What does it mean to be integrated? Alan Watts on Carl Jung

Alan Watts describes what it was like to meet Carl Jung in 1958 and in doing so, provides a great description of what “integration” looks like. In the therapy, yoga and psychedelic integration work I do, this is what I hope to support clients in embodying.

“I was enormously impressed with a man who was obviously very great, but at the same time, with whom everyone could be at ease. Jung managed to have wisdom and sanctity in such a way that when other people came into his presence they didn’t feel judged. They felt enhanced encouraged and invited to share in a common life.

And it was a sort of twinkle in Jungs eye. It gave me the impression that he knew himself to be just as much a villain as everybody else. Jung had a hintergedanken in the back of his mind. It showed in a twinkle in his eye. He knew himself, knew the “element of irreducible rascality” in himself, strongly and clearly and lovingly that he would never project the devil in himself upon somebody else, upon the scapegoat.

This made Jung an integrated character, thoroughly with himself.

Having seen and accepted his own nature, he had a kind of unity and absence of conflict within his own character. He was the sort of man who could feel anxious and afraid and guilty without being ashamed of feeling this way.

In other words, he understood that an integrated person wasn’t someone who had eliminated feelings of guilt or anxiety from his life, who is fearless and wooden and a kind of sage of stone. He is a person who feels all these things but has no recrimination against himself for feeling them.”

Transcribed from https://youtu.be/Jr_20uEVOiE