Jung-Carl-G.-Collected-Works-Volume-9-Part-II-Aion

THE SELF
psychic process has a value quality attached to it, namely its
feeling-tone. This indicates the degree to which the subject is
affected by the process or how much it means to him (in so far
as the process reaches consciousness at all). It is through the
"affect" that the subject becomes involved and so comes to feel
the whole weight of reality. The difference amounts roughly to
that between a severe illness which one reads about in a textbook
and the real illness which one has. In psychology one possesses
nothing unless one has experienced it in reality. Hence a
purely intellectual insight is not enough, because one knows
only the words and not the substance of the thing from inside.
62 There are far more people who are afraid of the unconscious
than one would expect. They are even afraid of their own
shadow. And when it comes to the anima and animus, this fear
turns to panic. For the syzygy does indeed represent the psychic
contents that irrupt into consciousness in a psychosis (most
clearly of all in the paranoid forms of schizophrenia). 12 The
overcoming of this fear is often a moral achievement of unusual
magnitude, and yet it is not the only condition that must
be fulfilled on the way to a real experience of the self.
6 3 The shadow, the syzygy, and the self are psychic factors of
which an adequate picture can be formed only on the basis of
a fairly thorough experience of them. Just as these concepts
arose out of an experience of reality, so they can be elucidated
only by further experience. Philosophical criticism will find
everything to object to in them unless it begins by recognizing
that they are concerned with facts, and that the "concept" is
simply an abbreviated description or definition of these facts.
Such criticism has as little effect on the object as zoological criticism
on a duck-billed platypus. It is not the concept that matters;
the concept is only a word, a counter, and it has meaning
and use only because it stands for a certain sum of experience.
Unfortunately I cannot pass on this experience to my public.
I have tried in a number of publications, with the help of case
material, to present the nature of these experiences and also the
method of obtaining them. Wherever my methods were really
applied the facts I give have been confirmed. One could see the
12 A classic case is the one published by Nelken: "Analytische Beobachtungen
uber Phantasien eines Schizophrenen." Another is Schreber's Memoirs of My
Nervous Illness.
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