Carl Jung on Emotion Lexicon
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 Emotion Anthology
Ideas are not just counters used by the calculating mind; they are also golden vessels full of living feeling. “Freedom” is not a mere abstraction, it is also an emotion. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Pages 310-311.
It is a great mistake in practice to treat an archetype as if it were a mere name, word, or concept. It is far more than that it is a piece of life, an image connected with the living individual by the bridge of emotion. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 96
Since the soul animates the body, just as the soul is animated by the spirit, she tends to favour the body and everything bodily, sensuous, and emotional. She lies caught in “the chains” of Physis, and she desires “beyond physical necessity.” She must be called back by the “counsel of the spirit” from her lostness in matter and the world. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Page 472.
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. ~Carl Jung; CW 9ii, par. 15.
The stirring up of conflict is a Lucipherian virtue in the true sense of the word. Conflict engenders fire, the fire of affects and emotions, and like every other fire it has two aspects, that of combustion and that of creating light. 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. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Page 179
As scientific understanding has grown, so our world has become dehumanized. Man feels himself isolated in the cosmos, because he is no longer involved in nature and has lost his emotional ‘unconscious identity’ with natural phenomena. ~Carl Jung; Man and His Symbols; Page 85.
Emoti0nal manifestations are based on similar patterns, and are recognizably the same all over the earth. We understand them even in animals, and the animals themselves understand each other in this respect, even if they belong to different species. ~Carl Jung, Symbols of Transformation, Page 234.
Who would have thought that the alchemists, popularly supposed to be searching for gold, were really promising themselves freedom from illusion, exaggerated emoti0n, passion, excess and all possible vices ~Carl Jung, ETH, Lecture XIII, Page 108.
The word ‘matter’ remains a dry, inhuman, and purely intellectual concept… How different was the former image of matter—the Great Mother—that could encompass and express the profound emoti0nal meaning of the Great Mother. ~Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols, pages 94-5.
Emoti0ns are often confused with feelings but this is all wrong. Feeling is a valuing function, whereas emotion is involuntary, in affect you are always a victim. ~Carl Jung, Lecture V 25May1934, Page 109.
Affect is undomesticated primitivity, annoyance can still be a feeling, but when your head begins to burn and you find your heart and pulse beat, then it has gone over into an emotin0. ~Carl Jung, Lecture V 25May1934, Page 109.
In the intensity of the emoti0nal disturbance itself lies the value, the energy which he should have at his disposal in order to remedy the state of reduced adaptation. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Page 82.
Archetypes are systems of readiness for action, and at the same time images and emoti0ns. They are inherited with the brain structure—indeed, they are its psychic aspect. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 31.
Turned towards the world, the anima is fickle, capricious, moody, uncontrolled and emoti0nal, sometimes gifted with daemonic intuitions, ruthless, malicious, untruthful, bitchy, double-faced, and mystical. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 222f.
Carl Jung Depth Psychology Blog
