Apart from a few poems, the only thing of Goethe’s that is alive for me is Faust. For me this was always a study-for relaxation I prefer English novels. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 88-89.
I regard my work on alchemy as a sign of my inner relationship to Goethe. ~Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections, Page 206
The problem of my destiny goes back a hundred and fifty years. Indeed it appeared as early as the twelfth century, as I have now discovered. Formerly I believed it only went back to Goethe’s Faust. (Jung now told the dream of his ancestors in which the last was only able to move his little finger.) The problem that appeared as a question in the twelfth century became my extremely personal destiny. Already Goethe had found an answer a hundred and fifty years ago. My father was so tormented by it that he died at the age of fifty-four. ~ Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 67.
My mother drew my attention to Faust when I was about 15 years old. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 88.
Faust is out of this world and therefore it transports you; it is as much the future as the past and therefore the most living present. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 88.
You can find a detailed exposition of the transcendent function in Goethe’s Faust. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 268
The transcendent function is not something one does oneself; it comes rather from experiencing the conflict of opposites. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 269
Everything else of Goethe’s pales beside Faust, although something immortal glitters in the poems too. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 88-89.
The tragic counter play between inside and outside (depicted in Job and Faust as the wager with God) represents, at bottom, the energetics of the life process, the polar tension that is necessary for self-regulation. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 311
It seems to me that one cannot meditate enough about Faust, for many of the mysteries of the second part are still unfathomed. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 88-89.
Goethe’s Faust almost reached the goal of classical alchemy, but unfortunately the ultimate coniunctio did not come off, so that Faust and Mephistopheles could not attain their oneness. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 453.
There was quite a crowd there and Barker, the professor of English from Cambridge, said, ‘Now Jung, you must know the famous passage in Faust about the setting sun!’ And Jung did know it and recited it. ~E.A. Bennet, Meetings with Jung, Page 284
Faust II has been my companion all my life, but it was only 20 years ago that certain things began to dawn on me, especially when I read Christian Rosencreutz’s Chymical Wedding, which Goethe also knew but, interestingly enough, did not mention among the alchemical literature of his Leipzig days. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 246.
As in Goethe’s Faust, here too it is the feminine element (Eve) that knows about the secret which can work against the total destruction of mankind, or man’s despair in the face of such a development. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 386-387
So far as we know, Goethe used only the relatively late alchemical literature, and it was the study of the classical and early medieval texts which first convinced me that Faust I and II is an opus alchymicum in the best sense. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 246.
You have hit the mark absolutely: all of a sudden and with terror it became clear to me that I have taken over Faust as my heritage, and moreover as the advocate and avenger of Philemon and Baucis, who, unlike Faust the superman, are the hosts of the gods in a ruthless and godforsaken age. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 309
The usual mistake of Western man when faced with this problem of grasping the ideas of the East is like that of the student in Faust. Misled by the devil, he contemptuously turns his back on science and, carried away by Eastern occultism, takes over yoga practices word for word and becomes a pitiable imitator. (Theosophy is our best example of this.) ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 3
It is only the intervention of time and space here and now that makes reality. Wholeness is realized for a moment only—the moment that Faust was seeking all his life. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 321
It is only the intervention of time and space here and now that makes reality. Wholeness is realized for a moment only—the moment that Faust was seeking: all his life. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Page 214.
Wholeness is realized for a moment only—the moment that Faust was seeking all his life. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 321
I do not underestimate the psyche in any respect whatsoever, nor do I imagine for a moment that psychic happenings vanish into thin air by being explained. Psychologism represents a still primitive mode of magical thinking, with the help of which one hopes to conjure the reality of the soul out of existence, after the manner of the “Proktophantasmist” in Faust: Are you still there? Nay, it’s a thing unheard. Vanish at once! We’ve said the enlightening word. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 750
It was from the spirit of alchemy that Goethe wrought the figure of the “superman” Faust, and this superman led Nietzsche’s Zarathustra to declare that God was dead and to proclaim the will to give birth to the superman, to “create a god for yourself out of your seven devils.” ~Carl Jung, CW 13, Para 163.
