The Wisdom of Not Knowing: Psychotherapy and Life

Abstract

In the Grail legend, the foolish Parsifal eventually asks the wounded king, “What ails thee?” This question, a combination of not knowing with a curiosity to know, heals the wasteland. “Knowing” forms our sense of consensual reality. “Not knowing” opens the imagination. We need both. This article hosts a discussion about what it takes to attain the wisdom of not knowing, how that type of wisdom is related to the capacity to bear paradox and symbol, and how that capacity might benefit us in psychotherapy and life.

The quest for knowledge, and the feeling one has attained it, is central to the human spirit. Knowing gives us orientation, competence, and trust. There is nothing inherently wise about not knowing; nothing wise about not knowing how to fix a flat tire or hold down a job; nothing wise about not knowing how to use my email or what the answer to 13 × 163 is. If you are a doctor and I come to you with a broken arm and you say, “I don’t know how to fix it,” I will not proclaim you a wise doctor; rather, I’ll go find a doc who knows how to set a bone. The benefits of knowing are thus obvious to most of us. But what of the costs?

Less well-known or appreciated is the fact that, insofar as knowing implies certainty, it carries the potential to become one-sidedly inflationary. The wisdom of not knowing, as I use the term, is not a celebration of ignorance but a conscious recognition of the dangers of perceived certainty.

It is surprisingly easy to feel as though one knows everything, and surprisingly difficult to consciously doubt one’s point of view! Many people seem to feel unreflectingly certain all the time. We all know the type: those for whom the science is settled, for whom political and religious values are clear, and for whom others who see things differently are just wrong, if not evil. When we recognize this attitude, we call it “fundamentalism,” perhaps thinking of the many horror stories of religious intolerance that led to, and still lead to, psychological and physical violence. The Catholic Inquisition, for example, imprisoned Giordano Bruno for seven years before finally hanging him upside down naked and then burning him alive at the stake in 1600 for daring to question Church doctrine, including his support for the Copernican model of the solar system. But fundamentalism is still alive and well today, and not only with respect to religious bigotry. One can find fundamentalist faith wherever it is impossible to say, “Can we talk about that?” and everywhere paradox and metaphor are concretized into unquestionable fact.

Jurojin, God of Longevity and Wisdom, (artist unknown—Japan), 19th century. Ivory, wood, H. 8.75, W. 4.0625 in. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Alfred W. Hoyt Collection, Bequest of Rosina H. Hoppin, 1965. Accession Number: 65.86.130.

Today, “politics” is the word we often give to the churning cauldron of archetypal imagination that religions used to specialize in. When religious containers shatter, as they have for many of us in the modern world, then political figures and ideologies can become unrecognized containers for deep and powerful archetypal energies. In 1958, at the height of the Cold War, Jung (1958/2006) points out in his book The Undiscovered Self. “You can take away a man’s gods, but only to give him others in return” (p. 46).

The State takes the place of God; that is why, seen from this angle, the socialist dictatorships are religions and State slavery is a form of worship …. The policy of the State is exalted to a creed, the leader or party boss becomes a demigod beyond good and evil, and his votaries are honored as heroes, martyrs, apostles, missionaries. There is only one truth and beside it no other. It is sacrosanct and above criticism. Anyone who thinks differently is a heretic. (p. 17)

Jung’s insight here seems to me chillingly accurate, and more relevant than ever. A 2017 Forbes article entitled “Is Ideology Becoming America’s Official Religion?” makes much the same point (Hart, 2017). As an example, when we do not recognize metaphors of right and left as metaphors that reflect a split in the collective and/or personal psyche, but instead see them as facts, and interpret these supposed facts as a basis for differentiating true from false and even, as we sadly see increasingly today, good from evil, then political points of view on either the right or the left risk becoming fundamentalist. Without a capacity for symbol and paradox—right and left—the possibility of dialogue recedes from view.

