Carl Jung Depth Psychology

Jung claimed that the ancients lacked a capacity for directed thinking, which was a modern acquisition. ~Sonu Shamdasani, Red Book, Page 197

The fact that painted images of an accomplished and hybrid kind illuminate the medieval format of a folio in scribal hand compounds any reflections on the linguistic task The novel language required a renewed ancient script.  ~Sonu Shamdasani, The Red Book, Page 222

Everything to come was already in images: to find their soul, the ancients went into the desert. This is an image. The ancients lived their symbols, since the world had not yet become real for them.  ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 236

Notice what the ancients said in images: the word is a creative act. The ancients said: in the beginning was the Word. Consider this and think upon it.  ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 236

“I think of Christianity in the desert. Physically, those ancients went into the desert. Did they also enter into the desert of their own self? Or was their self not as barren and desolate as mine? There they wrestled with the devil. I wrestle with waiting. It seems to me not less since it is truly a hot hell.” ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 236, fn 74

This, too, is an image of the ancients, that they lived in things symbolically: they renounced wealth in order to have a share of the voluntary poverty of their souls. Therefore I had to grant my soul my most extreme poverty and need. And the scorn of my cleverness rose up against this. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 236 fn 80

To the extent that the Christianity of this time lacks madness, it lacks divine life. Take note of what the ancients taught us in images: madness is divine. But because the ancients lived this image concretely in events, it became a deception for us, since we became masters of the reality of the world. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 238

His [Jung] retreat from the Burgholzli coincided with a shift in his research interests to the study of mythology, folklore, and religion, and he assembled a vast private library of scholarly works. ~The Black Books, Vol. I, Page 13

He [Jung] found the mythological work exciting and intoxicating. “It seemed to me I was living in an insane asylum of my own making,” he recalled in 1925. “I went about with all these fantastic figures: centaurs, nymphs, satyrs, gods and goddesses, as though they were patients and I was analyzing them. I read a Greek or a Negro myth as if a lunatic were telling me his anamnesis.” ~The Black Books, Vol. I, Page 13

… Jung noted that the work [CW 5] was written in 1911, his thirty-sixth year: “The time is a critical one, for it marks the beginning of the second half of life, when a metanoia, a mental transformation, not infrequently occurs.” ~The Black Books, Vol. I, Page 15

He [Jung] was conscious of the loss of his collaboration with Freud and was indebted to his wife [Emma] for her support. ~The Black Books, Vol. I, Page 15

One without a myth “is like one uprooted, having no true link either with the past, or with the  ancestral life which continues within him, or yet with contemporary human society.” ~Carl Jung, The Black Books, Vol. I, Page 15

The study of myth had revealed to Jung his mythlessness. He then undertook to get to know his myth, his “personal equation.” ~The Black Books, Vol. I, Page 15

Jung used to say in later years that his tormenting doubts as to his own sanity should have been allayed by the amount of success he was having at the same time in the outer world especially in America” ~Barbara Hannah, The Black Books, Vol. I, Page 19, fn 26

Permitting fantasy in myself had the same effect as would be produced on a man if he came into his workshop and found all the tools flying about doing things independently of his will. ~Carl Jung, The Black Books, Vol. I, Page 20

On September 20, 1910, at the age of twenty-three, Toni Wolff was brought by her mother to see Jung According to her sister Erna, he had successfully treated the son of a friend of her mother’s, who consequently recommended Jung. ~The Black Books, Vol. I, Page 27-28

In November 1912, Jung returned from his New York lectures. In a diary entry of December 29, 1924, Toni Wolff noted that twelve years before, on Jung’s return from America, she went to him and “spoke of relationship.” ~The Black Books, Vol. I, Page 29

In the November 15, 1913, entry in Book 2, following his account of the dream around December 1912 of the dove that transformed itself into a small girl and then back into the dove, Jung noted, “My decision was made. I had to give all my faith and trust to this woman [Toni].” ~The Black Books, Vol. I, Page 29

In March 1913 he went to America again for five weeks. Decades later, Toni Wolff noted in her diary, “The feeling is somehow similar to 1913, when C[arl] went to America and we separated-and yet we couldn’t do it afterward.” This suggests a separation may have taken place at this time. ~The Black Books, Vol. I, Page 29-30