The Bardo lifespan is forty-nine days. The souls live, so to speak, in a collective world, and are confronted with spirits and other images of life, “images of all creatures,” as Goethe says in Faust. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Page 183
We also find this triad in the development of Goethe’s Faust: the boy charioteer, the homunculus, and Euphorion. The boy charioteer is the soul-guiding function. Here we find the motif of “puer aeternus.” ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Page 120
The dichotomy of Faust-Mephistopheles came together within myself into a single person, and I was that person. In other words, I was directly struck, and recognized that this was my fate. ~Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections, Page 234
It [Faust] is a link in the Aurea Catena which has existed from the beginnings of philosophical alchemy and Gnosticism down to Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. ~Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections, Page 189
What disturbs you most in your dream, the sinking of the anima, corresponds to Faust’s words, “Go down then, I could also say, rise up!” – Carl Jung, Jung-Kirsch Letters, Page 36
Therefore I felt personally implicated, and when Faust, in his hubris and self-inflation, caused the murder of Philemon and Baucis, I felt guilty, quite as if I myself in the past had helped commit the murder of the two old people. ~Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections, Page 234
No. 2, [personality] on the other hand, felt himself in secret accord with the Middle Ages, as personified by Faust, with the legacy of a past which had obviously stirred Goethe to the depths. ~Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections, Page 87
Faust, on the other hand, was the living equivalent of No. 2, [personality] and I was convinced that he was the answer which Goethe had given to his times. ~Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections, Page 87
Medieval alchemy prepared the way for the greatest intervention in the divine world order that man has ever attempted alchemy was the dawn of the scientific age, when the daemon of the scientific spirit compelled the forces of nature to serve man to an extent that had never been known before. It was from the spirit of alchemy that Goethe wrought the figure of the “superman” Faust, and this superman led Nietzsche’s Zarathustra to declare that God was dead and to proclaim the will to give birth to the superman, to “create a god for yourself out of your seven devils.” Here we find the true roots, the preparatory processes deep in the psyche, which unleashed the forces at work in the world today. Science and technology have indeed conquered the world, but whether the psyche has gained anything is another matter. ~Carl Jung, CW 13, Para 163
While the girl witch is dancing with Faust on the Brocken, a little red mouse jumps out of her mouth. Innocent children’s souls and the souls of the just appear as white mice, those of the godless as red ones. The souls of unborn children, too, appear as white mice. There is a very widespread notion that the soul leaves the human body during sleep in the form of a mouse, sometimes to quench its thirst, sometimes to cause nightmares in people, animals, and trees— in that case, it is usually the soul of a girl. If the mouse does not return, the girl will die. To whistle after mice means to lure the souls into the afterworld. Mice are often signs of death. Gray and black mice generally indicate disaster. They spread the Black Death and other diseases. The white mouse appears as a fever demon but, on the other hand, also attracts fever. It is said that mice are created out of earth or putrefaction, or are made by witches. Because of their gray color they are seen as tempest animals, coming from the clouds or the fog, or being brought by the wind. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Page 345
Goethe’s Faust aptly says: “in the beginning was the deed”.” “Deeds” were never invented, they were done; thoughts, on the other hand, are a relatively late discovery of man. First he was moved to deeds by unconscious factors; it was only a long time afterward that he began to reflect upon the causes that had moved him; and it took it him a very long time indeed to arrive at the preposterous idea that he must have moved himself his mind being unable to identify any other motivating force than his own. ~Carl Jung; Man and His Symbols; Page 70.
