The young Carl Jung

Perhaps the start of the new year is partly celebrated as a way of coping with the inevitable anxiety of the uncertainty of what may lie ahead. Of course, everyone hopes for a good year, but the hope is tinged with worry.

The interesting thing about anxiety is that we all experience it in different circumstances, but for some it can become an underlying way of life. With such levels of anxiety, the anxiety is never an object – something out there, but it becomes us or as Carl Jung writes it ‘has us.’ We can become possessed by anxiety, but if we can find a space to reflect on it, it’s possible to see what is possessing us and why. Jung responds to a PhD student who, researching Kierkegaard, is asking about anxiety as neurosis, and its effect on creativity. Jung’s reply is that anxiety neurosis doesn’t produce art as it is essentially uncreative and harms life, so the question is rather would the writer or creative person have produced a different sort of art if they hadn’t been neurotic.

‘Neurosis is a justified doubt in oneself and continually poses the ultimate question of trust in man and in God. Doubt is creative if it is answered by deeds, and so is neurosis if it exonerates itself as having been a phase …’

Jung continues that if anxiety becomes a chronic habit, it then becomes something different ‘the daily catastrophe ready for use.’ In his autobiography, Jung describes his own experience when he was 12 years old and knocked down by another boy. Nearly losing consciousness after his head hit the kerbstone, he remained on the ground longer than he needed to after the thought flashed through his mind – ‘now I won’t have to go to school anymore’. Jung then had fainting spells whenever he went to school, or was asked to do homework. His anxiety about this grew to the extent that he had six months away from school doing what he wanted: ‘I frittered away my time with loafing, collecting, reading and playing but I didn’t feel any happier for it; I had the obscure feeling that I was fleeing from myself.’

His parents consulted doctors, sending him to relatives for a change of scene, but it was only when Jung overheard his father worrying about what would become of Jung as an adult if he couldn’t earn a living, that Jung realized the situation. He then determined to overcome his anxiety by taking out a school book and forcing himself to concentrate.

‘After ten minutes of this I had the finest of fainting fits. I almost fell off the chair, but after a few minutes I felt better and went on working … This time it took fifteen minutes before the second attack … I stuck it out and after an hour came the third attack. Still I did not give up, and worked for another hour, until I had the feeling that I had overcome the attacks. Suddenly I felt better than I had in all the months before … A few weeks later I returned to school, and never suffered another attack, even there … That’s when I learned what a neurosis is.’

Jung was able to then understand how he ‘had arranged this whole disgraceful situation … a diabolical plot on my part’ after the other boy had pushed him and why. Jung clearly had the strength to take this neurotic anxiety pattern on – for others where the original trauma is deeper and earlier, this maybe too much to try to control so effectively. Psycho-spiritual help is needed.