Life Wisdom and Death Wisdom
Which do you need — a life coach or a philosopher?
Carl Jung believed that young people — those under the age of around forty — have fundamentally different psychological challenges than those in middle and old age. The first half of life is, in Jung’s view, about overcoming the difficulties one faces in the outer world of work and relationships. It is about making one’s way in the world, developing confidence and competence, learning how to have serious, committed partnerships — in other words, about developing what psychologists call “ego strength”. Only after this solid foundation of worldly self-confidence has been established did he believe that it was appropriate to turn inward and engage in the deep self reflection of psychoanalysis, which is why he rarely accepted younger people as trainees.
The Jungian trajectory of self-development thus resembles respiration: outward directed expansion into the world followed by inward focussed contraction. This same dynamic characterises the “Hero’s Journey” made famous by mythologist Joseph Campbell, the archetypal story of the ego whose path mirrors that of the sun, rising towards its highest point of noonday glory before falling into the darkness of its nighttime journey into death and the underworld.
There are, I am proposing, two modes of wisdom corresponding to these two different phases of…
