13

Body and Soul

Since psyche and matter are contained in one and the same world, and moreover are in continuous contact with one another and ultimately rest on irrepresentable, transcendental factors, it is not only possible but fairly probable, even, that psyche and matter are two different aspects of one and the same thing. The synchronicity phenomena point, it seems to me, in this direction, for they show that the nonpsychic can behave like the psychic, and vice versa, without there being any causal connection between them. Our present knowledge does not allow us to do much more than compare the relation of the psychic to the material world with two cones, whose apices, meeting in a point without extension—a real zeropoint—touch and do not touch.

“On the Nature of the Psyche” (1947/1954), CW 8, § 418.

Psyche cannot be totally different from matter, for how otherwise could it move matter? And matter cannot be alien to psyche, for how else could matter produce psyche? Psyche and matter exist in one and the same world, and each partakes of the other, otherwise any reciprocal action would be impossible. If research could only advance far enough, therefore, we should arrive at an ultimate agreement between physical and psychological concepts. Our present attempts may be bold, but I believe they are on the right lines.

Aion (1951), CW 9ii, § 413.

One cannot say that every symptom is a challenge and that every cure takes place in the intermediate realm between psyche and physis. One can only say that it is advisable to approach every illness from the psychological side as well, because this may be extraordinarily important for the healing process. When these two aspects work together, it may easily happen that the cure takes place in the intermediate realm, in other words that it consists of a complexio oppositorum [complexity of the opposites], like the lapis.5 In this case the illness is in the fullest sense a stage of the individuation process.

Letter to Joachim Knopp, 10 July 1946, Letters, Vol. I, p. 429.

Probably in absolute reality there is no such thing as body and mind, but body and mind or soul are the same, the same life, subject to the same laws, and what the body does is happening in the mind.

Dream Analysis: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1928–1930 (14 November 1928), p. 20.

[W]e suffer very much from the fact that we consist of mind and have lost the body.

Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934–1939, Vol. I (21 November 1934), p. 251.

Not infrequently the dreams show that there is a remarkable inner symbolical connection between an undoubted physical illness and a definite psychic problem, so that the physical disorder appears as a direct mimetic expression of the psychic situation. I mention this curious fact more for the sake of completeness than to lay any particular stress on this problematic phenomenon. It seems to me, however, that a definite connection does exist between physical and psychic disturbances and that its significance is generally underrated, though on the other hand it is boundlessly exaggerated owing to certain tendencies to regard physical disturbances merely as an expression of psychic disturbances, as is particularly the case with Christian Science. Dreams throw very interesting sidelights on the inter-functioning of body and psyche.

“General Aspects of Dream Psychology,” (1916/1948), CW 8, § 502.

The materialistic premise is that the physical process causally determines the psychic process. The spiritualistic premise is the reverse of this. I think of this relationship in the physical sense as a reciprocal one, in which now one side and now the other acts as a cause. One could also say that under certain conditions the physical process reflects itself in the psychic, just as the psychic does in the physical.

Letter to Markus Fierz, 7 May 1945, Letters, Vol. I, p. 366.

[T]he body is a terribly awkward thing and so it is omitted; we can deal with things spiritually so much more easily without the despicable body.

Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934–1939, Vol. I (23 May 1934), p. 63.

We are entangled in the roots, and we ourselves are the roots. We make roots, we cause roots to be, we are rooted in the soil, and there is no getting away for us, because we must be there as long as we live. That idea, that we can sublimate ourselves and become entirely spiritual and no hair left, is an inflation. I am sorry, that is impossible; it makes no sense.

The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1932 (19 October, 1932), p. 29.

[T]he symptomatology of an illness is at the same time a natural attempt at healing.

“The Structure of the Psyche” (1927/1931), CW 8, §312.

Regarding organic illness (accidents, injuries, etc.) it can be stated with certainty that these things do at least have psychological syndromes, i.e., there is a concomitant psychic process which can sometimes also have an aetiological significance, so that it looks as though the illness were a psychic arrangement. At any rate there are numerous cases where the symptoms exhibit, in a positively remarkable way, a symbolic meaning even if no psychological pathogenesis is present.

