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Part 4 of 4
Since this psychic amnesia is not a conscious, willful act, we have no control over it. We all have experiences with people telling us about things we don't remember. We all have traumatic experiences in our lives that seem very fuzzy when we try to remember them. This is often our own unconscious protecting us from ourselves.
Now, while I do argue and believe firmly that we do often behave in ways that are the results of the unconscious jogging our elbow as part of its censorship work, and I argue and believe that we cannot be held directly responsible for these things, I want to qualify this by pointing out the other part of Jung's teaching. He argued that the key life's work for every person is to devote their lives to exploring the unconscious and getting to know it well so that the boundary between conscious and unconscious blurs and fades. The result of this work would be that the psyche would be well-balanced, we would be in very good condition in the sense of not having very much hidden material lost in the unconscious, and that as a result, their unconscious would be able to take a much more passive role in our lives; we would be much more under our own conscious control.
So at this point, I liken our responsibility to the man who breaks his neck one night trying to go to the bathroom. We don't blame him for breaking his neck, and in fact, we feel a good deal of compassion for him. At the same time, we are pretty angry with him because he didn't keep his house clean enough so that he would walk safely to his bathroom in the dark at night.
So, likewise, if a man picks up a book from the bookstore and leaves, having completely forgotten to pay for it, I have compassion for his embarrassment, for his fear and anxiety and his confusion about what he wants to do about it once he realizes what he's done. And, I have to encourage him to put more regular time into his life dealing with his emotional health and looking at the questions around what his unconscious may have been trying to tell him when this happened.
Mark
Sac CA USA
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Language pair: English; All
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