Knowing we do not know, the theme of this article, is a paradox. It requires of us a capacity for paradoxical thinking understood not as a regression to a pre-rational past, and not as nonsense, but as a higher level of consciousness that lies beyond, as Jung (1944/1980) puts it, “the petty reasoning mind” (para. 19).¹

An Introduction to the Wisdom of Not Knowing: Socrates, Keats, and Jung

Wisdom may come to us when we consciously realize how little we understand about ourselves, about others, and about the world around us rather than when we are certain, convinced we are right, and others are wrong. This type of wisdom has a venerable tradition behind it. When the Oracle of Delphi was asked if there was anyone wiser than Socrates, “the Pythia replied that there was no one wiser” (Plato, 1966, p. 81). Socrates—both believing the oracle and at the same time convinced he knows nothing “fine and good” (p. 83)—concludes he must be the wisest of all only because he alone knows that he does not know.

I am wiser than this man; for neither of us really knows anything fine and good, but this man thinks he knows something when he does not, whereas I, as I do not know anything, do not think I do either. I seem, then, in just this little thing to be wiser than this man at any rate, that what I do not know I do not think I know either. (Plato, 1966, p. 83)

Socrates insists that if he is wise, this is only because he alone knows that he does not know while others “fancy” that they do. This attitude may seem humble, or overly humble, but it was extremely threatening to the status quo. Socrates questioned everything. He encouraged others to do the same. Because of this, the ruling authorities viewed his teachings as an invitation to revolution. According to Plato in the Phaedo, Athens—a city known for valuing intellectual and political liberty—convicted Socrates of impiety and corrupting the youth in 399 B.C.E., and sentenced him to die by drinking hemlock. The charges included “corrupting the young and not believing in the gods in whom the state believes but in other new divinities” (Plato, 2022, pp. 45–46).

Socrates was a scapegoat. The city of Athens rejected him in parallel with their rejection of the inner enemy of their own unacknowledged doubt.

From a psychological perspective, delusions of certainty can arise in all of us when we are possessed by emotionally gripping complexes and/or buttressed against the anxiety of doubt by psychological defenses. If we have ever been in a state of fervor to defend what seems to be—or worse, must be—obviously and irrefutably true, we know what this feels like! Sometimes we fall into states of emotionally fired-up certainty due to traumatic experiences from our past—wounds that happened to us that we feel are happening again—that we must not allow to recur. Sometimes these complexes contain a collective dimension. Arguments that run along the lines of “everyone knows,” or, “the science says,” or, “the Pope says” come to mind here. These appeals carry weight and deserve to be taken seriously, but their claim to certainty comes from an identification with collective complexes and not any supposed perception of objective truth.

“Knowing,” in this sense, is easy to come by and easy to defend. One is affirmed in it everywhere by everybody. We fall into it. Not knowing, by way of contrast, is a choice. It is a capacity that requires an ego, a sense of I strong enough to differentiate itself from the we; an ability that must be grown and developed like a muscle, or like the body being trained to fold itself into different yoga poses. In this context, in an 1817 letter, the British poet John Keats (1899) refers to “negative capability”:

It struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. (p. 277)

Creativity, by definition, brings forth something new that does not yet exist. It thus presupposes an ability to be comfortable in the dark until something new sparks forth. For Keats (1899), this ability of “being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts” (p. 277) is a quality Shakespeare possessed “so enormously” (p. 277), but children also have it. Children, if they are healthy, tend not to be trapped in the boxes of familiarity that encapsulate so many adults, and are open to wonder. Thus, in Romanticism as in dreams, the child is often a symbol of creative genius.

For Jung (2009), those who cannot doubt are like children who do not grow and do not live.

He who cannot doubt does not bear himself. Such a one is doubtful; he does not grow and hence he does not live. Doubt is the sign of the strongest and the weakest. The strong have doubt, but doubt has the weak. (p. 301)

The strong can bear the unconscious dimensions of themselves, the Jungian shadow, which actively work to compensate the values, assumptions, beliefs, desires, and fears of the conscious personality, as well as of collective consciousness in general. Thus, consciously held doubt is a doorway leading to the self and to real relatedness with others. How crucial the wisdom of not knowing is for individuation, i.e., the process of consciously growing into what we are! There is always vastly more to us—and to others—than what we think we know.