The medieval theory of possession (toned down by Janet to “obsession”) was thus taken over by Breuer and Freud in a more positive form, the evil spirit to reverse the Faustian miracle being transmogrified into a harmless “psychological formula.” It is greatly to the credit of both investigators that they did not, like the rationalistic Janet, gloss over the significant analogy with possession, but rather, following the medieval theory, hunted up the factor causing the possession in order, as it were, to exorcize the evil spirit. Breuer was the first to discover that the pathogenic “ideas” were memories of certain events which he called “traumatic.” This discovery carried forward the preliminary work done at the Salpêtrière, and it laid the foundation of all Freud’s theories. As early as 1893 both men recognized the far-reaching practical importance of their findings. They realized that the symptom-producing “ideas” were rooted in an affect. This affect had the peculiarity of never really coming to the surface, so that it was never really conscious. The task of the therapist was therefore to “abreact” the “blocked” affect. ~Carl Jung, CW 15 Para 62
The creative process has a feminine quality, and the creative work arises from unconscious depths—we might truly say from the realm of the Mothers. Whenever the creative force predominates, life is ruled and shaped by the unconscious rather than by the conscious will, and the ego is swept along on an underground current, becoming nothing more than a helpless observer of events. The progress of the work becomes the poet’s fate and determines his psychology. It is not Goethe that creates Faust, but Faust that creates Goethe. And what is Faust} Faust is essentially a symbol. By this I do not mean that it is an allegory pointing to something all too familiar, but the expression of something profoundly alive in the soul of every German, which Goethe helped to bring to birth. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 159
It is naturally absurd for people to accuse the voice of Nature, the all-sustainer and all-destroyer of evil. If she appears inveterately evil to us, this is mainly due to the old truth that the good is always the enemy of the better. We would be foolish indeed if we did not cling to the traditional good for as long as possible. But as Faust says: Whenever in this world we reach the good, We call the better all a lie, a sham! ~Carl Jung, CW 17 Para 320
It is what is commonly called vocation: an irrational factor that destines a man to emancipate himself from the herd and from its well-worn paths. True personality is always a vocation and puts its trust in it as in God, despite its being, as the ordinary man would say, only a personal feeling. But vocation acts like a law of God from which there is no escape. The fact that many a man who goes his own way ends in ruin means nothing to one who has a vocation. He must obey his own law, as if it were a daemon whispering to him of new and wonderful paths. Anyone with a vocation hears the voice of the inner man: he is called. That is why the legends say that he possesses a private daemon who counsels him and whose mandates he must obey. The best-known example of this is Faust, and an historical instance is provided by the daemon of Socrates. Primitive medicine-men have their snake spirits, and Aesculapius, the tutelary patron of physicians, has for his emblem the Serpent of Epidaurus. He also had, as his private daemon, the Cabir Telesphoros, who is said to have dictated or inspired his medical prescriptions. ~Carl Jung, CW 17 Para 300
Having been stimulated by Karl Kerenyi’s book on the Aegean Festival in Faust Part II, he began working on Mysterium Coniunctionis in his sixty-sixth year; he finished the two volumes sixteen years later. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 165.
Later I consciously linked my work to what Faust had passed over: respect for the eternal rights of man, recognition of ‘the ancient,’ and the continuity of culture and intellectual history. ~Carl Jung, “Jung” by Gerhard Wehr, Page 183.
