“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.”

What does it mean?

A real meeting changes both people, and only if there is a reaction. No reaction, no transformation. The usual reading, especially in the essay, is about the doctor and the patient: treatment is not something one person does to another from outside the reaction. A competing reading turns the line into a claim that every acquaintance remakes you, which the 'if' refuses. The sentence is in Modern Man in Search of a Soul, in the psychotherapy essay, and the Collected Works reprint the thought at volume 16, paragraph 163. Chemistry is the metaphor. It is not a theory of romance, though people use it as one.

Did Carl Jung really say this?

The library’s label is Paraphrase or translation. The familiar English of that 1933 essay. Collected Works volume 16, paragraph 163, later gives a close sentence about two personalities meeting as chemical substances are mixed. Wording is not identical. This card follows the book people actually meet, and it is a translation from German.

Where it comes from

Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933), the essay on the problems of modern psychotherapy, in the Baynes translation

Approximate date: 1933.

How to use it

A supervision in a Sheffield school that leaves the senior person exactly as before has had no reaction in his sense, however long it ran. If both people shift, including the one with the authority, the metaphor has a chance of fitting. It does not make every shift an improvement.

A mindset reading

The condition is the useful part. Quoting the transformation and forgetting the 'if' makes an ordinary conversation look fated.

Understand the philosophy

The essay is about psychotherapy, not about chemistry as a science and not about destiny. The key clause is if there is any reaction. Volume 16, paragraph 163, is the later home of the thought. The shadow paragraphs explain one thing that can be in the reaction: what each person projects.

Related

• “The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort.”

  Paraphrase or translation

• “To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge.”

  Paraphrase or translation

• “These resistances are usually bound up with projections, which are not recognized as such, and their recognition is a moral achievement beyond the ordinary.”

  Paraphrase or translation

Related bias. Confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, remember, and accept what supports a view you already like, and to skim past what would hurt it. It is not a claim that every belief is stubborn. It is a pattern in how attention is spent.

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