The Wisdom of Not Knowing in Psychotherapy: Dreams and Therapeutic Doubt

In myth and folklore it is common for the hero to face an impossible problem. “Yes,” the king says, “you may marry the princess. All you must do is find the fish at the bottom of the sea who has swallowed a ring and bring that ring back. But if you do not accomplish this, I will put you to death.” Faced with this impossible task, the hero is forced to remain in uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts until something new and unexpected happens, perhaps in the form of helpful animals, a wise old woman in the woods, or some lucky occurrence or miracle. So it is in life. A successful confrontation with impossible problems in psychotherapy, such as our depression, addiction, paranoia, panic, or fusional dynamics in relationship—whatever it may be that we cannot overcome by intellectual insight, willpower, and good intentions alone—often requires us to rely on the unconscious for help—a painful process!

One benefit of psychotherapy, therefore, of developing a capacity for “being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” (Keats, 1899, p. 277) is that this capacity encourages questions and curiosity. When Parsifal finally asks the wounded Fisher King in the Grail legend, “What ails thee?” this question—a combination of not knowing with a desire to know—heals the wasteland. It is the central question in any Jungian analysis.

Analysis is an individual’s personal experiment with the unknown. Therefore, when someone comes to see me for psychotherapy, while I inevitably make conscious and unconscious judgments about the potential cause and treatment of that person’s suffering based on my training and experience, I also try to remember that, when it comes to the fate of this individual, I know nothing. Consciously bracketing my assumptions and conceptions in this regard is not easy; it does not automatically happen and is never fully possible. But the attempt itself facilitates curiosity, and, over time, I have been immensely impressed by how a willing suspension of disbelief in my theories, initial reactions, and/or projections creates space for unexpected revelations that are often more interesting, accurate, and helpful than what I (or my patients) thought we knew in advance. In hindsight, this “knowing” in advance often reveals itself to have been nothing more than a superficial or merely generalized assumption obliquely omitting the uniqueness of the person, like a map that is true enough but replaces the actual reality of a place with an idea. Sometimes the opposite is true, of course, in keeping with the paradoxical nature of everything. The benefit of knowing in psychotherapy—such as when a theory hits the mark—is that it acts like cool water calming the fire of anxiety, or like a compass leading the way through chaos.

I respect the capacity of patient and therapist to know. I also respect the capacity to not know. Paradoxically, not knowing, as I mean the term, is a form of knowing.

Knowing we do not know encourages a desire to know differently, to know more deeply—a desire that can lead to an awareness of, and reliance on, the unconscious in the patient, in the analyst, and in the intersubjective field between the two. In this respect, I would like to offer two examples of what I consider to be the wisdom of not knowing in psychotherapy. The first comes through work with dreams. The second comes through the role of what I call “therapeutic doubt” in working with trauma.

As a psychotherapist, if I were certain I understood the causes of a patient’s suffering and knew the way forward, I would never ask about dreams. I would not need to. Merely asking a patient, “Do you have any dreams?” presupposes therefore at least a touch of negative capability. In working with dreams, our goal is to discover the symbol in the symptom. The symptom is well known, but the symbol emerges out of darkness.

“What ails thee?” Dreams—especially the initial dreams in analysis—can be powerful expressions both of one’s suffering and of the way of healing. As we know from Keats, Shakespeare possessed the quality of remaining in mysteries and doubts in abundance, but in dreams we all at times become a Shakespeare. Therefore, when it comes to understanding dreams, we can adopt the same approach as to understanding Shakespeare. Coleridge (1906) recommends “poetic faith” (p. 161). Poetic faith, as distinct from fundamentalist faith, requires of us a capacity for (as Coleridge famously puts it) “a willing suspension of disbelief for the moment” in the symbolic semblances of imagination (p. 161).

Allow me to illustrate what I mean here with two dreams: the first from my own life and the second from my work with a patient in analysis.

