Digesting Jung: Food for the Journey - Inner City Books

40 The Value of Conflict
outside of it, to some extent objective, no longer emotionally
stressed. There is a sense of peace. This is not essentially different
from the traditional Christian concept of grace—“the peace that
passeth understanding”—except that it doesn’t come from a distant
God; it wells up inside.
This process requires patience and an ego strong enough to bend
but not break, otherwise a decision will be made out of desperation,
just to escape the tension. But when a decision is made prematurely—when
the tension has not been held long enough—then the
other side, the option that was not chosen, will be constellated even
more strongly and we’re right back in the fire.
Ah, one asks, but aren’t some conflicts intrinsically insoluble?
Well, yes, that may be true in terms of external solutions. But a
solution in outer life is as often as not simply avoiding or rationalizing
the underlying problem. As Jung writes:
If a man cannot get on with his wife, he naturally thinks the conflict
would be solved if he married someone else. When such marriages
are examined they are seen to be no solution at all. The old Adam
enters upon the new marriage and bungles it just as badly as he did
the earlier one. A real solution comes only from within, and then
only because the patient has been brought to a different attitude. 22
Women are ill-advised to be smug about this passage. Jung, as a
product of his time, was not gender-conscious. If he were writing
the above today, I dare say he would have reworded it to include
women, putting Eve on the hot-seat along with Adam.
22 “Some Crucial Points in Psychoanalysis: A Correspondence between Dr. Jung
and Dr. Loÿ,” Freud and Psychoanalysis, CW 4, par. 606.