Jung wrote in a private letter to Eugene Rolfe in 1960, a few months before his death:
“I had to understand that I was unable to make the people see what I am after. I am practically alone. There are a few who understand this and that, but almost nobody sees the whole. (…) I have failed in my foremost task, to open people’s eyes to the fact that man has a soul and there is a buried treasure in the field, and that our religion and philosophy are in a lamentable state.”¹
Jung was very magnanimous to take that responsibility unto his shoulders but we must consider that Jung was not the only one responsible for that problem, his followers also were and still are.
It is, of course, a delicate subject and few people have made those observations but they need to be looked at because what is at stake is the whole field of Analytical psychology and the legacy of Carl Jung.
Some interpreters of Jung’s writings could have been able to understand the core meaning of his works if they had asked themselves the right questions, but it seems that they did not.
Edward Edinger wrote:
“you should realize that Jung’s consciousness vastly surpasses your own. If he puts something in a way that seems unnecessarily difficult, the proper procedure is to assume that he knows what he is doing and knows something you don’t. If you make the assumption that you know better than he does and start out with a critical attitude don’t bother; the book isn’t for you. Jung’s depth and breadth are absolutely awesome. We are all Lilliputians by comparison, so when we encounter Jung we feel inferior, and we don’t like it. To read Jung successfully we must begin by accepting our own littleness; then we become teachable.”
This is obviously a flawed argument. If it were true, humans would never have been able to go to the moon because they would never have tried to understand the teachings of their predecessors. That argument from Edinger was a moral inadequacy and it is unfortunately followed by too many Jungians interpreters nowadays. It is as if they are continually saying: Jung is too difficult to understand, so why try? Or, no one has understood AION, why read it?
When Jungians feel Lilliputians, that is because they failed to be real scientists. They stopped trying to understand Jung’s whole psychology. Imagine if the field of physics was composed of a group of people who were unable to understand Einstein’s theory of relativity. You would say that physics is not a science because its conceptual core is not generally understood and accepted. This is the actual problem of Analytical psychology.
Lilliputians do not understand the individuation process or the Self and they repeat what the first generation of interpreters wrote, those same persons who did not understand those concepts themselves. If Jungian psychology is a “science”, it is a science in which no one understands what the master wrote and in which no one has ever equaled or surpassed the master. Lilliputianism, as an intellectual or a moral inadequacy, is something taught from generation to generation and it seems that Jungian analytical psychology has been hacked by the Lilliputians from the beginning.
¹Rolfe, Eugene. Encounter with Jung. Sigo Press. 1989. P.158
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