When I headed into Jungian analysis over 25 years ago now, grinding through a state of depression and meaninglessness, I had a dream the night before my first analytic session. I had spoken briefly to my analyst on the phone that day to arrange our meeting time. Then, that night, I had a dream that told me the secret to my state of depression was to “find the dove.”

I am having my first meeting with a woman psychologist. I arrive at her office; she greets me, and we begin the session. I feel sad and low and begin to talk about my depression. At one point, she looks intently into my eyes and says, “What we must do is find the dove; find where the dove is; that is the secret.”

Another example: a woman in her late 20s was going through a state of suicidal ideation brought on by the abrupt crisis of her fiancé being killed in a car crash at the hands of a drunk driver. Near the start of her analytic process, she dreamt she was working as a maid in a bed-and-breakfast on the third or fourth floor (not her job in waking life). In this dream, a man climbs up the steps with a large bag slung over his back. He sees her, and she sees him; they lock eyes, and she becomes terrified because she knows this man is carrying a sack filled with women’s dismembered body parts. The dreamer runs in terror into the streets at night, trying to escape, as this nightmare—an image of her feeling of falling to pieces—chases after her. And then she does something extraordinary: she stops, turns around, and faces him. As she does so, the fiend walks up to her and says something unexpected: “Happy birthday.” It was not her birthday at the time.

Both of these dreams, as is especially true for the initial dreams in analysis, acknowledge the symptom and point the way symbolically to a solution. But for us to take in that solution, we must develop some negative capability, i.e., a capacity to know we do not know everything through fact and reason. The imagery of finding the dove and the message of new life coming from death are beyond fact and reason.

Freud’s method of free association encourages us along these lines. Free association is a suspension of critical, rational thinking; it is akin to being on a train and looking outside at the landscape passing by, simply observing what is there in the inner flow of consciousness. Jung speaks of this process as making conscious the automatic play of ideas. It requires what is sometimes difficult for the modern mind, namely, a capacity for fantasy thinking as distinct from directed thinking; a thinking in images as distinct from words. While directed thinking is a relatively modern acquisition and directed by consciousness, fantasy thinking is ancient and primordial and directed by the unconscious. In analytic work, the goal is not to jettison directed thinking in favor of fantasy thinking—or the other way around—but to integrate them both.

The wisdom of not knowing is thus a prerequisite for working with dreams. I have also found it to be indispensable in working with trauma. In this context, I speak of “therapeutic doubt.”

Trauma produces certainty. The hideous phenomenon of trauma is not only that it happened but also that it keeps happening. We were betrayed and are therefore certain we will be and are being betrayed. Under the spellbinding shock of any traumatic event, the whole world and everything in it becomes a potential traumatizer. Even if the trauma survivor cannot intellectually agree with this way of putting it, the body is certain. The body freezes as defense systems—for example, dissociation, repression, splitting, and addiction—act beyond conscious awareness to shut down emotional responses and thus seal off the true self from contact with others. “We cannot, will not, be betrayed again,” the defenses seem to say. They protect us. In such circumstances, the implicit, if not explicit, psychotherapeutic question is: “Are other experiences possible besides the initial injuring ones?”

How can therapy open a sliver of distance between a traumatized imagination and what might be real and possible in the present and future? Therapeutic doubt creates that distance, even if just a little. Therapeutic doubt can arise through working with dreams, such as the “Happy Birthday” dream we looked at earlier, and it can also arise through a therapeutic relationship. When the patient risks being honest and vulnerable, then contact with the therapist that does not merely recapitulate the original trauma—or, if a recapitulation does take place, as it often does—if the therapist and patient can work through that enactment to a new and different outcome, then the patient may have an experience that something else really is possible besides the traumatic “knowing.” Perhaps the acceptance and understanding of the therapist—something one may not have experienced before—and counter the perceived certainty that all one can hope for in life is misunderstanding, criticism, and betrayal. If so, that new experience might create an openness in the patient that they can take with them outside the therapy room.

