Carl Jung on Old Age and Death
The great psychoanalyst says seeing death as the end is not psychologically beneficial
Psychoanalyst Carl Jung believed there were three important states to life: childhood, youth which extends up until thirty five to forty, then the second half of life, middle to old age. For Jung this latter half was of great importance:
A human being would certainly not grow to be seventy or eighty years old if this longevity had no meaning for the species to which he belongs. The afternoon of human life must also have a significance of its own and cannot merely be a pitiful appendage to life’s morning.
Jung saw this view as something that was diminished in his, and by extension our time. As he saw it the rules of life that govern the first half are not the same as the latter, and that many of the neuroses of older aged are ruled by an inability to engage in the necessary adaption to moving forward through life, a condition ruled by looking back and chasing the past.
This state is conditioned not just by an individual failing, but a diminishing of the cultural valuing of older age:
In primitive tribes we observe that the old people are almost always the guardians of the mysteries and the laws, and it is in these that the cultural heritage of the tribe is expressed. How does the matter stand with us? Where is the wisdom of our old people — where are their precious secrets and visions? For the most part the old try to compete with the young.
As if we need evidence that this condemnation is not only still the case but ever more so, we might look around at our youth obsessed culture, or the older figures of it such as Madonna distorting her face with surgery to attempt to put off the great curse of aging and remain with the young. We see the increase in obsession with “longevity” and figures such as Bryan Johnson claiming to be overcoming aging with diet and exercise. Our society increasingly sees age as an unequivocal bad, and once we reach middle age our cultural currency, rather than blossoming into wisdom and understanding, diminishes into shallow attempts to “compete with the young”.
Part of this though for Jung is connected to how we view death. Jung points out that from a psychological perspective it is necessary to see death as a destination to be attained instead of a pitiful avoidance. While this may not necessarily involve some belief in the afterlife, Jung hints that such a belief is not escapism but a healthy view of life’s end as meaningful, something to strive to as the young strive to the life ahead:
It is particularly fatal for such people to look backward. For them a prospect and a goal in the future are indispensable. This is why all great religions hold a promise of a life beyond; it makes it possible for mortal man to live the second half of life with as much perseverance and aim as the first. For the man of today the enlargement of and its culmination are plausible goals; but the idea of life after death seems to him questionable or beyond belief.
Jung goes on to say that proof of such belief is beyond the role of empirical science, but his own empirical observation suggests such a belief is psychologically better, again not as naive optimism but as the zenith of a meaningful life:
I have observed that a directed life is in general better, richer and healthier than an aimless one, and it is better to go forwards with the stream of time than backwards against it. To the psychotherapist an old man who cannot bid farewell to life is as feeble and sickly as a young man who is unable to embrace it…I therefore consider the religious teaching of a life hereafter consonant with the standpoint of psychic hygiene…from the standpoint of psychotherapy it would therefore be desirable to think of death as only a transition.
What Jung personally believed beyond this is not entirely clear, in an interview with the BBC he said he believed the psyche to not be bounded by time, “you can have dreams or visions of the future, you can see around corners, only ignorants deny these facts, it is quite evident that they do exist and have existed always, now these facts show that the psyche in part is not dependant on these confinements, and then what?”
Nonetheless Jung was only observing in his professional work that life after death makes sense as a necessary psychological reality akin to the nutritional needs of the body:
the far larger part of mankind does not know why the body needs salt, everyone demands it nonetheless because of an instinctive need. It is the same with the things of the psyche.
For Jung the reason we should take this seriously rests on the essense of his work, the symbolic bedrock of the psyche:
Do we ever understand what we think? We only understand that thinking which is a mere equation, and from which nothing comes out but what we have put in. That is the working of the intellect. But beyond that there is a thinking in primordial images — in symbols which are older than historical man; which have been ingrained in him from earliest times, and, eternally living, outlasting all generations, still make up the groundwork of the human psyche. It is only possible to live the fullest life when we are in harmony with these symbols; wisdom is a return to them. It is neither a question of belief nor of knowledge, but of the agreement of our thinking with the primordial images of the unconscious. They are the source of all our conscious thoughts, and one of these primordial thoughts us the idea of life after death.
Perhaps all this is summed up by a quote from Cicero:
“Nor do I regret that I have lived, since I have so lived that I think I was not born in vain, and I quit life as if it were an inn, not a home…the nearer I approach death the more I feel like one who is in sight of land at last and is about to anchor in one’s home port after a long voyage.”
Of course, all of this remains entirely in opposition to the culture we have developed in which death is ultimately, as much as we might caveat it with platitudes, a meaningless extinction. If nothing else Jung’s observation remains true that such a view is hardly commensurate with living the whole course of your life well.
"If nothing else Jung’s observation remains true that such a view is hardly commensurate with living the whole course of your life well."
Our culture is shaped by the rejection if the idea that there is no way for us to know that one life is better than another.