Jung and the Ancestors: Beyond Biography, Mending the Ancestral Web

while the origins of many disturbances can be found in patterns of relationship with one’s parents (who are, after all, ancestors too), one often needs to go beyond the biographical factors to perinatal and prenatal conditions, to multigenerational family patterns, and to ethnic, cultural, racial or national influences.

The less we understand of what our fathers and forefathers sought, the less we understand ourselves, and thus we help with all our might to rob the individual of his roots and his guiding instincts, so that he becomes a particle in the mass, ruled only by what Nietzsche called the spirit of gravity.53

Jung concludes that “inner peace and contentment” depends on whether or not one creates harmony between the “historical family”

The souls of the dead “know” only what they knew at the moment of death, and nothing beyond that. Hence their endeavor to penetrate into life in order to share in the knowledge of men. I frequently have a feeling that they are standing directly behind us, waiting to hear what answer we will give to them, and what answer to destiny. It seems to me a

Fate is more like an intention that is woven into the fabric of our being. Michael

The unconscious is a universal aspect of the psyche shared by all of us. It connects us with the origins of our being and intimately binds us together in our families, nations, and with all of creation.

It is difficult to determine whether these questions are more of a personal or more general (collective) nature. It seems to me that the latter is the case. A collective problem, if not recognized as such, always appears as a personal problem, and in individual cases may give the impression that something is out of order in the realm of the persona

The psychogenesis of the spirits of the dead seems to me to be more or less as follows. When a person dies, the feelings and emotions that bound his relatives to him lose their application to reality and sink into the unconscious, where they activate a collective content that has a deleterious effect on consciousness.

From that time on, the dead have become ever more distinct for me as the voices of the Unanswered, Unresolved, and Unredeemed; for since the questions and demands which my destiny required me to answer did not come to me from the outside, they must have come from the inner world. These conversations with the dead formed a kind of prelude to what I