Importantly, therefore, the capacity to bear ourselves through doubt is not merely a capacity to bear the “bad” parts of ourselves! It is also a capacity to bear our unmet needs for love, understanding, compassion, and relatedness, even if (or especially if) the fulfillment of those needs seems impossible. For someone who has been marked by trauma, those so-called “positive needs” are often the most difficult and challenging to accept. Opening up to them risks everything. Emily Dickinson (2020) puts this so well in her poem, I Can Wade Grief:

I can wade Grief—

Whole Pools of it—

I'm used to that—

But the least push of Joy

Breaks up my feet—

And I tip—drunken—

Let no Pebble—smile—

’Twas the New Liquor—

That was all! (p. 252)

Collective Trauma and Collective Dreams

Psychotherapy is understandably (and rightly) concerned with the survival and thriving of the individual. To this end, it almost always focuses on the patient’s personal life; for example, the impact of traumatic events in formative years. But what of collective trauma? Regardless of our upbringing, we are all affected—not equally, but nonetheless universally—by war, the exponential growth of technology, climate chaos, cultural conflicts, etc. The loss of psychological and spiritual meaning in the modern West—a “loss of soul,” as some have put it—is one example of a trauma we all confront in one way or another.

A client of mine, a middle-aged man, personally fell into this collective chasm between scientific fact and spiritual meaning during an analytic session a few years ago. Relaxing into a state of reverie near the beginning of the session, he began to describe the meaning of his life. He spoke in beautiful and emotional terms as he told me of many intimate personal experiences, including a profound sense of connectedness to nature. Then, suddenly, he stopped, put his face in his hands, and muttered, “I’m fucked.” When I asked him what he meant, he said, “Science tells us how things really are.” His understanding of “science” was that it had proven the cosmos is actually—as distinct from what he had been imagining—a spiritual void. There was no meaning out there; it was nothing but dead matter. From this perspective, which was not his own way of knowing, but rather a collective way, when he turned his gaze to the world objectively, he found the world did not have any capacity for his spiritual experiences. He plummeted headlong into a modern chasm; namely, between meaning and fact; and, as he fell into that darkness, the question of the meaning of his life seemed like a stupid question. He felt despair, hopelessness, and confusion. He stopped speaking.

“What ails thee?” I’m sure many of us can relate to this man’s dilemma. That is because it is not merely personal to him alone—it is not only the result of family-of-origin trauma, dissociated memories, or other experiences of that nature. His despair is a direct consequence of the evolution of Western civilization over the last four centuries or so.

As we consider what any of us might do to help this man (or ourselves) with the loss of soul in the modern world, it may be relevant to briefly consider how European Romanticism (1770–1850) dealt with this problem before turning our attention to how 20th- and 21st-century developments in psychology and physics may be confronting it. Romanticism is a 19th-century response to the scientific revolution (1543–1687) and the age of European enlightenment (1685–1815).

In his 1784 essay, “Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment?,” the German philosopher and one of the progenitors of the Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant (1999), sums up this complex scientific, political, social, religious, and psychological movement in one Latin phrase: Sapere Aude. “Sapere aude! Have courage to make use of your own understanding! is thus the motto of the Enlightenment” (p. 17). “Dare to know”—this is the essence of freedom, liberation from the tyranny of king and pope and freedom from the delusion and ignorance that enveloped humanity like a mist before the scientific revolution. The motto of the Royal Society, the oldest scientific society in the world, formed in 1660 and still active today, is “nullus in verba”: “take nobody’s word for it.”

Modernity aims at liberation through knowledge. It has been incredibly successful. The progress of Western civilization over the last four or five centuries is stunning. We value the blessings of modern medicine, the relative miracle of the rational ideal upon which our Western system of law and justice is founded, the creation of individual freedoms, and the scientific exploration of nature, even beyond Mother Earth; for instance, the incredibly beautiful—even numinous—pictures of the universe brought back to us by the James Webb space telescope! I, for one, do not want to return to the old days, even if it were possible to do so without pretense. But at the same time, modern ways of knowing possess a shadow side. Part of that shadow, as we have seen with respect to my patient, is an elimination of imagination and feeling as a means of knowing the true and the real.

