The First World War brought a sense of profound unease to the modern soul. The Enlightenment’s optimism about human potential had difficulty explaining the recent displays of mass violence and lust for power. Written during a time when people were cynical about humanity and desperate for a sense of purpose, psychoanalyst and intellectual Carl Jung’s Modern Man in Search of a Soul offers reflections on what it means to be human.  This collection of essays is a valuable window into the cultural currents that continue to shape our world almost a century later.

Here is a profile of the twentieth-century modern man. The modern man is solitary, both distinct from the masses and aware of that distinction. This differentiation from the collective unconscious becomes more marked as his consciousness increases. This happens in progressive stages. To be sure, there are whole swaths of humanity that have never undergone the process. Their mental activity resides in the collective unconscious, unaware of what they’re doing or why, not unlike primitive tribal groups of past eras.

The modern man lives in the present, both in the sense that he is cognizant of what occurs from moment to moment, but also in the sense that he is unhistorical: he looks back upon the practices of the past and finds them appalling. He strives to take what is salvageable from the past and understand what led up to the modern era, but he also refuses to be chained to traditions.

Consciousness in the modern era is easy enough to imitate. There are many who have mastered the appearance of modernity without being truly modern, attempting to arrive at the modern psychic state without undergoing the various stages of development and the challenges they involve. By contrast with these pseudo-moderns, the genuinely modern man is competent and takes a stand when necessary. Because he tends to be isolated, he is often viewed with suspicion by the herd, and even as old-fashioned because he does not mindlessly join in with the latest cultural fixations.

Every positive attribute has a dark side. In the case of modern man’s quality of present-mindedness, it is the illusion that we are the pinnacle of human achievement, that we have arrived at the end of human history. The recent memory of a catastrophic world war throws that idea back in our face and should keep us grounded.

Modern man has been pulled up short by the atrocities of the World War I. For all the talk of solidarity, the brotherhood of man, and international social democracy, we now live with a nagging uncertainty about the political and economic prescriptions that are being peddled again. The great ideas of our time that aimed to make the world a better place fell tragically short in the transition from theory to reality. Psychologically speaking, the atrocities that civilized man showed himself capable of carrying out has left modern man in an unsettled psychic state.

Man’s problem is a profoundly spiritual one. A psychoanalyst’s work concerns the inner life, and yet it is amply clear that the state of a person’s psyche has clear implications for the external world. Modern man’s skepticism about things getting better has led him to reject simplistic cure-all remedies. He views metaphysical platitudes with cynicism. Rituals and spiritual practices are outward expressions that attempt to satiate the soul’s longings, but modern man’s skepticism has led him to chase after material stability rather than treasures in heaven.

The sudden surge of interest in psychic aspects of our being shows that modern man finds the outer material existence to be lacking as well, just as talk of political reform and world peace seem tired and worn out.

People are craving meaningful experience in the inner life.The search for inner stability in materialism, politics, and established religion leaves many unsatisfied, and has led them to seek their own authentic spiritual connection rather than to take dead men and politicians at their word.

These musings about the soul of modern man will no doubt strike some as ethereal and unacademic. The aim is to draw attention to aspects of life of which the Western mind is barely conscious. It’s not unacademic, just unfamiliar. Even in physics, we are not finding hard-and-fast rules. Einstein’s discovery of relativity and instability at an atomic level show us that science is yet another realm in which people are denied the firm footing they crave.

As we can see, the soul of the West is in an unstable, dangerous state. The lack of rootedness has led to a restless hunger and growing disregard for morality. Consider the Chinese, Indian, and African who have seen the power-hungry Westerners subjugate their people under the pretext of civilizing and proselytizing. One American Indian, a pueblo chief and personal friend, confided in an unguarded moment that, “We don’t understand the whites; they are always wanting something—always restless—always looking for something. What is it? We don’t know. We can’t understand them. They have sharp noses, such thin, cruel lips, such lines on their faces. We think they are all crazy.”

