Carl Jung: CW 15 “Man In Spirit, Art And Literature”; Quotations

83 / 100

Carl Jung: CW 15 “Man in Spirit, Art and Literature”; Quotations

Carl Jung: Spirit, Art and Literature – YouTube

Carl Jung: CW 15 “Man in Spirit, Art and Literature”

All that gush about man’s innate goodness, which had addled so many brains after the dogma of original sin was no longer understood, was blown to the winds by Freud, and the little that remains will, let us hope, be driven out for good and all by the barbarism of the twentieth century. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 69

At such moments [“when an archetypal situation occurs”] we are no longer individuals, but the race. . . . ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Page 128.

The primordial image, or archetype, is a figure–be it a daemon, a human being, or a process–that constantly recurs in the course of history and appears wherever creative fantasy is freely expressed. Essentially, therefore, it is a mythological figure. . . . In each of these images there is a little piece of human psychology and human fate, a remnant of the joys and sorrows that have been repeated countless times in our ancestral history. . . . ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Page 127.

The psychiatrist knows only too well how each of us becomes the helpless but not pitiable victim of his own sentiments. Sentimentality is the superstructure erected upon brutality. ~Carl Jung; CW 15, Para 284.

The first step in individuation is tragic guilt. The accumulation of guilt demands expiation ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 1094.

The unsatisfied yearning of the artist reaches back to the primordial image in the unconscious which is best fitted to compensate the inadequacy and one-sidedness of the present. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 130.

As a human being he may have moods and a will and personal aims, but as an artist he is “man” in a higher sense—he is “collective man,” a vehicle and moulder of the unconscious psychic life of mankind. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 157

Thus, just as the one-sidedness of the individual’s conscious attitude is corrected by reactions from the unconscious, so art represents a process of self-regulation in the life of nations and epochs. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 131

By giving it shape, the artist translates it into the language of the present, and so makes it possible for us to find our way back to the deepest springs of life. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 130

The artist seizes on this image, and in raising it from deepest unconsciousness he brings it into relation with conscious values, thereby transforming it until it can be accepted by the minds of his contemporaries according to their powers. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 130

Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him his instrument. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 157

The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purposes through him. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 157

That is his [The Artist] office, and it is sometimes so heavy a burden that he is fated to sacrifice happiness and everything that makes life worth living for the ordinary human being. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 157

What the physician does is not his work [says Paracelsus] he is “the means by which nature is put to work. . . . Let him not say with desperate Satan: it is impossible.” He should put his trust in God. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 42

The fact that mothers bear children is not holy but merely natural. If people say it is holy, then one strongly suspects that something very unholy has to be covered up by it. Freud has said out loud “what is behind it,” only he has unfortunately blackened the infant instead of the mother. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 50

Nothing exerts a stronger psychic effect upon the human environment, and especially upon children, than the life which the parents have not lived. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 4

Doubt about our civilization and its values is the contemporary neurosis. If our convictions were really indubitable nobody would ever doubt them. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 69

Doubt alone is the mother of scientific truth. Whoever fights against dogma in high places falls victim, tragically enough, to the tyranny of a partial truth. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 70

Only that aspect of art which consists in the process of artistic creation can be a subject for psychological study, but not that which constitutes its essential nature. The question of what art is in itself can never be answered by the psychologist, but must be approached from the side of aesthetics. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 97

The supreme danger which threatens individuals as well as whole nations is a psychic danger. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 339

What if there were a living agency beyond our everyday human world—something even more purposeful than electrons? ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 148

Doubt alone is the mother of scientific truth. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 70

We would do well, therefore, to think of the creative process as a living thing implanted in the human psyche. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 115

The personal aspect of art is a limitation and even a vice. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 156

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. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 159

There are no inborn ideas, but there are inborn possibilities of ideas that set bounds to even the boldest fantasy and keep our fantasy activity within certain categories: a priori ideas, as it were, the existence of which cannot be ascertained except from their effects. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 126

It makes no difference whether the artist knows that his work is generated, grows and matures within him, or whether he imagines that it is his own invention. In reality it grows out of him as a child its mother. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 159

I have found by experience that telepathy does in fact influence dreams, as has been asserted since ancient times. But in acknowledging the phenomenon of telepathy I am not giving unqualified assent to the popular theory of action at a distance. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 503

Whoever speaks in primordial images speaks with a thousand voices. ~Carl Jung. CW 15 Page 129.

Do we delude ourselves in thinking that we possess and control our own psyches, and is what science calls the “psyche” not just a question-mark arbitrarily confined within the skull, but rather a door that opens upon the human world from a world beyond, allowing unknown and mysterious powers to act upon man and carry him on the wings of the night to a more than personal destiny. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 148

“Non-objective art draws its contents essentially from “inside.” This “inside” cannot correspond to consciousness, since consciousness contains images of objects as they are generally seen, and whose appearance must therefore necessarily conform to general expectations…. Behind consciousness there lies not the absolute void but the unconscious psyche, which affects consciousness from behind and from inside, just as much as the outer world affects it from in front and from outside.” ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 206