Onkel [Jung] said that the Germans were in league with the devil and had a lust for power which is satanic. Onkel then went on to say that the. Germans were Faust in his pact with Satan. ~Katy Cabot, Jung My Mother and I, Page 322
As I walked into Onkel’s [Jung’s] study today, he was sitting and writing at the table in front of his window, wearing his fur-lined dressing gown and skull cap. He looked rather like Erasmus, Faust, or some mediaeval alchemist. I had a decided mediaeval impression when I came in. ~Katy Cabot, Jung My Mother and I, Page 456
That higher and “complete” man is begotten by the “unknown” father and born from Wisdom, and it is he who, in the figure of the puer aeternus—”vultu metabolism albums et ater”—represents our totality, which transcends consciousness. It was this boy into whom Faust had to change, abandoning his inflated one-sidedness which saw the devil only outside. Christ’s “Except ye become as little children” is a prefiguration of this, for in them the opposites lie close together; but what is meant is the boy who is born from the maturity of the adult man, and not the unconscious child we would like to remain. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Pages 157-158
Man takes the place of the Creator. Medieval alchemy prepared the way for the greatest intervention in the divine world order that man has ever attempted: alchemy was the dawn of the scientific age, when the daemon of the scientific spirit compelled the forces of nature to serve man to an extent that had never been known before. It was from the spirit of alchemy that Goethe wrought the figure of the “superman” Faust, and this superman led Nietzsche’s Zarathustra to declare that God was dead and to proclaim the will to give birth to the superman, to “create a god for yourself out of your seven devils” ~Carl Jung, CW 13 ¶ 163
Hesitantly, as in a dream, the introspective brooding of the centuries gradually put together the figure of Mercurius and created a symbol which, according to all the psychological rules, stands in a compensatory relation to Christ. It is not meant to take his place, nor is it identical with him, for then indeed it could replace him. It owes its existence to the law of compensation, and its object is to throw a bridge across the abyss separating the two psychological worlds by presenting a subtle compensatory counterpoint to the Christ image. The fact that in Faust the compensatory figure is not, as one might almost have expected from the author’s classical predilections, the wily messenger of the gods, but, as the name “Mephistopheles” shows, a familiaris risen from the cesspits of medieval magic, proves, if anything, the ingrained Christian character of Goethe’s consciousness. To the Christian mentality, the dark antagonist is always the devil. As I have shown, Mercurius escapes this prejudice by only a hair’s breadth. But he escapes it, thanks to the fact that he scorns to carry on opposition at all costs. The magic of his name enables him, in spite of his ambiguity and duplicity, to keep outside the split, for as an ancient pagan god he possesses a natural undividedness which is impervious to logical and moral contradictions. This gives him invulnerability and incorruptibility, the very qualities we so urgently need to heal the split in ourselves ~Carl Jung, CW 13 Para 295
The old alchemists were nearer to the central truth of the psyche than Faust when they strove to deliver the fiery spirit from the chemical elements and treated the mystery as though it lay in the dark and silent womb of nature. It was still outside them. The upward thrust of evolving consciousness was bound sooner or later to put an end to the projection, and to restore to the psyche what had been psychic from the beginning. Yet, ever since the Age of Enlightenment and in the era of scientific rationalism, what indeed was the psyche It had become synonymous with consciousness. The psyche was “what I know.” There was no psyche outside the ego. Inevitably, then, the ego identified with the contents accruing from the withdrawal of projection. Gone were the days when the psyche was still for the most part “outside the body” and imagined “those greater things” which the body could not grasp. The contents that were formerly projected were now bound to appear as personal possessions, as chimerical phantasms of the ego-consciousness. The fire chilled to air, and the air became the great wind of Zarathustra and caused an inflation of consciousness which, it seems, can be damped down only by the most terrible catastrophe to civilization, another deluge let loose by the gods upon inhospitable humanity. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 562
There is, however, one thing more to be asked: “Three there are but where is the fourth?” Why is blue missing? This colour was also missing in the “distorted” mandala of our dreamer. Curiously enough, the calendrier that intersects the golden circle is blue, and so is the vertical disc in the three-dimensional mandala. We would conjecture that blue, standing for the vertical, means height and depth (the blue sky above, the blue sea below), and that any shrinkage of the vertical reduces the square to an oblong, thus producing something like an inflation of consciousness. Hence the vertical would correspond to the unconscious. But the unconscious in a man has feminine characteristics, and blue is the traditional colour of the Virgin’s celestial cloak (fig. 105). Guillaume was so absorbed in the Trinity and threefold aspect of the roy that he quite forgot the reyne. Faust prays to her in these words: “Supreme Mistress of the world! Let me behold thy secret in the outstretched azure canopy of heaven” ~Carl Jung, CW 12 Para 320