We have projected an image of power to the rest of the world, and have furiously tried to bolster that image. But this slavish investment in our outward image has left us scant time for reflection and cultivation of the inner life. There is currently little substance to the Western soul, intellectually, ethically, or artistically speaking. We are only now coming round to accepting the conclusion that we have become impoverished. 

Interestingly enough, even though the West has the East in turmoil, the East is beginning to gain strong spiritual footholds in the West. This has happened before. As the Roman Empire expanded eastward into Asia through military conquest, conquered Asia achieved its own cultural conquest over Rome.

For all our talk of cultural and intellectual superiority, we are just now delving into subjects that have been spiritual and philosophical mainstays in the East for centuries. The West is just now scratching the surface of astrology, philosophical relativism, and sexual studies.

The distress that the modern Western soul is experiencing has led to an openness to Eastern ideas. This idea might seem outlandish now, but give it time: What now looks like an insignificant archipelago in the sea of man’s spiritual aspirations will reveal itself to be the tops of a mountain range that will continue to rise to the surface of Western consciousness. The pessimists will read these developments as a sign of further spiritual decline. The optimists will view this as a remarkable spiritual opportunity for the enrichment of the West. Whether one interprets this as a positive or negative development, it is safe to call it a significant one.

Material causation is an assumption within the natural sciences that there is a physical explanation for all phenomena. This has made the discovery that some physical ailments have psychic origins an unfavorable development. The materialist’s attempts to reduce the psychic element to material principles, however, have been unsuccessful.

This is not to completely discount the contributions of Freud or his pupil Adler, but their views about human drives (for pleasure and power, respectively) are incomplete. They fail to account for the person’s spiritual goals. Freud and Adler are too tied to nineteenth-century thinking that undervalues imagination and the power of myth. They forget that man is searching for meaning. 

Common sense, rationality, and thoughtful decision-making go a long way in life, but they provide no answers to life’s ultimate questions of meaning and suffering. At bottom, psycho-neurosis arises from a person’s inability to make sense of life or find meaning in it. He wants more than logic and scientific explanations.

The therapist willing to accept this has a new horizon opened up to him as far as treatment of the patient, but he would be wise to tread carefully here. This is a realm with which the priest is more familiar, and so it is natural that the psychotherapist would refer someone to the church. But what about those who are mistrustful of the church or philosophers? The people who don’t just talk about a meaningful life but live it out are rare. The doctor is tasked with treating physical ailments, but if the pain has psychological or spiritual roots, the path to healing may involve pointing his patient to the four greatest gifts of grace achieved by man: faith, hope, love, and insight. 

The question of good and evil is not just a question for the church, but one with which the psychotherapist must also wrestle. This partnership will be mutually enriching.

At this point, psychology enjoys the vogue among the educated, but within twenty years, it will be widely accepted by people of all classes. Over the years, ideas trickle down from the elites to the masses.

Nowadays, many people come to the psychologist not to help them resolve some neurosis, but because of the emptiness that confronts them and their struggle to find meaning. Most are educated people who have found religious and philosophical responses to their crises unsatisfying. 

The psychotherapist is in a unique position of being able to validate the patients feelings of doubt, perhaps even admitting to entertaining similar doubts himself about religious questions: 

Does the Christ’s death actually redeem me?

Isn’t goodness relative?

What did Jesus say that the Buddha didn’t also teach?

The minister must hold to doctrine, which, presumably, he genuinely believes. But his answers often strike the modern man as the vestiges of dead tradition and dogma which can yield only worn-out answers.

The conflict between blind faith of childhood and rationalism pushed in universities has left the modern man anxious to figure out for himself how these things work.

Just as the priest in many ways is poorly equipped to diagnose psychological dysfunction, so the psychotherapist is often unfamiliar with the questions of ultimate meaning. As more and more people are bringing their spiritual quandaries to the psychotherapist instead of the priest, collaboration is essential to help people find a sense of liberation. Psychotherapists must now concern themselves with questions that used to be posed to ministers. To guide people toward a sense of meaning in their lives, they must learn from the theologian and get metaphysical.