Carl Jung "The Symbolic Life" CW 18 Quotations

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Carl Jung “The Symbolic Life” CW 18 Quotations

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Carl Jung: CW 18 “The Symbolic Life”

Dogmatic images, such as the Trinity, are archetypes which have become abstract ideas. But there are a number of mystical experiences inside the Church whose archetypal character is still visible. Therefore they sometimes contain a heretical or pagan element. Remember, for instance, St. Francis of Assisi. Only through the great diplomatic ability of Pope Boniface VIII could St. Francis be assimilated into the Church. You have only to think of his relation to animals to understand the difficulty. Animals, like the whole of Nature, were taboo to the Church. Yet there are sacred animals like the Lamb, the Dove, and, in the Early Church, the Fish, which are worshipped. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 222

Even the Pope, for all his infallibility, has to confess regularly, and not to a monsignor or a cardinal but to an ordinary priest. If the analyst does not keep in touch with his unconscious objectively, there is no guarantee whatever that the patient will not fall into the unconscious of the analyst. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 323

The individual is obliged by the collective demands to purchase his individuation at the cost of an equivalent work for the benefit of society. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 452.

Individuation and collectivity are a pair of opposites, two divergent destinies. They are related to one another by guilt. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 452.

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 normal to think about immortality, and abnormal not to do so or not to bother about it. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 310.

No rules can cope with the paradoxes of life. Moral law, like natural law, represents only one aspect of reality. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 625.

In reply to your kind enquiry about “rules of life,” I would like to remark that I have had so much to do with people that I have always endeavored to live by no rules as far as possible. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 625.

As I said, I have had quite a number of these Catholics—six.

I was quite proud to have so many, and I said to them, “Now, you see, what you tell me here, this is really serious.

You go now to your father-confessor and you confess, whether he understands or does not understand.

That is of no concern.

It must be told before God; and if you don’t do it, you are out of the Church, and then analysis begins, and then things will get hot, so you are much better off in the lap of the Church.”

So, you see, I brought these people back into the Church, with the result that the Pope himself gave me a private blessing for having taught certain important Catholics the right way of confessing.

For instance, there was a lady who played a very great role in the war.

She was very Catholic, and always in the summer she used to come to Switzerland to pass her summer holiday.

There is a famous monastery there with many monks, and she used to go to it for confession and spiritual advice.

Now, being an interesting person, she got a bit too interested in her father-confessor, and he got a bit too interested in her, and there was some conflict.

He was then removed to the Clausura, and she naturally collapsed, and she was advised to go to me.

So she came to me in full resistance against the authorities who had interfered, and I made her go back to her spiritual authorities and confess the whole situation.

And when she went back to Rome, where she lived, and where she had a confessor, he asked her, “Well, I know you from many years

ago: how is it that you now confess so freely?”

And she said she had learnt it from a doctor.

That is the story of how I got the Pope’s private blessing.

My attitude to these matters is that, as long as a patient is really a member of a church, he ought to be serious.

He ought to be really and sincerely a member of that church, and he should not go to a doctor to get his conflicts settled when he believes that he should do it with God. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 618-620

In this respect the “leaders,” with sure grasp, have understood what is so crucially lacking: an unquestionable spiritual and moral authority. The pope or the Church could say they are such an authority, but how many people believe it?

No doubt one ought to believe it, but doesn’t one always use this little word “ought” when one is forced to admit that one simply doesn’t know how the necessary remedy is to be brought about? ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1372

Consequently I do not permit myself the least judgment as to whether and to what extent it has pleased a metaphysical deity to reveal himself to the devout Jew as he was before the incarnation, to the Church Fathers as the Trinity, to the Protestants as the one and only Saviour without co-redemptrix, and to the present Pope as a Saviour with co-redemptrix.

Nor should one doubt that the devotees of other faiths, including Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and so on, have the same living relationship to “God,” or to Nirvana and Tao, as Buber has to the God-concept peculiar to himself. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1507

The Assumption is at least an important step forward in Christian (?) symbolism.

This evolution will be completed when the dogma of the Co-Redemptrix is reached.

But the main problem will not be solved, although one pair of opposites (8 and 9) has been smuggled into the divine wholeness.

Thus the Catholic Church (in the person of the Pope) has at least seen fit to take the Marianic movement in the masses,

i.e., a psychological fact, so seriously that he did not hesitate to give up the time-hallowed principle of apostolic authority. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1607

There are indeed people who have read with horror the Pope’s Encyclical on Christian marriage, and yet must admit that for cavemen our so-called “Christian” marriage is a cultural step forward.

Although we are still far from having overcome our prehistoric mentality, which enjoys its most signal triumphs just in the sphere of sex, where man is made most vividly aware of his mammalian nature, certain ethical refinements have nevertheless crept in which permit anyone with ten to fifteen centuries of Christian education behind him to progress towards a slightly higher level. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1799

The “Invisibles” further assert that our world of consciousness and the “Beyond” together form a single cosmos, with the result that the dead are not in a different place from the living. ~CW 18, Page 315.

The communications of “spirits” are statements about the unconscious psyche, provided that they are really spontaneous and are not cooked up by the conscious mind. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 313.

The Christian-my Christian-knows no curse formulas; indeed he does not even sanction the cursing of the innocent fig-tree by the rabbi Jesus” ~Carl Jung, CW 18, §1468.

Our psychology is a science . . . Plenty of unqualified persons are sure to push their way in and commit the greatest follies . . . Our aim is simply and solely scientific knowledge . . . If religion and morality are blown to pieces in the process, so much the worse for them . . . Knowledge is a force of nature that goes its way irresistibly from inner necessity. ~Carl Jung; CW 18; Page 314.

Nobody is immune to a nationwide evil unless he is unshakably convinced of the danger of his own character being tainted by the same evil. Carl Jung, CW 18, para 1400.

One has to remind oneself again and again that in therapy it is more important for the patient to understand than for the analyst’s theoretical expectations to be satisfied. The patient’s resistance to the analyst is not necessarily wrong; it is rather a sign that something does not “click.” Either the patient is not yet at a point where he would be able to understand, or the interpretation does not fit. ~Carl Jung. CW 18, Page 61

Lack of conscious understanding does not mean that the dream has no effect at all. Even civilized man can occasionally observe that a dream which he cannot remember can slightly alter his mood for better or worse. Dreams can be “understood” to a certain extent in a subliminal way, and that is mostly how they work. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 52.

Dreams are as simple or as complicated as the dreamer is himself, only they are always a little bit ahead of the dreamer’s consciousness. I do not understand my own dreams any better than any of you, for they are always somewhat beyond my grasp and I have the same trouble with them as anyone who knows nothing about dream interpretation. Knowledge is no advantage when it is a matter of one’s own dreams. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 122

Never apply any theory, but always ask the patient how he feels about his dream images. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 123.

Because the European does not know his own unconscious, he does not understand the East and projects into it everything he fears and despises in himself. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1253.

[There is a] . . . continued and progressive divine incarnation. Thus man is received and integrated into the divine drama. He seems destined to play a decisive part in it; that is why he must receive the Holy Spirit. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para, 1551.

We cannot receive the Holy Spirit unless we have accepted our own individual life as Christ accepted his. Thus we become the “sons of god” fated to experience the conflict of the divine opposites, represented by the crucifixion. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para, 1551.

Man’s suffering does not derive from his sins but from the maker of his imperfections, the paradoxical God. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1681

I consider my contribution to psychology to be my subjective confession. It is my personal psychology, my prejudice that I see psychological facts as I do. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 275.

Never forget that in psychology the means by which you judge and observe the psyche is the psyche itself. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 277.

Carl Jung – The Portable Jung

The individual must now consolidate himself by cutting himself off from God and becoming wholly himself Thereby and at the same time he also separates himself from society: Outwardly he plunges into solitude, but inwardly into Hell, distance from God” ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1103.

Reason becomes unreason when separated from the heart, and a psychic life void of universal ideas sickens from undernourishment. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 311.

The righteous man is the instrument into which God enters in order to attain self-reflection and thus consciousness and rebirth as a divine child trusted to the care of adult man. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 739.

The serpent owes his existence to God and by no means to man. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 690.

Then our era will be a near replica of the first centuries a.d., when Caesar was the State and a god, and divine sacrifices were made to Caesar while the temples of the gods crumbled away. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 581.

Since history repeats itself and the spiral of evolution seemingly returns to the point where it took off, there is a possibility that mankind is approaching an epoch when enough will be said about things which are never what we wish them to be, and when the question will be raised why we were ever interested in a bad comedy. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 581.

Our concept of consciousness supposes thought to be in our most dignified head. But the Pueblo Indians derive consciousness from the intensity of feeling. Abstract thought does not exist for them. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 16.

