Ann Belford Ulanov – Spiritual Aspects of Clinical Work (Quotations)
This door, a highly inconspicuous side-door on an unsuspicious looking and easily overlooked foot path … leads to the secret of transformation and renewal. ~Carl Jung, Spiritual Aspects of Clinical Work, Page 13
The images of the unconscious place a great responsibility upon [us]. Failure to understand them, or a shirking of ethical responsibility, deprives [us] of [our] wholeness and imposes a painful fragmentariness of [our] life. ~Carl Jung, Spiritual Aspects of Clinical Work, Page 22
This experience is charisma, for it is not vouchsafed to us nisi Deo concedente … but only if we give up the ego as the supreme authority and put ourselves wholly under the will of God. ~Carl Jung, Spiritual Aspects of Clinical Work, Page 26
Whatever the learned interpretation may be of the sentence ‘God is love,’ the words affirm the complexio oppositorum of the Godhead. ~Carl Jung, Spiritual Aspects of Clinical Work, Page 113
Being a part, man cannot grasp the whole. He is at its mercy. He may assent to it, or rebel against it; but he is always caught up by it and enclosed within it. He is dependent upon it and sustained by it. Love is his light and his darkness, whose end he cannot see … If he possesses a grain of wisdom, he will lay down his arms and name the unknown by the more unknown, ignotum per ignotius – that is, by the name of God. ~Carl Jung, Spiritual Aspects of Clinical Work, Page 113
… it is advisable to approach every illness from the psychological side as well, because this may be extraordinarily important for the healing process. When these two aspects [psyche and physis] work together, it may easily happen that the cure takes place in the intermediate realm. … ~Carl Jung, Spiritual Aspects of Clinical Work, Page 118
If the archetypal situation underlying the illness can be expressed in the right way the patient is cured. ~Carl Jung, Spiritual Aspects of Clinical Work, Page 129
“suffering was not only man’s fate but God’s fate” ~Carl Jung, Spiritual Aspects of Clinical Work, Page 214
Spirit goes deeper than the cerebrospinal system which supports our intellect, to include the sympathetic nervous system where psychic contents
“expres themselves only in symbolic actions,” ushering us into the company of the collective, of all living things, beyond ourselves, delivering us into emotional connection with what the Buddha expounds as compassion for all sentient beings. ~Ann Belford Ulanov, Spiritual Aspects of Clinical Work, Page 215
This problem illustrates that Spirit always desires the flesh: “if you love life, you want to live really, not as a mere promises hovering above things. ~Carl Jung, Spiritual Aspects of Clinical Work, Page 216
There is no individuation, no realisation of Spirit in life, without the body which is our animal root in the “definite facts which make you an individual, a self that is yourself and nobody else … No individuation can take place … without the animal, a very dark animal coming up from primordial slime … is absolutely indispensable. ~Carl Jung, Spiritual Aspects of Clinical Work, Page 216
we would rather accept anything in the world, any devil or any hell, than accept ourselves in our particular concreteness. That is the thing of which we are most afraid ~Carl Jung, Spiritual Aspects of Clinical Work, Page 220
One cannot individuate without being with other human beings … Being an individual is always being a link in a chain … ~Carl Jung, Spiritual Aspects of Clinical Work, Page 226
Our dreams present an image, much in the same way as nature allows a plant to grow, and it is up to us to draw conclusions. ~Carl Jung, Spiritual Aspects of Clinical Work, Page 226
The Self wants its own destruction as a symbolic form. ~Carl Jung, Spiritual Aspects of Clinical Work, Page 231
We would rather accept anything in the world, any devil or any hell, than accept ourselves in our particular concreteness. That is the thing of which we are most afraid … But only when we accept the thing which is loathsome to us, have we a real will to change, not before. ~Carl Jung, Spiritual Aspects of Clinical Work, Page 256
But the transcendent function also involves a descent away from ego reality, “to the deus absconditus, which possesses qualities very different from those of the God who shines by day. ~Carl Jung, Spiritual Aspects of Clinical Work, Page 249
“The ‘taming of the beast’ … is indeed a long process and coincides with the dissolution of egohood. What you call ‘deselving’ I call ‘becoming a self’: what previously seemed to be ‘ego’ is taken up into a greater dimension which dwarfs and surrounds me on all sides, and which I cannot grasp in its totality. In this connection … [we] rightly quote Paul … : ‘For in [God] we live, and move, and have our being’ (Acts 17:28). This experience … is vouchsafed to us only if we give up the ego as supreme authority and put ourselves wholly under the will of God” ~Carl Jung, Spiritual Aspects of Clinical Work, Page 230
And our dreams are like windows that allow us to look in … to that psychological process which is continually going on in our unconscious. It is a process of continual transformation with no end if we do not interfere. It needs our conscious interference to bring it to a goal … Otherwise, it is like the eternal change of the seasons in nature, a building up and a pulling down, integration and disintegration without end … from which nothing comes unless a human consciousness interferes and realizes the result … the revelations are without issue if consciousness doesn’t … grasp the treasure brought upon the wave of the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, Spiritual Aspects of Clinical Work, Page 226
The psychotherapist … must be absolutely clear that the treatment of the soul of a patient is a relationship in which the doctor is just as much involved as the patient. …” and, “The personality of the patient demands the personality of the doctor …” ~Carl Jung, Spiritual Aspects of Clinical Work, Page 266
Thus you can not only analyse your unconscious but you also give your unconscious a chance to analyse yourself, and therewith you gradually create the unity of conscious and unconscious without which there is no individuation at all. If you apply this method, then I can come in as an occasional adviser, but if you don’t apply it, then my existence is of no use for you ~Carl Jung, Spiritual Aspects of Clinical Work, Page 270
