After the publication of his book Symbols of Transformation (originally Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido), through which he revealed his differences with Freud, Jung was publicly rejected and criticized. About this period of his life he writes:
“After the break with Freud, all my friends and acquaintances withdrew. My book was declared rubbish. I was proclaimed a mystic, and that was the end of it… But I had foreseen my loneliness and had no illusions about the reactions of my so-called friends. This was something I had expected. I knew that I had staked everything and that I would have to answer for my convictions. I realized that the chapter ‘The Sacrifice’ meant my own sacrifice. This decision helped me to begin writing again, even though I knew that no one would understand my ideas.”
C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 162
(Note: the quoted passage is translated from Bulgarian.)
The experiences of loneliness, rejection, and being misunderstood, as well as the compulsion to sacrifice something important to us in order to follow the call of the soul, are an inevitable part of the processes of individuation. If a person is not ready to pay this price, psychic illness/neurosis follows. Jung, however, consciously chose to make the sacrifice, and this helped him withstand the trials. And what he sacrificed was later returned many times over.
In an outer sense, following his creative impulse led him to the creation of analytical psychology, which enriched our understanding of the human psyche in an exceptionally significant way. So many concepts that have entered common usage are owed to him: “archetypes” and the “collective unconscious,” “individuation” and “synchronicity,” “introversion” and “extraversion,” the psychic “shadow” and the “complex,” “anima” and “animus,” the four “psychic functions” (thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition), which underlie the well-known personality test MBTI (16 Personalities).
In an inner sense, this is the realization of his true Self, the walking of his personal process of individuation, and the formation of his “philosopher’s stone”—a fragment of immortality.
