Digesting Jung: Food for the Journey - Inner City Books

27
Working on Yourself
The goal is important only as an idea:
the essential thing is the opus which leads to the goal;
that is the goal of a lifetime. 101
In the process of analytic work, your best is not what you have to
offer intellectually, nor is your worst. You are graded not on what is
in your head or what is in your heart—both being fickle parameters—but
rather on who you are compared to who you could be.
And even then, not by your analyst, but by what you progressively
know of yourself from your own “instinct of truth.” 102
There are a lot of dull hours in analysis when nothing seems to
be happening. Of course there is the occasional Eureka! when the
heavens part and for a time all is clear, but the lasting revelations,
the enduring insights, generally come only after prolonged attention
to the mundane. This is quite a shock to those who go into analysis
seeking the divine.
Everyday life is the raw material of analysis. It is analogous to
what the alchemists called the prima materia, the lead or base metal
they strived to turn into gold by melting and running its vapors
through flasks and retorts, a process of distillation similar to making
strong liquor from wine. The alchemists’ distillatio is akin psychologically
to the process of discrimination: the differentiation of
moods and fantasies, attitudes, feelings and thoughts, with close
attention to the nitty-gritty detail of conflict in relationships—the
“he said,” “she said” encounters that in the moment bring you to a
boil and make you cringe when you cool down.
101 “The Psychology of the Transference,” The Practice of Psychotherapy, CW 16,
par. 400.
102 See above, pp. 91f.
104