“Our souls, where are they?”
If we are to find a path forward beyond our present crises, the one within and the one without, we must know this first.
This—belatedly, as large events have intervened—is the second of two reflections as our new year begins. Part One of this series is here.
19 JANUARY—In November 1913, C.G. Jung plunged into a profound, even existential crisis. He had, the previous year, made a final break with Freud, ending what had once been a rich and collaborative friendship. His personal (as in extra-marital) relations were fraught. His scholarly career was uncertain such that he resigned from the medical faculty at the University of Zürich.
Apart from these private matters, Europe was headed toward a cataclysm of world-historical magnitude. The Great War was nine months away, and Jung had dreams of horrors to be visited upon humanity he would soon interpret as premonitory. A world order that had endured for nearly half a century was collapsing. This was no more an order than our “rules-based order,” but its fall nonetheless had deep social-psychological consequences. The collective consciousness, let’s say, was destabilized.
Internal and external crises all at once—the private and personal and the public and political, the inner world and the outer. Fearing he may succumb to psychosis—a breach in his relationship with reality—Jung turned inward and began an unsparing exploration of his unconscious that he recorded in what would come to seven Black Books, which he then distilled in a single Red Book. “My soul, where are you?” Jung wrote as he began this confrontation with himself. The experience became the wellspring of much of his subsequent work.
I invoke Jung’s well-known crisis of the psyche because our circumstances as the new year begins are not dissimilar to those that weighed so heavily upon him a century and some ago. With the disasters of 2025 barely behind us, the disasters of 2026 beckon. The global order to which we have been accustomed, such as it has been in the post–1945 decades, is crumbling. Our national polities give way under the weight of incessant repression, censorship, abuses of office and of law and of power. The collective consciousness, no surprise, is once again destabilized. I read this as a shared spiritual crisis—however many among us are unaware of suffering it—that is inseparable from the crises we see out our windows.
Resignation, atomization, alienation—most of us from most others and most of us from ourselves: These have long been common features of life in the Western post-democracies. Our purported leaders and the corporate media serving them continue to cultivate these social and psychological traits as a means of pacification. Excessive consumption, entertainment, travel: These are typical of the retreats to which people are encouraged to resort. It comes altogether to a disconnection from the realities of our world—a kind of collective psychosis, indeed.
Ours is the direst of moments, and it is first of all essential to grasp the gravity of this circumstance. To turn away from this, to get lost in consumer nihilism or other sorts of frivolities, will come at a punishing price from here on out: It will mean acquiescing to global chaos and one or another form of suffocating, life-depleting authoritarianism. We will have our Netflix films and our Amazon orders and our flavored coffees, but our lives will be barren of spirit and all thought of possibility.
Our souls, where are they? This is our true question now.
Let us look within, taking a lesson from the great Swiss psychoanalyst, and pose it. If we are to find a humane and coherent path forward beyond our present crises, the one within and the one without, we must. I write now of Americans and those elsewhere in the Western post-democracies: This is my “we.” Who have we been, who are we, who are we now called upon to become? And the follow-on question: What are we called upon to do? And the follow-on to the follow-on: What are the limits of what we will do? Are we capable of changing our ways of life, our expectations? Are we capable—this the pith of it—of making small or great sacrifices if called upon to do so?