Memory of C.G. Jung by Suzanne Percheron
Memory of C.G. Jung by Suzanne Percheron:
Extracts from notes taken by Suzanne Percheron during or immediately after regular interviews she had with C. G. Jung from 1935 to 1961. The parts in parentheses are words spoken by S. Percheron. All others are recorded statements made by C. G. Jung, set down by her and gathered from her notebooks which she has authorized us to publish here.
1941
(Everything that you say has in me an immediate resonance; what X writes interests me, but you are something else . .. . )
Because it is the truth, a force of nature that expresses itself through me-l am only a channel-! don’t oppose myself to expression-therefore, several times I have said definite things that I didn’t know and that I forgot at once after having said them.
I let it enter-that’s the objective attitude.
I can imagine myself in many instances where I would become sinister to you.
For instance, if life had led you to rake up an artificial attitude, then you wouldn’t be able to stand me, because I am a natural being. By my very presence I crystalize; I am a ferment.
The unconscious of people who live in an artificial manner senses me as a danger. Everything about me irritates them, my way of speaking, my way of laughing. They sense nature .
Life, even at best, can force one to take this or that route, one sure must live it, but this can lead you into being artificial.
Truth can be cruel, useless-one must not always tell it, one must tell it when it can be useful, when it can do good.
Truth can drive “crazy.” We must not gauge this by our own vigor. You may become a little less sturdy and then you cannot stand it anymore.
One must be very prudent, full of precautions. There are few people who are truly interesting. One calls them “interesting.”
They are valuable in one narrow area; that’s the folly of an education that puts stress on ability rather than on humanity.
The result is a lack of human beings. One wants to bring our a talent-“You have a nice voice, become a tenor”-and they then strive to become that only, that is their folly.
As for me, I have always done my utmost to be a human being.
Already at school they were astonished when I wrote a good essay, because I loved sports and occasionally got drunk.
Inside himself a man depends on his reputation, one must not damage him there.
A woman also has her reputation, but it is in a different area, it is concerned more with her personal role, her role at home.
A man’s situation is different. To recognize a great error can be fatal for him, because by this he risks losing his authority.
I, for instance, if in certain matters my wife would notice my errors, or if she showed me that she notices them, I would be afraid of my wife.
Because then she shows me that I have not been conscious.
(But you would at least like to know this.)
Yes, provided that it is not too strong and perhaps also that it comes from myself.
That is why women need to be extremely diplomatic. That is a very difficult role for them, because one must not subsidize the fantasies of others.
Certain women make weaklings of their husbands, without authority, flaccid.
Others make them inflated-it’s a very delicate balance.
It is above all in this area that women are perceptive. On some other points one can show them their weakness, but as a general rule one cannot demonstrate to a surgeon that he has killed his patient or that he has botched an operation.
Men are less vulnerable in their quality as father, husband. There women are most susceptible.
For instance, one cannot tell a woman that she has lost her husband because she lacks charm without running the risk of wounding her.
Women are a magical force. They surround themselves with an emotional tension stronger than the rationality of men .
A man cannot create the atmosphere of a home. He can disturb the atmosphere, bt he cannot create it. The atmosphere of a home depends above all on the woman.
Woman is a very strong being, magical. That is why I am afraid of women.
Suzanne Percheron: I suppose that you dream?
Dr. Jung: No, I almost don’t dream anymore. (!!!)
I used to dream when I began to discover my unconscious.
One dreams when the unconscious has something to say, but my consciousness is always so receptive now that the door is open.
I am ready to accept. With me the unconscious can flow into consciousness.
I no longer have prejudice, or fear, or resistance. The dream is a way in which the unconscious makes itself known to consciousness.
Many people have no memory of their dreams because the unconscious knows that it will not be heard, so what’s the use; then they don’t remember.
(How could one bring about in France an evolution towards the recognition of unconscious life’)
I know only one way: through psychology. Perhaps there are other ways, by and by.
Everything happens in such small ways, invisibly. One does not notice it.
Take the time when Christ was on earth, or the time of the Buddha.
For their contemporaries it was only by and by, bit by bit that something was achieved.
(A practical question: How, when one wants to tell someone, something, can one avoid doing harm?)
That is a question of good taste, of tact, of discernment.
