Modern Man in Search of a Soul

Originally published in 1933, Modern Man in Search of a Soul is the first Carl Jung book that I’ve read in its entirety, having been recommended it by a colleague who said it was Jung’s most accessible work. That I read the whole thing is proof that said colleague was right. Modern Man in Search of a Soul is easier to read than other of Jung’s writing that I’ve encountered. Not easy, mind you, but easier, and more importantly than that, the book is very stimulating and inspiring. Jacob said he knows a guy who reads it every year, and I can see why. In its 244 pages are many reminders of what an incredible opportunity it is, this human life. We are endlessly fascinating and complex creatures.

Per my usual process for writing a blog post, I underlined and bracketed the passages that really spoke to me as I read, and upon finishing I typed up (or mostly dictated) those passages into a Word document, which wound up being ten and a half single-spaced pages. Having now read over those passages once, I’d like to share what stands out in my memory instead of taking my usual, more granular approach. I’d like to write to you as I might a friend who’s curious to know why I appreciate this book so much, and why I have come to feel genuine love for Carl Jung.

I’ll address that second part first. I love Carl Jung because it seems to me that Carl Jung truly loved himself. He knew from his decades of experience as a psychotherapist that in order to accept others for who they are, he had to first accept himself, and I’d say that this kind of acceptance is equivalent to love. His therapy patients had to feel in their bones that he accepted every single part of them, no matter how disturbing, stupid, pathetic, and enraging those parts might be. And the prerequisite for that kind of heroic love was to have it for himself. He also knew that any part of ourselves that we resist, or that we don’t accept, will actually impact us in more damaging ways than if we did accept them. I was actually reminded of what Chogyam Trungpa says in the book Meditation in Action when reading Jung’s words on this concept. To paraphrase them both, in focusing on an ideal of who we should be and how we should act, we cause the opposite, neglected side of that coin to grow stronger in some way. If we insist on only accepting the “good” part of ourselves, then the “bad” parts will wreak havoc in the form of neurotic or physical symptoms, and they will definitely show up in our dreams.

Jung emphasized dreams a lot in his work with patients, as they provided access to the unconscious, and since consciousness arises from the unconscious, its importance was—is—paramount. (Indeed, the very first chapter-essay in Modern Man in Search of a Soul is titled “Dream Analysis in Its Practical Application.”) According to Jung, our culture glorifies consciousness to an extreme, and we miss out on the invaluable wisdom and endless opportunity for expansion that a better understanding of the unconscious has to offer. And here I already can’t resist quoting him at some length: “If it were permissible to personify the unconscious, we might call it a collective human being combining the characteristics of both sexes, transcending youth and age, birth and death, and, from having at his command the human experience of one or two million years, almost immortal. If such a being existed, he would be exalted above all temporal change.” I myself am starting to agree with Lacanian psychoanalyst Macario Giraldo, who said on an episode of the Group Dynamics Dispatch podcast, “I believe in God because I believe in the unconscious.”

Reading Jung’s thoughts on the subject made me feel, once again, so glad that I run process groups, as such a huge purpose of those groups is to bring unconscious material to light. Of course individual therapy sessions should be doing that, too, but I believe that group is more efficient in this regard. In watching someone interact with multiple other people, you have more opportunities to see unconscious forces at play—and to actually feel those forces, because others feel what isn’t made explicit through awareness and language. The parts of ourselves that we don’t take responsibility for then become the responsibility of others. And that can feel icky, irritating, or downright scary.

A therapist who hasn’t done—and is continuing to do—the loving work of accepting all the parts of herself will not in the end be effective at her job. Jung basically agreed with Gandhi, that we must be the change we want to see. Or in his words, “Be the man through whom you wish to influence others.” You don’t influence others through talk alone. Your being—your energetic presence—must also convey the message in question.

But is this something we should actually strive for? Not in the sense—and this is just my own thinking—that we strive to attain other goals, like ascending a mountain or passing a test or getting a promotion. That kind of attitude when applied to our own being is just another version of self-rejection. “I’m not good enough in my current state, so I have to make myself better.” But can you—or the you who says you need to be better—make yourself better? Isn’t that version of you actually the root of the problem? As Audre Lorde says, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” The ego that got you into this mess is not going to get you out of it. That ego requires safety above all else, and none of us will ever get unstuck if we insist on being safe all the time. We must experiment with new, unpredictable things, and take risks and express ourselves. We must have an impact on others and allow others to impact us. Experiential learning is key. Jung says, “The way to experience, moreover, is anything but a clever trick; it is rather a venture which requires us to commit ourselves with our whole being.” And of course the kind of group work I’m obsessed with invites us to do all of the above. We experiment: what happens when I say this, instead of what I’d normally say because that’s what society or my family has conditioned me to say?

