Carl Jung on Emotions
Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self (Collected Works of C.G. Jung Vol.9 Part 2)
Emotion:
An involuntary reaction due to an active complex.
On the one hand, emotion is the alchemical fire whose warmth brings everything into existence and whose heat burns all superfluities to ashes (omnes superfluitates comburit). But on the other hand, emotion is the moment when steel meets flint and a spark is struck forth, for emotion is the chief source of consciousness. There is no change from darkness to light or from inertia to movement without emotion. [“Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype,” CW 9i, par. 179.]
Affect:
Emotional reactions marked by physical symptoms and disturbances in thinking. (See also complex and feeling.)
Affect is invariably a sign that a complex has been activated.
Affects occur usually where adaptation is weakest, and at the same time they reveal the reason for its weakness, namely a certain degree of inferiority and the existence of a lower level of personality. On this lower level with its uncontrolled or scarcely controlled emotions one . . . [is] singularly incapable of moral judgment.[“The Shadow,” Aion, CW 9ii, par. 15.] —
Emotion:
An involuntary reaction due to an active complex.
On the one hand, emotion is the alchemical fire whose warmth brings everything into existence and whose heat burns all superfluities to ashes (omnes superfluitates comburit).
But on the other hand, emotion is the moment when steel meets flint and a spark is struck forth, for emotion is the chief source of consciousness.
There is no change from darkness to light or from inertia to movement without emotion. [“Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype,” CW 9i, par. 179.]
[Carl Jung on Manipura and the value of Desire, Passions, Emotion.]
Yes, desire, passions, the whole emotional world breaks loose.
Sex, power, and every devil in our nature gets loose when we become acquainted with the unconscious.
Then you will suddenly see a new picture of yourself.
That is why people are afraid and say there is no unconscious, like children playing hide-and-seek.
A child goes behind a door and says, “Nobody is behind this door; don’t look here!” And so we have two marvelous psychological theories that nothing is behind this door, don’t look here, this is nothing important.
Those are apotropaic theories. But you will see that there is something, you must admit that there are such powers.
Then you make an abstraction, you make marvelous abstract signs of it, and talk of it with only a sort of shy hinting.
You speak euphemistically. As sailors never dared to say, “This damned hell of a sea, this black sea that is always so stormy and smashes our ships!”
They said, “The welcoming benevolent sea . . .”—in order not to arouse those alarming impressions, or to irritate those dark wind demons.
Instead of saying the archbishop of Canterbury, you say His Grace.
You don’t say the pope has issued a very foolish encyclica, you say the Vatican. Or instead of speaking of those hellish liars, you say Wilhelm strasse, or Downing Street, or the Quai d’Orsay.
That is the euphemistic abstract way of putting things.
Our science has the same purpose in using Latin or Greek words. It is a marvelous shield against the demons—the demons are afraid of Greek because they do not understand it.
And therefore we talk, as you have just demonstrated, in such an abstract way.
So it is just that—you get into the world of fire, where things become red-hot. After baptism you get right into hell—that is the enantiodromia.
And now comes the paradox of the East: it is also the fullness of jewels.
But what is passion, what are emotions? There is the source of fire, there is the fullness of energy.
A man who is not on fire is nothing: he is ridiculous, he is two-dimensional. He must be on fire even if he does make a fool of himself.
A flame must burn somewhere, otherwise no light shines; there is no warmth, nothing.
It is terribly awkward, sure enough; it is painful, full of conflict, apparently a mere waste of time—at all events, it is against reason.
But that accursed Kundalini says, “It is the fullness of jewels; there is the source of energy.” As Heraclitus aptly said: war is the father of all things. ~Carl Jung, The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga, Pages 33-34.
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