Suicide is certainly not the right answer – the goal of life is self-realization!

In a letter to Carl Gustav Jung, a woman asked whether a suicide attempt at the age of 21 might have destroyed part of her "self."

Dear Ms. N.,

Answering your question is not easy, as much depends on your understanding. Your understanding, in turn, depends on the development and maturity of your personal character. It is not possible to kill a part of yourself without first killing yourself.

When you destroy your conscious personality, the so-called ego personality, you deprive the self of its true goal, namely, self-realization. The goal of life is the realization of the self. When you kill yourself, you destroy the will of the self that guides you through life toward this ultimate goal. A suicide attempt does not impair the self's intention to become reality, but it can inhibit your personal development unless it is explained.

You should be aware that suicide is murder, because after a suicide, a corpse remains, just like any ordinary murder. Only, you yourself were killed. For this reason, common law punished a man who attempted suicide, and this also applies psychologically.

Therefore, suicide is certainly not the right answer. As long as you don't recognize the nature of this very dangerous impulse, you are blocking the path to further development, just as a man who wants to commit a theft without knowing what he intends and without recognizing the ethical implications of such an act cannot develop further unless he considers that he has a criminal inclination.

Such inclinations are very common, only they are not always successful, and there is hardly anyone who does not recognize, in one way or another, that a dark shadow follows him. That is human destiny. If it weren't so, we might one day become perfect, which could also be quite bad.

We shouldn't be naive, and to avoid that, we must descend to a more modest level of self-respect.

Hoping to have answered your question, I remain, yours faithfully. (C.G. Jung)