Symptom as Compensation

Jung’s structural account of the symptom is that it compensates a one-sided conscious standpoint. “If the conscious attitude were in all its parts adapted to the personality, it would never give rise to neurotic symptoms; these only occur when we cannot see the other side of our nature and the urgency of its problems” (Jung, CW 7 §436). The symptom is therefore “an indirect expression of unrecognized desires which, when conscious, come into violent conflict with our moral convictions.”

The mechanism is precise. Material withdrawn from conscious scrutiny — the shadow — cannot be corrected, integrated, or even disregarded by the patient, “for in reality he does not ‘possess’ the unconscious impulses at all. Thrust out from the hierarchy of the conscious psyche, they have become autonomous complexes” (CW 7 §436). The symptom is what those autonomous complexes look like once they have begun to act on consciousness from outside the ego’s authority. The patient who insists “the sexual question is all nonsense” finds that “other things of unknown origin cumber their path — hysterical moods, underhand tricks…a nervous catarrh of the stomach, pains in various places, unreasonable irritability, and a whole host of nervous symptoms.”

The therapeutic implication is not extirpation but restoration of the missing side. The symptom is information: it names which part of the personality the conscious standpoint has refused. To cure the symptom without restoring the missing side is to drive the autonomous-psychic-complex further from view; the worm “always rots the core.”

Relationships

Primary sources

jung-two-essays-analytical (Jung 1953, §436)