Jungian Life Task

 

from The Imperfectionist 

Jung describes being "thunderstruck" on hearing this – and knowing immediately what he had to do. "This was the collision with reality," he writes. "'Why, then, I must get to work!' I thought suddenly. From that moment on, I became a serious child. I crept away, went to my father's study, took out my Latin grammar, and began to cram with intense concentration." He worked on, and eventually the fainting symptoms vanished.

As the therapist Deborah Stewart put it in a recent edition of the (excellent) podcast This Jungian Life, Jung recognised in that moment that buckling down and studying was the "essential life task" that faced him. His character was being tested – and to move forward into life, rather than avoiding it, he needed to get to work.

So how will you know you're on the right track? For a start, a life task will be something you can accomplish "only by effort and with difficulty," as Jung puts it – and specifically, I'd say, with that feeling of "good difficulty" that comes from pushing back against your conditioned preferences for comfort and security. 

On the other hand, you can be certain that a life task is always something that is possible. It will be something you can do. If you only have £100 in the bank, your life task won't require that you have immediate access to a £1,000 computer monitor (though it might involve doing something to raise the cash). If you're the single parent of three small kids, it won't require working 18-hour days for a tech startup; and if you're unable to have children, it won't involve becoming a biological parent. The whole point of a life task is that it is demanded by the reality in which you actually find yourself.