Letter to Joachim Knopp, 10 July 1946, Letters, Vol. I, p. 429.

Even a ghost, if he wants to make an effect on this earth, always needs a body, a medium; otherwise he cannot ring bells or lift tables or anything that ghosts are supposed to do.

Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934–1939, Vol. I (17 October 1934), p. 168.

Anything experienced outside of the body has the quality of being without body; so you must experience the whole thing over again, it must come in a new way. Then whatever you learn in analysis will happen to you in reality. It must be like that, because you are the point of identity, you are the one that experiences analysis and the one that experiences life. Whatever you experience outside of the body, in a dream for instance, is not experienced unless you take it into the body, because the body means the here and now. If you just have a dream and let it pass by you, nothing has happened at all, even if it is the most amazing dream; but if you look at it with the purpose of trying to understand it, and succeed in understanding it, then you have taken it into the here and now, the body being a visible expression of the here and now. For instance, if you had not taken your body into this room, nobody would know you were here; though even if you seem to be in the body, it is by no means sure that you are, because your mind might be wandering without your realizing it. Then whatever is going on here would not be realized; it would be like a vague dream that floats in and out, and nothing has happened.

Visions: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1930–1934, Vol. II (21 February 1934), p. 1316.

People who are not consciously aware of the body suffer from a certain unreality of life in that inter-relatedness through participation mystique; they don’t know when they are hungry, and they neglect the simple functions of the body. I had a case, a girl of twenty-eight, who no longer heard her steps when she walked out in the street. That frightened her and she came to me. She dreamt that she was riding in a balloon—not in the basket but on top, high up in the air—and there she saw me with a rifle shooting at her from below. I finally shot her down. She was that girl I have told you about who never had seen her body. I suggested that she must bathe once in a while, and then she told me she had been brought up in a nunnery where the nuns taught her that the sight of the body was sin, that she should always cover her bath tub with a linen, so she never saw herself. I said: “Now go home and undress and stand before your long mirror and look at yourself.” And when she came back, she said: “It was not so bad after all, only I think my legs are a bit too hairy!” That is the truth, that is the way people think and feel when they have such symptoms.

Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934–1939. Vol. I (23 May 1934), p. 65.

Zarathustra says to go back to the body, go into the body, and then everything will be right, for there the greatest intelligence is hidden.

Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934–1939, Vol. I (6 February 1935), p. 370.

[J]ust as there is a relationship of mind to body, so there is a relationship of body to earth.

“The Role of the Unconscious” (1918), CW 10, § 19.

For what is the body? The body is merely the visibility of the soul, the psyche; and the soul is the psychological experience of the body.

Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934–1939, Vol. I (30 January 1935), p. 355.

[S]oul and body are not two things. They are one.

Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934–1939, Vol. I (30 January 1935), p. 355.

The body is the past, our earth, the world of heretofore, but out of it rises a new light which is not identical with the body.

Visions: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1930–1934, Vol. I (27 May 1931), p. 374.

[I]nasmuch as the living body contains the secret of life, it is an intelligence. It is also a plurality which is gathered up in one mind, for the body is extended in space, and the here and the there are two things; what is in your toes is not in your fingers, and what is in your fingers is not in your ears or your stomach or your knees or anywhere else in your body. Each part is always something in itself. The different forms and localizations are all represented in your mind as more or less different facts, so there is a plurality. What you think with your head doesn’t necessarily coincide with what you feel in your heart, and what your belly thinks is not what your mind thinks. The extension in space, therefore, creates a pluralistic quality in the mind. That is probably the reason why consciousness is possible.

Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934–1939, Vol. I (6 February 1935), p. 360.

The synchronicity principle possesses properties that may help to clear up the body-soul problem. Above all it is a fact of causeless order, or rather, of meaningful orderedness, that may throw light on psychophysical parallelism. The “absolute knowledge” which is characteristic of synchronistic phenomena, a knowledge not mediated by the sense organs, supports the hypothesis of a self-subsistent meaning, or even expresses its existence. Such a form of existence can only be transcendental, since, as the knowledge of future or spatially distant events shows, it is contained in a psychically relative space and time, that is to say in an irrepresentable space-time continuum.

“Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle” (1952), CW 8, § 948.

You can be anything if you are a spirit, because you have no form, no shape, you are just gas. You can assume any form; you can be this or that; you can transform at will quite arbitrarily into God knows what. “But you should not think like that,” or: “You should believe something, that will save you.” Believe if you can! You see, that is just the trouble. And why can’t you? Because you have a body. If you were a spirit you could be anywhere, but the damnable fact is that you are rooted just here, and you cannot jump out of your skin; you have definite necessities. You cannot get away from the fact of your sex, for instance, or of the color of your eyes, or the health or the sickness of your body, your physical endurance. Those are definite facts which make you an individual, a self that is just yourself and nobody else. If you were a spirit you could exchange your form every minute for another one—but being in the body you are caught; therefore, the body is such an awkward thing: it is a definite nuisance. All people who claim to be spiritual try to get away from the fact of the body; they want to destroy it in order to be something imaginary, but they never will be that, because the body denies them; the body says otherwise. They think they can live without sex or feeding, without the ordinary human conditions; and it is a mistake, a lie, and the body denies their convictions.

Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934–1939, Vol. I (23 May 1934), pp. 63–64.

Asthma is a suffocation phobia, and the more the fear increases, the more actual the suffocation, darkness, and unconsciousness.

Dream Analysis: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1928–1930 (6 March 1929), p. 154.

When you see that a certain spark of life has gone from the eye, the physical functioning of the body somewhere has gone wrong.

Dream Analysis: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1928–1930 (23 January 1929), p. 91.

We should return to the body in order to create spirit again; without body there is no spirit because spirit is a volatile substance of the body. The body is the alembic, the retort, in which materials are cooked, and out of that process develops the spirit, the effervescent thing that rises.

Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934–1939, Vol. I (6 February 1935), p. 368.

I take his cancer to be a spontaneous growth, which originated in the part of the psyche that is not identical with consciousness. It appears as an autonomous function intruding upon consciousness.

Psychology and Religion (1938/1940), CW 11, § 21.

The spirit consists of possibilities—one could say the world of possibilities was the world of the spirit. The spirit can easily be anything, but the earth can only be something definite. So remaining true to the earth would mean maintaining your conscious relationship to the body. Don’t run away and make yourself unconscious of bodily facts, for they keep you in real life and help you not to lose your real way in the world of mere possibilities where you are simply blindfolded. This is of course a somewhat one-sided teaching, and to a person who is nothing but the body, it is all wrong. You must not forget that by far the majority of people are nothing but body. This teaching, therefore, is only valid for those who have lost it, who have been deceived by the spirit.

Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934–1939, (23 May 1934), p. 66.

Those who are able to express the unconscious by means of bodily movements are rather rare. The disadvantage that movements cannot easily be fixed in the mind must be met by making careful drawings of movements afterwards, so that they shall not be lost to the memory. Still rarer, but equally valuable, is automatic writing, direct or with the planchette [a device for writing under supposed spirit guidance]. This, too, yields useful results.

“The Transcendent Function” ([1916]/1958), CW 8, § 171.

There is little difference between Nietzsche’s life and the life of a saint; he forsook his ordinary life, and went into the woods. The woods were called Rapallo, the Engadine, Nice, and so on, but he was alone, a hermit. He lived entirely in his books. He devoted himself to spiritual practices, one could say, and he lost the connection with the world of the flesh. He really became a sort of modern saint; the spiritual side got hold of him more than was good for the solution of his moral problem. For to solve the problem one must give equal value. We cannot say the side of the spirit is twice as good as the other side; we must bring the pairs of opposites together in an altogether different way, where the rights of the body are just as much recognized as the rights of the spirit.

Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934–1939, Vol. I (7 November 1934), p. 235.

[I]t had become clear to me, in a flash of illumination, that for me the only possible goal was psychiatry. Here alone the two currents of my interest could flow together and in a united stream dig their own bed. Here was the empirical field common to biological and spiritual facts, which I had everywhere sought and nowhere found. Here at last was the place where the collision of nature and spirit became a reality.

Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962), pp. 108–9.

5 See section 15, “Alchemical Transformation”