ABSTRACT

Waiting for the Soul to Speak: Silence and the Healing Process in C. G. Jung

“For both the pastor and the psychologist, the task begins with waiting until the soul entrusted to them finds its voice.” With these words, C. G. Jung, toward the end of his life, described access to the suffering human soul as a common task of pastoral care and psychotherapy. This paper explores the significance of silence and stillness within Jung's understanding of psychological healing and spiritual transformation.

An early example can be found in Jung's treatment of a young schizophrenic patient in 1910. Withdrawn into an inner world and remaining in a catatonic state, she was largely silent for a prolonged period before revealing a resurrection myth set in a lunar world. Looking back, she explained that this inner world had existed only in the form of images and feelings before finding expression in words

In the 1930s, Jung's collaborator Felicia Froboese-Thiele characterized his method through solitude, silence, inwardness, and meditation on images arising from the unconscious. Against this background, the paper examines how Jung's creation of a silent space in which images and feelings could gradually find expression in words developed from such early psychiatric encounters into a central element of his psychology. It further considers his engagement with mystics such as Jakob Böhme and Meister Eckhart, for whom inner stillness was a prerequisite for encountering the divine. The paper argues that, for Jung, inner stillness creates the conditions in which unconscious images and feelings can find expression in words, making possible both psychological healing and spiritual transformation.