On the whole, when there is complete unconsciousness, don’t say anything. The shock would be too great.
Unconsciousness is not complete when there is embarrassment, or any kind of reaction.
For instance, when someone is sitting with a snake under his armchair, one must warn him gently, but sometimes it is better not to give a warning .
The intuitives who construct daydreams which follow their fancy-with these intuitives who construct daydreams there develops, of necessity, an inferiority complex, and in order to make up for it more and more daydreams are necessary.
Naturally these intuitive spirits also have great charm and a certain power, because they seduce the others, whom it would pay to stay on the ground, but who listen to them and are seduced.
In reality hurt and danger are reinforced. On earth one must become substance.
(How can one remedy this?)
Simply by becoming conscious of it. By confirming the fact, by not avoiding it. One must of necessity acquire this understanding.
(But then one is unhappy. One should not have to be shown by someone else.)
One must not avoid unhappiness. One must accept suffering; it is a great teacher.
(But happiness too! I don’t think that I avoid unhappiness and I have learned much by observing my suffering, but I have learned much from happiness, and I seek it.)
There, that’s the error, one must not seek happiness. The happiness that one seeks is a usurped one.
Organic happiness, the bliss that comes from the center of the earth, that alone is fruitful and that simply comes.
Sometimes it surges from the deepest suffering.
Let me quote Nietzsche’s verses, who in the greatest depth of his suffering cries suddenly: “The world, has it become perfect?” such bliss did he feel.
One must not seek happiness, one must not avoid suffering.
When one distances oneself too much from suffering one loses depth, and happiness comes from depth.
Intuitives don’t have substance; they have inventiveness, imagination. They don’t complete anything. It is necessary for them to acquire this faculty.
(I don’t want to become too wise. Haven’t you ever been afraid of becoming too wise?)
Not me. I have always desired it.
You-you talk about something rigid and austere.
But austerity goes with an artificial notion of wisdom. The wiser one is, the happier one is.
Wisdom, that’s a gift of nature. It’s joyous-laughter. Chinese bellies-it’s the art of living. Wisdom comes from folly.
When one is wise one loves everything, but in moderation.
One finds that the extremes are too costly. It’s the same line, one finds oneself on the same line, but one does not go too far, because excesses must be paid for.
Austerity is also in the realm of nature-the forests, the mountains-but without insistence, nature never insists on its qualities; and to do this means, in fact, to lose the quality of one’s quality. It no longer is nature, no longer natural.
One insists on one’s qualities because, at that moment, one is identified with one’s quality.
One believes that one is “that” Let flow that which emanates from you without insisting, without purpose–otherwise one has a dissatisfaction with oneself.
(What did you want to tell me the other day when you said: “You are too innocent to have an inferiority complex”? Is it this?)
No, not really. It’s more complicated than that. “Innocent” comes from the root “nocif,” noxious.
You are not noxious, you are not damaged, you are not gnawed, and because one is not injured, one does not injure.
We live but a very short time, one must keep this in mind.
The world is already not that of my father, and the world of my children is very different.
In the world of my father, Christian truth was the::absolute truth. Now religion is a legend. In the old days one did not surmise this problem.
One must necessarily live in this world, now. God, that’s man’s weakness.
Your weakness is always your greatest strength. We cannot resist our will to live. We make a field of action, we give in to a will that is not ours, “something pushes me.”
You are French, I am Swiss.
I am obliged, like my country, to develop myself in a vertical dimension. In a vaster country one can develop oneself horizontally.
If I had been born in America, I’d have covered miles.
To fulfill the present moment . . . but the present flows out of the past, and the future will flow out of it. So for the fullness of the present one must not forget the past and the future . One has no understanding of the present if one has no knowledge of the past and of the future .
Not to preach, to avoid anything that one could call a sermon, or self-righteousness.
But one must not insist on one’s weakness, one makes weakness weaker by demonstrating it.
I speak in such a way that the other can say, “He accuses himself.”
To ring indirectly; if it resonates in the other, fine. If I make it ring, then it’s bad.
It is of no importance whether evil is here or there, but one can deal only with the evil in oneself, because it is within one’s reach, elsewhere one trespasses.
There are people who are gratified by the crimes of others; I am not.
