Summary: Carl Jung On Why Some People Annoy Us

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

The Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung and the writer Hermann Hesse have strikingly similar thoughts about why some people annoy us so much. Here are a couple of indicative quotes:

If you hate a person, you hate something about him that is part of yourself. What is not part of us does not bother us.

Hermann Hesse, "Demian"

Anything that annoys us in others can lead to an understanding of ourselves.

Carl Jung

As Hesse and Jung point out, if someone says or does something that seems selfish or rude, and we feel angry or frustrated in response, then there is something in this experience that can tell us more about ourselves.

This does not mean that other people do not behave immorally or that our judgment about such behavior is completely unfounded. The point is that our negative emotional reactions to perceived shortcomings in other people reflect something that is happening within us.

Psychological projection is a well-known self-defense mechanism. It causes our own insecurities, flaws and flaws to project onto others. When we severely judge someone else for being rude, selfish, or stupid, in a sense, we do so in order to avoid confronting these characteristics in ourselves.

In his Investigation of the Phenomenology of the Self, Jung speaks of the "shadow" - the unknown, dark side of personality.

It is dark because it is instinctive, irrational and primitive, composed of impulses such as lust, power, greed, envy, anger and rage. But she is also a hidden source of creativity and intuition. Awareness and integration of the shadow aspect is essential to psychological health, a process Jung called individuation.

The shadow is also dark because it is hidden from the light of consciousness. According to Jung, we suppress these dark aspects of the unconscious, which is why sooner or later we begin to project them onto others. He's writing:

These resistances are usually associated with projections. No matter how obvious it may be to an independent observer that this is a matter of projection, there is little hope that the subject will be aware of it himself. As you know, the matter is not in the consciousness of the subject, but in the unconscious, which makes a projection. Hence, he encounters projections, but does not create them. The result of the projection is to isolate the subject from his environment, since the real attitude towards him is replaced by an illusory one. The projection transforms the world into a copy of the subject's own unknown face.

It is often regrettable to observe how blatantly a person confuses his own life and the lives of others, remaining completely unable to see that all this tragedy is happening in himself and how he continues to feed and support her.

No, it is not the person or his behavior that bothers us, but our reaction to him. But we can use this reaction as a reflection tool to figure out why this anger and irritation occurs.

At some deep inner level, we know that all people are essentially the same. It is not “other”. It is "we" or "ours" expressed in different bodies from different points of view. Priest Edward Bickersteth, in A Treatise on Prayer, describes one episode from the life of the English Christian reformer John Bradford:

The pious martyr Bradford, when he saw the poor prisoner who was being led to execution, exclaimed: "There, if not for the mercy of God, John Bradford would have gone too." He knew that in his heart there were the same sinful principles that led the criminal to this shameful end.

The quote is open to various interpretations, but in light of this discussion, it can be concluded that Bradford was aware of the evil - the shadow aspect - in himself that led someone else to commit a crime and subsequently to execution.

Each of us has a shadow, as does the freedom to make our own decisions. And each of us is capable of doing what will bother him. But it is the emergence of this anxiety that makes us confront the shadow aspect of the personality. At the same time, the negative emotions that we have about the behavior of other people (irritation, anger, rage) can be used to carefully study our reaction, get to know our shadow and, ultimately, with our personality in all its versatility.

Adapted from: "Carl Jung and Hermann Hesse Explain Why Other People Irritate Us" / Sam Woolfe.