“As this “inside” is invisible and cannot be imagined, even though it can affect consciousness in the most pronounced manner, I induce those of my patients who suffer mainly from the effects of this “inside” to set them down in pictorial form as best they can. The aim of this method of expression is to make the unconscious contents accessible and so bring them closer to the patient’s understanding. The therapeutic effect of this is to prevent a dangerous splitting-off of the unconscious processes from consciousness. In contrast to objective or “conscious” representations, all pictorial representations of processes and effects in the psychic background are symbolic. They point, in a rough and approximate way, to a meaning that for the time being is unknown. “ ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 207

What if there were a living agency beyond our everyday human world—something even more purposeful than electrons ? Do we delude ourselves in thinking that we possess and control our own psyches, and is what science calls the “psyche” not just a question-mark arbitrarily confined within the skull, but rather a door that opens upon the human world from a world beyond, allowing unknown and mysterious powers to act upon man and carry him on the wings of the night to a more than personal destiny. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 148

Freud was a great destroyer, but the turn of the century offered so many opportunities for debunking that even Nietzsche was not enough. Freud completed the task, very thoroughly indeed. He aroused a wholesome mistrust in people and thereby sharpened their sense of real values. All that gush about man’s innate goodness, which had addled so many brains after the dogma of original sin was no longer understood, was blown to the winds by Freud, and the little that remains will, let us hope, be driven out for good and all by the barbarism of the twentieth century. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 69

For one can fall victim to possession if one does not understand betimes why one is possessed. One should ask oneself for once: Why has this idea taken possession of me? What does that mean in regard to myself? A modest doubt like this can save us from falling head first into the idea and vanishing forever. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 72

A person must pay dearly for the divine gift of creative fire. It is as though each of us was born with a limited store of energy. In the artist, the strongest force in his make-up, that is, his creativeness, will seize and all but monopolize this energy, leaving so little over that nothing of value can come of it. The creative impulse can drain him of his humanity to such a degree that the personal ego can exist only on a primitive or inferior level and is driven to develop all sorts of defects—ruthlessness, selfishness (“autoeroticism”), vanity, and other infantile traits. These inferiorities are the only means by which it can maintain its vitality and prevent itself from being wholly depleted. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 158

The artist’s relative lack of adaptation turns out to his advantage; it enables him to follow his own yearnings far from the beaten path, and to discover what it is that would meet the unconscious needs of his age. Thus, just as the one-sidedness of the individual’s conscious attitude is corrected by reactions from the unconscious, so art represents a process of self-regulation in the life of nations and epochs. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 131

Every creative person is a duality or a synthesis of contradictory qualities. On the one side he is a human being with a personal life, while on the other he is an impersonal creative process. As a human being he may be sound or morbid, and his personal psychology can and should be explained in personal terms. But he can be understood as an artist only in terms of his creative achievement. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 157

The distortion of beauty and meaning by grotesque objectivity or equally grotesque irreality is, in the insane, a consequence of the destruction of the personality; in the artist it has a creative purpose. Far from his work being an expression of the destruction of his personality, the modern artist finds the unity of his artistic personality in destructiveness. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 175

Whoever speaks in primordial images speaks with a thousand voices; he enthralls and overpowers, while at the same time he lifts the idea he is seeking to express out of the occasional and the transitory into the realm of the ever enduring. He transmutes our personal destiny into the destiny of mankind, and evokes in us all those beneficent forces that ever and anon have enabled humanity to find a refuge from every peril and to outlive the longest night. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 129

The creative process, so far as we are able to follow it at all, consists in the unconscious activation of an archetypal image, and in elaborating and shaping this image into the finished work. By giving it shape, the artist translates it into the language of the present, and so makes it possible for us to find our way back to the deepest springs of life. Therein lies the social significance of art it is constantly at work educating the spirit of the age, conjuring up the forms in which the age is most lacking. The unsatisfied yearning of the artist reaches back to the primordial image in the unconscious which is best fitted to compensate the inadequacy and one-sidedness of the present. The artist seizes on this image, and in raising it from deepest unconsciousness he brings it into relation with conscious values, thereby transforming it until it can be accepted, by the minds of his contemporaries according to their powers. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 130

Being essentially the instrument of his work, [the artist] is subordinate to it, and we have no right to expect him to interpret it for us. He has done his utmost by giving it form, and must leave the interpretation to others and to the future. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 161

Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purposes through him. As a human being he may have moods and a will and personal aims, but as an artist he is “man” in a higher sense—he is “collective man,” a vehicle and moulder of the unconscious psychic life of mankind. That is his office, and it is sometimes so heavy a burden that he is fated to sacrifice happiness and everything that makes life worth living for the ordinary human being. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 157

The daemonism of nature, which man had apparently triumphed over, he has unwittingly swallowed into himself and so become the devil’s marionette. This could happen only because he believed he had abolished the daemons by declaring them to be superstition. He overlooked the fact that they were, at bottom, the products of certain factors in the human psyche. When these products were dubbed unreal and illusory, their sources were in no way blocked up or rendered inoperative. On the contrary, after it became impossible for the daemons to inhabit the rocks, woods, mountains, and rivers, they used human beings as much more dangerous dwelling places. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 43

