Something Jung Said

Or, as Robert Anton Wilson Admonished, "Be wary of any unearned wisdom."

The psychiatrist Carl Jung offered that “All neurosis is a substitute for legitimate suffering.” In my practice, this is a core principle. Most of us think of “neuroses” or “neurotic behavior” as some of the things that “bother” us about others. Nagging, repetitive behavior, tics and fidgeting, ruminating, obsessing, “mood swings”, the myriad symptoms of “codependency”. More serious behaviors like substance use, manipulation, binging and purging, physical and emotional violence, hypomania/mania, catastrophizing, and dozens more might also be called “neurotic” behaviors.

These are important, because when it comes to being able to change how we feel, we need to have access to how we feel. In different helping methods, it has been said (in one way or another) that “You can’t heal what you can’t feel.” Neuroses as Jung is referring to them, are behaviors (that he often saw as “unconscious”) that put distance/barriers between us and experiencing how we feel. The technical difficulty though is that neuroses not only have limited use in terms of feeling better, they tend to perpetuate or create problems.

What seems most significant in his idea is that neuroses are a “. . . substitute for legitimate suffering.” It’s hugely important to consider the possibility that “legitimate suffering” (whatever that is) facilitates changing how we feel – at the very least, it is a strategy for impeding or stopping “neurotic behaviors”. A slightly different way of saying it, legitimate suffering might seem to Jung the method of changing a lot of behaviors that are unwanted/unhealthy. I would go so far as to say that “legitimate suffering” also relieves us of “bad feelings”, insofar as this is possible. Sometimes referred to as “grieving”, “processing”, “metabolizing”, or “dealing with ones’ issues”. Methods of legitimate suffering are what I hope many of my posts here will be about.