EDITORIAL NOTE
The most famous idea of Jung's is his recognition of the
psychological value of spiritual experience.

To that - these are paragraphs 519-526 of Jung’s work
”THE CONFESSIONAL” specifically addressing clergy work
with therapeutic applications of hypnosis

The fuller work is HERE on our website under SCHOLARLY WORKS

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519 It is easy for the doctor to show understanding in this respect, you will say. But people forget that even doctors have moral scruples, and that certain patients confessions are hard even for a doctor to swallow. Yet the patient does not feel himself accepted unless the very worst in him is accepted too.

No one can bring this about by mere words; it comes only through reflection and through the doctor’s attitude towards himself and his own dark side. If the doctor wants to guide another, or even accompany him a step of the way, he must feel with that person’s psyche.

He never feels it when he passes judgment. Whether he puts his judgments into words, or keeps them to himself, makes not the slightest difference. To take the opposite position, and to agree with the patient off-hand, is also of no use, but estranges him as much as condemnation.

Feeling comes only through unprejudiced objectivity.

This sounds almost like a scientific precept, and it could be confused with a purely intellectual, abstract attitude of mind. But what I mean is something quite different. It is a human quality a kind of deep respect for the facts, for the man who suffers from them, and for the riddle of such a man’s life.

The truly religious person has this attitude. He knows that God has brought all sorts of strange and inconceivable things to pass and seeks in the most curious ways to enter a man’s heart.

He therefore senses in everything the unseen presence of the divine will. This is what I mean by “unprejudiced objectivity.” It is a moral achievement on the part of the doctor, who ought not to let himself be repelled by sickness and corruption. We cannot change anything unless we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses.

I am the oppressor of the person I condemn, not his friend and fellow-sufferer. I do not in the least mean to say that we must never pass judgment when we desire to help and improve. But if the doctor wishes to help a human being he must be able to accept him as he is. And he can do this in reality only when he has already seen and accepted himself as he is.

520 Perhaps this sounds very simple, but simple things are always the most difficult. In actual life it requires the greatest art to be simple, and so acceptance of oneself is the essence of the moral problem and the acid test of one’s whole outlook on life.

That I feed the beggar, that I forgive an insult, that I love my enemy in the name of Christ all these are undoubtedly great virtues. What I do unto the least of my brethren, that I do unto Christ.

But what if I should discover that the least amongst them all, the poorest of all beggars, the most impudent of all offenders, yea the very fiend himself that these are within me, and that I myself stand in need of the alms of my own kindness, that I myself am the enemy who must be loved what then?

Then, as a rule, the whole truth of Christianity is reversed: there is then no more talk of love and long-suffering; we say to the brother within us “Raca,” and condemn and rage against ourselves.

We hide him from the world, we deny ever having met this least among the lowly in ourselves, and had it been God himself who drew near to us in this despicable form, we should have denied him a thousand times before a single cock had crowed.

521 Anyone who uses modern psychology to look behind the scene not only of his patients’ lives but more especially of his own life and the modern psychotherapist must do this if he is not to be merely an unconscious fraud will admit that to accept himself in all his wretchedness is the hardest of tasks, and one which it is almost impossible to fulfill.

The very thought can make us sweat with fear. We are therefore only too delighted to choose, without a moment’s hesitation, the complicated course of remaining in ignorance about ourselves while busying ourselves with other people and their troubles and sins.

This activity lends us a perceptible air of virtue, by means of which we benevolently deceive ourselves and others! God be praised, we have escaped from ourselves at last!

There are countless people who can do this with impunity, but not everyone can, and these few break down on the road to their Damascus and succumb to a neurosis.

How can I help these people if I myself am a fugitive, and perhaps also suffer from the morbus sacer of a neurosis? Only he who has fully accepted himself has “unprejudiced objectivity.”

But no one is justified in boasting that he has fully accepted himself. We can point to Christ, who sacrificed his historical bias to the god within him, and lived his individual life to the bitter end without regard for conventions or for the moral standards of the Pharisees.

522 The Protestants must sooner or later face this question: Are we to understand the “imitation of Christ” in the sense that we should copy his life and, if I may use the expression, ape his stigmata; or in the deeper sense that we are to live our own proper lives as truly as he lived his in its individual uniqueness?

It is no easy matter to live a life that is modeled on Christ’s, but it is unspeakably harder to live one’s own life as truly as Christ lived his.

Anyone who did this would run counter to the conditions of his own history, and though he might thus be fulfilling them, he would none the less be misjudged, derided, tortured, and crucified. He would be a kind of crazy Bolshevist who deserved the cross.

We therefore prefer the historically sanctioned and sanctified imitation of Christ. I would never disturb a monk in the practice of this identification, for he deserves our respect. But neither I nor my patients are monks, and it is my duty as a physician to show my patients how they can live their lives without becoming neurotic, Neurosis is an inner cleavage the state of being at war with oneself.

Everything that accentuates this cleavage makes the patient worse, and everything that mitigates it tends to heal him. What drives people to war with themselves is the suspicion or the knowledge that they consist of two persons in opposition to one another.

The conflict may be between the sensual and the spiritual man, or between the ego and the shadow. It is what Faust means when he says: “Two souls, alas, dwell in my breast apart!” A neurosis is a splitting of personality.

523 Healing may be called a religious problem. In the sphere of social or national relations, the state of suffering may be civil war, and this state is to be cured by the Christian virtue of forgiveness and love of one’s enemies.

That which we recommend, with the conviction of good Christians, as applicable to external situations, we must also apply inwardly in the treatment of neurosis.

This is why modern man has heard enough about guilt and sin. He is sorely enough beset by his own bad conscience, and wants rather to know how he is to reconcile himself with his own nature how he is to love the enemy in his own heart and call the wolf his brother.

524 The modern man does not want to know in what way he can imitate Christ, but in what way he can live his own individual life, however meager and uninteresting it may be. It is because every form of imitation seems to him deadening and sterile that he rebels against the force of tradition that would hold him to well-trodden ways.

All such roads, for him, lead in the wrong direction. He may not know it, but he behaves as if his own individual life were

God’s special will which must be fulfilled at all costs. This is the source of his egoism, which is one of the most tangible evils of the neurotic state. But the person who tells him he is too egoistic has already lost his confidence, and rightly so, for that person has driven him still further into his neurosis.

525 If I wish to effect a cure for my patients I am forced to acknowledge the deep significance of their egoism, I should be blind, indeed, if I did not recognize it as a true will of God. I must even help the patient to prevail in his egoism; if he succeeds in this, he estranges himself from other people.

He drives them away, and they come to themselves as they should, for they were seeking to rob him of his “sacred” egoism. This must be left to him, for it is his strongest and healthiest power; it is, as I have said, a true will of God, which sometimes drives him into complete isolation.

However wretched this state may be, it also stands him in good stead, for in this way alone can he get to know himself and learn what an invaluable treasure is the love of his fellow beings.

It is, moreover, only in the state of complete abandonment and loneliness that we experience the helpful powers of our own natures.

526 When one has several times seen this development at work one can no longer deny that what was evil has turned to good, and that what seemed good has kept alive the forces of evil.

The arch-demon of egoism leads us along the royal road to that in-gathering which religious experience demands. What we observe here is a fundamental law of life: enantiodromia or conversion into the opposite; and it is this that makes possible the reunion of the warring halves of the personality and thereby brings the civil war to an end.

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Presented for Consideration by the Rev. Christian Skoorsmith,
Vice-President CSIG and Psychology Doctoral candidate

(2024)

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