The statement that man was created seems to me important.
Modern Psychology: C. G. Jung’s Lectures at the ETH Zürich, 1933-1941
This psychological fact does not prove the feeling of having been created, but it contains a substantial possibility for such a feeling.
This is a very unpopular and antiquated point of view but it is true.
If we understand “man is created” in this sense it changes our whole attitude.
For if we think that everything originates in the conscious the door is open to a Luciferian hybris.
Then we believe “where there is a will there is a way” and think we are the gods of this world.
Then there is not one god but many gods, for everyone is trying to be the one and only god.
But if we understand: “I am created” correctly, then we recognise that we are a product, that we were anticipated.
We were and knew it not.
It was, so to speak, known, but we must leave the question open who it was that knew it.
If we adopt this point of view we are not very far from the old formulation that man was created.
We are thought from our psyche before we know it, we can bring empirical facts to prove this.
So the statement that “man was created” seems to me very important.
I speak, of course, of his psychic existence and this must not be confused with the facts of natural science regarding his anatomical existence. ~Carl Jung, ETH, 12 January 1940
It is not I who create myself, rather I happen to myself.
Carl Jung Depth Psychology Facebook Group
The term “self” seemed to me a suitable one for this unconscious substrate, whose actual exponent in consciousness is the ego.
The ego stands to the self as the moved to the mover, or as object to subject, because the determining factors which radiate out from the self surround the ego on all sides and are therefore supraordinate to it.
The self, like the unconscious, is an a priori existent out of which the ego evolves.
It is, so to speak, an unconscious prefiguration of the ego.
It is not I who create myself, rather I happen to myself.
This realization is of fundamental importance for the psychology of religious phenomena, which is why Ignatius Loyola started off his Spiritual Exercises with “Homo creatus est” as their “fundamentum.”
But, fundamental as it is, it can be only half the psychological truth.
If it were the whole truth it would be tantamount to determinism, for if man were merely a creature that came into being as a result of something already existing unconsciously, he would have no freedom and there would be no point in consciousness.
Psychology must reckon with the fact that despite the causal nexus man does enjoy a feeling of freedom, which is identical with autonomy of consciousness.
However much the ego can be proved to be dependent and preconditioned, it cannot be convinced that it has no freedom.
An absolutely preformed consciousness and a totally dependent ego would be a pointless farce, since everything would proceed just as well or even better unconsciously.
The existence of ego consciousness has meaning only if it is free and autonomous.
By stating these facts we have, it is true, established an antinomy, but we have at the same time given a picture of things as they are.
There are temporal, local, and individual differences in the degree of dependence and freedom.
In reality both are always present: the supremacy of the self and the hybris of consciousness. ~Carl Jung CW 11, Para 391
Carl Jung Depth Psychology Blog
