Jung and the Ancestors: Beyond Biography, Mending the Ancestral Web

must be able to talk to the dead, must be able to reconcile them. For the dead are the makers of illnesses, causing all the trouble to the tribe . . . [the medicine man] is supposed to be able to . . . make a compromise with them, to lay them or to integrate them properly. He has to collect these spirits and make them into a whole, integrate them;

What remains unlived, unresolved, unredeemed and unanswered will be passed on to future generations.

Jung concludes that “inner peace and contentment” depends on whether or not one creates harmony between the “historical family”

A human life is nothing in itself; it is part of a family tree. We are continuously living the ancestral life, reaching back for centuries, we are satisfying the appetites of unknown ancestors, nursing instincts which we think are our own, but which are quite incompatible with our character; we are not living our own lives, we are paying the debts

The souls of the dead “know” only what they knew at the moment of death, and nothing beyond that. Hence their endeavor to penetrate into life in order to share in the knowledge of men. I frequently have a feeling that they are standing directly behind us, waiting to hear what answer we will give to them, and what answer to destiny. It seems to me a

I feel very strongly that I am under the influence of things or questions which were left incomplete and unanswered by my parents and grandparents and more distant ancestors.

From that time on, the dead have become ever more distinct for me as the voices of the Unanswered, Unresolved, and Unredeemed; for since the questions and demands which my destiny required me to answer did not come to me from the outside, they must have come from the inner world. These conversations with the dead formed a kind of prelude to what I

Jung concludes, “are uninformed too, and need man, or contact with consciousness, in order to attain knowledge.”

while the origins of many disturbances can be found in patterns of relationship with one’s parents (who are, after all, ancestors too), one often needs to go beyond the biographical factors to perinatal and prenatal conditions, to multigenerational family patterns, and to ethnic, cultural, racial or national influences.