These “centres” are the so-called chakras? and you not only find them in the teachings of yoga but can discover the same idea in old German alchemical books, which surely do not derive from a knowledge of yoga. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 16.

For modern psychology, ideas are entities, like animals and plants. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 742.

Sooner or later it will be found that nothing really new happens in history. There could be talk of something really novel only if the unimaginable happened : if reason, humanity and love won a lasting victory. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1356.

The essence of culture is continuity and conservation of the past; craving for novelty produces only anti-culture and ends in barbarism. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1344.

Human reality is made up of a thousand vulgarities. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1354.

A life of ease and security has convinced everyone of all the material joys, and has even compelled the spirit to devise new and better ways to material welfare, but it has never produced spirit. Probably only suffering, disillusion, and self-denial do that. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1346.

Most people need someone to confess to otherwise the basis of experience is not sufficiently real. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1811.

“Facts first and theories later is the keynote of Jung’s work. He is an empiricist first and last.” This view meets with my approval. ~Carl Jung, citing British Medical Journal (9 February 1952), CW 18, Page 664

When a man is in the wilderness, it is the darkness that brings the dreams ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 674

And you can be sure that the dream is your nearest friend; the dream is the friend of those who are not guided any more by the traditional truth and in consequence are isolated. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 674

We must never forget that Christ was an innovator and revolutionary, executed with criminals. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1539

The reformers and great religious geniuses were heretics. It is there that you find the footprints of the Holy Spirit, and no one asks for him or receives him without having to pay a high price. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1539

Why was that cruel immolation of the Son necessary if the anger of the “deus ultionum” is not hard to appease? One doesn’t notice much of the Father’s goodness and love during the tragic end of his Son. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1539

Suffering that is not understood is hard to bear, while on the other hand it is often astounding to see how much a person can endure when he understands the why and the wherefore. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1578

It is quite understandable that we should seek to hold the truth at arm’s length, because it seems impossible to give oneself up to a God who doesn’t even respect his own laws when he falls victim to one of his fits of rage or forgets his solemn oath. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1539

We take flight into the Christian collectivity where we can forget even the will of God, for in society we lose the feeling of personal responsibility and can swim with the current. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1539

His gods and demons have not disappeared at all; they have merely got new names. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 82

We find numberless images of God, but we cannot produce the original. There is no doubt in my mind that there is an original behind our images, but it is inaccessible. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1589

The important fact about consciousness is that nothing can be conscious without an ego to which it refers. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 18.

There is no reason whatsoever why you should or should not call the beyond-self Christ or Buddha or Purusha or Tao or Khidr or Tifereth. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1672

That gives peace, when people feel that they are living the symbolic life, that they are actors in the divine drama. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 630

A career, producing of children, are all maya compared with that one thing, that your life is meaningful. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 630

My intuition consisted in a sudden and most unexpected insight into the fact that my dream meant myself, my life and my world, my whole reality as against a theoretical structure erected by another, alien mind for reasons and purposes of its own. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 490

An analyst who cannot risk his authority will be sure to lose it. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1172

You can’t wrest people away from their fate, just as in medicine you cannot cure a patient if nature means him to die. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 291

Therefore our Lord himself is a healer; he is a doctor; he heals the sick and he deals with the troubles of the soul; and that is exactly what we call psychotherapy. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 370

The doctor has to cope with actual suffering for better or worse, and ultimately has nothing to rely on except the mystery of divine Providence. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1578

It seems to me to be the Holy Spirit’s task and charge to reconcile and unite the opposites in the human individual through a special development of the human soul. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1553

He who can risk himself wholly to it finds himself directly in the hands of God, and is there confronted with a situation which makes “simple faith” a vital necessity; in other words, the situation becomes so full of risk or overtly dangerous that the deepest instincts are aroused. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1539

The alchemists thought of their opus as a continuation and perfection of creation. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1631

The utterances of the heart— unlike those of the discriminating intellect—always relate to the whole. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1719

The heartstrings sing like an Aeolian harp only under the gentle breath of a mood, an intuition, which does not drown the song but listens. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1719

What the heart hears are the great, all-embracing things of life, the experiences which we do not arrange ourselves but which happen to us. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1719

What sets one man free is another man’s prison. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 163

But when we penetrate the depths of the soul and when we try to understand its mysterious life, we shall discern that death is not a meaningless end, the mere vanishing into nothingness—it is an accomplishment, a ripe fruit on the tree of life. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1705-7

Nor is death an abrupt extinction, but a goal that has been unconsciously lived and worked for during half a lifetime. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1705-7

But if we listen to the quieter voices of our deeper nature we become aware of the fact that soon after the middle of our life the soul begins its secret work, getting ready for the departure. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1705-7

Out of the turmoil and error of our life the one precious flower of the spirit begins to unfold, the four-petaled flower of the immortal light, and even if our mortal consciousness should not be aware of its secret operation, it nevertheless does its secret work of purification. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1705-7

It is my practical experience that psychological understanding immediately revivifies the essential Christian ideas and fills them with the breath of life. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1666

Suffering is not an illness; it is the normal counterpole to happlness. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 179

It is always possible that what lies in the darkness beyond our consciousness is totally different from anything the most daring speculation could imagine. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 617

The very numbers you use in counting are more than you take them for. They are at the same time mythological entities (for the Pythagoreans they were even divine), but you are certainly unaware of this when you use numbers for a practical purpose. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 461

It is the face of our own shadow that glowers at us across the iron curtain. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 85

This general point of view lifts the individual out of himself and connects him with humanity. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 116

If a man is capable of leading a responsible life himself, then he is also conscious of his duties to the community. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 56

Childlike faith, when it comes naturally, is certainly a charisma. But when “joyful faith” and “childlike trust” are instilled by religious education, they are no charisma but a gift of the ambiguous gods, because they can be manipulated only too easily and with greater effect by other “saviours” as well. ~Carl Jung, CW 18

What is the use of technological improvements when mankind must still tremble before those infantile tyrants, ridiculous yet terrible, in the style of Hitler? Figures like these owe their power only to the frightening immaturity of the man of today, and to his barbarous unconsciousness. Truly we can no longer afford to underestimate the importance of the psychic factor in world affairs. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 11

Suffering that is not understood is hard to bear, while on the other hand it is often astounding to see how much a person can endure when he understands the why and the wherefore. A philosophical or religious view of the world enables him to do this, and such views prove to be, at the very least, psychic methods of healing if not of salvation. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 692

The archetypes are the great decisive forces, they bring about the real events, and not our personal reasoning and practical intellect . . . The archetypal images decide the fate of man. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 183

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

Just as conscious contents can vanish into the unconscious, other contents can also arise from it. Besides a majority of mere recollections, really new thoughts and creative ideas can appear which have never been conscious before. They grow up from the dark depths like a lotus. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 37.

Rationalism and superstition are complementary. It is a psychological rule that the brighter the light, the blacker the shadow; in other words, the more rationalistic we are in our conscious minds, the more alive becomes the spectral world of the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, CW 18 Para 10

Nature commits no errors. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 95

The interpretation of dreams enriches consciousness to such an extent that it relearns the forgotten language of the instincts. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 52

Most people need someone to confess to, otherwise the basis of experience is not sufficiently real. They do not “hear” themselves, cannot contrast themselves with something different, and so they have no outside “control.” Everything flows inwards and is answered only by oneself, not by another. It makes an enormous difference whether I confess my guilt only to myself or to another person. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 17

There is no admonition to repentance unless the patient does it himself, no penance unless—as is almost the rule he has got himself in a thorough mess, and no absolution unless God has mercy on him. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 17

We cannot demand of our patients a faith which they reject because they do not understand it, or which does not suit them even though we may hold it ourselves. We have to rely on the curative powers inherent in the patient’s own nature, regardless of whether the ideas that emerge agree with any known creed or philosophy. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 664

In psychology it is very important that the doctor should not strive to heal at all costs. One has to be exceedingly careful not to impose one’s own will and conviction on the patient. You have to give him a certain amount of freedom. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 147

You can’t wrest people away from their fate, just as in medicine you cannot cure a patient if nature means him to die. Sometimes it is really a question whether you are allowed to rescue a man from the fate he must undergo for the sake of his further development. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 147

What are religions? Religions are psychotherapeutic systems. What are we doing, we psychotherapists? We are trying to heal the suffering of the human mind, of the human psyche or the human soul, and religions deal with the same problem. Therefore our Lord himself is a healer; he is a doctor; he heals the sick and he deals with the troubles of the soul; and that is exactly what we call psychotherapy. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 181

We have stripped all things of their mystery and numinosity: nothing is holy any longer. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 94

Only through our feebleness and incapacity are we linked up with the unconscious, with the lower world of the instincts and with our fellow beings. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 109

Brooding is a sterile activity which runs round in a circle, never reaching a sensible goal. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 16

Contradictory views are necessary for the evolution of any science, only they must not be set up in rigid opposition to each other but should strive for the earliest possible synthesis. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 639

Ultimate truth, if there be such a thing, demands the concert of many voices. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page xiv

The idea of an unconscious psyche has not yet gained undisputed currency, despite the existence of an overwhelming mass of empirical material which proves beyond all doubt that there can be no psychology of consciousness without a recognition of the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para ix

Fantasy is not a sickness but a natural and vital activity which helps the seeds of psychic development to grow. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para viii

It makes an enormous difference whether I confess my guilt only to myself or to another person. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 17

He is the man who plants a field and before the crop is ripe is off again to a new field. He has ploughed fields behind him and new hopes ahead all the time, and nothing comes off. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 33.