Jung says (and I paraphrase) that man must experiment to learn anything knew, and to solve problems. He also says (and I quote), “Certainties can arise only through doubt, and results through experiment.” Knowledge, paradoxically, comes from not knowing. A child touches a flame because they don’t know it will burn them, and through that experiment, they learn that fire is hot. And as this example also implies, suffering—or at least pain—plays a huge role in expanding our consciousness. If we didn’t have problems in life—things, events, and people that cause us pain and suffering—we wouldn’t need to learn anything new. For this reason, Jung was a proponent of problems. I’m sure he’d agree with the Buddha, who said that a person will always have 83 problems; solve one and another instantly takes its place. But the 84th problem—that we don’t want to have any problems—is actually something we can control. Problems, according to Jung, are what give life meaning. “The serious problems of life,” he writes, “are never fully solved. If it should for once appear that they are, this is the sign that something has been lost. The meaning and design of a problem seem not to lie in its solution, but in our working at it incessantly. This alone preserves us from stultification and petrifaction.”

Why work incessantly on a problem if we know it can never be fully solved? Isn’t that similar to saying we won’t hike any of the Appalachian Trail if we can’t hike the whole thing? It’s all about the process, of course. That old cliché about the journey versus the destination. Yes, we humans love to achieve a goal, but what happens every time a new goal is achieved? Every single time? We set a new goal for ourselves. So we’re clearly in it—if only unconsciously—for the process, the journey. The thrill of reaching a destination is short lived, if actually thrilling at all. But the process is an endless source of life energy. So it makes sense that the Intelligence guiding all of Creation would make the human condition itself an unsolvable problem. How generous! For “every problem,” to quote Jung, “brings the possibility of a widening of consciousness.” Sadly, though—at least in my opinion—we often choose to create other, smaller problems, ridiculous and stupid ones, and miss out on grappling with far more meaningful predicaments.

This notion of problems being necessary and therefore ever-present and abundant reminds me of something else Jung says in Modern Man in Search of a Soul, which is basically this: in many cases the solution to a problem is what creates another problem! He writes, “Every step in material ‘progress’ adds just so much force to the threat of a more stupendous catastrophe.” As made evident by his interest in Chinese philosophy (I loved the introduction he wrote to the Wilhelm-Baynes translation of the I Ching), Jung believed in opposites—although “believed” isn’t the right word because it’s simply a factual truth that you can’t have darkness without light, love without hate, life without death, up without down, outside without inside, etcetera, etcetera. “Every good quality has its bad side,” he says, “and nothing that is good can come into the world without directly producing a corresponding evil.” Think of most human inventions: the plane, the train, the automobile; the internet; AI… Those are obvious examples. But Jung asserts that nothing in this world is purely good. Everything “directly produces a corresponding evil.” Baked right into everything is its opposite.

And if this is the case, then I’d be inclined to disagree—and indeed have been so inclined for years now—with the notion that our “true nature” as humans is loving kindness. How can our true nature possibly be just one thing? Aren’t we expressions of the entire universe, and doesn’t that universe contain all the things—good, bad, and ugly? And isn’t it true that “nature tears down what she herself has built up—yet she builds it once again” (to quote Jung)? And aren’t we the same as “nature,” and therefore meant to tear things down and rebuild them? Destruction and creation? Hatred and love? Our true nature should contain everything the universe contains, not just loving kindness and compassion. And if we expect ourselves to be nothing but loving kindness and compassion, then we unconsciously force a compensation to take place. Better to bring our hatred into the light of consciousness and have more control over it by acknowledging it exists and is supposed to be there, and getting to know it better. And in that very act cultivating love! See how that works out?

Everything we need to experience is here, if we can accept it. Yes, and.

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I want to go back to Jung’s emphasis on self-acceptance or love. He makes it clear in Modern Man in Search of a Soul—in the final essay, “Psychotherapists or the Clergy”—that to live from a place of self-acceptance is no easy task. It may sound simple, like it shouldn’t require effort because it may actually sound lazy to some people. Jung says that “simple things are always the most difficult. In actual life it requires the greatest discipline to be simple.” Jesus Christ had that kind of discipline, as did the Buddha, and countless others who just aren’t as famous. Of the former, Jung writes, “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.”

See, if we were supposed to be just like Jesus Christ, then we would be Jesus Christ. But there was only one Jesus Christ. He already happened. Now it’s time for you to happen, for you to be as much of yourself as you can be, just as Christ was as much of himself as he could be. In trying to be like someone else, we’re attaching to what we believe is known. If I act like them, then I will feel such-and-such a way and XYZ will happen. This mindset appeals to us because it’s predictable. Or at least we think it is. But to be yourself is not at all predictable, because you have never existed before! How can you be yourself when you don’t even know what that is?

Here's where it might be useful to parse out some semantics. I actually don’t think we can ever really be ourselves. Because wouldn’t that mean that ourself is a static, unchanging thing that we can either be or not be? “I don’t know who I am” is something I hear a lot as a therapist. People want to fit themselves into a category and in that way know who they are: I’m that type of person. But none of us can ultimately be categorized. Who we are is constantly changing, depending on the circumstance we’re in. Does “being yourself” mean that you respond to the same stimulus in the same way every time? Might your response vary depending on your mood, how much sleep you got the night before, whether or not you’re fed and hydrated enough, or any number of other factors?

