Im Werk von C.G. Jung

The question “why do we live?” is a question ancient as human, the attempt – always relaunched – to face a world shrouded in enigmas. Carl Gustav Jung matured the conviction that the question of meaning has a crucial function: each person plays the value, or disvalue, of their own life. He knew very well that he was dealing with a question that cannot have an answer, and that indeed every formulation is a myth that man elaborates to manage an insoluble dilemma. Yet the question of meaning touched him at the deepest level. Starting from therapeutic experience, Jung became convinced that - in many cases - his patients were neurotic only because they suffered from what he defined as "the general neurosis of our time": an increasingly widespread feeling of meaninglessness of life. In most cases it was accompanied by a feeling of religious emptiness. In his opinion, in fact, no one truly heals (and no one finds meaning) "if he cannot reach a religious attitude", which "naturally has nothing to do with the profession of a faith or with belonging to a Church". 

Aniela Jaffé reveals to us what Jung contrasted, as “sense,” to the “nonsense” of life. She does so by recovering and dialoguing with the central themes of Jungian thought: archetypes, the unconscious, dreams, internal images, the myths of religion, the sacred, alchemy, art. According to Jung, no science (biology, physics, laws of the cosmos) can offer adequate answers regarding the meaning of life. But neither can provide it an interpretation of psychic contents that is based exclusively on personal life events. Meaning is an experience of totality: it presupposes both reality, the one that each person experiences in time, and an eternal quality of life; personal experiences but also transcendence. If the tension between these two dimensions is missing, it begins “a feeling of accidentality and senselessness that prevents us from living life with that wealth of meaning that it requires to be fully lived.”