Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell:
“Follow Your Bliss.”
The work of some people seems
to me to utilize principles embodied in traditional
cultures to help modern people heal. Carl Jung,
the great Swiss psychiatrist and scholar and one
of the most profound thinkers of modern times,
was one such person. Jung described the work of
psychotherapy as “the healing of souls.”
Like Weston Price, Jung was born in the 1870s
and spent his life seeking to understand fundamental
forces that shape the lives of people everywhere
to determine health and wellness. While Price
came to understand the biological laws that determine
physical development and resistance to disease,
Jung combined his encyclopedic knowledge of anthropology,
history, religion, philosophy and mythology with
his understanding of psychotherapeutic processes
to investigate the forces that drive the human
psyche.
Jung’s discoveries
in the psychic realm were equally as profound
and far-reaching as Price’s in the physical
– and as little understood and appreciated.
The work of these two great men gives us a basis
for understanding how we must be if we are to
find health of body and mind and make the most
of our time on earth. Price and Jung gave us blueprints
for living and specific recommendations based
on a marvelous understanding of all that came
before us.
People of earlier and simpler
cultures developed highly accurate prescriptions
for living satisfying and healthy lives, lives
generally untroubled by the depression, loneliness,
and turmoil that mark so many lives today. They
discovered certain truths about food, attitudes,
and ways of life, wisdom that may help lead us
to health and happiness.
Jung called the search by
each of us for his or her own unique path in life
the quest for individuation. He saw that quest
as the means to reaching an understanding of one’s
own individuality, and with it a sense that one
could find one’s way with purpose and confidence,
embracing one’s own “innermost, last,
and incomparable uniqueness.” Out of this
comes a capacity for self-love, necessary for
healing, and love of others, necessary for relatedness
and the feeling that our lives have meaning.
Many people today are as far from this quest for
individuation as they are from a traditional diet
that follows the principles Price discovered.
Our mental and emotional deficiencies may contribute
as much to the development of chronic medical
problems as our nutritional deficiencies and excesses.
Genuine and lasting healing requires disciplined
attention to both diet and psyche.
Lawrence Leshan, a psychologist
who worked with patients at the Sloan-Kettering
Cancer Institute in New York City for many years,
described an approach to psychic health in a very
simple way. Observing that many of his patients
had lost hope of ever achieving a way of life
that would give real and deep satisfaction, he
often asked them if they were living “the
kind of life that makes us look forward zestfully
to each day and to the future.” Most were
not, and I’ve observed this same lack of
joy in many of my patients not only with cancer
but also with various other chronic diseases.
It is a lack of joy that often precedes the illness
by many years.
I’ve told people that
if you want to become well, you need to do things
each day that you really love to do, things that
make you happy, activities that you care about
deeply. I talk with people about their daily lives,
their routines, and try to help them see how they
can make the time and find a way to do those things
they’ve dreamed about doing but pushed aside
because of the demands we all face. The difference
in many people who become ill is that the demands
have become overwhelming. Typically, there is
a sense that the demands of family, job, and society
leave no room for the pursuit of even modest goals
and aspirations – dreams, if you will. I
think that without dreams and the capacity to
act on them, there can be no recovery from chronic
problems, indeed, no real health.
Some thirty years ago, journalist
Bill Moyers did a series of extended interviews
broadcast on public television with the renowned
mythologist and anthropologist Joseph Campbell.
Campbell, author of The Hero With a Thousand Faces
and many other acclaimed works, was in his eighties,
having spent a lifetime considering the role of
myths – dreams, stories, fantasies, aspirations,
as expressed in oral and written mythological
tales – in people’s lives. Asked by
Moyers at the very end of the last program to
summarize what he had learned, Campbell smiled
and then spoke softly.
“ Follow your bliss,” he said. “Follow
your bliss.” The show ended.
Joseph Campbell’s
advice effectively summarizes Leshan’s approach.
The psychic shift that can take place if such
advice is followed can profoundly affect a person’s
ability to heal.
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