Jung

Jung thought that whatever its roots in previous experience, neurosis consists of a refusal – or inability – in the here and now to bear legitimate suffering. Instead this painful feeling or some representation of it is split off from awareness and the initial wholeness – the primordial Self – is broken. Such splitting ultimately derives from the apparent impossibility of affirming the whole of one's nature and gives rise to the range of dissociations and conflicts.

- Donald Sandner and John Beebe, Psychopathology and Analysis. In Jungian Analysis, edited by Murry Stein (Splitting, Possession, and Working Through).

The unconscious is repressed, and a person ends up in an energic impasse. With energy being used for such a narrow range of activities and for defenses against the sealed-off unconscious, much of life's possibilities for wholeness and satisfaction are denied.

- Murray Stein, Jung's Map of the Soul: An Introduction (Emergence of the Self: The Five Stages of Consciousness).

The whole task of his personality lies in the very thing he sought to avoid. Any doctor who deludes him on that score is doing him a disservice. The patient has not to learn how to get rid of his neurosis, but how to bear it. His illness is not a gratuitous and therefore meaningless burden; it is his own self, the "other" whom, from childish laziness or fear, or for some other reason, he was always seeking to exclude from his life. In this way, as Freud rightly says, we turn the ego into a "seat of anxiety," which it would never be if we did not defend ourselves against ourselves so neurotically.

As soon as the ego becomes a "seat of anxiety," we all run away from ourselves and refuse to admit our fear.

That dreaded "other self" is the main target of psychoanalysis with its depreciating, undermining technique which is always seeking to wear down the enemy and cripple him for good. We should not try to "get rid" of a neurosis, but rather to experience what it means, what it has to teach, what its purpose is. We should even learn to be thankful for it, otherwise we pass it by and miss the opportunity of getting to know ourselves as we really are. A neurosis is truly removed only when it has removed the false attitude of the ego.

We do not cure it – it cures us.

A man is ill, but the illness is nature's attempt to heal him. From the illness itself we can learn so much for our recovery, and what the neurotic flings away as absolutely worthless contains the true gold we should never have found elsewhere.

- C.G. Jung, The State of Psychotherapy Today, CW 10: Civilization in Transition, pars. 360-361.

The possibility of rebirth constellates with the breakdown of what has gone before. That is why Jung emphasized the positive purpose of neurosis. But because they do not understand, people cling to the familiar, refuse to make the necessary sacrifices, resist their own growth. Unable to give up their habitual lives, they are unable to receive new life.

- Marion Woodman, The Pregnant Virgin: A Process of Psychological Transformation (Inner City Books 1985), p. 24.

Art: Ken Hamilton, Leaving the Citadel