Carl Jung on Hearing Voices

One of the chapters in the book we’re working on, Visions: A Thoughtful Guide to Common Paranormal Phenomena, deals with voices that people hear.

Carl Jung  treated patients who heard voices. One of the most interesting cases, which he talks about in his autobiography, was that of a schizophrenic older woman who heard voices “distributed throughout her entire body, and a voice in the middle of the thorax was ’God’s voice,’” Jung writes.

He told her that was the voice they should rely on, because this particular voice made sensible remarks and enabled him to manage this patient. One time the voice in the thorax, God’s voice, told the woman to allow Jung to test her on the Bible. So for the next seven years, once every two weeks, Jung assigned her a chapter in the Bible to read and then tested her on it. “In this way,” Jung wrote, “her attention was kept alert, so that she did not sink deeper into the disintegrating dream.” After six years, the result of Jung’s technique was that the voices that had once been everywhere throughout her body were now just on the left side. The right side was totally free of them.  He concluded that she was cured, but only halfway.

Through his work with patients like this woman, he realized that paranoid ideas and hallucinations hold a kernel of meaning. “A personality, a life history, a pattern of hopes and desires lie behind the psychosis….At the bottom we discover nothing new and unknown in the mentally ill; rather, we encounter the substratum of our own natures.”

It would be interesting if psychiatrists or psychologists conducted a study of mediums in the spiritualist town of Cassadaga, Florida, where most of the residents hear voices, communicate with the dead, and constantly are honing their skills. In Cassadaga, this is considered normal. Business as usual.

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7 Responses to Carl Jung on Hearing Voices

  1. CJ says:

    Definite synchro that you mention my relationship with Dr. X being “a book”. Just last night as I was laying in bed waiting for sleep to claim me, that very idea actually came into my mind. Actually, this enormous (and increasing) stack of hand-written journal entries is ALREADY a book. I’ve entitled it THE PATH NOT TAKEN, (totally not recalling the famous poem penned decades ago), because I had the opportunity to spend my life with Dr. X, and instead married a man , my husband of 55 years, to resolve a powerful karmic issue. At the time, I didn’t know that was the reason I married him and have stayed with him. When I sent a letter of condolence to Dr. X’s family, I asked if it would be inappropriate for me to request a photo of him. Of course in my letter I didn’t mention that his Dad and I had shared a rare, beautiful relationship (altho totally within acceptable moral limits). A few days later, I received a brief but lovely ‘thank you’ from his son, accompanied by two small photos. My husband asked me who it was, and I reminded him. He hadn’t been hubby’s doc but hubby had known him, and when I identified him in the photo I told hubby “Dr. X has joined my group of Healers on the Other Side who take care of me”, and I asked him if he would purchase a little frame for me to put the photo in. Surprisingly, (hubby is a heavy Scorpio), he brought me a perfect small frame, and Dr. X’s image sits on my bedside table, with no protest from hubby. Strange, huh. Another peculiar aspect of this story is that the sweet woman in the funeral home who told me Dr.X had died, and that his wife had died in 2011, she asked me if I wanted HER obit, too. I did, and upon receiving it discovered that Mrs. X Had died within a few short weeks after I had spoken with her on the phone and she had told me about his Alzheimer’s. How to explain such an off-the-wall event? I DO know, from him, that they are not residing in the same extra-dimensional space…..that he is in a dimension populated by Healers.
    New knowledge for me, because although I’ve always known Healers continue to work in Spirit, I DIDN’T know there is a specific dimension for them if they choose to spend time there. LOVE IT!!!!!!!

