The Wisdom of Not Knowing: Psychotherapy and Life

Abstract

In the Grail legend, the foolish Parsifal eventually asks the wounded king, “What ails thee?” This question, a combination of not knowing with a curiosity to know, heals the wasteland. “Knowing” forms our sense of consensual reality. “Not knowing” opens the imagination. We need both. This article hosts a discussion about what it takes to attain the wisdom of not knowing, how that type of wisdom is related to the capacity to bear paradox and symbol, and how that capacity might benefit us in psychotherapy and life.

Notes

1 “Things have gone rapidly downhill since the Age of Enlightenment for, once this petty reasoning mind, which cannot endure any paradoxes, is awakened, no sermon on earth can keep it down. A new task then arises: to lift this still undeveloped mind step by step to a higher level and to increase the number of persons who have at least some inkling of the scope of paradoxical truth” (Jung, 1944/1980, para. 19).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Thomas Elsner

Thomas Elsner is a Jungian analyst and co-chief editor of Psychological Perspectives. He trained as a Jungian analyst at the Center for Depth Psychology according to C. G. Jung and Marie-Louise von Franz in Zürich, Switzerland, is a training analyst at the C. G. Jung Study Center of Southern California, and maintains a private practice in Santa Barbara.