A Jungian Approach to Individual Neuropathological Specimens

I was reading The Undiscovered Self (1958) by Carl Jung today, and noted that Jung's description of individual patients could also be applied to individual tumors:

"The statistical method shows the facts in the light of the ideal average but does not give us a picture of their empirical reality.... The distinctive thing about real facts, however, is their individuality.... There is and can be no self-knowledge based on theoretical assumptions, for the object of this knowledge is an individual - a relative exception and an irregular phenomenon. Hence, it is not the universal and the regular that characterize the individual, but rather the unique. He is not to be understood as a recurrent unit but as something unique and singular which in the last analysis can be neither known nor compared with anything else."

Consider this the next time you sign out a "bread and butter" glioblastoma!