The people would never have been Deutsch taken in and carried away so completely if this figure had not been a reflected image of the collective hysteria Deutsch. Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1400 .

The immunity of the nation depends entirely upon the existence of a leading minority immune to the evil and capable of combating the powerful suggestive effect. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1400

When you are in the darkness you take the next thing, and that is a dream. And you can be sure that the dream is your nearest friend; the dream is the friend of those who are not guided any more by the traditional truth and in consequence are isolated. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 674.

The serpent owes his existence to God and by no means to man. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 690.

Since we are psychic beings and not entirely dependent upon space and time, we can easily understand the central importance of the resurrection idea: we are not completely subjected to the powers of annihilation because our psychic totality reaches beyond the barrier of space and time. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1572.

We do not know what an archetype is (i.e., consists of), since the nature of the psyche is inaccessible to us, but we know that archetypes exist and work. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 694.

The better we understand the archetype, the more we participate in its life and the more we realize its eternity or timelessness. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 695.

The utterances of the heart—unlike those of the discriminating intellect—always relate to the whole. The heartstrings sing like an Aeolian harp only to the gentle breath of a premonitory mood, which does not drown the song but listens. What the heart hears are the great things that span our whole lives, the experiences which we do nothing to arrange but which we ourselves suffer. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 9

We have stripped all things of their mystery and numinosity nothing is holy any longer. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 94

To find happiness in the spirit one must be possessed of a “spirit” to find happiness in. A life of ease and security has convinced everyone of all the material joys, and has even compelled the spirit to devise new and better ways to material welfare, but it has never produced spirit. Probably only suffering, disillusion, and self-denial do that. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 6

Because the European does not know his own unconscious, he does not understand the East and projects into it everything he fears and despises in himself. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 8

Without wishing it, we human beings are placed in situations in which the great “principles” entangle us in something, and God leaves it to us to find a way out. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 869

Besides a majority of mere recollections, really new thoughts and creative ideas can appear which have never been conscious before. They grow up from the dark depths like a lotus. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 37.

Our personal psychology is just a thin skin, a ripple on the ocean of collective psychology. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 183

Much may be said for Freud’s view as a scientific explanation of dream psychology. But I must dispute its completeness, for the psyche cannot be conceived merely in causal terms but requires also a final view. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 473

I am a neutral Swiss and even in my own country I am uninterested in politics, because I am convinced that 99 per cent of politics are mere symptoms and anything but a cure for social evils. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 564.

About 50 per cent of politics is definitely obnoxious inasmuch as it poisons the utterly incompetent mind of the masses. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 564.

The healthy man does not torture others-generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1354.

When I hear such questions, it always makes me think of the Rabbi who was asked how it could be that God often showed himself to people in the olden days but that nowadays one no longer saw him. The Rabbi, replied: “Nor is there anyone nowadays who could stoop so low” ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 600

We are so captivated by and entangled in our subjective consciousness that we have simply forgotten the age-old fact that God speaks chiefly through dreams and visions. The Buddhist discards the world of unconscious fantasies as “distractions” and useless illusions; the Christian puts his Church and his Bible between himself and his unconscious; and the rationalist intellectual does not yet know that his consciousness is not his total psyche, in spite of the fact that for more than seventy years the unconscious has been a basic scientific concept that is indispensable to any serious student of psychology ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 601

In any serious case the choice is limited by the kind of revealed image one has received. Yahweh and Allah are monads, the Christian God a triad (historically), the modern experience presumably a tetrad, the early Persian deity a dyad. In the East you have the dyadic monad Tao and the monadic Anthropos (purusha), Buddha, etc. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1611

I make a general distinction between “religion” and a “creed” for the sake of the layman, since it is chiefly he who reads my books and not the academic scholar. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1637

Dreams are very often anticipations of future alterations of consciousness. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 51.

Every conscious act or event thus has an unconscious aspect, just as every sense-perception has a subliminal aspect: for instance, sound below or above audibility, or light below or above visibility. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 186.

The unconscious is, as the collective psyche, the psychological representative of society. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 453.

In my humble opinion all this has very much to do with psychology. We have nothing to go by but these images. Without images you could not even speak of divine experiences. You would be completely inarticulate. You only could stammer “mana” and even that would be an image. Since it is a matter of an ineffable experience the image is indispensable. I would completely agree if you should say: God approaches man in the form of symbols. But we are far from knowing whether the symbol is correct or not ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1612

Perhaps in a more enlightened era a candidate for governmental office will have to have it certified by a psychiatric commission that he is not a bearer of psychic bacilli. How much this would have spared the world had it been done before 1933!” ~C.G. Jung, CW 18, par. 1378

If the whole is to change, the individual must change himself. Goodness is an individual gift and an individual acquisition. In the form of mass suggestion it is mere intoxication, which has never yet been counted a virtue. ~C.G. Jung, CW 18, par. 1378

Goodness is acquired only by the individual as his own achievement. No masses can do it for him. But evil needs masses for its genesis and continued existence. ~C.G. Jung, CW 18, par. 1378

The scientist knows that no epidemic can be sealed off by a cordon sanitaire unless the individual is prevented from breaking it. Nor can one hope for the cleanliness of a people unless the individual is induced to wash himself daily. ~C.G. Jung, CW 18, par. 1378

“The mastermen of the S.S. are all, when segregated each by himself, indescribably small and ugly. But the good man shines like a jewel that was lost in the Sahara.” ~C.G. Jung, CW 18, par. 1378

Whatever we fight about in the outside world is also a battle in our inner selves. For we must finally admit that mankind is not just an accumulation of individuals utterly different from one another, but possesses such a high degree of psychological collectivity that in comparison the individual appears merely as a slight variant. How shall we judge of this matter fairly if we cannot admit that it is also our own problem? Anyone who can admit this will first seek the solution in himself, and this in fact is the way all the great solutions begin. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 313

Modern psychology can affirm that for many people this problem arises in the second half of life, when the unconscious often makes itself felt in a very insistent way. The unconscious is the land of dreams, and according to the primitive view the land of dreams is also the land of the dead and of the ancestors. From all we know about it, the unconscious does in fact seem to be relatively independent of space and time, nor is there anything objectionable in the idea that consciousness is surrounded by the sea of the unconscious, just as this world is contained in “Orthos.” The unconscious is of unknown extent and is possibly of greater importance than consciousness. At any rate, the role which consciousness plays in the life of primitives and primates is insignificant compared with that of the unconscious. The events in our modern world, as we see humanity blindly staggering from one catastrophe to the next, are not calculated to strengthen anyone’s belief in the value of consciousness and the freedom of the will. Consciousness should of course be of supreme importance, for it is the only guarantee of freedom and alone makes it possible for us to avoid disaster. But this, it seems, must remain for the present a pious hope. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 754

At a time when all available energy is spent in the investigation of nature, very little attention is paid to the essence of man, which is his psyche, although many researches are made into its conscious functions. But the really unknown part, which produces symbols, is still virtually unexplored. We receive signals from it every night, yet deciphering these communications seems to be such an odious task that very few people in the whole civilized world can be bothered with it. Man’s greatest instrument, his psyche, is little thought of, if not actually mistrusted and despised. “It’s only psychological” too often means: it is nothing. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 102

Dogmas are spiritual structures of supreme beauty, and they possess a wonderful meaning which I have sought to fathom in my fashion. Compared with them our scientific endeavours to devise models of the objective psyche are unsightly in the extreme. They are bound to earth and reality, full of contradictions, logically and aesthetically unsatisfying. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 663

The activity of the collective unconscious manifests itself not only in compensatory effects in the lives of individuals, but also in the mutation of dominant ideas in the course of the centuries. This can be seen most clearly in religion, and, to a lesser extent, in the various philosophical, social, and political ideologies. It appears in most dangerous form in the sudden rise and spread of psychic epidemics, as for instance in the witch hunts in Germany at the end of the fourteenth century, or in the social and political utopias of the twentieth century. How far the collective unconscious may be considered the efficient cause of such movements, or merely their material cause, is a question for ethnologists and psychologists to decide; but certain experiences in the field of individual psychology indicate the possibility of a spontaneous activity of archetypes. These experiences usually concern individuals in the second half of life, when it not infrequently happens that drastic changes of outlook are thrust upon them by the unconscious as a result of some defect in their conscious attitude. While the activity of the personal unconscious is confined to compensatory changes in the personal sphere, the changes effected by the collective unconscious have a collective aspect: they alter our view of the world, and, like a contagion, infect our fellow men. (Hence the astonishing effects of certain psychopaths on society!) ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1161

The great events of world history are, at bottom, profoundly unimportant. In the last analysis, the essential thing is the life of the individual. This alone makes history, here alone do the great transformations first take place, and the whole future, the whole history of the world, ultimately spring as a gigantic summation from these hidden sources in individuals .In our most private and most subjective lives, we are not only the passive witnesses of our age, and its sufferers, but also its makers. We make our own epoch. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1400.

