Life, old age and death in Carl Jung's writings

What is it about?

After supporting Freud, who considered him his successor, Carl Gustav Jung broke away from him. Their disagreement focused in particular on sexuality, which Freud considered as the key to the interpretation of all human behaviour. For Jung, libido generally referred to the psychic manifestation of vital energy, of which sexual desire was only one manifestation. Jung wanted to remain open to everything that could lead human beings to seek the meaning of life: spirituality could not be a matter of sexuality alone. Jung also attached considerable importance to the original images deriving from myths, dreams and delusions that reflect an innate, collective unconscious. These ideas contribute to Jung's description of the stages of life

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Why is it important?

After childhood, which is a fight for the existence of the self, comes young age, which extends from puberty to middle life. Human beings must then struggle to transform their primitive nature in order to acquire a social existence and adapt to it. Then, from the age of forty, the afternoon of life begins. Human beings must gradually accept that they need to turn towards themselves, and throughout this stage, which will lead them to old age, they need to seek the meaning of their lives, pursue their personal development, and progress in a process of individuation, which is self-realization, realization of “their Self”. Aging is therefore not a decline but opens up the possibility of fulfilment by discovering oneself, by becoming what one is. Death then becomes the goal of life, and the collective unconscious, which takes its roots in the history of humanity, leads to seeing death as the gateway to eternity and therefore a stage in the unfolding of life. This is of course an act of faith, a belief that escapes the scientific domain. The essential issue is to entrust oneself to these primitive images from the collective unconscious, even if one doubts or refuses to believe in immortality. And so Jung invites us not to confuse belief in God with the idea of God in man.

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