Skip to main content

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.

Popular posts from this blog

UnLiberating Therapy

One of the ironies of most counseling and therapy nowadays is that it is constrained by the rules of Political Correctness. Political Correctness is a set of rules for speaking and thinking. No matter what you experience or think or feel, these rules tell you what the right attitudes are, the right words, the right thoughts. Anything that contradicts the rules is swiftly and harshly condemned. And so is the person who breaks them. Political Correctness infects the psychological world at all levels. This is ironic because when Sigmund Freud, the most famous of the founders of this new discipline, set out to investigate human psychology, he broke and contradicted some of the most powerful rules of his place and time. He talked openly and in detail about sex. In our culture we hear and speak about sex all the time. In his, it was a deeply taboo subject. Very much Politically In Correct. Part of the point of therapy is getting at the truth. And especially at truths that we...

Useless Men?

This incredibly brain-dead op-ed piece in the New York Times , written by a "man", informs us that since (male-created) technology allows women to have children on their own, men are no longer necessary. This is a wide-spread meme today and one more indication that men who are looking for an ally in solving their problems need to take care. My response to this ludicrous exercise in self-hatred  is very simple: Women make babies. Men make civilizations. ---

What makes a man a man?

"Common to many societies, men must 'impregnate women, protect dependents from danger, and provision kith and kin'." Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity David D. Gilmore, 1991 This much seems to be written, as it were, in the male body as its basic syntax, its classic form, in the primal language of testosterone: To make and raise children with females To protect the group from animal predators and other human males. To hunt and thus provide meat/fish. Sounds like it comes down to...well, sex and violence. Or, more alliteratively and less provocatively: Procreation, protection and protein. A place to start. I assume that the evolutionary theory is basically correct and that the hunter-gatherer society is the primal human organization that still fundamentally shapes us as a species. “Reading” the male physically and socially, I am hypothesizing that the male gender is meant for three fundamental purposes: procreating, protecting the group from anim...