One’s contemporaries are always dense and never understand that what appears to them unseemly ebullience comes less from personal temperament than from the still unknown wellsprings of a new age. How people looked askance at Nietzsche’s volcanic emotion, and how long he will be spoken of in times to come! Even Paracelsus has now been gratefully disinterred after four hundred years in an attempt to resuscitate him in modern dress. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 4

We must be able to let things happen in the psyche. For us, this is an art of which most people know nothing. Consciousness is forever interfering, helping, correcting, and negating, never leaving the psychic processes to grow in peace. It would be simple enough, if only simplicity were not the most difficult of all things. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 20

The fundamental error persists in the public that there are definite answers, “solutions,” or views which need only be uttered in order to spread the necessary light. But the most beautiful truth—as history has shown a thousand times over—is no use at all unless it has become the innermost experience and possession of the individual. Every unequivocal, so-called “clear” answer always remains stuck in the head, but only very rarely does it penetrate to the heart. The needful thing is not to know the truth but to experience it. Not to have an intellectual conception of things, but to find our way to the inner, and perhaps wordless, irrational experience—that is the great problem. Nothing is more fruitless than talking of how things must or should be, and nothing is more important than finding the way to these far-off goals. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 7

If you take a typical intellectual who is terribly afraid of falling in love, you will think his fear very foolish. But he is most probably right, because he will very likely make foolish nonsense when he falls in love. He will be caught most certainly, because his feeling only reacts to an archaic or to a dangerous type of woman. This is why many intellectuals are inclined to marry beneath them. They are caught by the landlady perhaps, or by the cook, because they are unaware of their archaic feeling through which they get caught. But they are right to be afraid, because their undoing will be in their feeling. Nobody can attack them in their intellect. There they are strong and can stand alone, but in their feelings they can be influenced, they can be caught, they can be cheated, and they know it. Therefore never force a man into his feeling when he is an intellectual. He controls it with an iron hand because it is very dangerous. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 20

Although we are still far from having overcome our primitive mentality, which enjoys its most signal triumphs just in the sphere of sex where man is made most vividly aware of his mammalian nature, certain ethical refinements have nevertheless crept in which permit anyone with ten to fifteen centuries of Christian education behind him to progress towards a slightly higher level. On this level the spirit—from the biological an incomprehensible psychic phenomenon—plays a not unimportant role psychologically. It had a weighty word to say on the subject of Christian marriage and it still participates vigorously in the discussion whenever marriage is doubted and depreciated. It appears in a negative capacity as counsel for the instincts, and in a positive one as the defender of human dignity. Small wonder, then, that a wild and confusing conflict breaks out between man as an instinctual creature of nature and man as a spiritual and cultural being. The worst thing about it is that the one is forever trying violently to suppress the other in order to bring about a so-called harmonious solution of the conflict. Unfortunately, too many people still believe in this procedure, which is all-powerful in politics; there are only a few here and there who condemn it as barbaric and would like to set up in its place a just compromise whereby each side of man’s nature is given a hearing. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para xii

Why is it that we are especially interested in psychology just now? The answer is that everyone is in desperate need of it. Humanity seems to have reached a point where the concepts of the past are no longer adequate, and we begin to realize that our nearest and dearest are actually strangers to us, whose language we no longer understand. It is beginning to dawn on us that the people living on the other side of the mountain are not made up exclusively of red-headed devils who are responsible for all the evil on this side of the mountain. A little of this uneasy suspicion has filtered through into the relations between the sexes; not everyone is utterly convinced that everything good is in “me” and everything evil in “you.” Already we can find super-moderns who ask themselves in all seriousness whether there may not be something wrong with us, whether perhaps we are too unconscious, too antiquated, and whether this may not be the reason why when confronted with difficulties in sexual relationships we still continue to employ with disastrous results the methods of the Middle Ages if not those of the caveman. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para xi

Our personal psychology is just a thin skin, a ripple on the ocean of collective psychology. The powerful factor, the factor which changes our whole life, which changes the surface of our known world, which makes history, is collective psychology, and collective psychology moves according to laws entirely different from those of our consciousness. The archetypes are the great decisive forces, they bring about the real events, and not our personal reasoning and practical intellect . . . The archetypal images decide the fate of man. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 183

International relations turned into the most exaggerated nationalism, and the very God of the earth, the ultima ratio of all things worldly—money—developed a more and more fictitious character never dreamt of before. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1306

There is no psychology yet of such infinitely complex matters as economics or politics. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1307

I don’t consider myself competent to deal with the ultimate meaning of our world crisis. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1307

You call a certain phenomenon a symptom when it is obvious that it does not function as a logical means to an end but rather stands out as a mere result of chiefly causal conditions without any obvious purposiveness. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1309

Thus the yellow colour of the skin in a case of jaundice is a phenomenon with no purposiveness and we therefore call it a symptom, as contrasted with the war-paint of a Red Indian which is a purposive part of the war ceremonial. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1309

The Quotable Jung

The whole of a nation never reacts like a normal modern individual, but always like a primitive group being. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para

Man in the group is always unreasonable, irresponsible, emotional, erratic, and unreliable. Crimes the individual alone could never stand are freely committed by the group being. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para

The State is the psychological mirror-image of the democracy monster. As the nation always rises as one man, the State is just as good as one man. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para

It, the State, is not like a Roman Caesar, enslaving prisoners of war on the lower strata of the population; it squeezes its contributions out of the most vital and most gifted individuals of its domain, making slaves of them for its own wasteful devices. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para

It [The State] does not know that energy only works when accumulated. Its energy is money. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para

It seems that “democracy” was a suitable name only in the very youth of the State-ghost. In order to support its boundless ambitions two brand-new “isms” had to be invented: Socialism and Communism. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para

Money value is fast becoming a fiction guaranteed by the State. Money becomes paper and everybody convinces everybody else that the little scraps are worth something because the State says so. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para

As far back as 1918 I published a paper in which I called the attention of my contemporaries to an astounding development in the German edition of the collective unconscious. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para

I had caught hold of certain collective dreams of Germans which convinced me that they portrayed the beginning of a national regression analogous to the regression of a frightened and helpless individual, becoming first infantile and then primitive or archaic. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para

I saw Nietzsche’s “blond beast” looming up, with all that it implies. I felt sure that Christianity would be challenged and that the Jews would be taken to account. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para

Germany was the first country to experience the miracles worked by democracy’s ghost, the State. She saw her money becoming elastic and expanding to astronomical proportions and then evaporating altogether. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para

The whole educated middle class was utterly ruined, but the State was on top, putting on more and more of the “-istic” rouge as war-paint. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para

Through Communism in Russia, through National Socialism in Germany, through Fascism in Italy, the State became all-powerful and claimed its slaves body and soul. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para

Democracy became its own mirror-image, its own ghost, while the ghost became appallingly real, an all-embracing mystical presence and personality that usurped the throne a pious theocratic Christianity had hoped God would take. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para

The old totalitarian claim of the Civitas Dei is now voiced by the State: one sheep as good as another and the whole herd crowded together, guarded by plain-clothed and uniformed wolf-dogs, utterly deprived of all the rights which the man on the island who called himself a democracy had dreamt of. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para

And a new miracle happened. Out of nowhere certain men came, and each of them said like Louis XIV, “L’etat c’est moi.” ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para

But he comes from Braunau, a little town that has already produced two famous mediums—the Schneider brothers. (Harry Price has written a book about one of them.) Hitler is presumably the third and the most efficient medium from Braunau. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para

When the State-spirit speaks through him, he sends forth a voice of thunder and his word is so powerful that it sweeps together crowds of millions like fallen autumn leaves. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para

