But Jungian psychology, and the disciplined practice of personal growth it promotes, offers another perspective based on the assumption that the goal of life is not happiness but meaning.
An old saying has it that religion is for those who are afraid of going to Hell; spirituality is for those who have been there. Unless we are able to look at the existential discrepancy between what we long for and what we experience, unless we consciously address the task of personal spirituality, we will remain forever in flight, or denial, or think of ourselves as victims, sour and mean-spirited to ourselves and others.
It is in the swamplands where soul is fashioned and forged, where we encounter not only the gravitas of life, but its purpose, its dignity and its deepest meaning.
Any therapy which does not address the issues of soul must remain superficial in the end, no matter how much palliation of symptoms it initially provides.
Jung suggested that neurosis “must be understood, ultimately, as the suffering of a soul which has not discovered its meaning.”4 Note that he does not role out suffering, only the meaninglessness of life against which neurosis is a defense.
Authentic suffering is a realistic response to the ragged edges of being. The purpose of therapy is not, then, to remove suffering but to move through it to an enlarged consciousness that can sustain the polarity of painful opposites.
Jung considered that a neurosis is not only a defense against the wounding of life, but an unconscious effort to heal such wounds. Thus one may respect the intent of the neurosis if not its consequences. Symptoms, then, are expressions of a desire for healing. Rather than repress them, or eliminate them, one must understand the wound they represent. Then the wound and the motive to heal may contribute to the enlargement of consciousness.
Maturity implies not so much avoiding being abandoned, but in abandoning ourselves with few illusions … . If we succeed in bearing the anxiety of solitude, new horizons will open to us and we will learn finally to exist independently of others.
As obvious as this notion of independence is, and as desirable as we may profess it to be, most of life is a flight from the anxiety of being radically present to ourselves and naked before the universe.
Indeed, next to the fantasy of immortality, the hardest fantasy to relinquish is the thought that there is someone out there who is going to fix us, take care of usspare us the intimidating journey to which we have been summoned. No wonder we run from such a journey, project it onto gurus, never quite at home with ourselves.
A functional definition of Self, then, would be the archetype of order within us. That is to say, the Self is an activity of psyche whose function is to further the development of the individual. One might say that the Self selves, or that we experience it selving through our somatic, affective and imaginal experiences. One could also describe the Self as a “willing matrix,” that is, it is both teleological and contextual, both purpose and container. Psyche or soul, then, is simply our word for the mysterious process through which we experience the movement toward meaning.
Jung declared that he did not seek the cause of a neurosis in the past but in the present: “I ask, what is the necessary task which the patient will not accomplish?“11 Invariably, the task involves some new level of responsibility, some more honest encounter with the shadow, some deepening of the journey into places we’d rather not go. Yet all of those psychic states have a soulful purpose. Our task is to live through them, not repress them or hurtfully project them onto others. What is not faced within is still carried as a deep personal pathology. To experience some healing within ourselves. and to contribute healing to the world, we are summoned to wade through the muck from time to time. Where we do not go willingly, sooner or later we will be dragged.
Soul work is the prerequisite not only of healing but also of maturation. Again, Carotenuto expresses it well:
The ultimate purpose of psychotherapy is not so much the archeological exploration of infantile sentiments as it is learning gradually and with much effort to accept our own limits and to carry the weight of suffering on our own shoulders for the rest of our lives. Psychological work, instead of providing liberation from the cause of serious discomfort, increases it, teaching the patient to become adult and, for the first time in his life, actively face the feeling of being alone with his pain and abandoned by the world.
Jung observed that the opus, the work of soul, consists of three parts, “insight, endurance and action.”13 Psychology, he noted, can assist only in the provision of insight. After that comes the moral courage to do what one must and the strength to bear the consequences.
