Therapist Therapy Anthology
Wisdom never forgets that all things have two sides, and it would also know how to avoid such calamities if ever it had any power. ~Carl Jung, Mysterium Conjunctionis, Para 135
As therapists we are subject to the unavoidable destinies of our patients. ~Carl Jung; Conversations with C.G. Jung, Psychotherapy, Page 113.
Dreams are often anticipatory and would lose their specific meaning on a purely causalistic view. They afford unmistakable information about the analytical situation, the correct understanding of which is of the greatest therapeutic importance. ~Carl Jung; “The Practical Use of Dream Analysis” CW 16: The Practice of Psychotherapy; Page 312.
There are analysts who believe that they can get along without self-analysis. This is Munchausen psychology, and they will certainly remain stuck. They forget that one of the most important therapeutically effective factors is subjecting you to the objective judgment of another. As regards ourselves we remain blind, despite everything and everybody. Carl Jung; “The Theory of Psychoanalysis”; CW 4: Freud and Psychoanalysis; Page 449.
All religions are therapies for the sorrows and disorders of the soul.” ~Carl Jung; “Commentary to The Secret of the Golden Flower”, 1929.
One has to remind oneself again and again that in therapy it is more important for the patient to understand than for the analyst’s theoretical expectations to be satisfied. The patient’s resistance to the analyst is not necessarily wrong; it is rather a sign that something does not “click.” Either the patient is not yet at a point where he would be able to understand, or the interpretation does not fit. ~Carl Jung; Man and His Symbols. (1964) Essay retitled “Symbols and the Interpretation of Dreams” In CW 18: P.61
The new attitude gained in the course of analysis tends sooner or later to become inadequate in one way or another, and necessarily so, because the flow of life again and again demands fresh adaptation. Adaptation is never achieved once and for all.…In the last resort it is highly improbable that there could ever be a therapy which got rid of all difficulties. Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health. What concerns us here is only an excessive amount of them. ~Carl Jung; CW 9; The Transcendent Function.
When I was working on the stone tablets, I became aware of the fateful links between me and my ancestors. I feel very strongly that I am under the influence of things or questions which were left incomplete and unanswered by my parents and grandparents and more distant ancestors.
It often seems as if there were an impersonal karma within a family, which is passed on from parents to children. It has always seemed to me that I had to answer questions which fate had posed to my forefathers, and which had not yet been answered, or as if I had to complete, or perhaps continue, things which previous ages had left unfinished.
It is difficult to determine whether these questions are more of a personal or more of a general (collective) nature. It seems to me that the latter is the case. A collective problem, if not recognized as such, always appears as a personal problem, and in individual cases may give the impression that something is out of order in the realm of the personal psyche.
The personal sphere is indeed disturbed, but such disturbances need not be primary; they may well be secondary, the consequence of an insupportable change in the social atmosphere. The cause of disturbance is, therefore, not to be sought in the personal surroundings, but rather in the collective situation. Psychotherapy has hitherto taken this matter far too little into account. ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams, Reflections; Pages 233-234.
He [the psychotherapist] is not just working for this particular patient, who may be quite insignificant, but for himself as well and his own soul, and in so doing he is perhaps laying an infinitesimal grain in the scales of humanity’s soul. Small and invisible as this contribution may be, it is yet an opus magnum. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, par. 449.
…as a psychotherapist I do not by any means try to deliver my patients from fear. Rather, I lead them to the reason for their fear, and then it becomes clear that it is justified. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 398-400.
I think that if you immerse yourself in my thought-processes without regarding them as a new gospel, a light will gradually go up for you about the nature of psychotherapy. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 455-456.
The psychotherapist must be a philosopher in the old sense of the word. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 455-456.
It is of course essential for the psychotherapist to have a fair knowledge of himself, for anyone who does not understand himself cannot understand others and can never be psychotherapeutically effective unless he has first treated himself with the same medicine. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 455-456.
The psychiatrist understands nothing of psychotherapy in principle because he is never in the position of having to practice it. One could just as well subordinate internal medicine to surgery. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 163.
To the psychotherapist an old man who cannot bid farewell to life appears as feeble and sickly as a young man who is unable to embrace it. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Pages 399-403.
