Original artwork, not a still
Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.
Behind the line
What it means
Our interpretation.
It is a psychiatrist's joke at the expense of psychiatry: if everyone is a little mad, there is nobody left to cure. The wisecrack is popular because it sounds like the hard-won verdict of a famous therapist, and because it flatters readers who feel they do not fit in. The safe reading is a remembered quip passed along by a colleague, not a Jung doctrine.
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In context
May contain spoilersShow the scene
No book or paper of Jung's contains it. Quote Investigator traces the best evidence to the English biographer Vincent Brome, whose 1978 life of Jung says Jung remarked to one of his assistants, "Show me a sane person and I'll cure him for you". Brome got it from an interview he conducted in 1963 with Jolande Jacobi, who worked with Jung for decades, two years after Jung's death in 1961. Earlier versions in the 1950s credit "one of Freud's pupils" with a similar line about a normal man, and a 1975 journal item gave it to Freud, so the attribution to Jung rests on that single recollection.
Sources (1)
- Quote Investigator: Show Me a Sane Man and I Will Cure HimWhole articleReference checked
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