One wants to look for the guilty one and one loses track of one’s own fault.
There is a desperate determination not to enter one’s own domain, to accuse another if one wants to avoid the fault in oneself.
One must not be glad that another has committed the fault because that is a trap into which one can fall. In saying, “There, it’s him!” I feel free of guilt.
One wants to correct, to remedy evil. Everyone can correct his own evil, but not evil elsewhere.
Through the sermon one deprecates one’s fault, one’s sin.
It is part of our wholeness to have a shadow.
Nothing satisfies our thirst but our wholeness; it is foolishness to be glad that another is guilty. One is also guilty.
One finds that the right time comes when one is ready.
When one is born to be something, one must become it. The unused libido acts in an autonomous way.
1950
On a train a fantasy so absorbed me that I did not read the book I had along: a man was about to drown, he was floundering. I arrive at home and learn that at that same moment my grandson almost drowned.
An English girl of the nobility, titled, is born in India. Wealthy parents.
Her aya (nanny) takes full charge of her and she is nourished morally by Asia-tales, legends, atmosphere, plus the influence of the land where she is born.
Then she is sent to France to an aristocratic boarding school. She becomes unbalanced, dissociated, cannot live, cannot adapt.
She does not want to acknowledge to herself that she has the background of an Asian peasant.
She comes to see me and makes no progress. Of her dreams I cannot manage to understand a good third.
I tell her: “Go see someone else, I cannot … ” “No,” says she, “at least you listen to me. I can talk to you. With the others I don’t even have that.” “Good, let’s cry and continue.”
She arrives one day: “I have dreamt of a golden scarab.”
At that precise moment something knocks on my windowpane. The noise attracts my attention, I turn around.
Against the glass there is a golden scarab, that is its name. I pick it up and put it on her knees. “See!” Coincidence, synchronicity, which principle?
When one has neglected a feeling (this concerns a woman), an animus attack sets in.
One of my clients suffered a formidable animus attack.
On the way over she noticed some nice strawberries in a basket and wanted to buy some for me. But she gave herself a thousand reasons not to do it.
She arrived here in a state of regression.
When you have repressed, neglected, contradicted your feeling it works like a time bomb. When you think that it is a real feeling, you, must never neglect it.
1951 The alchemists had no psychological language; they had to use symbols. Gold is the Self.
It’s the most precious quaternity, it’s the natural division of the circle. These are the four functions.
Honey? All the sweetness of the earth which one draws from the flowers . If one knows that one is stupid, one can be nice and sweet; tolerance saves energy.
(Jung has sculpted on a piece of wood an image of the collective unconscious. He tells me about it.)
My hands were guided by vague impressions, vague thoughts , to which I could not give greater definition. I took a piece of wood and started to carve it.
That comes from the unconscious. Give your hands a chance somewhere where one fathoms this language, somewhere where these things are understood .
1953
(Why did you tell me that having a lot of money can bring about a feeling of inferiority?)
You lose your security. You have acquired a false security, and it is this false security on which you live that causes your feeling of inferiority.
One lives wrapped in cotton, protected from the cold and the heat . It is not good never to be cold or hot .
Very few people do anything with money, they are paralyzed.
A famous composer had a friend, a patron, who had given him a beautiful villa and had guaranteed him an income and an opulent life.
The composer composed nothing anymore.
After some time he comes to see me. “I am obsessed by a dream: I have received a mortal wound, I bleed profusely and nothing can stop the hemorrhage.”
I counsel him: “You have become too rich, give a part away.” Violent denials.
Sometime later the patron stops a part of his contributions.
A great shock for the composer. Six months later he had composed a very good opera.
(I have an impression that I know my shadow.)
The shadow is something very evasive. I don’t know mine. I study it by the reaction of those around me. We depend on the reflection of the mirror of our entourage. When it is not good, self-criticism is in order.
Every time that you make substantial progress, you lose a set of your relationships.
All my colleagues thought that I would enter internal medicine.
When I became a psychiatrist, several drifted away from me.
When I chose mental illness, still others departed.
When I practiced psychoanalysis, new defections. When I first approached Freud .. . when I broke with Freud . . .
It is very difficult to do things for oneself; it is nor stimulating enough.
