Below is an excerpt from Jung’s autobiographical book, in which this brilliant psychiatrist and psychologist describes the latest years of his life, well into his 80s. His words touch and move me; I feel in them the lived experience of a long and extraordinary life. I am grateful for the sincerity and deep humanity with which he shares these reflections from the end of his journey.
“…The older I have become, the less I have understood or had insight into myself. I am astonished, disappointed, pleased with myself. I am distressed, depressed, rapturous. I am all these things at once, and cannot add up the sum. I am incapable of determining ultimate worth or worthlessness; I have no judgment about myself and my life. There is nothing I am quite sure of. I have no definite convictions—not about anything, really. I know only that I was born and exist, and it seems to me that I have been guided.
I exist on the foundation of something which I do not know. In spite of all uncertainties, I feel a solidity underlying all existence and a continuity in my mode of being. The world into which we are born is brutal and cruel, and at the same time divine and beautiful. Which element we think outweighs the other, whether meaninglessness or meaning, is a matter of temperament… I cherish the anxious hope that meaning will preponderate and win the battle. When Lao-tzu says: ‘All are clear, I alone am clouded,’ he is expressing what I now feel in advanced old age…
This is old age—a limitation. Yet so much fills me: plants, animals, clouds, day and night, and the eternal in man. The more uncertain I have felt about myself, the more there has grown up in me a feeling of kinship with all things. In fact, it seems to me as if that alienation which so long separated me from the world has become transferred into my own inner world, and has revealed to me an unexpected unfamiliarity with myself.”
— C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 358 (English edition)
