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Finding Strength to Help Us Through Hard Times
By: Dominique Marguerite, Ph.D.
When we humans are physically or psychologically threatened or injured in some way, we often become angry. This form of excitation is instinctive and healthy, but it sometimes turns into destructive action and violence. Alternatively, anger can be repressed, but may then build up and eventually burst forth as rage. What to do? Carl G. Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist, suggests we begin by cultivating self-knowledge. He would have us become aware of and learn to handle both the sunny and dark sides of our natures. The self-aware individual will recognize both "how much good he can do, and what crimes he is capable of...."
Dreams and fairy tales are the products of our creative unconscious and reveal basic patterns of our psychological dynamics. The famous German collectors of folk and fairy tales, the Brothers Grimm, tell the story of the Two Travelers. It illustrates, albeit not explicitly, the opposing forces of good and evil in the human psyche. The travelers are a good-spirited tailor and a sour-tempered shoemaker. The shoemaker succumbs to his dark nature and perpetrates all sorts of violence on the tailor, withholding food, blinding, abandonment in the forest, a typically graphic set of Grimm horrors. The tailor struggles on, blind and alone, neither helped by, nor doing harm to, a host of animals (and potential meals) that fall within his grasp. At last he makes it to a city, only to find that his old travel companion is now shoemaker to the king. Fearing revenge the shoemaker convinces the king to give the tailor an impossible task, to find the king's lost crown. The tailor succeeds with the help of a duck whose neck he earlier had not wrung. More trials follow, and in each the tailor is helped by a forest creature whom he had spared while he had suffered, lost in wilderness. His eventual triumph comes with delivering a son and heir to the king with the help of a stork.
In our daily confrontations with anger, we may expect such help from within if we follow Jung's advice to understand the dual nature of the forces within ourselves. Jung says that "it is often tragic to see how blatantly a man bungles his own life and the lives of others yet remains totally incapable of seeing how much the whole tragedy originates in himself, and how he continually feeds it and keeps it going. Not consciously, of course, for consciously he is engaged in bewailing and cursing a faithless world that recedes further and further into the distance." Jung further admonished us not to succumb to either the good or evil of our psychological makeup. Through self knowledge, we can find strength to help us suffer through hard times, with a balanced psyche intact, to arrive in better times with joy.
The inhumanity of the shoemaker is possible for each of us. The potential for evil lies in our unconscious: greed, love of power, murderous thoughts, or the ability to act unethically. In the depth of the psyche of humankind lurks absolute evil, the expression of which is acts of violence, cruelty, torture. These parts of ourselves, despised and rejected, are relegated to the unconscious, ideally at an early age. As children, we quickly adjust to our environment, to particular forms of family and culture. It is a necessary aspect of becoming a socialized individual.
But the potential for evil does not go away. More importantly, negative aspects of the psyche can take on a life of their own if we do not confront and deal with them. Sometimes, what we cannot admit in ourselves, we see in others. In ancient Hebrew society, the people sacrificed or sent out into the wilderness two specially chosen goats, that they might symbolically bear away the sins and faults of humankind. In modern life, we also choose scapegoats to purge ourselves of anger. They may be individuals, places, circumstances, even entire races. Rollo May, humanist psychologist, perhaps said it best: "Life consists of achieving good not apart from evil but in spite of it."
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