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A hundred years ago

CG Jung gave some excellent advice to therapists:

Anyone who wants to know the human psyche will learn next to nothing from experimental psychology*.  He would be better advised to abandon exact science, put away his scholar's gown, bid farewell to his study, and wander with human heart through the world.   
There in the horrors of prisons, lunatic asylums and hospitals, in drab suburban pubs, in brothels and gambling-halls, in the salons of the elegant, the Stock Exchanges, socialist meetings, churches, revivalist gatherings and ecstatic sects, through love and hate, through the experience of passion in every form in his own body, he would reap richer stores of knowledge than text-books a foot thick could give him, and he will know how to doctor the sick with a real knowledge of the human soul. 
-- Carl Jung (from "New Paths in Psychology", in Collected Papers on Analytic Psychology, London, 1916)


*The laboratory psychology of his time.

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PsychToon 1

Excellent question

A Jungian analyst down in LA opens his professional site with this: Why do we choose partners who fail to meet some of the important needs in our life, even though there was something about them that caused us to deeply love them initially? Falling in love is an overpowering experience. To me, it is one of the most easily accessible signs of the reality of the unconscious, showing that we are often in the grip of forces we neither understand nor control. When, with time, that ecstatic and tumultuous state subsides, it becomes clearer who the beloved idol really is. And every one eventually reveals feet of clay. What sometimes happens then is that instead of the idealizing obsession we had in the beginning, we switch gears and what strikes us most are flaws. It's almost all we can see. Qualities that once drew us in now put us off. This change of view can feel deeply disappointing. Or even like betrayal. But it's usually the case that our own projections and deep needs