted disciple he had been; he resigned from the International Psychoanalytic Association; he severed his tics with Zurich University; and he began what he called his Nekyia, a painful journey through the unconscious.
Curiously, Freud himself also went through a period of mid-life change that was remarkably similar. Beginning in 1894, when he too was thirty-eight, Freud embarked on a six-year period of turbulence: His father died; he broke off an intimate relationship with his mentor, Wilhelm Fliess; he abandoned his interest in neurology to begin formulating the principles of psychoanalysis; and finally, he initiated his own self-analysis.
Describing the mid-life crises of these two great men and the astonishing parallels between them. Dr. Henri F. Ellen-berger writes: "Both suffered symptoms of emotional illness: Freud spoke of his 'neurasthenia' or his 'hysteria'; Jung spent long periods brooding by the lake, or piling stones into little castles. Both men underwent self-imposed psychic exercises, each according to his own method: Freud by free association, endeavoring to recover the lost memories of his early childhood; Jung by forced imagination and the drawing of his dreams. In both men these exercises worked as a self-therapy, although in the beginning they increased their sufferings."" —
When this critical period ended, both men emerged dramatically transformed and strengthened. At the age of forty-four each was now ready to lead rather than follow, with his basic ideas more sharply formulated. Freud's focus was on the past—childhood and sexuality. Jung's focus was on the present and future—evolving adulthood. But it was Jung alone who drew universal truth from his personal transformation, incorporating his own mid-life metamorphosis into his thinking about the development of the human personality.
When a person begins to look backward and take stock of how his life has developed, "real motivations are sought and real discoveries made," said Jung; but the insights that follow "arc gained only through the severest shock." He accounted for these shocks by pointing out that we tend to regard every experience forcing us to greater awareness as a curse—just as the biblical fall of man, which began with the bite of the apple, presents the dawn of consciousness as a curse. Thus we tend to turn away from such insights, or deny them, because our increased awareness "separates us even further from the paradise of unconscious childhood," he said.
Nevertheless, Jung felt strongly that mid-life was the time to renounce this unconscious paradise, because the second half of life had a purpose quite different from the first. The first half of life should be devoted to making our mark on the world by earning money, extending conquests, and raising children, he said. But in the second half of life there should be a contraction, an end to getting ahead, in order to concentrate on exploring the self.
Jung believed that many neuroses are rooted in flight from one's life tasks. Thus, he suggested, the difficulties that men in their forties experience are often caused by fear, and their resistance to growth and change. "The very frequent neurotic disturbances of adult years all have one thing in common," said Jung. "They want to carry the psychology of the youthful phase over the threshold of the so-called years of discretion."
In the Jungian framework psychotherapy begins by bringing a person back to reality and making him more aware of his present situation. Even more important, however, since Jung believes that every human being is always striving for wholeness, striving to be well, many symptoms that in Freudian terms are seen as pathological are viewed, in Jungian terms, as healthy signs of growth.
This distinction is absolutely crucial to our understanding of the process by which the growth of the personality proceeds over the entire life course, and equally crucial to our understanding of what the mid-life crisis is all about.
To illustrate the significance of this difference, Dr. David Hart, a Jungian analyst, explains that if a man is working at a job that no longer stimulates him, he may begin to suffer from disturbing symptoms like anxiety or fear. But that docs not mean that he is "sick."
"If you analyze what is going on," says Hart, "the man may really be trying to repress tendencies towards greater realization of his personality, which might lead him into a different kind of life, or to different activities, or even different relationships. In other words, for the development of his personality he might need to expand beyond the narrow life which he is now leading, which, of course, produces a lot of fear."
In Jungian terms disturbing symptoms like anxiety, fear, or pain generally mean that a man is being challenged to grow and change. If he resists, if he is unable to tolerate this distress long enough to see where it might be leading him, he will have thrown away an opportunity to enlarge his life.
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