There were and there are simply not enough doctors who have any reliable training in psychotherapy. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 542-544.
Hence I am all for the psychotherapist calmly acknowledging that he treats and cures neither with diet nor pills nor with the surgeon’s knife. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 178-180.
He[A patient being referred] is desperate for therapy, and needs it too—as he basically consists of an intellectual halo wandering lonely and footless through the world. ~Carl Jung to Erich Neumann, 11Sept1933.
Music is dealing with such deep archetypal material with boots as swift as and those who play don’t realize this. Yet, used therapeutically from this level music should be an essential part of every analysis ~Carl Jung, J.E.T., Page 126.
I maintained that psychiatry, in the broadest sense, is a dialogue between the sick psyche and the psyche of the doctor, which is presumed to be ‘normal.’ It is a coming to terms between the sick personality and that of the therapist, both in principle equally subjective. ~Carl Jung, MDR, Page 110.
In therapy the problem is always the whole person, never the symptom alone. We must ask questions which challenge the whole personality. ~Carl Jung, MDR, Page 117.
One has to remind oneself again and again that in therapy it is more important for the patient to understand than for the analyst’s theoretical expectations to be satisfied. ~Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols, Page 61.
I practice psychology in the first place as a science, in the second place as an instrument of psychotherapy. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 56-57.
I have had a number of TB patients in my time and some really excellent results with psychotherapy, but it is true that the average somatic case generally has a resistance to a psychological approach, particularly the TB patients, since TB is, in a way a “pneumatic” disease, that is, affecting the life-giving breath. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 100-101
Altogether, you are practising on me an extremely beneficial Psychotherapy of a special kind, giving me the valuable experience of what I can only call “meaningful collaboration,” a working together in spirit and in deed. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 360.
In some cases of psychotherapeutic treatment, contact with the sphere of the archetypes can produce the kind of constellation that underlies synchronicity. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 498-500
I also observed that a large number of my neurotic patients who were tubercular were “freed” from their complexes under psychotherapeutic treatment, learnt to breathe properly again and in the end were cured. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 533-534
I don’t see where you get the impression that I might be discouraged in this respect, since I was the first to emphasize the enormous role religion plays particularly in the individuation process, as I was the first to raise the question of the relation between psychotherapy and religion in its practical aspects. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 566
It was actually through my therapeutic work that I began to understand the essence of the Christian faith. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 631-632
The theologian, the only person besides the psychotherapist to declare himself responsible for the cura animarum, is afraid of having to think psychologically about the objects of his belief. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 628-630
It [Individuation] is not a therapy. Is it therapy when a cat becomes a cat? It is a natural process. Individuation is a natural process. It is what makes a tree turn into a tree; if it is interfered with, then it becomes sick and cannot function as a tree, but left to itself it develops into a tree. That is individuation. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking; Interviews and Encounters, Pages 205-218
But the fact is that the approach to the numinous is the real therapy and in as much as you attain to the numinous experiences you are released from the curse of pathology. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 377
On the contrary, when I began my career as a psychiatrist and psychotherapist, I was completely ignorant of Chinese philosophy, and only later did my professional experience show me that in my technique I had been unconsciously following that secret way which for centuries had been the preoccupation of the best minds of the East. ~Carl Jung, CW 13, Para 10
Freud rightly recognized that this bond is of greatest therapeutic importance in that it gives rise to a mixtum compositum [composite mixture] of the doctor’s own mental health and the patient’s maladjustment. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 358.
The therapist must be guided by the patient’s own irrationalities. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 82.
A therapist with a neurosis is a contradiction in terms. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 179
The great healing factor in psychotherapy is the doctor’s personality. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 198.
Therefore our Lord himself is a healer; he is a doctor; he heals the sick and he deals with the troubles of the soul; and that is exactly what we call psychotherapy. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 370
Hence the optimistic assumption of psychotherapy that conscious realization accentuates the good more than the overshadowing evil. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 253-254.
Depending on the peculiar nature of the case the most primitive therapeutic methods can achieve even better results than the most refined. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 324
But the task of the Church is not the same as that of psychotherapy. The Church means serving the community, therapy serves the individual. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 235
