“attain to the numinous experience”
A neurosis is a functional disorder of the mind (emotions) involving anxiety, phobia or other abnormal behavioral symptoms. “Pierre Teilhard de Chardin realized that awareness or self-consciousness was necessary for a healthy sense of what it means to be human. This affirms Freud’s suspicion that repression and the blocking of consciousness is the source of neurosis.”[i]
Why has psychology been so impotent in treating widespread neurosis? Rollo May says: “If we assume that the fundamental neurotic process … is the loss of the sense of being … then we are playing directly into the patient’s neurosis … psychotherapy becomes an expression of the fragmentation of the period [culture] rather than an enterprise for overcoming it.”[ii]
Insight # 53 comes to us from Eugene Pascal who in his book Jung to Live By (1992) shows how Jung’s theories can be applied to everyday life and how to achieve self-transformation.
“You are quite right: the main interest of my work is not concerned with the treatment of neurosis, but rather with the approach to the numinous [spiritual] which is the real therapy, and inasmuch as you attain to the numinous experience, you are released from the curse of pathology. Even the disease takes on a numinous character.”[iii]
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Additional Reading:
- Neuroses, The ABC’s of Simple Reality, Vol 2
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[i] Henry, Roy Charles. “Neurosis and the Courage to Respond.” Why Am I Here? October 2014, p. 271.
[ii] May, Rollo. The Discovery of Being. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1983, pp. 164-165.
[iii] Pascal, Eugene. Jung to Live By. New York: Warner Books, Inc., 1992, p. 69.
