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PASTORAL PSYCHOLOGY
human guilt can produce. In this experience of guilt the main
problem is not the opposition of the individual to social
demands and physical necessity. It is a question of being ; of eternal
life.
This difference appears very plainly if a comparison is made
between the religious person’s clear consciousness in guilt that
everything is at stake, and the passive, tearful sorrow at one’s
own shortcomings which is met in the person whose inmost
being has never been shaken by a real experience of guilt.
In this connection we may note what could be termed an
‘aesthetic’ feeling of guilt, a sentimental indulgence in which
an individual tries to ‘make a poem of his misery’. It never
involves the depths of the self. It is a mood, fleeting and
superficial, that brings ‘crocodile tears’ to the eyes. Its source is
selfpity, an inverted form of pride.
An Experience of Real Guilt
In a commemoration volume published on the occasion of
C. G. Jung’s! sixtieth birthday there appeared a notable essay by
Hans Trib, entitled, ‘Individuation, Guilt and Decision’. It is
remarkable, because on reading it one gains the impression that
a report of a meeting of religious testimony has been included
inadvertently in an account of the proceedings of a scientific
congress. Although the form of the essay is academic, richly
embellished with technical terms, its material is a description of
a profoundly moving personal experience which had the result,
among others, of producing a schism between Hans Trüb and
Jung.
Trib describes something that happened to him. He calls it
‘the appearance of an absolute phenomenon of guilt’, as a
consequence of which he came into a wholly new spiritual
relation to himself. In connection with it he goes so far as to use
the religious term ‘conversion’. Hitherto, as he explained, he
had believed in the world of the spirit as a fascinating and
attractive condition which, for him, meant the highest and
purest form of experience. He suspected, however, that
something beyond this, a sublime self, existed. There was, he thought,
a higher, lighter world and a lower, dark world—the former to
1 Die Kulturelle Bedeutung der komplexen Psychologie, Berlin, 1935.
150
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