The Unlived Life: Carl Jung’s Profound Insight into Parental Influence

Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent. C. G. JUNG

But never, never could the state of your soul be attributed to what your mother or father did to you some thirty years ago! They simply were the necessary occasion for your appearance in the community, their having performed the necessary rites that allowed your soul to enter the world.

The present is haunted by the archetypal dynamics which remind us that any story untold is an unconscious present.

SS: That just brought to mind a conversation I had with Franz Jung, Jung’s son, at one point where he said he often heard his father knocking around the house still. He just accepted it. His presence was still there.

Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent.

Jung, especially, developed a psychotherapy that was oriented toward soul. Unlike Freud, who viewed the unconscious as a boiling cauldron of evil impulses, Jung uncovered our lost creative impulses lying there, as well as the lost gods or mythological images that he called archetypes.