Jung: Your suffering is the cure and the greatest thing you've ever produced

Your sickness holds your cure.

In the previous chapter, we talked about living our solitude, but today Jung and Nietzsche take it even further.

Especially Jung, who suggests that the healing of our psychological problems, including neuroses, is to be found precisely in those same problems.

That’s why today’s teachings are crucial in the path of healing and transformation for every person, as they propose something revolutionary that Jung repeated throughout many of his works: that the illness is the cure.

Or in his own words: “Neurotic symptoms contain a truth the patient needs to hear” (Jung, CW vol. 16, The Practice of Psychotherapy).

Jung argues that depression, anxiety, panic attacks, addictions and so on are not the real difficulty. The true issue lies beneath them.

Just as fever is a natural mechanism of our immune system to combat infection, neuroses are the channel and attempt of the Self to heal us and bring about inner transformation.

Nietzsche says:

Do you intend to take the path of your tribulation, the path to yourself? Then show me your right and your strength to do so!¹

Jung says something crucial in this regard:

People have a very strong collective consciousness that makes them sick when they try to follow their own path, to be with and work on themselves.
This may well become a real tribulation, an illness, a neurosis.
But if a neurosis is already present, then any doctor who truly understands these matters would be compelled to say:
“If the patient wants to be cured, they must follow the path of their neurosis,” precisely the thing everyone warns against.
People say: “If you have a neurosis, run from it, travel to India or somewhere where neuroses supposedly don’t exist, leave your neurosis behind in Europe, bury it there.”
But I would say: “Follow the path of your neurosis. It is the best thing you’ve ever created, your true worth.”²

Since the word tribulation implies suffering, Nietzsche affirms that our suffering is the path toward ourselves, and he urges us to be strong on that path.

Carl Jung goes even further and says that the neurosis is the best thing we have ever produced, our true value.

That may sound absurd. How could depression, for example, be the best thing we’ve ever produced?

The answer is that neurosis is the Self’s attempt to awaken us and give us the opportunity to find meaning.

Accept your situation as part of yourself

Nietzsche says:

Are you someone capable of escaping a yoke?
Some discarded their last value when they discarded their servitude.³

Carl Jung responds:

So, whatever situation we find ourselves in, we must accept it as a symptom of ourselves.
Our situation is us. If we do not assume it as the expression of ourselves, we simply abandon it out of indulgence, and in doing so we lose the values we once possessed: namely, our servitude, our connection to humanity, our usefulness to others and to ourselves.
As you well know, the tangled mess in which everyone lives constitutes the roots of their existence.
It is the channel through which they fertilize the earth.⁴

Jung and Nietzsche are not referring to blind or passive submission but to what it means to bear a burden, a responsibility, a limitation, a relationship with the world.

In this case, the burden of being ourselves. Being able to live out who we are with our limitations, our problems, and even our neuroses.

Jung had also said that the mistake lies in trying to reach the Self to free ourselves from the yoke of destiny, which would be egotistical, as it attempts to avoid or flee from something essential.

The opposite, he argues, would be correct: to accept our destiny and our entire situation as something that belongs to us.

Such an assumption of responsibility could lead to a profound awakening of consciousness, because in that framework, our environment, relationships and even our attachments or yokes would emerge from within ourselves.

Then we would have the extraordinary opportunity to understand why they’re there, what part of us gives rise to them.

We would see that everything truly begins within, and that the external world is filled with our own interpretations.

We could then see beyond the veil of our projections.

Zarathustra: What do you want to be free for?

Nietzsche says:

Free from what? What does that matter to Zarathustra!
Your eyes must clearly tell me: free for what?
Can you give yourself your own good and evil, and hang your will over yourself like your own law?
Can you be such a judge of yourself and avenger of your own law?
To be alone with the judge and avenger of one’s own law is terrifying.
Thus is a star hurled into the void and into the icy breath of solitude.⁵

Jung comments:

Those who believe they can escape the servitude to which they are called by life and destiny, indulging instead in their ego, are completely mistaken.
They will soon find that they’ve become so unreal they can no longer influence the world.
The world cannot reach them, and they become useless, mere castaways, abandoned on the shores of life.
But if we accept our servitude, if we truly entangle ourselves in life, then we may produce something and earn the right to walk our own path.
But that path can only be walked if we are willing to accept the fact that we are our own law.
Then collective consciousness is thrown overboard, along with all those collective ideas.
The question is: Can we bear it? Can we withstand such an offense to our collective consciousness?⁶

Nietzsche points out that what lies behind the desire for freedom is more important than freedom itself.

That’s why Zarathustra doesn’t celebrate the one who breaks free, but the one who can create meaning with their freedom.

True freedom, for Nietzsche, demands creative responsibility and a total inversion of traditional morality.

It’s not about being free to do whatever you want, but about rising up as the legislator of your own existence, as a new origin of meaning.

It is the affirmation of the will to power: the capacity to impose on yourself a destiny created from within.

Jung warns us that we cannot escape who we are and where we are.

He is not against freedom, only against the false freedom of the inflated ego, which simply wants to avoid what it is.

What I understand is that only through conscious obedience to our deepest calling, only through a genuine bond with life and destiny, can true freedom emerge.

We must be strong in that task, because creating our own law means betraying collective values, losing our sense of belonging, and being misunderstood.

True freedom requires enormous inner strength, even when it leads us toward what is most authentic.

---

Remember: I’ve committed myself to deeply studying all of Jung’s work and also to freely sharing what I learn, so my content will always be free. But if you’d like to support my project, I’d gladly accept a coffee:

---

I also recommend that you read my following publications:

• A Message to the Lonely from Nietzsche and Jung

• How to Destroy the Herd Mind for a New Society (Jung and Nietzsche)

• Nietzsche and Jung: How to Fill Your Life with Meaning and Value

---

Sources:

1, 3, 5 : Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part One, Chapter 7, “On the Way of the Creator”

2, 4, 6: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934–1939, November 1935, Session VI. Carl Jung's commentary on Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra