Carl Jung on Emotion Anthology
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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.
Emotional 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 emotion, 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 emotional meaning of the Great Mother. ~Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols, pages 94-5.
Emotions 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 emotion. ~Carl Jung, Lecture V 25May1934, Page 109.
In the intensity of the emotional 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 emotions. 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 emotional, sometimes gifted with daemonic intuitions, ruthless, malicious, untruthful, bitchy, double-faced, and mystical. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 222f.
Even in rearing a child it is often good for parents to react emotionally and not with cool superiority to the child’s bad behaviour. Children often irritate their parents just to make them show emotion. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 14.
The anima comes out of an emotional act, taking place in darkness, the compensation for the crime against the fire; the anima is the compensating element that must be extracted from matter. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 32.
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, Man and His Symbols, Page 96.
Although ESP is a gift of certain individuals and seems to depend upon an emotional perception, the picture it produces is that of an objective fact. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 181.
Emotions follow an instinctual pattern, i.e., an archetype. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 43-47.
The introverted thinker is very much in need of a developed feeling, i .e., of a less autoerotic, sentimental, melodramatic and emotional relatedness to people and things. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 163-174
The idea that mescalin could produce a transcendental experience is shocking. The drug merely uncovers the normally unconscious functional layer of perceptional and emotional variants, which are only psychologically transcendent but by no means “transcendental,” i.e., metaphysical. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 222-224.
The Indians, if influenced by Buddhism, habitually depotentiate their emotions by reciting a mantra. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 430-433
I do not need to tell you how much I would appreciate that a balanced mind should write a review about this book [Aion], which has chiefly aroused subjective emotions but hardly any objective evaluation. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 510-511
“God” therefore is in the first place a mental image equipped with instinctual “numinosity,” i.e., an emotional value bestowing the characteristic autonomy of the affect on the image. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 520-523
If I just tell the anima that she is working off some collective notion on me which I have no idea of accepting as part of my individuality, that does no good at all—when I am in the grip of an emotion it is no support to me to say it is a collective reaction. . ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 49
The deposit of man’s whole ancestral experience—so rich in emotional imagery—of father, mother, child, husband and wife, of the magic personality, of dangers to body and soul, has exalted this group of archetypes into the supreme regulating principles of religious and even of political life, in unconscious recognition of their tremendous psychic power. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 337
Emotions are instinctive, involuntary reactions which upset the rational order of consciousness by their elemental outbursts. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 497.
It is an almost regular occurrence for a woman to be wholly contained, spiritually, in her husband, and for a husband to be wholly contained, emotionally, in his wife. One could describe this as the problem of the “contained” and the “container.” ~Carl Jung, CW 17, Para 331C
But as long as he [Man] is unable to control his moods and emotions, or to be conscious of the myriad secret ways in which unconscious factors insinuate themselves into his arrangements and decisions, he is certainly not his own master. ~Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols, Page 83.
The universal hero myth always refers to a powerful man or god-man who vanquishes evil in the form of dragons, serpents, monsters, demons, and so on, and who liberates his people from destruction and death. The narration or ritual repetition of sacred texts and ceremonies, and the worship of such a figure with dances, music, hymns, prayers, and sacrifices, grip the audience with numinous emotions and exalt the individual to an identification with the hero. ~Carl Jung; Man and His Symbols; Page 68.
We carry our past with us, to wit, the primitive and inferior man with his desires and emotions, and it is only with an enormous effort that we can detach ourselves from this burden. If it comes to a neurosis, we invariably have to deal with a considerably intensified shadow. And if such a person wants to be cured it is necessary to find a way in which his conscious personality and his shadow can live together. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 132
To cherish secrets and hold back emotion is a psychic misdemeanour for which nature finally visits us with sickness—that is, when we do these things in private. But when they are done in communion with others they satisfy nature and may even count as useful virtues. It is only restraint practised for oneself alone that is unwholesome.
It is as if man had an inalienable right to behold all that is dark, imperfect, stupid, and guilty in his fellow men—for such, of course, are the things we keep secret in order to protect ourselves. It seems to be a sin in the eyes of nature to hide our inferiority—just as much as to live entirely on our inferior side. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 132