It is my conviction that the investigation of the psyche is the science of the future. Psychology is the youngest of the sciences and is only at the beginning of its development. It is, however, the science we need most. Indeed, it is becoming ever more obvious that it is not famine, not earthquakes, not microbes, not cancer but man himself who is man’s greatest danger to man, for the simple reason that there is no adequate protection against psychic epidemics, which are infinitely more devastating than the worst of natural catastrophes. The supreme danger which threatens individuals as well as whole nations is a psychic danger. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 339

There is no illness that is not at the same time an unsuccessful attempt at a cure. Instead of showing up the patient as the secret accomplice of morally inadmissible wishes, one can just as well explain him as the unwitting victim of instinctual problems which he doesn’t understand and which nobody in his environment has helped him solve. His dreams, in particular, can be taken as nature’s own auguries, having nothing whatever to do with the all-too human self-deluding operations which Freud insinuates into the dream-process. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 68

When I speak of the relation of psychology to art we are outside [art’s] sphere, and it is impossible for us not to speculate. We must interpret, we must find meanings in things, otherwise we would be quite unable to think about them. We have to break down life and events, which are self-contained processes, into meanings, images, concepts, well knowing that in doing so we are getting further away from the living mystery. As long as we ourselves are caught up in the process of creation, we neither see nor understand; indeed we ought not to understand, for nothing is more injurious to immediate experience than cognition. But for the purpose of cognitive understanding we must detach ourselves from the creative process and look at it from the outside; only then does it become an image that expresses what we are bound to call “meaning.” ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 121

Perhaps art has no “meaning,” at least not as we understand meaning. Perhaps it is like nature, which simply is and “means” nothing beyond that. Is “meaning” necessarily more than mere interpretation—an interpretation secreted into something by an intellect hungry for meaning? Art, it has been said, is beauty, and “a thing of beauty is a joy forever.” It needs no meaning, for meaning has nothing to do with art. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 121

A great work of art is like a dream; for all its apparent obviousness it does not explain itself and is always ambiguous. A dream never says “you ought” or “this is the truth.” It presents an image in much the same way as nature allows a plant to grow, and it is up to us to draw conclusions. If a person has a nightmare, it means he is either too much given to fear or too exempt from it; if he dreams of a wise old man, it means he is either too much of a pedant or else in need of a teacher. In a subtle way both meanings come to the same thing, as we realize when we let a work of art act upon us as it acted upon the artist. To grasp its meaning, we must allow it to shape us as it shaped him. Then we also understand the nature of his primordial experience. He has plunged into the healing and redeeming depths of the collective psyche, where man is not lost in the isolation of consciousness and its errors and sufferings, but where all men are caught in a common rhythm which allows the individual to communicate his feelings and strivings to mankind as a whole. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 161

The unborn work in the psyche of the artist is a force of nature that achieves its end either with tyrannical might or with the subtle cunning of nature herself, quite regardless of the personal fate of the man who is its vehicle. The creative urge lives and grows in him like a tree in the earth from which it draws its nourishment. We would do well, therefore, to think of the creative process as a living thing implanted in the human psyche. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 115

Personal causes have as much or as little to do with a work of art as the soil with the plant that springs from it. We can certainly learn to understand some of the plant’s peculiarities by getting to know its habitat, and for the botanist this is an important part of his equipment. But nobody will maintain that everything essential has then been discovered about the plant itself. The personal orientation which the doctor needs when confronted with the question of aetiology in medicine is quite out of place in dealing with a work of art, just because a work of art is not a human being, but is something supra-personal. It is a thing and not a personality; hence it cannot be judged by personal criteria. Indeed, the special significance of a true work of art resides in the fact that it has escaped from the limitations of the personal and has soared beyond the personal concerns of its creator. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 107

Every period has its bias, its particular prejudice, and its psychic malaise. An epoch is like an individual; it has its own limitations of conscious outlook, and therefore requires a compensatory adjustment. This is effected by the collective unconscious when a poet or seer lends expression to the unspoken desire of his times and shows the way, by word or deed, to its fulfilment—regardless whether this blind collective need results in good or evil, in the salvation of an epoch or its destruction. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 153

Re-immersion in the state of participation mystique is the secret of artistic creation and of the effect which great art has upon us, for at that level of experience it is no longer the weal or woe of the individual that counts, but the life of the collective. That is why every great work of art is objective and impersonal, and yet profoundly moving. And that is also why the personal life of the artist is at most a help or a hindrance, but is never essential to his creative task. He may go the way of the Philistine, a good citizen, a fool, or a criminal. His personal career may be interesting and inevitable, but it does not explain his art. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 162

The essence of a work of art is not to be found in the personal idiosyncrasies that creep into it—indeed, the more there are of them, the less it is a work of art—but in its rising above the personal and speaking from the mind and heart of the artist to the mind and heart of mankind. The personal aspect of art is a limitation and even a vice. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 156

