Digesting Jung: Food for the Journey - Inner City Books

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The Inner Voice
Anyone with a vocation hears the voice of
the inner man: he is called. 110
What is it, asks Jung, that induces one to rise out of unconscious
identity with the mass as out of a swathing mist? He suggests that it
is due to many and various irrational factors, but particularly to
something commonly called vocation:
True personality is always a vocation and puts its trust in it as in
God, despite its being, as the ordinary man would say, only a personal
feeling. But vocation acts like a law of God from which there
is no escape. The fact that many a man who goes his own way ends
in ruin means nothing to one who has a vocation. He must obey his
own law, as if it were a daemon whispering to him of new and wonderful
paths. 111
Having a vocation originally meant “to be addressed by a voice.”
Examples of this are ubiquitous in the writings of the Old Testament
prophets.
When I was in Zurich training to be an analyst I listened for that
voice. Was analytic work truly my vocation? If the voice called,
would I hear? What if it did not? Or, almost worse, what if it did? I
was mindful of the way Samuel, as told in the Bible, became one of
the elect:
And it came to pass at that time . . . ere the lamp of God went out in
the temple of the Lord, where the ark of God was, and Samuel was
laid down to sleep;
That the Lord called Samuel: and he answered, Here am I.
110 “The Development of Personality,” The Development of Personality, CW 17,
par. 299.
111 Ibid.
113