As we can see from the example of Faust, the vision of the symbol is a pointer to the onward course of life, beckoning the libido towards a still distant goal—but a goal that henceforth will burn unquenchably within him, so that his life, kindled as by a flame, moves steadily towards the far-off beacon. This is the specific life-promoting significance of the symbol, and such, too, is the meaning and value of religious symbols. I am speaking, of course, not of symbols that are dead and stiffened by dogma, but of living symbols that rise up from the creative unconscious of the living man. The immense significance of such symbols can be denied only by those for whom the history of the world begins with the present day. ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 202
With the coming of the Enlightenment, metaphysics as a whole began to decline, and the rift which then opened out between knowledge and faith could no longer be repaired. The more resplendent figures in the metaphysical pantheon had their autonomy restored to them practically untarnished, which assuredly cannot be said of the devil. In Goethe’s Faust, he has dwindled to a very personal familiaris, the mere “shadow” of the struggling hero. After rational-liberal Protestantism had, as it were, deposed him by order of the day, he retired to the shadier side of the Christian Olympus as the “odd man out,” and thus, in a manner not unwelcome to the Church, the old principle reasserted itself: Omne bonum a Deo, omne malum ab homine. The devil remains as an appendix to psychology. Carl Jung, CW 11 Para 471
A conscientious doctor must be able to doubt all his skills and all his theories, otherwise he is be fooled by a system. But all systems mean bigotry and inhumanity. Neurosis —let there be no doubt about this—may be any number of things, but never a “nothing but.” It is the agony of a human soul in all its vast complexity—so vast, indeed, that any and every theory of neurosis is little better than a worthless sketch, unless it be a gigantic picture of the psyche which not even a hundred Fausts could conceive. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 357
This Chinese conception is echoed in the well-known passage from Faust:
Two souls, alas, are housed within my breast,
And each will wrestle for the mastery there.
The one has passion’s craving crude for love,
And hugs a world where sweet the senses rage;
The other longs for pastures fair above,
Leaving the murk for lofty heritage.
Empirically, the self appears in dreams, myths, and fairytales in the figure of the “supraordinate personality” (v. ego), such as a king, hero, prophet, saviour, etc., or in the form of a totality symbol, such as the circle, square, quadratura circuli, cross, etc. When it represents a complexio oppositorum, a union of opposites, it can also appear as a united duality, in the form, for instance, of Tao as the interplay of yang and yin, or of the hostile brothers, or of the hero and his adversary (arch-enemy, dragon), Faust and Mephistopheles, etc. Empirically, therefore, the self appears as a play of light and shadow, although conceived as a totality and unity in which the opposites are united. Since such a concept is irrepresentable — tertium non datur—it is transcendental on this account also. It would, logically considered, be a vain speculation were it not for the fact that it designates symbols of unity that are found to occur empirically. ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 790
And I chose Goethe also because of his significance in this regard to Jung, and in particular for his orchestration of this drama of what Jung was to call the “shadow” in the human spirit. ~ Laurens van der Post, Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 193
In Schiller we have to reckon with a predominance of intellect, not at the expense of his poetic intuition but at the cost of feeling. To Schiller himself it seemed as though there were a perpetual conflict in him between imagination and abstraction, that is, between intuition and thinking. “Even now it happens often enough that the power of imagination disturbs my abstraction, and cold reasoning my poetry” (Goethe, ed. Beutler, XX, p. 20) ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 117
A science can never be a Weltanschauung but merely the tool with which to make one. Whether we take this tool in hand or not depends on the sort of Weltanschauung we already have. For no one is without a Weltanschauung of some sort. Even in an extreme case, he will at least have the Weltanschauung that education and environment have forced on him. If this tells him, to quote Goethe, that “the highest joy of man should be the growth of personality,” he will unhesitatingly seize upon science and its conclusions, and with this as a tool will build himself a Weltanschauung—to his own edification. But if his hereditary convictions tell him that science is not a tool but an end in itself, he will follow the watchword that has become more and more prevalent during the last one hundred and fifty years and has proved to be the decisive one in practice. Here and there single individuals have desperately resisted it, for to their way of thinking the meaning of life culminates in the perfection of the human personality and not in the differentiation of techniques, which inevitably leads to an extremely one-sided development of a single instinct, for instance the instinct for knowledge. If science is an end in itself, man’s raison d’etre lies in being a mere intellect. If art is an end in itself, then his sole value lies in the imaginative faculty, and the intellect is consigned to the lumber-room. If making money is an end in itself, both science and art can quietly shut up shop. No one can deny that our modern consciousness, in pursuing these mutually exclusive ends, has become hopelessly fragmented. The consequence is that people are trained to develop one quality only; they become tools themselves. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 696