The Romantic poets and philosophers addressed this shadow side of the Enlightenment. They were not against the Enlightenment but complementary with it—the moon to its sun, the night to its day. The Romantics were fully on board with the liberation of the individual from the shackles of dogmatic authoritarianism and fundamentalism. But they were also knowers who knew they did not—and could not—know everything through fact and reason. For them, feeling and imagination were also doorways to truth and reality.

If “sapere aude” is the defining spirit of the Enlightenment, then negative capability—“dare to not know”—defines Romanticism. In Romantic literature, a divine capacity for doubt often goes down to the bottom of everything, even to the truth and reality of a material world separate from the psyche. While most modern Westerners find questioning the reality of a material world distinct from the mind to be incomprehensible and/or intolerable, for Percy Shelley it was a liberating experience, opening him to the astonishing miracle of life. In his 1819 essay, “On Life,” Shelley (1977) beautifully and powerfully describes this experience:

Life, and the world, or whatever we call that which we are and feel, is an astonishing thing. The mist of familiarity obscures from us the wonder of our being…. Life, the great miracle, we admire not, because it is so miraculous. It is well that we are thus shielded by the familiarity of what is at once so certain and so unfathomable from an astonishment which would otherwise absorb and overawe the functions of that which is [its] object. (pp. 474–475)

Shelley adroitly flips the scientific revolution on its head here. Astonishment—an emotional reaction—is proof we are connected to reality, not divorced from it! Our modern sense of scientific/materialistic knowing does not lead us into the light of objective truth, but instead unknowingly envelops us in a “mist of familiarity.” Doubt dispels this mist and thus clears the way for contact with a revelation so astonishing, so earth-shaking, that it threatens to “absorb and overawe” us; namely, “the solid universe of external things is ‘such stuff as dreams are made of’” (p. 476).

Shelley’s point of view bridges the chasm between scientific “fact” and spiritual “imagination” that my patient fell into. For one who is encapsulated in the scientific certainty of the modern age, “Life, & the world” is not “whatever we call that which we are & feel”; it is a dead machine. There is no mysterious meaning to life; we only imagine that.

Shelley, however, is a poet and not a physicist. Why should we listen to him? Yes, “the poetry” speaks to imagination, wishes, and fantasies, but, as we all know, “the science” tells us what is true and real.

I recently came across an interesting example of how a reconciliation of the collective modern split between fact and meaning might be working itself out today within the realm of science. This occurred while listening to the Lex Fridman Podcast. Fridman is a young artificial intelligence researcher working on autonomous vehicles, human-robot interaction, and machine learning at MIT who hosts a fascinating, wide-ranging, and multi-disciplinary podcast offering extended conversations with people on the cutting edge of contemporary cultural, psychological, spiritual, and political issues. On March 31, 2020, Fridman interviewed Roger Penrose, a Nobel Laureate in physics and one of our greatest living scientists. Near the end of the interview, Fridman asks Penrose the very question my patient foundered on; namely, “the most ridiculous, maybe the most important question: What is the meaning of life?” After some nervous/embarrassed laughter on both sides and a low, “Oh God,” Penrose composes himself and responds, “All I will say, I think it is not a stupid question. … You see, I tend to think that the mystery of consciousness is tied up with the mystery of quantum mechanics” (Penrose, 2020, 1:24). The mystery of psyche and matter? A world-renowned physicist asserting that the question of the meaning of life is not a stupid question? This is not, as they say, your grandfather’s physics.

In his interview with Fridman, Penrose says he likes to call himself a “scientist but not a materialist.” That is because, as he says, “we do not know what the material is.” It would surprise my patient to hear that. While the average person on the street is certain that science obviously knows what matter is, it takes a Penrose to know we do not know anything great or good about the nature of matter.

While the wisdom of not knowing does not answer the question of the meaning of life, it does reopen the door to the question itself through an awareness of mystery. That is quite a lot.

The Wisdom of Not Knowing and Contemporary Politics: The Inner Revolution and Symbolic Death

I would now like to turn our attention away from the personal and collective dimensions of psychotherapy and briefly wonder how the wisdom of not knowing might pertain to the contemporary sociopolitical world.