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

Nothing would be more mistaken than to suppose that the poet is working with second-hand material. On the contrary, the primordial experience is the source of his creativeness, but it is so dark and amorphous that it requires the related mythological imagery to give it form. In itself it is wordless and imageless, for it is a vision seen “as in a glass, darkly.” It is nothing but a tremendous intuition striving for expression. It is like a whirlwind that seizes everything within reach and assumes visible form as it swirls upward. Since the expression can never match the richness of the vision and can never exhaust its possibilities, the poet must have at his disposal a huge store of material if he is to communicate even a fraction of what he has glimpsed, and must make use of difficult and contradictory images in order to express the strange paradoxes of his vision. Dante decks out his experience in all the imagery of heaven, purgatory, and hell; Goethe brings in the Blocksberg and the Greek underworld; Wagner needs the whole corpus of Nordic myth, including the Parsifal saga; Nietzsche resorts to the hieratic style of the bard and legendary seer; Blake presses into his service the phantasmagoric world of India, the Old Testament, and the Apocalypse; and Spitteler borrows old names for the new figures that pour in alarming profusion from his muse’s cornucopia. Nothing is missing in the whole gamut that ranges from the ineffably sublime to the perversely grotesque. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 151

The love-episode is a real experience really suffered, and so is the vision. It is not for us to say whether its content is of a physical, psychic, or metaphysical nature. In itself it had psychic reality, and this is no less real than physical reality. Human passion falls within the sphere of conscious experience, while the object of the vision lives beyond it. Through our senses we experience the known, but our intuitions point to things that are unknown and hidden, that by their very nature are secret. If ever they become conscious, they are intentionally kept secret and concealed, for which reason they have been regarded from earliest times as mysterious, uncanny, and deceptive. They are hidden from man, and he hides himself from them out of religious awe, protecting himself with the shield of science and reason. The ordered cosmos he believes in by day is meant to protect him from the fear of chaos that besets him by night —his enlightenment is born of night-fears! ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 148

Thoughts are real, they are the consciousness. People can’t see that. Einstein could not. ~Carl Jung, J.E.T., Pages 90-95

The self would be the preceding stage, a being that is more than man and that definitely manifests; that is the thinker of our thoughts, the doer of our deeds, the maker of our lives, yet it is still within the reach of human experience. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1348

If you practise this art, there are certain thoughts which you can project at suitable moments. Mohammed seems to have been able to do this. His visions fitted the situation and corresponded to his own wishes. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 7th July 1939

I confess I am afraid of a long drawn-out suffering. It seems to me as if I am ready to die, although as it looks to me some powerful thoughts are still flickering like lightnings in a summer night. Yet they are not mine, they belong to God, as everything else which bears mentioning. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 450.

Again, the view that good and evil are spiritual forces outside us, and that man is caught in the conflict between them, is more bearable by far than the insight that the opposites are the ineradicable and indispensable preconditions of all psychic life, so much so that life itself is guilt. I can only formulate my thoughts as they escape from me, like a geyser. Those who come after me will have to put them in order. ~Carl Jung, Jung by Gerhard Wehr, Page 302

[Paracelsus Birth] It stood in the sign of Scorpio, a sign that, according to ancient tradition, was favourable to physicians, the ministers of poisons and of healing. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 1

And, following a tragic law, he [Paracelsus] must also fall out with his friends, as the predestined consequence of the fateful bond with his only friend, his father—for psychic endogamy is attended by heavy punishments. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 5

Just as, in art, a merry paganism emerged from under the skirts of the Church, so, behind the curtain of scholastic disputation, a paganism of the spirit flourished in a rebirth of Neoplatonism and natural philosophy. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 9

The highest cosmogonic principle, corresponding to the Gnostic demiurge, is the Yliaster or Hylaster, a hybrid compound of hyle (matter) and astrum (star). ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 11

These archetypal images belong to humanity at large and can crop up autochthonously in anybody’s head at any time and place, only needing favourable circumstances for their reappearance. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 11

The “Limbus” is a circle. The animate world is the larger circle, man is the “Limbus minor,” the smaller circle. He is the microcosm. Consequently, everything without is within, everything above is below. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 31

Matter, as something infinitely distributed throughout space, is the absolute opposite of that concentration of the organic which is psyche. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 12

The Victorian era was an age of repression, of a convulsive attempt to keep anaemic ideals artificially alive in a framework of bourgeois respectability by constant moralizings. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 45

Freud has said out loud “what is behind it,” only he has unfortunately blackened the infant instead of the mother. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 50

Scientifically, the theory of infantile sexuality is of little value. It is all one to the caterpillar whether we say that it eats its leaf with ordinary pleasure or with sexual pleasure. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 51.

As a matter of fact, Leonardo did have an illegitimate mother and a stepmother, but in reality the dual-mother problem may be present as a mythological motif even when the two mothers do not really exist. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 55.

