At the time, he was very successful professionally as the president of the International Psychoanalytic Association, a lecturer at the University of Zurich, and a vibrant private practice. He was also the heir apparent to Sigmund Freud, but didn’t always agree with his mentor yet put himself at career risk by disagreeing. On December 12, 1912, he wrote,
“I resolved on the decisive step. I was sitting at my desk once more, thinking over my fears. Then I let myself drop. Suddenly it was as though the ground literally gave way beneath my feet, and I plunged down into the dark depths. I could not fend off a feeling of panic.”
After parting ways with Freud over major theoretical differences, Jung entered a period of profound psychological upheaval. He experienced disturbing dreams and intense inner visions. Many biographers and Jung himself considered this a type of self-induced psychosis or “creative illness” that lasted several years. Rather than suppress or flee from these experiences, Jung documented them in what became known as The Red Book — a stunning, illustrated manuscript that explored his unconscious mind through myth, symbol, active imagination, and introspection.
Ultimately, he saw that the ways in which we lived our youth are simply not up to the task of meeting the realities of our middle and older years which led him to writing:
“Wholly unprepared, we embark upon the second half of life. Or are there perhaps colleges for forty-year-olds which prepare them for their coming life and its demands as the ordinary colleges introduce our young people to a knowledge of the world? No, thoroughly unprepared we take the step into the afternoon of life; worse still we take this step with the false assumption that our truths and ideals will serve us as hitherto. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning; for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.”
And, it was this quote that led me to creating MEA and writing this white paper, The Emergence of Long Life Learning.
-Chip