Jung: “When a situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate.”




The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate. That is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner opposite, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposing halves.

Collected Words 9ii
Christ, A Symbol of the Self
Paragraph 126






“Given the flood tide of massacres perpetuated by crazy people, have we made a grievous error in our policies regarding the confinement of the mentally ill?

Joe Klein, Time, January 24, 2011




Of all the things that Carl Jung said, I find this statement to be among the most profound. This is a succinct statement about the reality of the psyche — that what happens on the inside greatly affects what happens on the outside.
I find Joe Klein’s statement– he is one of the senior writer’s for Time — to be a disturbing reflection of the state of consciousness of the mainstream media.
The actions of Jared Loughner are a reflection both of his psyche and the psyche of America. To espouse confinement rather than treatment and education about understanding mentally illness is a repressive direction that will result in even more events such as this one.
Character comes out in a crisis situation — the uneducated and repressive way that so many people in the media have responded to these events in Tucson is a reflection of The Unconscious of America.

What is it in American Psyche that has such a fascination with, such an unexamined complex, about guns? I would suggest that much of this has to do with the failure to deal with what Jung called “the shadow.”




Next post: The Shadow, or
“Guns don’t kill people… The unrecognized Shadow kills people.”





2 Comments

  1. I agree that the American shadow erupts on a fairly regular basis. And the saddest thing of all is that so few can own that these violent outbursts are the result of our insistence that we are All-American, as pure as the driven snow.

    We all live with the results of mass delusion. Those who speak of the dark underside of the collective American psyche are called unpatriotic liars, ostracized and dismissed/marginalized.

    Until we create room for discussion of our collective responsibility (in contrast to calling the various shooters singular and crazy and/or delusional) we will continue to have these tragic incidents.

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