C.G. Jung: “The right way to wholeness is made up of fateful detours and wrong turnings.”
C.G Jung, on the longissima via:
. . . One could say that while the patient is unconsciously and unswervingly seeking the solution to some ultimately insoluble problem, the art and technique of the doctor are doing their best to help him towards it. “Ars totum requirit hominem!” [“The art requires the whole person.”] exclaims an old alchemist.
It is just this homo totus [whole person] whom we seek. The labors of the doctor as well as the quest of the patient are directed towards that hidden and as yet unmanifest “whole” man, who is at once the greater and the future man.
But the right way to wholeness is made up, unfortunately, of fateful detours and wrong turnings.
It is the longissima via [longest path], not straight but snakelike, a path that unites the opposites in the manner of the guiding caduceus, a path whose labyrinthine twists and turns are not lacking in terrors.
It is on this longissima via that we meet with those experiences which are said to be “inaccessible.”
Their inaccessibility really consists in the fact that they cost us an enormous amount of effort: they demand the very thing we most fear, namely the “wholeness” which we talk about so glibly and which lends itself to endless theorizing, though in actual life we give it the widest possible berth.
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