Myself, when I am not forced by the suffering of another .. . It is important for others that you are in a good state; it is very important to know this .
One is effective only when one loves people. One can’t do anything when one does not participate.
And if you make them participate in your substance, then you give them something.
A woman thinks almost always in terms of relationships. The anima can construct illusions of relationship: one builds bridges where there aren’t any.
The anima makes demands and thinks that the fault lies on the other side. A man doesn’t ask himself whether the fault is his, because he does not realize that relationship means exchange. He demands that the other should give to him.
When he finds the one who is to blame, he gives up his responsibility. But he does not realize what one loses when one does not recognize one’s fault. By the same token, if one is truly just, one loses one’s guiltiness.
Everything I am telling you here you must find out for yourself. Man is the last half hour of creation .
When I was in Africa, I bad, one day, a sensation of what it was like, the world of long ago: there was nothing, not a sound, the great silence before the advent of man.
One must realize that our consciousness needs to be better developed; too many things happen that need to be conscious.
Insofar as you become more conscious, you carry on your biological task, the task of creation, through the increase in your consciousness.
Here is perhaps the secret of your youth, your freshness. Even if the faculties of the body begin to wither, you continue to fulfill your biological task, which is your purpose.
If you no longer understand consciously, you petrify in a bed of concrete. You don’t fulfill your biological purpose , and that is petrification.
1954
(Jung bad been ill. He was rather tired.)
When I know that I have a day when I won’t see anybody, that is so restful.
When the body becomes weak, one sees less, one hears less. One no longer hears the song of the birds.
(There are hearing aids.)
But that is a mechanical voice, that belongs to the apparatus, that is no longer the real thing, one detaches oneself from reality. Nevertheless the erotic connection exists .
A certain lowering of the mental level allows one to perceive the psychic layer which makes for the movement, the pattern, the color of things .
(Color corresponds to frequencies, to certain waves. One could say that colors are produced by man. We possess the faculty to produce colors . For instance, by taking mescaline, we produce colors of extraordinary beauty … )
No, in doing that you paralyze the reality function. In reality there is the struggle with the weightiness of matter.
There you detach yourself from it, and that is flight. Never to detach oneself from reality, to accept it as it is.
Plato says that his philosophy is a preparation for death. Without death, there is no depth . It too is an adventure .
With women there is a snake in the spinal cord, it is in her spinal column. That frightens men …. Men are more naive; with women there is no real naiveté . Men are heavy, clumsy, but naive .
(November 8 , 1954 . He has an arrack of rheumatism since this morning. As I go towards his armchair he is reading a book and has just rime to get up. Barely at ease again, he notices that the light hits me in the eye and gets up to lower the blind …. You are working on the Transformations of the Libido . . .. )
I wrote this book around 1912. It was my first great work. At the end I told myself: but I don’t have a myth. After all, I am a Christian.
Jesus Christ? Is he for me the hero, the myth? I had to recognize that this was not so, that I did not have one.
This thought was very, very disagreeable for me. I did nor even want to dwell on it.
One day I had a dream. I was in a very luxurious room, Renaissance style.
The marble table was like emerald and through a gilded arch one could see the blue sky without a cloud.
My four children were with me, but not my wife. Suddenly a pretty dove, pure white, enters and comes to rest on the table … and. she becomes a little girl.
Then later she became a dove again and flew away.
I thought a lot about this dream.
The little girl resembled my oldest daughter, and I was trying conscientiously-I really held to that-to avoid too strong a bond with my oldest daughter.
But I thought: this has, nevertheless, to do with my daughter. That was my contact with the unconscious. I had not yet put into words the concept of “anima.”
There is a book (a letter?) of Plato which begins: We were three, Socrates, but where is the one of yesterday? That intrigued me.
Faust also speaks of three, and then four.
The Trinity, one knows, but who is the fourth?
There are three synoptic gospels, a fourth gnostic one. The apostles have three animals, plus an angel. Egypt: Horus and his three sons. The fourth has a head. Always
the fourth is apart.
Always three, and what is the fourth like?
Always, everywhere, this same symbolism.
There are three functions one can locate; the fourth is exceptional. One can perceive intuition only through the ways of the unconscious.
If you want to indicate wholeness, you make the circle with the cross inside. The cardinal points.
Four-that’s when you want to characterize something that is complete. In the four elements one again finds three plus one.
You can take them in sets of three: water, wind, fire are moving; earth is static.
If you take earth, water, wind, the setup is different, but always the process is 3 + 1.
In alchemy it takes three or four days to produce the philosopher’s stone. In the last decade one has worked with three principles of natural science: space, time, movement.
Where is the fourth?
No natural law is absolute, valid everywhere. It’s a statistic; one computes the average.
In the guise of fact science gives us an average . Exceptional facts are thus conjured away, the diversity of nature is no longer apparent, and that is wrong.
And if you apply this to mankind, it is also wrong. There is no normal man, not even two fingerprints are alike.
One must add the fourth principle: synchronicity.
The exceptional events which are reality and which science is not concerned with, since it speaks in averages .
(I believe that it is in this last decade that he has found , admitted , this principle of synchronicity.)
So I thought: the Trinity is light, but what is the fourth? What allows one to take notice of light? Darkness, the shadow.
The fourth, that’s the devil. He is the only metaphysical person outside of the gods. Without the fourth there is no meaning.
As long ago as the fourteenth century a Norman poet wrote a “pilgrimage of the soul,” where he has the following vision: God is sitting on a throne of gold, the Queen sits by his side on a brown crystal-no golden gleams here, the brown that’s the earth.
The bride is admitted to the Thalamus (the nuptial chamber); one knows what will follow-the child will be born.
(Hieros gamos?)
The virgin was the mediatrix. In a new prayer she becomes the Queen of Creation.
The next dogma which is already being discussed: the joint redemption. When she will have attained this rank, she will be as her son.
Let us say it’s ninety-five percent certain that she will be divine.
(What difference will that make to people?)
It is an expression of a change in outlook that goes together with psychology.
I have lived the myth of the fourth, the problem of evil. Evil is prevented by the figure of the Mother of God, the mother of sinners.
This is a step toward this idea of evil, it is a very radical allusion to the integration of the fourth. She is still, of course, of immaculate conception, that means that she is a goddess.
The incarnation must be repeated one more time, but this time not by a goddess, but by a real woman, on a plane a little below the metaphysical.
The integration of evil. Woman. The devil. A French proverb says something like this: That which the devil cannot, a woman will do.
Synchronicity is an anticipation.
The exceptions to the rule are rejected from the natural sciences, but in these events of “chance” there are significant coincidences.
In the street you see a person on the opposite sidewalk and you think: that’s so and so . You cross the street: it isn’t so and so.
But you find yourself face to face with him as soon as you have turned the corner and you say: by what chance have I run into you?
These anticipations, perceptions, coincidences are nor chance.
This proves that , under certain conditions, time, space and causality are relative to the psyche.
Our psyche can function as though space did not exist. The psyche can thus be independent of space, of time, and of causality. This explains the possibility of magic.
The archetype is outside of me as well as in me.
The psychoid archetype only resembles the psyche: animals, plants, the wind behave like us .
(That is what makes things universal.)
Makes them one. The fourth reduces the three to unity: the axiom of Marie, the alchemist.
(You speak of the integration of evil. It’s frightening, at times, the vulgar thoughts which occur to us-and I cite two or three examples. Does everybody have thoughts like that?)
“Vulgar”-that’s not saying enough. But people don’t want to admit it. They are in the mold of the “pale criminal” of whom Nietzsche speaks.
They are afraid of their crime. They have not understood that integrating one’s crime is to confront it.
To deny it serves only to destroy goodness, because if you don’t have the courage to be face to face with your crime, you cannot have any real goodness.
No wholeness without the fourth . No light without shadow. No heaven without hell.
One must have the courage of one’s qualities (qualities taken in their double sense-I make him repeat this two or three times) .
One must tell oneself: I am also that. It is painful, very painful.
Unless one is a cynic or unless one has undertaken to relativize one’s crimes and virtues.
When I hear talk about total love or honesty I want to . . . There is no such thing as perfect love, as complete honesty …. Nobody, nobody. And if one were to be thus, how could he stand the others?
He would need that which does not exist. Let us be humble. Let us realize that “it comes to us” … but people don’t want this.
Intelligence depends on moral capacities. When someone has reached his limits, one cannot make him understand more . . .. One must first admit one’s limits, recognize
them, and then, by working on it, one can pass beyond them.
(Why not before?)
Because when one is filled with one’s own ego, the truth does not count anymore. X will be stopped by his desirousness since he is unwilling to make sacrifices.
Why does X avoid others? Because his own limits are about to be reached, and the others know that which he does not understand.
If you are big, you admit the superiorities of others; if you are narrow and small you resent them.
It is difficult for superior people to have friends; they risk crushing them.
But if one isn’t oneself, what kind of friendship would that be!
1956
One must avoid exuberance, enthusiasm, optimism: one must be very cautious in order to avoid the presence of the devil.
The present is the product of the unconscious: unforeseeable.
Confused . . . You put forth an idea, one answers, who can foresee what will become of it?
Such are the contents of the unconscious.
“Who is near me is near the fire, who is far from me is far from the kingdom”
(apocryphal).
If I am brusque and disagreeable with you, it is the anima that I am wounding .
(Someone told me: I don’t understand this, Jung says that feeling is a rational function and that love is irrational?)
Love is irrational insofar as it is a passion, but often, at the end of one’s life, one sees that one’s feeling has been rational.
Numbers are autonomous. They had their life, their significance before men used them as instruments.
The mathematicians continue to use them as instruments, so in that instant they become dry. Before they had their proper significance.
l-is unity, the whole, singularity.
2-rhis is the two halves, the complementaries, the opposites which combine to form the whole; but by the same token there is an implication of doubt.
3-2 + 1, that’s the triangle. Father, mother and the result. It is a completeness, it is divinity.
4-wholeness. That includes evil, woman, but it is not finished.
5-that is where man comes in: two arms, two legs, the head.
Five members. For the primitives the head is but a member like the rest. The center point is in the heart or in the guts, not in the head.
6-Thar’s the two triangles, fire and water. Point upward: masculine. Point down: feminine. Tied together indissolubly.
If one pulls them apart, one has the square, the two bases confound each other.
Sign of Venus who reunites the two sexes as the goddess of love.
To put them one on top of the other.
The prime numbers are infinite. It has been discovered that an equation of the fifth degree has no possible solution . . .
(it is never finished?)
Yes, by death, luckily.
A psychic content can be simultaneously an idea and a •psychic event which represents this idea.
For instance: freedom can be an idea, and as long as it is an idea one can .conceive it. But ii is also a psychic event.
Philosophical concepts have an existence in themselves, but you don’t control it.
Take one, if you give a chance to this idea of one, what will this number cell us?
You can ask it for an account of itself. one is alone, one is singular.
Well outside of myself I am the singular being, indivisible, without age.
The sole being and the all, without anything else outside it, that’s God. I have joined myself together with my wife: two from one, the beginning of the world.
The number series begins with two.
I was one and I want to join together-I am two. If I want to become one again, then it’s three.
I cannot become one again, I must become new. Two is the generative principle. The Holy Ghost is a mother.
In Hebrew the word “RUAH” is simultaneously masculine and feminine.
Three is dynamic, coward a goal. To give co the other, to give co things the possibility to manifest themselves .
Children are in the collective unconscious until they acquire a small consciousness of their personality, until they say “I,” or “me,” or their name.
They are rooted in the collective unconscious and are uprooted from it by the flood of impressions from the outside. They know everything, but they lose the memory of it.
Symbols are the determinants of experience. Much of the attitude cowards earthly existence depends on them.
Matter is a field of probabilities, but nature consists also of the psychic given . . . a curious mixture of the material given and the psychic given.
It is this dissociation which is basic and the cause of all fundamental doubts.
Physical faces are at rimes inextricably mixed with psychic facts; at other times they are independent. These are entangled causal chains.
This is what produces synchronicity.
One is caused by the ocher and vice versa: the material , the physical, by the psychic, and the psychic by the physical.
In order to conceive of chis one muse free oneself from prejudices. Example of the person of whom one dreams or speaks and whom one sees appearing .
The psyche, which we have a tendency to take for a subjective face, is really a face that extends outside of us, outside of time, outside of space.
Children’s dreams which are a summary of what will be their life’s problem.
When an archetype is constellated in us, there is an opportunity for an experience.
The archetypes are the forms of the instincts. It is shown that these forms are in nature, because nature is psychic also.
It was not known that instinct has a specific form which is the archetype.
There are insects which are in symbiosis with certain planes. Why? How?
They behave as if they were made for each other. Type A ants cut the leaves of certain trees.
These trees produce a honey which accumulates in the crevices of that tree and which is the food of type B ants which destroy type A ants .
Circumstances can change the archetypal image.
It then becomes puzzling. For instance, functioning can be damaged by the image of the father or of the mother.
A prejudice is created. And in a certain situation where you should have been oriented or aided by the archetype, this does not function and you are nor with it.
That is where there is a difference between humans and animals. But a human being always has the faculty to learn.
When an insect cannot apply its instinct it is lost. It cannot reflect, or make deductions.
It is necessary to reflect, to meditate. A madman who is intelligent has a better chance of being healed than one who is not.
Intelligence-that’s not only the spirit, that’s the heart. “What loves will know.”
To distrust unilateral development. The spirit can be an isolated fact which is nor transmitted. If the spirit is nor transmitted by love, then it is possessed by power.
The power-spirit is a rule of tremendous weight.
“You must understand,” “you must believe,” that’s eternal damnation. A strong, independent spirit can walk alone.
It is hard for such a one to submit to love.
That is the unilateral nature of the creature. Eros fills a woman’s life, but love cannot fill a man’s life.
A man needs a lot of humility to acknowledge his love. But if he doesn’t acknowledge it, iris a wound that cannot be healed.
Man will transmit his spirit when he will have learned love and how to recognize it.
The one-sidedness of the creature is found again in woman, the woman who wants to dominate through her love; that’s the abuse of the power of love, her love then is not true love.
It’s that the devil is in everything, that one cannot suppress pride.
If Nerval had had the humility to recognize his love for Aurelia, then Aurelia would either have known how to be “sound”-in other words her animus would have understood what a real love consists of-or Gerard de Nerval would have been able to detach himself from it without loss.
For a woman marriage is the great business.
Until now notions of prestige and love were blended among young people: the female, quite naturally, chooses the winner of the two combatants.
But for a man this is not so. For him this is not the only thing in life.
A man does not marry a goddess-he would be gobbled up, dominated, he would never reach his goal. The woman would be unhappy to be a goddess instead of a woman.
It is only through knowledge of the shadow that one reaches the anima.
It’s the same for the animus. And as long as their shadow is not recognized, women are possessed by their animus. Anima, animus-these are possessions by personalities.
It’s the inferior function which is interesting. The differentiated function-there is nothing more one can do with it.
It is convenient for “communication,” as a “bridge,” but it is not interesting.
One cannot make anything from what is perfect. Whereas the imperfect has all the potential. Ex perfecto nihil fit.
But oh, the feeling of the intellectual! There is not enough love, because one must love the imperfect in order to love wholly.
Take the differentiated intellectual. He does not admit that there are problems without solution, he always believes that by working one can arrive at the solution.
But there are things that must remain in darkness, and who doesn’t know this loses out. Inferior thinking hangs on to things as they are.
To realize one’s inferior function is to realize one’s unconscious.
[Inferiority complex]
One wants to fill (all) space when one should accept one’s little space. One must know where one is. There are the realities. For instance, “I am Swiss,” “I am a captain in the army,” these are uncontestable facts .
I have perhaps made a few sick people better, that’s true, I have written books, but will they have lasting value? I have perhaps made errors . .. . I don’t rake up causes . .. . I am selfish . There are some people I hate. I don’t like anything modern-art or music. One can make an image which is quire banal , but also true.
I swallow myself, that belongs to self-realization. Sure you have a feeling, but your feeling is subjective. One accepts this, or also, the smallness of one’s friends.
Certain people keep up an exaggerated position, they rake up too much space. If one reduces it, one can fill it up, or even expand it-which is a great happiness .
X has a young soul. I have an old soul. At high school, at fifteen, my schoolmates called me the Patriarch Abraham.
That’s very important, an old soul. We always retain traces of an existence which is not earthly, a state of abundance, where we know everything .
Superior being in a stare of Samadhi. I have seen him in a chapel, as though asleep: when he will awaken, I will depart …. A superior being imagined for a purpose, a human existence.
(Will you recall that you were Dr. Jung, will you remember his hair, his feet, this cupboard, your wife, your children?)
That’s questionable. For a very short time, perhaps . . . when the biological bond is broken with youth.
(Compensatory function of the unconscious. So it’s all the same?)
No, because that which is unconscious is not at our disposition. In aging one keeps one’s passions. Space and rime are relative for the psyche.
Intelligence, that’s the nimble, lively, immediate, well-adapted working of all the functions . The result is a finished product.
Thought, the interlocutor, understands even if a term is unusual, but with intelligence of the heart (feeling), one understands the emotional values, those of a situation.
One can have slow intuition, nor nimble, without importance or value.
On the other hand, with an intelligent intuition, you perceive possibilities of great importance.
The same with sensation. You can be intelligent in your sensation and in your perception through sensations.
You can be accurate, or you can be slow to see paltry things. Intelligence is a quality of the whole person, in each aspect. In that sense, in this specific context, one can call it an impregnation.
For instance, you receive a problematic letter; you cannot quire grasp the terms; but a truly intelligent person reads between the lines. A slight smile, a gesture modify the text .
That is why a conversation is more complete than a thick volume.
Intelligence is a general quality, a quality that characterizes the whole being.
It’s like two machines, exactly alike, but one lacks oil. When one sees an animal do that which it has to do-a car watching a mouse and making an effective leap, an insect transporting a flower’s pollen-one could say that they are intelligent.
Suzanne Percheron: (One loves to meet someone who corresponds to one’s ideal, into whom one can pour one’s own profundity.)
Dr. Jung: But depth does not depend on a relationship, it is in us .
It can become apparent thanks to a relationship, bur one experiences it in oneself, without anyone, it’s irrational.
Your individuality, your Self, appears in the objective facts of your life.
An event can seem incredible, unacceptable, but if it happens to you, then it means that it is you .
After the use of mescaline one sees the perfect form because the perception of the specific is lacking. There is in us a factor which distributes color, quality.
Through mescaline our perception of the specific is annulled and you see as the creator sees, who does not notice the imperfections.
One then loses the sharpness of perception and one is detached from reality. You are not changed afterwards!
They have discovered transcendence-! strive to earn it. It is like in narco-analysis; they discover the secrets of the sick.
The important thing, however, is not that one discovers it, but that the sick person frees himself from his secret.
To free oneself from a secret is an act that has merit.
As for me, I am not curious to enter the secret chamber without permission. I want to obtain it by a moral effort.
That there be a transcendent world, one must draw the moral consequences from it.
When I came back from heaven-if it had been given to me to go there–the task would be too heavy . . ..I am often annoyed if I know too many things about my patient.
I try to forget them, I try not to know when a patient at times seeks to deceive me. I evaluate it, I tell myself: Oh! Oh! he doesn’t know me, he is careful.
That’s good. Lack of restraint, that’s heedless, that is not caring about the impression one makes.
There is a correspondence between the content of a projection and the being on whom it is projected. The receiver provokes a certain projection.
What must be involved, still deeper in the unconscious, is a factor that seems to have seen the “total plan” of the personality.
This factor is generally personified under the aspect of the opposite sex-animus-anima.
But one makes a lot of other projections, isn’t that so It is not always in the domain of love.
It is contrary to nature to commit incest, just as it is contrary to nature nor to yield to a great inclination.
1958
Suzanne Percheron: (We were coming back from a trip to Greece. M. said: “The Greeks did not have the notion of divinity. “)
Dr. Jung: They made themselves images which went with the ambiance of the place, ceremonies, processions. Greece is a place which geographically, topographically, corresponds to the gods.
Psyche’s fissure filled itself up at the moment when Christianity came.
Just as in 26 after Christ the temples in Egypt caved in for the first time.
Synchronicity The holy places are given places.
Chartres was built on the site of the cult of a Celtic earth goddess.
There was a fountain there. So many temples, churches were built on already hallowed ground. At Delphi, as at Eleusis, the real Greek cult was that of the mother goddess , the most ancient cult. ~C. G. Jung, Emma Jung and Toni Wolff – A Collection of Remembrances;Pages 51-70.
