"The Discovery of the Unconscious" by Ellenberger

The Henri Ellenberger book, “The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry,” has been very useful to me in my attempt as an adult to understand the oldest, deepest, largest, strongest part of our minds. I can not remember where I heard about the book but I know it wasn't until my seventy-fifth year on this planet.

Ellenberger's history of hypnosis is deeper and more comprehensive than anything else I've read, relating it's central place and context in the search for understanding the subconscious. I mention hypnosis particularly because my own study and practice of it created the path through dreams and fairy tales that enabled me to slay dragons and discover their hoarded gold in their caves and bring the inhabitants of the castle and town back to life, and the leaves to come back out on the trees.

Here (p. 207) he quotes Carl Gustave Carus (1789-1869):

The key to the knowledge of the nature of the soul's conscious life lies in the realm of the unconscious. This explains the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of getting a real comprehension of the soul's secret. If it were an absolute impossibility to find the unconscious in the conscious, then Man should despair of ever getting knowledge of his soul, that is a knowledge of himself. But if this impossibility is only apparent, then the first task of a science of the soul is to state how the spirit of Man is able to descend into those depths.

One of our most important struggles in life is surely to “know thyself,” to achieve a realistic, universalistic selfhood that enables us to coordinate our actions with others and to construct courses of action that work for everyone. And yet, I invariably reflect upon reading something like Ellenberger's history of how rare it is that we even hear once about such a book. All those years of school, university, graduate school, continuing education, self-education but finding the really good stuff like this is pretty much a matter of sheer luck. I suppose, yes, that a whole lot of intense labor, searching, criticism, preparation, failure and experience is absolutely necessary to get anything out of Ellenberger as well as his protagonists like Charcot, Janet, Freud, Jung and the others. It's probably a miracle that as many of us do get the minuscule bit we do get, given that most of us have all we can do just to survive, never mind to raise children, to work, and to get some sleep.

It feels like an infinite luxury to have the circumstances to be able to work on a book like this. But it also feels like a complete sacrifice of one's life! It's like that corn of wheat that must fall into the ground and die.