What is wrong with the world? Is it global warming, the looming prospect of civil war in the United States, the danger of nuclear conflict, economic disparity, white supremacy, the exponential growth of artificial intelligence, MAGA Republicans, cancel culture, woke leftists? What can individuals contribute to the problem of war, the possible elimination of the human in the face of cyber-physical systems (AI), the disintegration of meaning, pandemics, and other crises that confront us today?

In the early 19th century, Coleridge (1884) said, “In the treatment of nervous cases, he is the best physician who is the most ingenious inspirer of hope” (p. 417). Where might hope come from if we consider our society as a patient with a “nervous case?” Here are some of the answers I often hear in popular culture:

1. Our hope lies in the ever-continuing advances of technology.

2. Hope is found by thinking rationally instead of reacting emotionally.

3. We can have hope for the future through collective good will and cooperation.

A 2022 symposium entitled “Values” curated by Bocconi University on behalf of the World Economic Forum recognized how “values are essential—particularly in times of crisis” (para. 1), and many intelligent, creative, and wealthy people around the world today have their eyes on the creation of new global values for the 21st century. But are the new values we desperately need today really going to materialize as the brainchildren of a global elite? Values have to do with the feeling function, with empathy and imagination. Feeling is a function of valuing. Can we legislate feeling? The suggestion I offer here is that a rebirth of cultural values must take account of the collective unconscious—not only as an impediment to the instantiation of new values but also as a creative matrix of transformation that gives birth to them. The threshold we must cross over in order to find new values is the recognition that we do not know how to form them. Are values “created”? I am here arguing they are “formed” because they arise somatically through the feeling function.

For Jung, what is wrong with the world today is not only that we do not understand what is happening, but we do not understand that we do not understand. In this context, Jung speaks of “the great Dream.” In a letter to Sir Herbert Read (a well-known art critic) in 1960, one year before his death, Jung (2011) emphasized that before we turn to our dreams, we must know that we do not know.

We obstinately want [the future] to be as we expect it. We decide, as if we knew. We only know what we know, but there is plenty more of which we might know if only we could give up insisting on what we do know. But the dream would tell us more …. We have simply got to listen to what the psyche spontaneously says to us …. It is the great dream which has always spoken through the artist as a mouthpiece. All his love and passion (his “values”) flow towards the coming guest to proclaim his arrival. … What is the great Dream? It consists of the many small dreams and the many acts of humility and submission to their hints. It is the future and the picture of the new world, which we do not understand yet. We cannot know better than the unconscious and its intimations. There is a fair chance of finding what we seek in vain in our conscious world. Where else could it be? (p. 586)

I Don’t Know the Way, and I’m Not Meant to Know the Way

This is a holy attitude that allows the voice of inner and outer nature to speak, or, more specifically, that allows us to listen. But who has the capacity to do this? G. K. Chesterton (1910/2007), the English essayist, novelist, and poet, once remarked, “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried” (p. 29). Chesterton’s observation, it seems to me, applies with equal truth and weight to the depth psychological ideal. There are individual exceptions, of course, but these prove the rule: Turning to the collective unconscious as a source of truth and guidance is difficult and has been left untried. To do it, we would first need to develop a capacity to doubt the truth and the righteousness of our conscious point of view. Even this, as a threshold experience, is hard enough!

Jung lived through two world wars. He was understandably pessimistic about the possibility of fundamental societal transformation. However, Jung always held hope that if enough individuals faced themselves, one person at a time, this might eventually lead to collective change. Jung (1970) famously called this facing of ourselves the “confrontation with the shadow” (para. 708). The theory is easy to understand and undoubtedly true. If more people would own their shadow instead of repressing and projecting it onto others, the world would be a better place. But who can bear it? Why confront our own darkness when it is so much easier, and so much more gratifying, to attack one’s neighbor, one’s spouse, and/or the ever-present cultural, religious, and political enemies? Owning our shadow has also—like knowing that we do not know; like turning to the great dream—been found difficult and left untried.