“All that is outside, also is inside,” we could say with Goethe. But this “inside,” which modern rationalism is so eager to derive from “outside,” has an a priori structure of its own that antedates all conscious experience. It is quite impossible to conceive how “experience” in the widest sense, or, for that matter, anything psychic, could originate exclusively in the outside world. The psyche is part of the inmost mystery of life, and it has its own peculiar structure and form like every other organism. Whether this psychic structure and its elements, the archetypes, ever “originated” at all is a metaphysical question and therefore unanswerable. The structure is something given, the precondition that is found to be present in every case. And this is the mother, the matrix—the form into which all experience is poured. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Pages 101-102
With the coming of the Enlightenment, metaphysics as a whole began to decline, and the rift which then opened out between knowledge and faith could no longer be repaired. The more resplendent figures in the metaphysical pantheon had their autonomy restored to them practically untarnished, which assuredly cannot be said of the devil. In Goethe’s Faust, he has dwindled to a very personal familiaris, the mere “shadow” of the struggling hero. After rational-liberal Protestantism had, as it were, deposed him by order of the day, he retired to the shadier side of the Christian Olympus as the “odd man out,” and thus, in a manner not unwelcome to the Church, the old principle reasserted itself: Omne bonum a Deo, omne malum ab homine. The devil remains as an appendix to psychology. Carl Jung, CW 11 Para 471
Man takes the place of the Creator. Medieval alchemy prepared the way for the greatest intervention in the divine world order that man has ever attempted: alchemy was the dawn of the scientific age, when the daemon of the scientific spirit compelled the forces of nature to serve man to an extent that had never been known before. It was from the spirit of alchemy that Goethe wrought the figure of the “superman” Faust, and this superman led Nietzsche’s Zarathustra to declare that God was dead and to proclaim the will to give birth to the superman, to “create a god for yourself out of your seven devils” ~Carl Jung, CW 13 ¶ 163
It was from the spirit of alchemy that Goethe wrought the figure of the “superman” Faust, and this superman led Nietzsche’s Zarathustra to declare that God was dead and to proclaim the will to give birth to the superman, to “create a god for yourself out of your seven devils.” ~Carl Jung, CW 13, Para 163.
A Latin proverb says: canis panem somniat, piscator pisces (the dog dreams of bread, the fisherman of fish). The alchemist, too, dreams in his own specific language. This enjoins upon us the greatest circumspection, all the more so as that language is exceedingly obscure. In order to understand it [the language], we have to learn the psychological secrets of alchemy. It is probably true what the old Masters said, that only he who knows the secret of the Stone understands their words. It has long been asserted that this secret is sheer nonsense, and not worth the trouble of investigating seriously. But this frivolous attitude ill befits the psychologist, for any “nonsense” that fascinated men’s minds for close on two thousand years among them some of the greatest, e.g., Newton and Goethe must have something about it which it would be useful for the psychologist to know ~Carl Jung, CW 13, Para 90
The union of the spiritual, masculine principle with the feminine, psychic principle is far from being just a fantasy of the Gnostics: it has found an echo in the Assumption of the Virgin, in the union of Tifereth and Malchuth, and in Goethe’s “the Eternal Feminine leads us upward and on.” ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 327
The original meaning of “to have a vocation” is “to be addressed by a voice.” The clearest examples of this are to be found in the avowals of the Old Testament prophets. That it is not just a quaint old-fashioned way of speaking is proved by the confessions of historical personalities such as Goethe and Napoleon, to mention only two familiar examples, who made no secret of their feeling of vocation. ~Carl Jung, CW 17 Para 301
It is quite obvious that all human beings have father and mother complexes, and it therefore means nothing if we discern traces of a father or mother complex in a great work of art; just as little as would the discovery that Goethe had a liver and two kidneys like any other mortal. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1723
Everything to do with the masses is hateful to me. Anything popularized becomes common. Above all I would not disseminate Goethe, rather cook books. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 88-89.
