Carl Gustav Jung did not define fulfillment as happiness, pleasure, or success. In his psychology, a fulfilled life was one that could be lived through -with meaning, balance, and inner stability – despite suffering, uncertainty, and change.
This becomes especially clear in a 1939 interview published in The Listener (London), where Jung was asked what he considered the basic factors that make for happiness in the human mind. His answer was precise and restrained:
“Good physical and mental health.
Good personal and intimate relationships, such as marriage, the family, and friendships.
The faculty for perceiving beauty in nature and art.
Reasonable standards of living and satisfactory work.
And a philosophic or religious point of view capable of coping successfully with the vicissitudes of life.”
— C. G. Jung, The Listener, 1939
This list reveals what Jung truly believed fulfillment depends on. He was not describing an ideal lifestyle or a formula for success. He was naming the psychological foundations that allow a person to remain whole over the course of a lifetime.
Notably absent from Jung’s answer is wealth. Money can support some of these conditions, but Jung did not see it as a determining factor. In fact, he repeatedly warned that outer success without inner meaning often leads to emptiness rather than fulfillment.
Elsewhere, Jung expressed this idea even more bluntly:
“The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.”
For Jung, a fulfilled life was not one free of suffering, but one equipped to endure it. Health sustains vitality, relationships anchor the psyche, beauty nourishes the soul, work provides structure, and a philosophical or religious outlook gives life coherence when circumstances become difficult.
In that sense, Jung’s answer from 1939 is less a definition of happiness than a diagnosis of what human beings require to remain inwardly balanced. Fulfillment, in his view, is not something to be chased or accumulated – it emerges when outer life and inner meaning are brought into lasting alignment.