The originator of this teaching has, moreover, identified it with his method of “psychoanalysis,” thereby making it into a rigid system that may rightly be charged with absolutism. On the other hand, the extraordinary emphasis laid upon this theory causes it to stand out as a strange and unique phenomenon against its philosophical and scientific background. Nowhere does it merge with other contemporary concepts, nor has its author made any conscious effort to connect it with its historical predecessors. This impression of isolation is heightened still further by a peculiar terminology which at times borders on subjective jargon. To all appearance sand Freud would prefer to have it that wait is as if this theory had developed exclusively in the doctor’s consulting-room and were unwelcome to everyone but himself and a thorn in the flesh of “academic” science. And yet, even the most original and isolated idea does not drop down from heaven, but grows out of an objective network of thought which binds all contemporaries together whether they recognize it or not ~Carl Jung, CW15, Para 44

The historical conditions which preceded Freud were such that they made a phenomenon like himself necessary, and it is precisely the fundamental tenet of his teaching namely, the repression of sexuality that is most clearly conditioned in this historical sense. Like his greater contemporary Nietzsche, Freud stands at the end of the Victorian era, which was never given such an appropriate name on the Continent despite the fact that it was just as characteristic of the Germanic and Protestant countries as of the Anglo-Saxon. The Victorian era was an age of repression, of a convulsive attempt to keep anaemic ideals artificially alive in a framework of bourgeois respectability by constant moralizings. These ideals were the last offshoots of the collective religious ideas of the Middle Ages, and shortly before had been severely shaken by the French Enlightenment and the ensuing revolution. Hand in hand with this, ancient truths in the political field had become hollow and threatened to collapse. It was still too soon for the final overthrow, and consequently all through the nineteenth century frantic efforts were made to prevent the Christian Middle Ages from disappearing altogether. Political revolutions were stamped out, experiments in moral freedom were thwarted by middle-class public opinion, and the critical philosophy of the late eighteenth century reached its end in a renewed, systematic attempt to capture the world in a unified network of thought on the medieval model. But in the course of the nineteenth century, enlightenment slowly broke through, particularly in the form of scientific materialism and rationalism ~Carl Jung, CW15, Para 45

This is the matrix out of which Freud grew, and its mental characteristics have shaped him along foreordained lines. He has a passion for explaining everything rationally, exactly as in the eighteenth century; one of his favourite maxims is Voltaire’s “Écrasez l’infâme.” With a certain satisfaction he invariably points out the flaw in the crystal; all complex psychic phenomena like art, philosophy, and religion fall under his suspicion and appear as “nothing but” repressions of the sexual instinct. This essentially reductive and negative attitude of Freud’s towards accepted cultural values is due to the historical conditions which immediately preceded him. He sees as his time forces him to see. This comes out most clearly in his book The Future of an Illusion, where he draws a picture of religion which corresponds exactly with the prejudices of a materialistic age ~Carl Jung, CW15, Para 46

Freud’s revolutionary passion for negative explanations springs from the historical fact that the Victorian age falsified its cultural values in order to produce a middle-class view of the world, and, among the means employed, religion or rather, the religion of repression played the chief role. It is this sham religion that Freud has his eye on. The same is true of his idea of man: man’s conscious qualities, his idealistically falsified persona, rest on a correspondingly dark background, that is to say on a basis of repressed infantile sexuality. Every positive gift or creative activity depends on some infantile negative quantity, in accordance with the materialistic bon mot: “Der Mensch ist, was er isst” (man is what he eats) ~Carl Jung, CW15, Para 47

This conception of man, considered historically, is a reaction against the Victorian tendency to see everything in a rosy light and yet to describe everything sub rosa. It was an age of mental “pussyfooting” that finally gave birth to Nietzsche, who was driven to philosophize with a hammer. So it is only logical that ethical motives as determining factors in human life do not figure in Freud’s teaching. He sees them in terms of conventional morality, which he justifiably supposes would not have existed in this form, or not have existed at all, if one or two bad-tempered patriarchs had not invented such precepts to protect themselves from the distressing consequences of their impotence. Since then these precepts have unfortunately gone on existing in the super-ego of every individual. This grotesquely depreciative view is a just punishment for the historical fact that the ethics of the Victorian age were nothing but conventional morality, the creation of curmudgeonly praeceptores mundi ~Carl Jung, CW15, Para 48

Like Nietzsche, like the Great War, and like James Joyce, his literary counterpart, Freud is an answer to the sickness of the nineteenth century. That is indeed his chief significance. For those with a forward-looking view he offers no constructive plan, because not even with the boldest effort or the strongest will would it ever be possible to act out in real life all the repressed incest-wishes and other incompatibilities in the human psyche ~Carl Jung, CW15, Para 52

In order to mitigate this cramp of conscience, Freud invented the idea of sublimation. Sublimation means nothing less than the alchemist’s trick of turning the base into the noble, the bad into the good, the useless into the useful. Anyone who knew how to do this would be certain of immortal fame. Unfortunately, the secret of converting energy without the consumption of a still greater quantity of energy has never yet been discovered by the physicists. Sublimation remains, for the present, a pious wish-fulfilment invented for silencing inopportune questions ~Carl Jung, CW15, Para 53

In discussing these problems I do not wish to lay the main emphasis on the professional difficulties of the practising psychotherapist, but on the evident fact that Freud’s programme is not a forward-looking one. Everything about it is oriented backwards. Freud’s only interest is where things come from, never where they are going. It is more than the scientific need for causality that drives him to seek for causes, for otherwise it could not have escaped him that many psychological facts have explanations entirely different from those based on the faux pas of a chronique scandaleuse ~Carl Jung, CW15, Para 54