What one could “enjoy” of Goethe is, for me, too patriarchal, too much de l’epoque. What I value in Goethe I cannot “enjoy”; it is too big, too exciting, too profound. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 88-89.
Beyond that I have had experiences which are, so to speak, “ineffable,” “secret” because they can never be told properly and because nobody can understand them (I don’t know whether I have even approximately understood them myself), “dangerous” because 99% of humanity would declare l was mad if they heard such things from me, “catastrophic” because the prejudices aroused by their telling might block other people’s way to a living and wondrous mystery, “taboo” because they are “Holy” protected by “Fear of the Gods” as faithfully described by Goethe:
Shelter gives deep cave.
Lions around us stray,
Silent and tame they rove, And sacred honors pay to the holy shrine of love. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 141.
I would give the earth to know whether Goethe himself knew why he called the two old people “Philemon” and “Baucis.” ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 310
In Goethe’s poem Erlking, the king tries to lure the soul of a boy away from his real father, to become a playmate for his own daughters! In the end, he takes it with force. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Page 55-56
Prof Jung: He was a great artist, but he was also a philosopher and we expect a philosopher to think. His work ran away with him and that was his weakness. Such a thing would not have happened to Goethe, or Schiller, or Shakespeare. That was his weakness: he was a genius with a big hole in him. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminars, Page 1255
Biographies should show people in their undershirts. Goethe had his weaknesses, and Calvin was often cruel. Considerations of this kind reveal the true greatness of a man. This way of looking at things is better than false hero worship! ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, Page 165.
We must not forget that even Goethe is not the absolute authority but a human being who, as far as his unconscious is concerned, is just as small and impotent as any other insignificant person. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Schmid Correspondence, Page 79
The German word ‘Seele’, which by no means is the same as the English word ‘Soul’, is an old word, sanctioned by Tradition, used by the greatest German mystics like Eckhart and poets like Goethe to signify the Ultimate Reality, but experienced under a feminine aspect. ~James Kirsch, Jung-Kirsch Letters, Page 179
If thou wouldst into the infinite stride,
Explore the finite on every side. ~Goethe, cited in Jung by Gerhard Wehr, Page 4
Jung recalled Goethe’s dictum: “Dare to storm those gates which everyone gladly sneaks past,” referring to the common deep-rooted human aversion to looking behind the pleasant facade of self-deception and coming to know oneself. ~Gerhard Wehr, “Jung” by Gerhard Wehr, Page 191
Then I asked him [Jung] how he felt with no one to carry on [his work]. He said it was not necessary; he was leaving behind a wealth of literature, and the ones to come would glean from it. “After all,” he said, “Nature does not produce a series of me, and after Goethe or Schopenhauer, there was no one – after all, notes etc. are kept, and I put my thoughts into them, and leave behind a great deal of literature.” ~Katy Cabot, Jung My Mother and I, Page 187
And I chose Goethe also because of his significance in this regard to Jung, and in particular for his orchestration of this drama of what Jung was to call the “shadow” in the human spirit. ~ Laurens van der Post, Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 193