Knowing we do not know comes at a tremendous cost. It requires sacrifice. For example, from his face and body language as well as his words, I imagine it must have taken Penrose decades to distance himself from the collective prejudices and judgments both within himself and his colleagues and to finally affirm, individually and publicly, as a scientist, that when faced with “the mystery of consciousness, the mystery of quantum mechanics,” the question of the meaning of life is no longer a stupid question.

How does it feel to go beyond all that the conscious self feels as familiar? It is terrifying. When the world as we have known it—our core assumptions, beliefs, and guiding fictions—falls to pieces, we call that event “apocalypse” or “catastrophe.” Not knowing is a death of the old self that did know. Disorientation, alienation, and loss of a felt sense of purpose and meaning are distinct possibilities.

If we acknowledge and accept that there is a vital need today for a fundamental transformation of values, both in ourselves and in the world, then we must come to grips with how things change. Good news and bad news are found here. The good news is that change is possible. The bad news is that change happens through symbolic death, as in the perennial philosophy “die and be reborn.”

I had a client many years ago when I was beginning my practice as an analyst who was suffering to his bones in a state of depression and regression. His dreams brought up images of rebirth out of all manner of death. Working with one of these dreams, I told him, “You are in a transformation process.” “It doesn’t feel like transformation,” he replied, as he exhaled in near despair. Looking back on this event now, I think to myself, “Yes it does; that is exactly what transformation feels like.”

Death plays a terrifying and necessary role in the unfolding of the soul’s development. In 1957, the year the Soviets successfully launched the world’s first artificial satellite and tested the first intercontinental ballistic missile at the height of the Cold War, Jung (1976) wrote a letter to the Reverend David Cox in which he stated that our civilization faced two choices—either literal or symbolic death: “We are threatened with universal genocide unless we can work out the way of salvation by a symbolic death” (para. 1661). Some 17 years later, when Martin Luther King (2010) addressed the staff of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in retreat at Frogmore, South Carolina, only a few months before his assassination in Memphis on April 4, 1968, he came close to echoing Jung’s diagnosis and prognosis for contemporary Western society:

If America is to survive, the country will have to collectively die to its old values and give birth to the new…. For its very survival’s sake, America must re-examine old presuppositions and release itself from many things that for centuries have been held sacred. For the evils of racism, poverty, and militarism to die, a new set of values must be born. (p. 142)

Both C. G. Jung and Martin Luther King call for revolution. Instead of advocating political violence, however, they go to the heart of the matter—to the human heart—and call for a revolution of the ruling assumptions, perceptions, and beliefs of collective consciousness. As an alternative to societal disintegration and/or literal genocide, they advise symbolic death. For this to be even remotely possible, however, we must first cross over the threshold and embrace knowing that we do not know.

Astonishingly, our hope lies in our capacity to die. Humanity has always been afraid of death, but the modern mind resists it at all costs. The modern psyche does not feel it is safe to die, just as we do not feel it is safe to not know. Death is the ultimate not knowing, the ultimate darkness, the ultimate fact that negates our identification with power and control. The wisdom of not knowing, therefore, is choosing figurative death. Paradoxically, it is also a choice for new life and new ways of knowing.

Jain Svetambara Tirthankara in Meditation (artist unknown—India/Gujarat or Rajasthan), 11th century. Marble, H. 39 in. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, purchase, Florence and Herbert Irving Gift, 1992. Accession Number: 1992.131.

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Thomas Elsner

Thomas Elsner is a Jungian analyst and co-chief editor of Psychological Perspectives. He trained as a Jungian analyst at the Center for Depth Psychology according to C. G. Jung and Marie-Louise von Franz in Zürich, Switzerland, is a training analyst at the C. G. Jung Study Center of Southern California, and maintains a private practice in Santa Barbara.

Notes

1 “Things have gone rapidly downhill since the Age of Enlightenment for, once this petty reasoning mind, which cannot endure any paradoxes, is awakened, no sermon on earth can keep it down. A new task then arises: to lift this still undeveloped mind step by step to a higher level and to increase the number of persons who have at least some inkling of the scope of paradoxical truth” (Jung, 1944/1980, para. 19).