Quotes by Edward Whitmont

Eventually, as we become more fully aware of our problems, another critical point is reached, when insights really have occurred and we try to act upon them. We then discover to our dismay that our attempts to solve them by an effort of will avails us nothing, that our good intentions, as the saying goes, merely pave the way to hell. Good intentions all too readily can foster the illusion that we have settled an issue, when actually it is far from settled and seems to have not the slightest intention of ever being settled. This leads to a deadlock in which we see we need to change but cannot, try as we may. We know we need to renounce our egoistic controlling attempts but we cannot even make ourselves do that. We are up against the paradox that discipline and conscious effort are indispensable but do not get us far enough in our really critical areas. We reach the point where we are tempted to give up in despair because after all, what's the use? We begin to feel that analysis is like deliberate, organized torture; the most problematic things are rubbed in again and again and no matter how we exert ourselves there is no way to change them.

This state has its meaning too. As Dante puts it, the entrance to purgatory is at the deepest point of hell. A resolution of this seemingly hopeless impasse eventually occurs by virtue of the awareness that the ego's claim of a capacity to control rests on an illusion. Without the actual experience of this sort of impasse the ego cannot renounce its claim to the central position. It is only when we have come to our wits' end, and this in the face of our most sincere and extreme efforts, only when we realize that we are hopelessly incapable of changing ourselves, can we begin to accept our real existential position in the life drama. When we are able to say. "this is I, this is my being, and nothing can save me from or free me from being this sort of person," then we have come to the point of acceptance that initiates a fundamental transformation of which we are the object, not the subject. Transformation of our personality occurs in us, upon us but not by us. The unconscious changes itself and us in response to our awareness and acceptance of our station, of our cross.

Therapy is, in essence, the effort to effect an adequate relationship between the ego and the unconscious needs, to bring into awareness their relative positions in respect to each other and to discover the requirements for a continuing cooperative partnership. Therapeutic progress depends upon awareness; in fact the attempt to become more conscious is the therapy.

Our ego freedom lies not in the choice of the cards but in discovering or developing the best possible tactics, in terms of the cards we happen to hold, against our formidable antagonist, the Self, our real hidden and basic being, of which our "I" seems but a temporary and passing structure but is nevertheless a structure which is required and impelled to make the most of itself, to play for keeps, indeed for its very life. Playing for keeps is, interestingly enough, a motif found in primitive rites, for instance in Aztec games, in which the team losing the game was sacrificed, or in the rites of the contest and the sacrificial death of the Year Kings.

Ask someone to give a description of the personality type which he finds most despicable, most unbearable and hateful, and most impossible to get along with, and he will produce a description of his own repressed characteristics-a self-description which is utterly unconscious and which therefore always and everywhere tortures him as he receives its effect from the other person. These very qualities are so unacceptable to him precisely because they represent his own repressed side; only that which we cannot accept within ourselves do we find impossible to live with in others. Negative qualities which do not bother us so excessively, which we find relatively easy to forgive-if we have to forgive them at all-are not likely to pertain to our shadow.

Repression will always call forth a compensatory counteractivity of the unconscious which will, through the back door, force upon us the very thing we are trying to repress. On the other hand, conscious discipline-deliberately planning, curbing or directing our acts in awareness of their effects, or renouncing action if that should be required-can be borne and is eminently human.

Until we consciously set out to separate what is typical and what is individual in ourselves, we are constantly mixing up the two in inappropriate ways: trying to solve individual problems in collective terms and to deal with nonpersonal collective impulses as if they were individual reactions.

Repression of sexuality leads to hysterical (hystera means womb in Greek), exaggerated pseudospirituality, typical of Victorianism and Freud's days. But repression of the religious myth leads to the neurosis of our time, to a primitive mythologization of secular values, to a pseudoreligion of material prosperity, monetary greed and sexual thrills. Finally, the repressed energy of the myth contains also the threat of collective no less than individual psychosis, which those who can become aware of the situation have the awesome responsibility to attempt to transform.

When one has learned to live with manifestations of the "not-I" in an attitude of concrete acceptance, bearing one's seemingly inferior personal characteristics as a burden rather than identifying with them and at the same time humbly remaining open to the demands of hitherto unrealized transpersonal powers, a new phase of psychological transformation is initiated. The instinctual drives themselves may change character and consequently the needs for suppressive discipline or sublimation can be lessened. Much of what formerly seemed evil, or at least compulsively disturbing, reveals itself as merely primitive and therefore capable of constructive growth. The instinctual drives thus transformed and matured cease to be sources of moral danger, temptation or sin; instead they become the originators of new creative impulses and possibilities of expression which eventually widen the scope of the personality and with it the whole life.

If we want to know the next step along the path toward what we are "meant to be," we can look for the thing that attracts and frightens at the same time. That which merely attracts or merely repels is also something to be dealt with, but in a slightly more peripheral way.

We may say that one's unrealized potential, one's undeveloped growth needs, may become one's fate. Seemingly, life demands not only adaptation to external reality but, equally, adaptation to inner reality, to what one is "meant to be" in terms of the force patterns of the objective psyche. There appears to be a compelling urge to adapt to what one is meant to be-to one's inner truth-which may have little or nothing to do with one's conscious ideas or purposes.