An excellent example of this is his essay on Leonardo da Vinci and the problem of the two mothers. As a matter of fact, Leonardo did have an illegitimate mother and a stepmother, but in reality the dual-mother problem may be present as a mythological motif even when the two mothers do not really exist. Mythical heroes very often have two mothers, and for the Pharaohs this mythological custom was actually de rigueur. But Freud stops short at the scurrilous fact; he contents himself with the idea that naturally something unpleasant or negative is concealed in the situation. Although this procedure is not exactly “scientific,” yet, considered from the standpoint of historical justice, I credit it with a greater value than if it were scientifically unassailable. All too easily the dark background that is also present in the Leonardo problem could be rationalized away by a narrow scientific approach, and then Freud’s historical task of showing up the darkness behind the false facades would not be fulfilled ~Carl Jung, CW15, Para 55

A small scientific inaccuracy has little meaning here. If one goes through his works carefully and critically, one really does have the impression that Freud’s aim of serving science, which he pushes again and again to the fore, has been secretly diverted to the cultural task of which he himself is unconscious, and that this has happened at the expense of the development of his theory. Today the voice of one crying in the wilderness must necessarily strike a scientific tone if the ear of the multitude is to be reached. At all costs we must be able to say that it is science which has brought such facts to light, for that alone is convincing. But even science is not proof against the unconscious Weltanschauung ~Carl Jung, CW15, Para 55

How easy it would have been to take Leonardo’s St. Anne with the Virgin and the Christ Child as a classical representation of the mythological motif of the two mothers! But for Freud’s late Victorian psychology, and for an infinitely large public as well, it is far more effective if after “thorough investigation” it can be confirmed that the great artist owed his existence to a slip-up of his respectable father! This thrust goes home, and Freud makes this thrust not because he consciously wants to abandon science for gossip, but because he is under compulsion from the Zeitgeist to expose the possible dark side of the human psyche. Yet the really scientific clue to the picture is the dual-mother motif, but that only stirs the few to whom knowledge really matters, however unfashionable it may be. Such an hypothesis leaves the greater public cold, because to them Freud’s one-sided, negative explanation means very much more than it does to science ~Carl Jung, CW15, Para 55

A general psychological theory that claims to be scientific should not be based on the malformations of the nineteenth century, and a theory of neurosis must also be capable of explaining hysteria among the Maori. As soon as the sexual theory leaves the narrow field of neurotic psychology and branches out into other fields, for instance that of primitive psychology, its one-sidedness and inadequacy leap to the eye. Insights that grew up from the observation of Viennese neuroses between 1890 and 1920 prove themselves poor tools when applied to the problems of totem and taboo, even when the application is made in a very skilful way. Freud has not penetrated into that deeper layer which is common to all men. He could not have done so without being untrue to his historical task. And this task he has fulfilled task enough for a whole life’s work, and fully deserving the fame it has won ~Carl Jung, CW15, Para 59

Freud was first and foremost a “nerve specialist” in the strictest sense of this word, and in every respect he always remained one. By training he was no psychiatrist, no psychologist, and no philosopher. In philosophy he lacked even the most rudimentary elements of education. He once assured me personally that it had never occurred to him to read Nietzsche. This fact is of importance in understanding Freud’s peculiar views, which are distinguished by an apparently total lack of any philosophical premises. His theories bear the unmistakable stamp of the doctor’s consulting-room. His constant point of departure is the neurotically degenerate psyche, unfolding its secrets with a mixture of reluctance and ill-concealed enjoyment under the critical eye of the doctor ~Carl Jung, CW15, Para 61

Freud owed his initial impetus to Charcot, his great teacher at the Salpêtrière. The first fundamental lesson he learnt there was the teaching about hypnotism and suggestion, and in 1888 he translated Bernheim’s book on the latter subject. The other was Charcot’s discovery that hysterical symptoms were the consequence of certain ideas that had taken possession of the patient’s “brain.” Charcot’s pupil, Pierre Janet, elaborated this theory in his comprehensive work Névroses et idées fixes and provided it with the necessary foundations. Freud’s older colleague in Vienna, Joseph Breuer, furnished an illustrative case in support of this exceedingly important discovery (which, incidentally, had been made long before by many a family doctor), building upon it a theory of which Freud said that it “coincides with the medieval view once we substitute a psychological formula for the `demon’ of priestly fantasy” ~Carl Jung, CW15, Para 62

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, CW15, Para 62

This provisional formulation was certainly simple too simple to do justice to the essence of the neuroses in general. At this point Freud commenced his own independent researches. It was first of all the question of the trauma that occupied him. He soon found (or thought he had found) that the traumatic factors were unconscious because of their painfulness. But they were painful because according to his views at the time they were one and all connected with the sphere of sex. The theory of the sexual trauma was Freud’s first independent theory of hysteria. Every specialist who has to do with the neuroses knows on the one hand how suggestible the patients are and, on the other, how unreliable are their reports. The theory was therefore treading on slippery and treacherous ground. As a result, Freud soon felt compelled to correct it more or less tacitly by attributing the traumatic factor to an abnormal development of infantile fantasy. The motive force of this luxuriant fantasy-activity he took to be an infantile sexuality, which nobody had liked to speak of before ~Carl Jung, CW15, Para 63

