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‘Where, in your opinion, do the deeper causes of the spiritual, moral, and social crisis of our age lie?’
‘In order to answer that question I will have to reach back into the past a little’, replied Professor Jung. ‘Before the First World War we all lived in a comparatively quiet, satisfied, one could perhaps even say happy time; then a tendency became noticeable and grew ever more powerful, which tore people out of the orderly world to which they were accustomed and which had stood the test of time, forcing them to reject the traditional healthy norms and rules of the bourgeois moral order. This tendency was a desperate cry for the unrestricted expression of instinct, for free love, and an irrepressible desire for the expression of an allegedly repressed will to power. Sigmund Freud became the spokesman, the mouthpiece of the upsurge of sexuality in that he reduced all the nervous disorders of mankind to the repression of the instinctual world. Alfred Adler emphasized the repressed will to power’.
‘There can be no doubt, however, that an instinctual world which no longer operates along ordered and regulated lines must inevitably lead to chaos. Even in primitive peoples the spiritual order of the father is opposed to the chaotic primal world of the mother, and there are specific regulations and rites according to which the instincts may be lived out. By and large, before the First World War we still possessed and adhered to standards of decency or, let us say, a ‘moral’ order. Our entire upbringing was based on this ethical and social codex, and it was good that it was. We had a belief in the Church and in Christianity, and our parents were religious, pious and upright and felt deeply obligated to the moral and social rules handed down to them. But as soon as we shattered this ethical order by the unrestrained and dissolute living out of