But if you carefully study what President Roosevelt is up to and what the famous N.R.A. meant to the world of American commerce and industry, then you get a certain idea of how near the great State in America is to becoming Roosevelt’s incarnation. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para

Just as Christianity had a cross to symbolize its essential teaching, so Hitler has a swastika, a symbol as old and widespread as the cross. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1328

And just as it was a star over Bethlehem that announced the incarnation of God, so Russia has a red star, and instead of the Dove and the Lamb a hammer and sickle, and instead of the sacred body a place of pilgrimage with the mummy of the first witness. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1328

Hitler’s picture has been erected upon Christian altars. There are people who confess on their tombstones that they died in peace since their eyes had beheld not the Lord but the Fuhrer. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1329

You find in neo-paganism the most beautiful Wotanistic symbolism, Indo-germanic speculation, and so on. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1329

In North Germany there is a sect that worships Christ in the form of a rider on a white horse. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1329

It does not go as far as collective hallucinations, though the waves of enthusiasm and even ecstasy are running high. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1329

Nations in a condition of collective misery behave like neurotic or even psychotic individuals. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1330

It is usually the doctor treating a patient who unwittingly assumes the role of the projected figure. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1330

By transference the doctor appears in the guise of the father, for instance, as that personality who symbolizes superior power and intelligence, a guarantee of security and a protection against overwhelming dangers. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1330

In Hindu literature you also find the terms padma (lotus) and chakra, meaning the flowerlike centres of different localizations of consciousness. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1331

In Tantrism and Lamaism it is used as an instrument of concentration and as a means of uniting the individual consciousness, the human ego-personality, with the superior divine personality of the non-ego, i.e., of the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1332

Mandalas often have the character of rotating figures. One such figure is the swastika. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1332

When Nietzsche wrote his prophetic masterpiece, Thus Spake Zarathustra, he certainly had not the faintest notion that the superman he had created out of his personal misery and inefficiency would become a prophetic anticipation of a Fuhrer or Duce. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1333

Hitler and Mussolini are more or less ordinary human beings, but ones who, curiously enough, assume that they themselves know what to do in a situation which practically nobody understands. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1333

They [Hitler & Mussolini] seem to have the superhuman courage or the equally superhuman recklessness to shoulder a responsibility which apparently nobody else is willing or able to carry. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1333

Only a superman could be entrusted with faculties that are equal to the difficulties of the actual situation. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1333

But we know that mystical experience as well as identification with an archetypal figure lend almost superhuman force to the ordinary man. Not in vain do the Germans call their Fuhrer “our Joan of Arc.” ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1333

I am told that Hitler locked himself in his room for three days and nights when his whole staff beseeched him not to leave the League of Nations. When he appeared again he said without any explanation, “Gentlemen, Germany must leave the League.” ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1333

Hitler’s unconscious seems to be female. Mussolini’s Latin and very masculine temperament does not allow a comparison with Hitler. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1334

As an Italian he [Mussolini] is imbued with Roman history, and indeed in every gesture he betrays his identity with the Caesar. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1334

It is most characteristic what rumour has to say about him. I am told—I don’t know whether there is any truth in it or not—that not very long ago he [Mussolini] appeared at a reception in the Roman toga and the golden laurel wreath of the Caesar, creating a panic that could only be hushed up by the most drastic measures. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1334

Gossip is surely a bad thing, but I confess I always find it interesting because it is often the only means of getting information about a public figure. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1334

Gossip does not need to be true in order to be of value. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1334

Then if it [Gossip] gives an entirely twisted picture of a man, it clearly shows the way in which his persona, that is his public appearance, functions. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1334

Most of the biography of a public figure consists of the persona’s history and often of very little individual truth. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1334

The problems of modern life are too urgent to remain the playthings of shortsighted partisans. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1335

The religions might indeed be considered as psychotherapeutic systems which assist our understanding of instinctual disturbances, for these are not a recent phenomenon but have existed from time immemorial. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 519

The psyche consists not only of the contents of consciousness, which derive from sensory impressions, but also of ideas apparently based on perceptions which have been modified in a peculiar way by preexistent and unconscious formative factors, i.e., by the archetypes. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 519

The psyche can therefore be said to consist of consciousness plus the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 519

This leads us to conclude that part of the psyche is explicable in terms of recent causes, but that another part reaches back into the deepest layers of our racial history. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 519

All religious and metaphysical concepts rest upon archetypal foundations, and, to the extent that we are able to explore them, we can cast at least a superficial glance behind the scenes of world history, and lift a little the veil of mystery which hides the meaning of metaphysical ideas. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 519

Metaphysics is, as it were, a physics or physiology of the archetypes, and its dogmas formulate the insights that have been gained into the nature of these dominants—the unconscious leitmotifs that characterize the psychic happenings of a given epoch. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 519

The archetype is “metaphysical” because it transcends consciousness. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 519

Preoccupation with historical subjects may at first glance seem to be merely a physician’s personal hobby, but to the psychotherapist it is a necessary part of his mental equipment. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 518

In Italy it is the Fascio, and in Germany the S.S. is fast on the way to becoming something like a religious order of knights that is going to rule a colony of sixty million natives. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1336

In the history of the world there has never been a case where order was established with sweet reasonableness in a chaos. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1336

Chaos yields only to enforced order. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1336

In the dictator and his oligarchical hierarchy the State-ghost appears in the flesh. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1337

Disorder is destructive. Order is always a cage. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1338

Freedom is the prerogative of a minority and it is always based on the disadvantage of others. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1338

Switzerland, the oldest democracy in the world, calls herself a free country because no foreigner ever enjoyed a liberty to her disadvantage until America and Great Britain went off the gold standard. Since then we have felt like victims. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1338

If we are stumbling into an era of dictators, Caesars, and incarnated States, we have accomplished a cycle of two thousand years and the serpent has again met with its own tail. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1342

Even as Christianity challenged the Roman Imperium, enthroned ambitious Roman bishops as Pontifices Romani, and perpetuated the great Empire in the theocracy of the Church and the Holy Roman Empire, so the Duce has produced once more all the stage scenery of the Imperium which will soon reach from Ethiopia to the Pillars of Hercules as of old. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1328

Again it is Germany that gives us some notion of the underlying archetypal symbolism brought up by the eruption of the collective unconscious. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1329

The onslaught on Christianity is obvious; it would not even need corroboration through a neo-pagan movement incorporating three million people. This movement can only be compared with the archetypal material exhibited by a case of paranoid schizophrenia. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 576

This unconscious attempt plays a great role in the general personification of the State. It gives it its ghostlike quality and bestows upon it the faculty of incarnating itself in a human personality. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1331

The almost personal authority and apparent efficiency of the State are, in a sense, nothing else than the unconscious constellation of a superior instinctual personality which compensates the obvious inefficiency of the conscious ego-personality. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1330

The persona is never the true character; it is a composite of the individual’s behaviour and of the role attributed to him by the public. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1334

Since Socialism and Communism merely enhance the attributes of democracy, i.e., of a Constitution where there is a ruler without subjects and subjects without a ruler, they only serve to hollow out the meaning of Parliament, of government, of money, and of the so-called rights of the free citizen. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1334

Any human judgment, no matter how great its subjective” conviction, is liable to error, particularly judgments concerning transcendental subjects. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1584

It is our judgment that introduces the element of deception. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1584

The unconscious is neutral, rather like nature. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1586

It is the task of consciousness to select the right place where you are not too near and not too far from water; but the water is indispensable. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1586

A metaphysical being does not as a rule speak through the telephone to you; it usually communicates with man through the medium of the soul, in other words, our unconscious, or rather through its transcendental ‘psychoid” basis. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1586

Science is made by man, which does not mean that there are not occasionally acts of grace permitting transgression into realms beyond. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1591

I merely hold that metaphysics cannot be an object of science, which does not mean that numinous experiences do not happen frequently, particularly in the course of an analysis or in the life of a truly religious individual. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1591

Here Basil the Great would say, “Of course that is so, but all evil comes from man and not from God,” forgetting altogether that the serpent in Paradise was not made by man, and that Satan is one of the sons of God, prior to man. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1593

Even the God of the New Testament is still irascible and vengeful to such a degree that he needs the self-sacrifice of his son to quench his wrath. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1593

He is the Father or Creator of Satan as well as of Christ. Certainly if God the Father were nothing else than a loving Father, Christ’s cruel sacrificial death would be thoroughly superfluous. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1593

What Victor White writes about the assimilation of the shadow is not to be taken seriously. Being a Catholic priest he is bound hand and foot to the doctrine of his Church and has to defend every syllogism. . ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1594

Being a doctor I am never too certain about my moral judgments. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1594

What God is in himself nobody knows; at least I don’t. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1595

Only a thing that changes and evolves, lives, but static things mean spiritual death. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1595

I would completely agree if you should say: God approaches man in the form of symbols. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1612

The privatio boni cannot be compared to the quaternity, because it is not a revelation. On the contrary, it has all the earmarks of a “doctrine,” a philosophical invention. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1613

Of course I am pleading the cause of the thinking man, and, inasmuch as most people do not think, of a small minority. . ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1616

As I have said, it makes a great and vital difference to man whether or not he considers himself as the source of evil, while maintaining that all good stems from God. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1617

The dogma of the Virgin Birth does not abolish the fact that “God” in the form of the Holy Ghost is Christ’s father. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1619

Christ is on the contrary the innocent and blameless victim without the macula peccati, therefore not really a human being who has to live without the benefit of the Virgin Birth and is crucified in a thousand forms. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1620

Penitence or remorse follows the deviation from the superior will. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1627

Thus the Gnostics thought that Christ had cut off his shadow, and I have never heard that he embodies evil as Yahweh explicitly does. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1633

To be alone with God is highly suspect, and, mind you, it is, because the will of God can be terrible and can isolate you from your family and your friends and, if you are courageous or foolish enough, you may end up in the lunatic asylum. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1637

Nothing shields you better against the solitude and forlornness of the divine experience than community. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1637

The self has always been, and will be, your innermost centre and periphery, your scintilla and punctum solis. It is even biologically the archetype of order and—dynamically—the source of life. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1638

Yet without dualism there is no cognition at all, because discrimination is impossible. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1639

We cannot even conceive of a thing that is not a form of energy, and energy is inevitably based upon opposites. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1640

Jung has been given the title “Gnostic” which he has rejected. ~Reverend David Cox, CW 18, Para 1641

The designation of my “system” as “Gnostic” is an invention of my theological critics. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1642

I loved the Gnostics in spite of everything, because they recognized the necessity of some further raisonnement, entirely absent in the Christian cosmos. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1643

I have Gnosis so far as I have immediate experience, and my models are greatly helped by the representations collectives of all religions. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1643

The sacrificium intellectus is a sweet drug for man’s all-embracing spiritual laziness and inertia. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1643

Gnosis is characterized by the hypostatizing of psychological apperceptions, i.e., by the integration of archetypal contents beyond the revealed “truth” of the Gospels. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1647

The people who call me a Gnostic cannot understand that I am a psychologist, describing modes of psychic behaviour precisely like a biologist studying the instinctual activities of insects. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1647

The Catholic Church has almost succeeded in adding femininity to the masculine Trinity. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1657

As God lives in everybody in the form of the scintilla of the self, man could see his “daemonic,” i.e., ambivalent, nature in himself and thus he could understand how he is penetrated by God or how God incarnates in man. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1660

The bill of the Christian era is presented to us: we are living in a world rent in two from top to bottom; we are confronted with the H-bomb and we have to face our own shadows. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1661

We are threatened with universal genocide if we cannot work out the way of salvation by a symbolic death. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1661

I don’t presume to know what the psyche is; I only know that there is a psychic realm in which and from which such manifestations start. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1586

We find numberless images of God, but we cannot produce the original. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1589

Psychology to me i an honest science that recognizes its own boundaries, and I am not a philosopher or a theologian who believes in his ability to step beyond the epistemological barrier. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1591

I believe firmly in the intrinsic value of the human attempt to gain understanding, but I also recognize that the human mind cannot step beyond itself, although divine grace may and probably does allow at least glimpses into a transcendental order of things. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1589

In so far as the human mind and its necessities issue from the hands of the Creator, we must assume that moral judgment was provided by the same source. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1604

As I am not making a metaphysical judgment, I cannot help remarking that at least in our empirical world the opposites are inexorably at work and that, without them, this world would not exist. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1640

If man were positively the origin of all evil, he would possess a power equal or almost equal to that of the good, which is God. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1593

The self is not the ego, it symbolizes the totality of man and he is obviously not whole without God. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1624

“Many are called, but few are chosen” is an authentic logion and not characteristic of Gnosticism alone. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1641

For the patient’s mental health it is all-important that he gets some proper understanding of the numina the collective unconscious produces, and that he assigns the proper place to them. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1591

I must confess that I myself could find access to religion only through the psychological understanding of inner experiences, whereas traditional religious interpretations left me high and dry. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1643

It was only psychology that helped me to overcome the fatal impressions of my youth that everything untrue, even immoral, in our ordinary empirical world must be believed to be the eternal truth in religion. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1643

In spite of the fact that the Church long ago discouraged the idea of a quaternity, the fact remains that Church symbolism abounds in quaternity allusions. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1606

Protestantism is free to ignore the spiritual problems raised by our time, but it will remove itself from the battlefield and thereby lose its contact with life. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1608

Faith on the contrary—as it seems to me—maintains the conviction that the projection is a reality. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1635

Individuation is as much a fatality as a fulfillment. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 529

Being a natural and spontaneous symbol, the quaternity has everything to do with human psychology, while the trinitarian symbol (though equally spontaneous) has become cold, a remote abstraction. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1609

It makes an enormous practical difference whether your dominant idea of totality is three or four. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1610

Yahweh and Allah are monads, the Christian God a triad (historically), the modern experience presumably a tetrad, the early Persian deity a dyad. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1611

I don’t pretend to be able to explain the actual condition of the world, but it is plain to any unprejudiced mind that the forces of evil are dangerously near to a victory over the powers of good. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1593

One should listen to the inner voice attentively, intelligently and critically (Probate spiritus!), because the voice one hears is the influxus divinus consisting, as the Acts of John aptly state, of “right” and “left” streams, i.e., of opposites. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1662

If one depreciates the unconscious one blocks the channels through which the aqua gratiae flows, but one certainly does not incapacitate the devil by this method. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1586

It is sheer malevolence to accuse me of an atheistic attitude simply because I try to be honest and disciplined. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1589

If I should express a belief beyond that or should assert the existence of God, it would not only be superfluous and inefficient, it would show that I am not basing my opinion on facts. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1589

I am well satisfied with the fact that I know experiences which I cannot avoid calling numinous or divine. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1589

As the general manifestations of the unconscious are ambivalent or even ambiguous (“It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God,” Heb. 10:31), decision and discriminating judgment are all-important. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1588

As one habitually identifies the “psyche” with what one knows of it, it is assumed that one can call certain (supposed or believed) metaphysical entities non-psychic. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1649

It seems to me of paramount importance that Protestantism should integrate psychological experience, as for instance Jacob Boehme did. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1654

Inasmuch as out of evil good may come, and out of good evil, we do not know whether creation is ultimately good or a regrettable mistake and God’s suffering. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1654

If we seek genuine psychological understanding of the human being of our own time, we must know his spiritual history absolutely. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1833

The urgent therapeutic necessity of confronting the individual with his own dark side is a secular continuation of the Christian development of consciousness and leads to phenomena of assimilation similar to those found in Gnosticism, the Kabbala, and Hermetic philosophy. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1517

Behind the shadow, however, the deeper layers of the unconscious come forward, those which, so far as we are able to ascertain, consist of archetypal, sometimes instinctive, structures, so-called ‘patterns of behaviour.” ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1830

True “redemption” comes about only when he is led back to that deepest and innermost source of life which is generally called God. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1745

Jesus was the channel for a new and direct experience of God, and how little this depends on external conditions is amply demonstrated by the history of Christianity. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1745

In this sense, too, Judas would be his [Christ’s] dark brother, since in the story of the Temptation the devil of worldly power stepped up to Jesus in much the same way as Mara tempted the Buddha. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1747

Although I owe not a little to philosophy, and have benefited by the rigorous discipline of its methods of thought, I nevertheless feel in its presence that holy dread which is inborn in every observer of facts. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1730

We know that children often have dreams dealing with the unconfessed problems of their parents. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1804

From the Indian standpoint our psychology looks like a “dialectical” yoga. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1817

For the greatest enigma in the world, and the one that is closest to us, is man himself.