Cases of abnormal precocity of development had naturally long been known in the medical literature, but such had not been assumed to be the case in relatively normal children. Freud did not commit this mistake either, nor did he envisage any concrete form of precocious development. It was rather a question of his paraphrasing and interpreting more or less normal infantile occurrences in terms of sexuality. This view unleashed a storm of indignation and disgust, first of all in professional circles and then among the educated public. Apart from the fact that every radically new idea invariably provokes the most violent resistance of the experts, Freud’s conception of the infant’s instinctual life was an encroachment upon the domain of general and normal psychology, since his observations from the psychology of neurosis were transferred to a territory which had never before been exposed to this kind of illumination ~Carl Jung, CW15, Para 63

Careful and painstaking investigation of neurotic and, in particular, hysterical states of mind could not conceal from Freud that such patients often exhibit an unusually lively dream life and on that account like to tell of their dreams. In structure and manner of expression their dreams frequently correspond to the symptomatology of their neurosis. Anxiety states and anxiety dreams go hand in hand and obviously spring from the same root. Freud could therefore not avoid including dreams within the scope of his investigations. He had recognized very early that the “blocking” of the traumatic affect was due to the repression of “incompatible” material. The symptoms were substitutes for impulses, wishes, and fantasies which, because of their moral or aesthetic painfulness, were subjected to a “censorship” exercised by ethical conventions. In other words, they were pushed out of the conscious mind by a certain kind of moral attitude, and a specific inhibition prevented them from being remembered ~Carl Jung, CW15, Para 64

The “theory of repression,” as Freud aptly called it, became the centre-piece of his psychology. Since a great many things could be explained by this theory, it is not surprising that it was also applied to dreams. Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams (1900) is an epoch-making work and probably the boldest attempt ever made to master the enigma of the unconscious psyche on the apparently firm ground of empiricism. Freud sought to prove with the aid of case material that dreams are disguised wish-fulfilments. This extension of the “repression mechanism,” a concept borrowed from the psychology of neurosis, to the phenomenon of dreams was the second encroachment upon the sphere of normal psychology. It had immense consequences, as it stirred up problems which would have required for their solution a more compendious equipment than the limited experiences of the consulting-room ~Carl Jung, CW15, Para 64

The Interpretation of Dreams is probably Freud’s most important work, and at the same time the most open to attack. For us young psychiatrists it was a fount of illumination, but for our older colleagues it was an object of mockery. As with his recognition that neurosis has the character of a medieval “possession,” so, by treating dreams as a highly important source of information about the unconscious processes “the dream is the via regia to the unconscious” Freud rescued something of the utmost value from the past, where it had seemed irretrievably sunk in oblivion. Indeed, in ancient medicine as well as in the old religions, dreams had a lofty significance and the dignity of an oracle. At the turn of the century, however, it was an act of the greatest scientific courage to make anything as unpopular as dreams an object of serious discussion. What impressed us young psychiatrists most was neither the technique nor the theory, both of which seemed to us highly controversial, but the fact that anyone should have dared to investigate dreams at all. This line of investigation opened the way to an understanding of schizophrenic hallucinations and delusions from the inside, whereas hitherto psychiatrists had been able to describe them only from the outside. More than that, The Interpretation of Dreams provided a key to the many locked doors in the psychology of neurotics as well as of normal people ~Carl Jung, CW15, Para 65

The first group produces pictures of a synthetic character, with a pervasive and unified feeling-tone. When they are completely abstract, and therefore lacking the element of feeling, they are at least definitely symmetrical or convey an unmistakable meaning ~Carl Jung, CW15, Para 208

The second group, on the other hand, produces pictures which immediately reveal their alienation from feeling. At any rate they communicate no unified, harmonious feeling-tone but, rather, contradictory feelings or even a complete lack of feeling. From a purely formal point of view, the main characteristic is one of fragmentation, which expresses itself in the so-called “lines of fracture” that is, a series of psychic “faults” (in the geological sense) which run right through the picture. The picture leaves one cold, or disturbs one by its paradoxical, unfeeling, and grotesque unconcern for the beholder. This is the group to which Picasso belongs ~Carl Jung, CW15, Para 208

In Faust’s metamorphosis, Gretchen, Helen, Mary, and the abstract “Eternal Feminine” correspond to the four female figures of the Gnostic underworld, Eve, Helen, Mary, and Sophia. And just as Faust is embroiled in murderous happenings and reappears in changed form, so Picasso changes shape and reappears in the underworld form of the tragic Harlequin a motif that runs through numerous paintings. It may be remarked in passing that Harlequin is an ancient chthonic god ~Carl Jung, CW15, Para 211

In view of the dazzling versatility of Picasso, one hardly dares to hazard a guess, so for the present I would rather speak of what I have found in my patients’ material. The Nekyia is no aimless and purely destructive fall into the abyss, but a meaningful katabasis eis antron, a descent into the cave of initiation and secret knowledge. The journey through the psychic history of mankind has as its object the restoration of the whole man, by awakening the memories in the blood. The descent to the Mothers enabled Faust to raise up the sinfully whole human being Paris united with Helen that homo totus who was forgotten when contemporary man lost himself in one-sidedness. It is he who at all times of upheaval has caused the tremor of the upper world, and always will. This man stands opposed to the man of the present, because he is the one who ever is as he was, whereas the other is what he is only for the moment. With my patients, accordingly, the katabasis and katalysis are followed by a recognition of the bipolarity of human nature and of the necessity of conflicting pairs of opposites. After the symbols of madness experienced during the period of disintegration there follow images which represent the coming together of the opposites: light / dark, above / below, white / black, male / female, etc. In Picasso’s latest paintings, the motif of the union of opposites is seen very clearly in their direct juxtaposition. One painting (although traversed by numerous lines of fracture) even contains the conjunction of the light and dark anima. The strident, uncompromising, even brutal colours of the latest period reflect the tendency of the unconscious to master the conflict by violence (colour = feeling) ~Carl Jung, CW15, Para 213