  2. CJ says:

    You may remember that the physician who cared for me during my years as a nursing student, and continued after Ted and I married, suddenly communicated with me in 2o11. I’ll call him Dr. X., and he and I had a beautiful relationship. When I got pregnant with our first child I wanted Dr. X to be my OB, but he had left the state of GA. No contacts from him through the decades. None. I had no idea where he might be or even if he was still alive. Then out of nowhere, he began to visit me in my sleeping dreams. I was stunned. As the dreams continued, I decided to attempt to locate him, and found him in a tiny South GA town. I decided to phone him….did….his wife answered…I explained to her who I was, that Dr. X had been my doctor decades ago and I was calling to say hello, to see how he was doing, to thank him for saving my life so very many years ago. Mrs. X informed me that he was afflicted with deep Alzheimer’s and wouldn’t remember me. I expressed my empathy, then ended the call, holding onto the phone , not wanting to believe it. His dream visits continued frequently, and I began to keep a journal that was not part of my long-term dream journal. He gave me information in the dreams that I couldn’t know, and had to verify, and the information was always accurate. It was REALLY him. Then on June 25, 2013, he came in a dream and told me he had finally crossed over. I HAD to confirm that, so used research techniques….ultimately was directed to the local funeral home in their little town to the funeral home there. I told the lovely woman who answered that I’d heard from a mutual friend that a friend had passed, and could she check her archives and see? When I gave her his name, her response was immediate. “Oh, Mrs. C, ” she replied,”I don’t need to check archives. He’s right here in the computer. He passed away just a few days ago, on June 16, 2013″. She offered to send me his obit, and she did. Since then, Dr. X and I have an on-going dialogue that I am recording in hard copy….now more than 40 legal-size pads worth. Sometimes I wonder if I’m crazy, having a relationship with a discarnate entity while I am corporeal, then I think about Jane Roberts/Seth and Ruth Montgomery/Arthur Ford, (by NO means comparing me to their level of expertise) but am comforted. The bottom line is that when Dr X was still incarnate and lost in terminal Alzheimer’s, he was very much alive and together and lucid out of his body and some part of his consciousness connected to me and continues to do so. This assures me that there HAS TO BE some part of consciousness is activated during these neurological diseases. HAS to be!

  3. CJ says:

    I definitely agree about Alz. No one has any means of knowing….including the physicians who specialize in neurological diseases…what actually is happening in the lost minds of ALZ dementia patients as their connection to life as we know it diminishes and they are beyond reach.. I’ve cared for patients in Hospice who are in the deepest terminal coma of ALz, who suddenly have opened their eyes and spoken clearly to “someone” invisible, then they are out and gone. So I never dismiss the possibility of other explanations for these types of phenomena that the medical pros scratch their heads over.

    • Trish and Rob says:

      I saw it in my mother, CJ. In her later years, she saw ghosts, spoke to dead relatives. Once, this happened in the presence of a friend who is psychic, who asked who the man was sitting at the foot of my mom’s bed. It was her youngest brother, Dick, who had “dropped by for a visit.” This happened a number of times. With Alzheimer’s, consciousness is elsewhere. The disease gives people who are afraid of death an opportunity to sample the afterworld before they get there.

  4. CJ says:

    You’ve probably seen a new commercial on TV that addresses “symptoms” of Parkinson’s Disease patients. In this commercial, it is stated that more than 50% of PD patients experience hearing voices and hallucinations….seeing and hearing people that no one else can see or hear. The commercial, of course, is for a medication to treat this “symptom”. WOW. I am extremely glad that I was born with mediumship abilities: clairvoyance, clairaudience, and clairsentience, as well as a degree of telepathy. Otherwise, this commercial would scare the beejeebies out of me.

    However, it raises a significant question in my mind, with a potential explanation/theory. Parkinson’s is a progressive, incurable neurological disease that has five phases. I am currently bridging from late stage three into early stage four, and the challenges increase as the disorder progresses. And the symptoms are many, varying from patient to patient.

    Here’s my potential; hypothesis: As a brain disease, what if Parkinson’s “opens” some type of “portal” within the brain-mind, for lack of a more apt description, that allows the patient to develop mediumship abilities, and are not “symptoms” at all? PD affects different areas of the brain in different patients, thus there may be a particular aspect of gray matter that some patients experience while others do not. Medical science has come up with a medication, of course, that they hope will “treat and prevent” this
    phenomenal “symptom”. I like my theory better, but unfortunately clinicians would never in a million years consider such a possibility. What do YOU think??

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