It is exceedingly probable that the psyche is analogous to the body and is capable of having as many diseases. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1777

We all need nourishment for our psyche. It is impossible to find such nourishment in urban tenements without a patch of green or a blossoming tree. We need a relationship with nature. Carl Jung, The Earth Has a Soul: The Nature Writings of C.G. Jung, p. 154-155

Understood as a psychological phenomenon, Ufos compensate our insecurity in this world. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 492

It is quite obvious that all human beings have father and mother complexes, and it therefore means nothing if we discern traces of a father or mother complex in a great work of art; just as little as would the discovery that Goethe had a liver and two kidneys like any other mortal. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1723

The supposed vacuum of a merely subjective psychic space becomes filled with objective figures, having wills of their own, and is seen to be a cosmos that conforms to law, and among these figures the ego takes its place in transfigured form. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1720

We also meet this phenomenon in alchemy, where a woman adept often plays the role of the soror mystica (Zosimos and Theosebeia, Nicolas Flamel and Peronelle, John Pordage and Jane Leade, and in the nineteenth century Mr. South and his daughter, Mrs. Atwood) ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1703

This is not a “scientific” book [Answer to Job] but a personal confrontation with the traditional Christian world view, occasioned by the impact of the new dogma of the Assumption. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 662

Although in human beings the archetype represents a collective and almost universal mode of action and reaction, its activity cannot as a rule be predicted; one never knows when an archetype will react, and which archetype it will be. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 1492

And before raising the cry that modern psychology destroys religious ideas by “psychologizing” them, we should reflect that it is just this psychology which is trying to renew the connection with the realities of the psyche, lest consciousness should flutter about rootlessly and helplessly in the void, a prey to every imaginable intellectualism. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 1495

One must be deeply and directly moved by the strangeness, one might almost say by the incomprehensibility, of the Eastern psyche. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1483

Knowledge of Eastern psychology provides the indispensable basis for a critique of Western psychology, as indeed for any objective understanding of it. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1483

Gnosticism is still an obscure affair and in need of explanation, despite the fact that sundry personages have already approached it from the most diverse angles and tried their hands at explanations with doubtful success. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1478

But the philologist or theologian who concerns himself with Gnosticism generally possesses not a shred of psychiatric knowledge, which must always be called upon in explaining extraordinary mental phenomena. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1479

The explanation of Gnostic ideas “in terms of themselves,” i.e., in terms of their historical foundations, is futile, for in that way they are reduced only to their less developed forestages but not understood in their actual significance. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 1479

The archetypal motifs of the unconscious are the psychic source of Gnostic ideas, of delusional ideas (especially of the paranoid schizophrenic forms), of symbol-formation in dreams, and of active imagination in the course of an analytical treatment of neurosis. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 1480

In the light of these reflections, I regret Dr. Quispel’s quotations from the Gnostics, that the “Autopator contained in himself all things, in [a state of] unconsciousness (iv ayvtoaria)” and that “The Father was devoid of consciousness (avevvorjros)” as a fundamental discovery for the psychology of Gnosticism. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 1481

As a Christian I have to share the burden of my brother’s wrongness, and that is most heavy when I do not know whether in the end he is not more right than I. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1466

I hold it to be immoral, in any case entirely unchristian, to put my brother in the wrong (i.e., to call him fool, ass, spiteful, obdurate, etc.) simply because I suppose myself to be in possession of the absolute truth. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1466

I hold all confessionalism to be completely unchristian. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1466

If possessed the absolute truth I could do nothing further than to press into my patient’s hand a book of devotion or confessional guidance, just what is no longer of any help to him. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 1467

Whoever talks in today’s world of an absolute and single truth is speaking in an obsolete dialect and not in any way in the language of mankind. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 1468

Christianity possesses good tidings from God, but no textbook of a dogma with claim to totality. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 1468

Since technology consists of certain procedures invented by man, it is not something that somehow lies outside the human sphere. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1404

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. Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1358

It is therefore in the highest degree desirable that a knowledge of psychology should spread so that men can understand the source of the supreme dangers that threaten them. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1358

Not by arming to the teeth, each for itself, can the nations defend themselves in the long run from the frightful catastrophes of modern war. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1358

But if you are faced with a good judge of men, he will extract your painful secrets from your trouser pocket with the greatest skill without your knowing it, and do it much better than was ever done by a psychodiagnostic method. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1459

I am no prophet, and I cannot predict the future of our society. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1460

Thanks to the mass media and the cheap sensationalism offered by the cinema, radio, and newspapers, and thousands of amusements of all kinds, life in the recent past has rapidly been approaching a condition that was not far removed from the hectic American tempo. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1343

All time-saving devices, amongst which we must count easier means of communication and other conveniences, do not, paradoxically enough, save time but merely cram our time so full that we have no time for anything. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1343

The essence of culture is continuity and conservation of the past; craving for novelty produces only anti-culture and ends in barbarism. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1343

Unfortunately our world, or perhaps the moral structure of man, is so constituted that no progress and no improvement are consistently good, since sooner or later the corresponding misuse will appear which turns the blessing into a curse. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1344

One has only to think of the spiritual devastation that has already been wrought by materialism, the invention of would-be intellectuals equipped with truly infantile arguments. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1345

To remove the ideal from the material to the spiritual world is a tricky business, because material happiness is something tangible (if ever it is attained), and the spirit an invisible thing which it is difficult to find or to demonstrate. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1346

An attainable sausage is as a rule more illuminating than a devotional exercise; in other words, to find happiness in the spirit one must be possessed of a “spirit” to find happiness in. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1346

A life of ease and security has convinced everyone of all the material joys, and has even compelled the spirit to devise new and better ways to material welfare, but it has never produced spirit. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1346

But at all times there are only very few who are convinced from the bottom of their hearts that material happiness is a danger to the spirit, and who are able to renounce the world for its sake. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1346

One man, because of his inner weakness, needs encouragement ; another, because of his inner assurance, needs the restraint of austerity. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1349

Austerity enforces simplicity, which is true happiness. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1349

But to live simply, without regret and bitterness, is a moral task which many people will find very hard. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1349

The community is not anything good in itself, as it gives countless weaklings a wonderful opportunity to hide behind each other and palm off their own incompetence on their fellows. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1352

Community at all costs, I fear, produces the flock of sheep that infallibly attracts the wolves. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1354

There could be talk of something really novel only if the unimaginable happened: if reason, humanity, and love won a lasting victory. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1356

About 50 per cent of politics is definitely obnoxious inasmuch as it poisons the utterly incompetent mind of the masses. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1301

We are on our guard against contagious diseases of the body, but we are exasperatingly careless when it comes to the even more dangerous collective diseases of the mind. . ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1301

Since technology consists of certain procedures invented by man, it is not something that somehow lies outside the human sphere. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1404

I am no prophet, and I cannot predict the future of our society. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1460

An attainable sausage is as a rule more illuminating than a devotional exercise; in other words, to find happiness in the spirit one must be pssessed of a “spirit” to find happiness in. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1346

One man, because of his inner weakness, needs encouragement; another, because of his inner assurance, needs the restraint of austerity. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1349

Austerity enforces simplicity, which is true happiness. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1349

But to live simply, without regret and bitterness, is a moral task which many people will find very hard. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1349

The community is not anything good in itself, as it gives countless weaklings a wonderful opportunity to hide behind each other and palm off their own incompetence on their fellows. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1352

Community at all costs, I fear, produces the flock of sheep that infallibly attracts the wolves. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1354

There could be talk of something really novel only if the unimaginable happened: if reason, humanity, and love won a lasting victory. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1356

About 50 per cent of politics is definitely obnoxious inasmuch as it poisons the utterly incompetent mind of the masses. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1301

We are on our guard against contagious diseases of the body, but we are exasperatingly careless when it comes to the even more dangerous collective diseases of the mind. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1301

It is a truism that there are never facts enough, but, on the other hand, there is only one human brain, which only too easily gets swamped by the boundless flood of material. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1296

Yet the primitive is far from being illogical and is just as far from being “animistic.” ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1297

The fundamental error persists in the public that there are definite answers, “solutions,” or views which need only be uttered in order to spread the necessary light. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1292

But the most beautiful truth—as history has shown a thousand times over-—is of no use at all unless it has become the innermost experience and possession of the individual. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1292

Not to have an intellectual conception of things, but to find our way to the inner, and perhaps wordless, irrational experience—that is the great problem. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1292

Most people know very well how things should be, but who can point the way to get there? ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1292

Absolute assertions belong to the realm of faith—or of immodesty. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1294

I owe my relations to China and to Richard Wilhelm simply and solely to certain psychological discoveries. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1286

As soon as the Romans, beginning with the campaigns of Pompey, made themselves the political masters of Asia Minor, Rome became inundated with Hellenistic-Asiatic syncretism. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1287

I do not know how much the spiritual and political decline of Spain and Portugal had to do with their conquest of the primitive South American continent, but the fact remains that the two countries which first established their rule in East Asia, namely Holland and England, were also the first to be thoroughly infected with theosophy. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1287

For instance, in dreams we think in very much the same way as the primitive thinks consciously. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1290

With primitives, waking life and dream life are less divided than with us—so little, in fact, that it is often difficult to find out whether what a primitive tells you was real or a dream. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1290

The psychological peculiarities of the Americans exhibit features that would be accessible to psychoanalysis, since they point to intense sexual repression. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1284

The motif of the anima is developed in its purest and most naive form in Rider Haggard. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1280

It is a symptom of profound unconsciousness that our scientific age has lost sight of the paramount importance of the psyche as a fundamental condition of human existence. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1278

