Carl Jung - Where Does Meaning Come From? - Videos

Beautiful and true, but a cautionary word to those of us who bow to Jung's brilliance while forgetting that the germination of his thoughts grew from an admixture of lead and gold. "Creation is messy business," I write in my latest book. Here, in these beautiful words we should recall that the profound beauty of his ideas may be as much attributed to having suffered child abuse, arrogance, machismo, plagiarism, polygamy and for most of his writings, a difficulty in elaborating his ideas with simplicity and clarity. His ideas were as much born out of a psychotic break (with the father), seances and pure good luck as from his erudition, hard work and deep insights into the mysteries of life. I think Jung himself would invoke the alchemical recipe that accounts for such success, "The Sun and its Shadow complete the Work." If we don't keep a balanced view of the man, we run the risk of a terrible inflation (idealization), one that contaminates his great opus and our work.

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Thom F. Cavalli, Ph.D. January 13, 2011 at 8:42am

Beautiful and true, but a cautionary word to those of us who bow to Jung's brilliance while forgetting that the germination of his thoughts grew from an admixture of lead and gold. "Creation is messy business," I write in my latest book. Here, in these beautiful words we should recall that the profound beauty of his ideas may be as much attributed to having suffered child abuse, arrogance, machismo, plagiarism, polygamy and for most of his writings, a difficulty in elaborating his ideas with simplicity and clarity. His ideas were as much born out of a psychotic break (with the father), seances and pure good luck as from his erudition, hard work and deep insights into the mysteries of life. I think Jung himself would invoke the alchemical recipe that accounts for such success, "The Sun and its Shadow complete the Work." If we don't keep a balanced view of the man, we run the risk of a terrible inflation (idealization), one that contaminates his great opus and our work.
Jamie Rosanna Dorig January 12, 2011 at 2:53pm

I've spent a fair amount of time contemplating where people find meaning in life. It occurred to me at one point that we don't only find meaning, we also give it. We give meaning by giving value, a word connected to valour or courage....

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