I’ve also been thinking a lot about roles recently. How I show up as a group member, for instance, is drastically different from how I show up as a group leader. In many ways, I feel like a completely different person when inhabiting each role. My choices for how to respond to a given group situation are different for each role. Sometimes as a leader I wish I was a member so I could express impatience or irritation with someone that it would not be appropriate for me to express as a leader. And sometimes as a member I don’t want to be vulnerable in the ways that that role demands. I want to ask questions of other people instead of making statements about how I’m feeling. Which one of those roles is the “real me”? They both are! Being myself can look like a lot of different things. And then of course it’s supposed to change as I advance through the stages of life. Jung suggests that we have colleges for 40-year-olds that prepare them for the second half of life. Without them, “Thoroughly unprepared we take this step into the afternoon of life…with the false presupposition that our truths and ideals will serve us as hitherto. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life's morning—for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.” You could draw a parallel to situation A versus situation B; what is true in one is a lie in the other. If we insist that truth should be the same in every situation, then we won’t show up authentically, and we will suffer as a result.

When we see that we are in constant flux, a perpetual state of becoming, much like a flowing river, then we’re able to respond more freely, because our response doesn’t have to match up with some ideal idea of ourselves that is actually a delusion. We’re free to respond, that is, rather than react. And Jung would say that this is where creativity happens. He says that the “the creative act…is the antithesis of mere reaction.” When we just react to something, we’re not using our creativity at all. Indeed, the words “creativity” and “reactivity” are anagrams—just move the C and the R around to create the other word—and it just so happens that they’re opposites. A reaction is almost always a defensive phenomenon, inasmuch as we’re unconsciously trying to shore up our sense of self. But if we know that our self is always changing, anyway, then we know there’s nothing solid to protect or defend, so we’re available to respond in more creative ways. And in doing that, we are becoming more of ourselves.

So much of this process depends on being in touch with our feelings as they’re happening. When we get reactive, it’s because we’re trying not to feel something in particular, because we believe it would be too painful if we really felt it. But in avoiding those emotions, we’re avoiding ourselves. We’re trying to be someone we’re not—at least in this moment. And we’re squandering one of our greatest resources. When we know how we feel—which we can only do by letting ourselves feel it—then we know how best to respond or proceed. Jung says, “It is most often feeling that is decisive in matters of good and evil, and if feeling does not come to the aid of reason, the latter is usually powerless. Did reason and good intentions save us from the World War, or have they ever saved us from any other catastrophic nonsense? Have any of the great spiritual and social revolutions sprung from reasoning?” Jung is saying what I’ve said many times on this podcast: emotions are running the show here on planet Earth. And if we continue to deny their supremely powerful role—continue avoiding what feels uncomfortable because it doesn’t align with some stupid self-image we’ve created out of fear and the pressure to conform, continue forcing our children to learn boring, useless information instead of letting them follow their own interests (which are rooted in feelings)—then “catastrophic nonsense” will continue being the order of the day.

War won’t end until individuals stop being at war with themselves. As above, so below. To quote A.S. Neill, author of Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing, “All hate is self-hate.” This rings doubly true for me when I remember that all of us are expressions of the same consciousness, or what Jung calls “a psychic life which embraces us all.” He says, “In each of us there is at least one voice which seconds [that of our supposed enemy].” We’re all, if you will, just fingers and toes on the same body of the same Cosmic Christ. In fighting with others, we’re fighting with the parts of ourselves that we’ve denied and split off from and relegated to the deepest shadows of our psyches. We condemn others on the pretense that by doing so, those people will eventually shape up and act right—that is, act how we want them to act. That’s why we have prisons, right, and various other forms of punishment? We’re hoping to liberate the bad actors from their own bad behavior. Rehabilitate them. But according to Carl Jung, “Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses. I am the oppressor of the person I condemn, not his friend and fellow-sufferer.” He isn’t saying that we “must never pass judgment in the cases of persons whom we desire to help and improve. But if [we] wish to help a human being [we] must be able to accept him as he is. And [we] can do this in reality only when [we have] already seen and accepted [ourselves] as [we are]… We cannot change anything unless we accept it.” Another Carl—Carl Rogers—would eventually say the same thing in his book On Becoming a Person: “When I accept myself as I am, then I change.”

That feels like a good stopping place. Before signing off, I’ll leave you with a few quotes from the book that I wasn’t able to work in, but that deserve to be read. “You can exert no influence if you are not susceptible to influence.” “Ideas spring from a source that is not contained within one man's personal life. We do not create them; they create us.” “Knowledge rests not upon truth alone, but upon error also.” And lastly, “It is from need and distress that new forms of life take their rise, and not from mere wishes or from the requirements of our ideals.”

I wish you all the best in the practice—the process—of becoming yourself more and more, of living your life as truly as Christ lived his. To quote Jung one last time, “The art of life is the most distinguished and rarest of all the arts.”