Quotation
Last reviewed:
“What is suppressed comes up again in another place in altered form, but this time loaded with a resentment that makes the otherwise harmless natural impulse our enemy.”
Carl Jung · Thinkers beyond philosophy · Modern · 1951; this English in the Collected Works
What does it mean?
Suppression, he says, does not rewrite an impulse. The will can hold it down, and it returns elsewhere, altered, and now resentful, so that a harmless impulse has become an enemy. The usual reading is a warning about what repression costs, not a promise that attention will dissolve the impulse. A competing reading, the pop-psychology one, shortens the paragraph into 'what you resist persists', as if resistance itself fed the thing. He is talking about suppression that does not alter nature, and about the resentment that then loads the return. The sentence is Aion, paragraph 51. It is technical. The slogan is not a fair compression.
Did Carl Jung really say this?
The library’s label is Paraphrase or translation. Hull's English of paragraph 51, on impulses the will can suppress but not change. This is the nearest real sentence to the later slogan 'what you resist persists', which is not his and is filed apart.
Where it comes from
Collected Works, volume 9 part ii, Aion, paragraph 51, R. F. C. Hull's translation
Approximate date: 1951; this English in the Collected Works.
How to use it
A habit you only ban, in a Glasgow flat, with no account of what the impulse was for, often shows up as irritation at someone else who does the thing openly. That pattern is close to the paragraph. The slogan on a mug is not the citation.
A mindset reading
The enemy, in his clause, is the impulse after it has been loaded with resentment, not the fact that you tried to govern yourself. Do not use the sentence as an argument against every restraint.
Understand the philosophy
Paragraph 51 is in the same volume as the shadow. The key contrast is suppress versus alter. Paragraph 14 is the moral effort of seeing the shadow. The misattributed card, 'what you resist persists', is the sentence people put in place of this one. Keep them apart.
- self
- mind
- change
FAQ
What does it mean?
Suppression, he says, does not rewrite an impulse. The will can hold it down, and it returns elsewhere, altered, and now resentful, so that a harmless impulse has become an enemy. The usual reading is a warning about what repression costs, not a promise that attention will dissolve the impulse. A competing reading, the pop-psychology one, shortens the paragraph into 'what you resist persists', as if resistance itself fed the thing. He is talking about suppression that does not alter nature, and about the resentment that then loads the return. The sentence is Aion, paragraph 51. It is technical. The slogan is not a fair compression.
Did Carl Jung really say this?
Paraphrase or translation. Hull's English of paragraph 51, on impulses the will can suppress but not change. This is the nearest real sentence to the later slogan 'what you resist persists', which is not his and is filed apart.
Which work is it in?
Collected Works, volume 9 part ii, Aion, paragraph 51, R. F. C. Hull's translation Approximate date: 1951; this English in the Collected Works.