Great poetry draws its strength from the life of mankind, and we completely miss its meaning if we try to derive it from personal factors. Whenever the collective unconscious becomes a living experience and is brought to bear upon the conscious outlook of an age, this event is a creative act which is of importance for a whole epoch. A work of art is produced that may truthfully be called a message to generations of men. So Faust touches something in the soul of every German, as Jacob Burckhardt has already remarked. So also Dante’s fame is immortal, and the Shepherd of Hermas was very nearly included in the New Testament canon. Every period has its bias, its particular prejudice, and its psychic malaise. An epoch is like an individual; it has its own limitations of conscious outlook, and therefore requires a compensatory adjustment. This is effected by the collective unconscious when a poet or seer lends expression to the unspoken desire of his times and shows the way, by word or deed, to its fulfilmentregardless whether this blind collective need results in good or evil, in the salvation of an epoch or its destruction ~Carl Jung, CW15, Para 153

The essence of a work of art is not to be found in the personal idiosyncrasies that creep into it indeed, the more there are of them, the less it is a work of art but in its rising above the personal and speaking from the mind and heart of the artist to the mind and heart of mankind. The personal aspect of art is a limitation and even a vice. Art that is only personal, or predominantly so, truly deserves to be treated as a neurosis. When the Freudian school advances the opinion that all artists are undeveloped personalities with marked infantile autoerotic traits, this judgment may be true of the artist as a man, but it is not applicable to the man as an artist. In this capacity he is neither autoerotic, nor heteroerotic, nor erotic in any sense. He is in the highest degree objective, impersonal, and even inhuman or suprahuman for as an artist he is nothing but his work, and not a human being ~Carl Jung, CW15, Para 156

In the artist, the strongest force in his make-up, that is, his creativeness, will seize and all but monopolize this energy, leaving so little over that nothing of value can come of it. The creative impulse can drain him of his humanity to such a degree that the personal ego can exist only on a primitive or inferior level and is driven to develop all sorts of defects ruthlessness, selfishness (“autoeroticism”), vanity, and other infantile traits. These inferiorities are the only means by which it can maintain its vitality and prevent itself from being wholly depleted ~Carl Jung, CW15, Para 158

The autoeroticism of certain artists is like that of illegitimate or neglected children who from their earliest years develop bad qualities to protect themselves from the destructive influence of a loveless environment. Such children easily become ruthless and selfish, and later display an invincible egoism by remaining all their lives infantile and helpless or by actively offending against morality and the law ~Carl Jung, CW15, Para 158

How can we doubt that it is his art that explains the artist, and not the insufficiencies and conflicts of his personal life? These are nothing but the regrettable results of his being an artist, a man upon whom a heavier burden is laid than upon ordinary mortals. A special ability demands a greater expenditure of energy, which must necessarily leave a deficit on some other side of life ~Carl Jung, CW15, Para 158

I found that there are psychic parallelisms which simply cannot be related to each other causally, but must be connected by another kind of principle altogether. This connection seemed to lie essentially in the relative simultaneity of the events, hence the term “synchronistic.” It seems as though time, far from being an abstraction, is a concrete continuum which possesses qualities or basic conditions capable of manifesting themselves simultaneously in different places by means of an acausal parallelism, such as we find, for instance, in the simultaneous occurrence of identical thoughts, symbols, or psychic states ~Carl Jung, CW15, Para 81

Another example, pointed out by Wilhelm, would be the coincidence of Chinese and European periods of style, which cannot have been causally related to one another. Astrology would be an example of synchronicity on a grand scale if only there were enough thoroughly tested findings to support it. But at least we have at our disposal a number of well-tested and statistically verifiable facts which make the problem of astrology seem worthy of scientific investigation. Its value is obvious enough to the psychologist, since astrology represents the sum of all the psychological knowledge of antiquity ~Carl Jung, CW15, Para 81

The fact that it is possible to reconstruct a person’s character fairly accurately from his birth data shows the relative validity of astrology. It must be remembered, however, that the birth data are in no way dependent on the actual astronomical constellations, but are based on an arbitrary, purely conceptual time system. Owing to the precession of the equinoxes, the spring-point has long since moved out of the constellation of Aries into Pisces, so that the astrological zodiac on which horoscopes are calculated no longer corresponds to the heavenly one. If there are any astrological diagnoses of character that are in fact correct, this is due not to the influence of the stars but to our own hypothetical time qualities. In other words, whatever is born or done at this particular moment of time has the quality of this moment of time ~Carl Jung, CW15, Para 82