Carl Jung on the value of a person
C.G. Jung Letters, Vol. 1: 1906-1950
Anonymous
Dear Herr N., 27 October 1930
The wonderful Chinese statuette not only came as an extraordinary surprise but has also given me much pleasure.
As I am a great admirer of Chinese art I can appreciate your gift all the more highly.
May I take this opportunity to express the hope that the latest developments have not shaken anything essential in you.
In the last resort the value of a person is never expressed in his relation to others but consists in itself.
Therefore we should never let our self-confidence or self-esteem depend on the behaviour of another person however much we may be humanly affected by him.
Everything that happens to us, properly understood, leads us back to ourselves; it is as though there were some unconscious guidance whose aim it is to deliver us from all ties and all dependence and make us dependent on our-selves.
This is because dependence on the behaviour of others is a last vestige of childhood which we think we can’t do without.
Yours sincerely,
C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 78
To confront a person with his shadow
To confront a person with his shadow is to show him his own light. Once one has experienced a few times what it is like to stand judgingly between the opposites, one begins to understand what is meant by the self.
Anyone who perceives his shadow and his light simultaneously sees himself from two sides and thus gets in the middle. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 872
Every creative person is a duality
Modern Man in Search of a Soul
“Every creative person is a duality or a synthesis of contradictory aptitudes.
On the one side he is a human being with a personal life, while on the other side he is an impersonal, creative process.
Since as a human being he may be sound or morbid, we must look at his psychic make-up to find the determinants of his personality.
But we can only understand him in his capacity of artist by looking at his creative achievement.
We should make a sad mistake if we tried to explain the mode of life of an English gentleman,a Prussian officer, or a cardinal in terms of personal factors.
The gentleman, the officer and the cleric function as such in an impersonal rMe, and their psychic make-up is qualified by a peculiar objectivity.
We must grant that the artist does not function in an official capacity-the very opposite is nearer the truth.
He nevertheless resembles the types I have named in one respect, for the specifically artistic disposition involves an overweight of collective psychic life as against the personal.
Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument.
The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purposes through him.
As a human being he may have moods and a will and personal aims, but as an artist he is ” man” in a higher sense-he is “collective man “-one who carries and shapes the unconscious, psychic life of mankind.
To perform this difficult office it is sometimes necessary for him to sacrifice happiness and everything that makes life worth living for the ordinary human being. ~Carl Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, Pages 168-169.
The Shadow sometimes appears as a Duality
Letters of C. G. Jung: Volume 2, 1951-1961
To R. J. Zwi Werblowsky
Dear Dr. Werblowsky, 21 May 1953
Best thanks for kindly sending me your two lectures.
I have read them with great interest; the second even twice, as Father White came to Zurich the day before yesterday.
Your critique is most interesting but not exactly easy reading.
When I saw Father White he hadn’t yet read it.
But I hope I shall have an opportunity to discuss certain points with him.
You are absolutely right about the hornet’s nest.
The two dark figures in Kafka are a duplication of the shadow or of the self (the two white balls).
This duality attaches, for instance, to the messengers from the underworld
(Apocalypse of Peter) or the “helpful animals.”
As a rule the shadow appears only in the singular.
If it occasionally appears as a duality this is, so to speak, a “seeing double”: a conscious and an unconscious half, one figure above the horizon, the other below.
So far as I know anything definite about it, the duplication seems to occur when the split-off figure is real in a special sense-real as a ghost.
Duplications also occur in dreams, but less frequently than in fairy tales and legends.
The duplication is the origin of the motif of the hostile brothers.
I read the Ibn Ezra passage in a book I can’t remember the name of for the moment. I hope to locate the quotation sometime.
With best regards,
Yours sincerely,
C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 116-117.
