Carl and I.

I’m not generally given to quoting sound bytes from the great and the good. Though they might be laudable enough when taken in context and with a measure of circumspection, in a general sense they’re usually overly simplistic, often self-consciously clever to the point of pretension, and sometimes just too damn shallow.

However…

I’m just setting out on an introduction to Carl Jung, and I can’t help identifying with a few things he said, such as:

‘To be normal is the ideal aim of the unsuccessful.’

‘So every man whose fate it is to go his individual way must proceed with hopefulness and watchfulness, ever conscious of the loneliness and its dangers.’

Maybe this sense of the familiar can be explained by the fact that Carl and I had a critical experience in common: enforced separation from the mother figure at an early age. According to somebody called John Bowlby, who I’ve never heard of but was probably very clever, this commonly leads to a defensive attitude of emotional detachment, and to becoming self-absorbed and self-reliant to an unusual degree.

(He makes it sound like an illness, doesn’t he? Well, I’m gradually getting over the first condition, but rarely in public.)

And there are another couple of things that ring a bell with me:

‘Nobody reads my books,’ said Carl, and

‘I have such a hell of a trouble to make people see what I mean.’

Taken together, all of this makes me feel a little less adequate than I did before.