What is the use of technological improvements when mankind must still tremble before those infantile tyrants, ridiculous yet terrible, in the style of Hitler? ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1278

I know of so many who, opening one of my books and, stumbling upon a number of Latin quotations, shut it with a bang, because Latin suggests history and therefore death and unreality. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1264

No matter how much we are of today, there has been a yesterday, which was just as real, just as human and warm, as the moment we call Now, which—alas—in a few hours will be a yesterday as dead as the first of January anno Domini 1300. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1266

The psyche is not only of today, it reaches right back to prehistoric ages. Has man really changed in ten thousand years? Have stags changed their antlers in this short lapse of time? ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1266

Instincts are the most conservative determinants of any kind of life. The mind is not born a tabula rasa. Like the body, it has its predetermined individual aptitudes: namely, patterns of behaviour. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1271

I have called the psychological manifestations of instinct “archetypes.” ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1271

A CONCORDANCE BY THORNTON LADD

Thus Communism is an archaic, highly insidious pattern of life which characterizes primitive social groups. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1272

The instinct to survive is aroused as a reaction against the tendency to mass suicide represented by the H-bomb and the underlying political schism of the world. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1274

Three of her symptoms, which all affected the respiratory activity, could be traced back to a trauma at the age of puberty, an attempted rape, when the full impact of the man’s body had compressed the thorax. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1045

Its [Wittel’s Book] motto is: “Human beings must live out their sexuality, otherwise their lives will be warped.” ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 926

We have to realize, quite dispassionately, that whatever we fight about in the outside world is also a battle in our inner selves. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 927

But anyone who has learnt to examine the background of his own thoughts and actions, and has acquired a lasting and salutary impression of the way our unconscious biological impulses warp our logic, will soon lose his delight in gladiatorial shows and public disputation, and will perform them in himself and with himself. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 928

Knowledge is a force of nature that goes its way irresistibly from inner necessity. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 929

Understanding is a terribly binding power, possibly a veritable soul murder when it levels out vitally important differences. ~Carl Jung, Schmid-Guisan Letters, Page 140

The core of the individual is a mystery of life, which dies when it is “grasped.” ~Carl Jung, Schmid-Guisan Letters, Pages 145-146

Stimulated by Breuer’s discovery of a psychological connection, Freud bridged this large gap in our knowledge by his method of psychanalysis, and he demonstrated that a determining psychological factor can be found for every symptom. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 945

By dint of his theory of psychological determination, Freud has become very important for psychiatry, especially for the elucidation of the symptoms, so far completely unintelligible, of dementia praecox. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 922

Anyone who has been able to profit by Freud’s writings will read with great interest how the sensitive soul of the poet gradually freed itself from the crushing weight of mother-love and its attendant emotional conflicts, and how as a result the hidden source of poetic creativity began to flow. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 796

For modern psychology, ideas are entities, like animals and plants. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 742

In general, the heart seems to have a more reliable memory for what benefits the psyche than does the head, which has a rather unhealthy tendency to lead an “abstract” existence, and easily forgets that its consciousness is snuffed out the moment the heart fails in its duty. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 744

Reason becomes unreason when separated from the heart, and a psychic life void of universal ideas sickens from undernourishment. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 745

The Buddha said: “These four are the foodstuffs, ye bhikkus, which sustain the creatures that are born, and benefit the creatures that seek rebirth. The first is edible food, coarse or fine ; touch is the second ; the thinking capacity of the mind is the third; and the fourth is consciousness. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Pages 309-311

All mythological ideas are essentially real, and far older than any philosophy. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 742

Immortality cannot be proved any more than can the existence of God, either philosophically or empirically. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 743

Equally, it seems to me that the doctor of the soul should not go along with the fashionable stupidities but should remind his patient what the normal structural elements of the psyche are. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 744

The East has one big myth—which we call an illusion in the vain hope that our superior judgment will make it disappear. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 563

Because he cannot discover God’s throne in heaven with a telescope or radar, or establish for certain that dear father or mother are still about in a more or less corporeal form, he assumes that such ideas are not “true.” ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 565

Myths, however, consist of symbols that were not invented but happened. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 568

It was not the man Jesus who created the myth of the God-man; it had existed many centuries before. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 568

In many cases emotion and symbol are actually one and the same thing. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 570

No understanding is gained by memorizing words, for symbols are the living facts of life. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 571

Psychology cannot establish any metaphysical “truths,” nor does it try to. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 742

Gilgamesh is really an arriviste par excellence, [pusher, upstart, unscrupulous person], a man of ambitious plans, and a great king and hero. All the men are working for him like slaves to build a town with mighty walls ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 235

The women [of the town] feel neglected and complain to the gods [representations of the unconscious] about their reckless tyrant. So the gods decide that something has to be done about it ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 235

Translated into psychological language this means: Gilgamesh is using his consciousness only, his head has wings and is detached from the body, and his body is going to say something about it ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 235

It will react with a neurosis, that is, by constellating a very opposite factor. How is this neurosis described in the poem? The gods decide to “call up,” that is to make, a man like Gilgamesh. They create Enkidu; yet he is in some ways different. The hair of his head is long, he looks like a cave-man, and he lives with the wild animals in the plains and drinks from the water-wells of the gazelles ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 235

Gilgamesh, being normal so far, has a perfectly normal dream about the intention of the gods. He dreams that a star falls down on his back, a star like a mighty warrior, and Gilgamesh is wrestling with him but cannot shake himself free. Finally he overcomes him and puts him down at his mother’s feet, and the mother “makes him equal” to Gilgamesh. The mother is a wise woman and interprets the dream for Gilgamesh so that he is ready to meet the danger ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 235

Enkidu is meant to fight Gilgamesh and bring him down, but Gilgamesh in a very clever way makes him his friend. He has conquered the reaction of his unconscious by cunning and will-power and he persuades his opponent that they are really friends and that they can work together. Now things are going worse than ever ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 235

Although right in the beginning Enkidu has an oppressive dream, a vision of the underworld where the dead live, Gilgamesh is preparing for a great adventure. Like heroes, Gilgamesh and Enkidu start out together to overcome Humbaba, a terrible monster whom the gods have made guardian of their sanctuary on the cedar mountain. His voice ros like the tempest, and everyone who approaches the wood is overcome by weakness ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 236

The giant Humbaba guards the garden of Ishtar. Gilgamesh conquers the giant and wins Ishtar, whereupon Ishtar immediately makes sexual advances to her deliverer ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 396

Man becomes human through conquering his animal instinctuality. a solution already anticipated in the Gilgamesh Epic by the hero’s renunciation of the terrible Ishtar ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 398

Now the gods decide to interfere, or rather it is a goddess, Ishtar, who tries to defeat Gilgamesh. The ultimate principle of the unconscious is the Eternal Feminine, and Ishtar, with true feminine cunning, makes wonderful promises to Gilgamesh if he will become her lover: he would be like a god and his power and wealth would increase beyond measure ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 237

But Gilgamesh does not believe a word of it, he refuses with insulting words and reproaches her for all her faithlessness and cruelty towards her lovers. Ishtar in her rage and fury persuades the gods to create an enormous bull, which descends from the heavens and devastates the country ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 237

A great fight begins, and hundreds of men are killed by the poisonous breath of the divine bull. But again Gilgamesh, with the help of Enkidu, slay him, and the victory is celebrated ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 237

Ishtar, overcome by rage, descends to the wall of the city, and now Enkidu himself commits an outrage against her. He curses her and throws the member of the dead bull in her face ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 238

This is the climax, and now the peripeteia sets in. Enkidu has more dreams of an ominous nature and becomes seriously ill and dies ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 238

This means that the conscious separates from the unconscious altogether; the unconscious withdraws from the field, and Gilgamesh is now alone and overcome with grief ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 239

He can hardly accept the loss of his friend, but what torments him most is the fear of death. He has seen his friend die and is faced with the fact that he is mortal too. One more desire tortures him to secure immortality ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para CW18 ¶ 239

He sets out heroically to find the medicine against death, because he knows of an old man, his ancestor, who has eternal life and who lives far away in the West ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 239

So the journey to the underworld, the Nekyia, begins, and he travels to the West like the sun, through the door of the heavenly mountain. He overcomes enormous difficulties, and even the gods do not oppose his plan, although they tell him that he will seek in vain ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 239

Finally he comes to his destination and persuades the old man to tell him of the remedy. At the bottom of the sea he acquires the magic herb of immortality, the pharmakon athanasias, and he is bringing the herb home. Although he is tired of travelling he is full of joy because he has the wonderful medicine and does not need to be afraid of death any more ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 239

But while he is refreshing himself by bathing in a pool, a snake smells out the herb of immortality and steals it from him ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 239

After his return, he takes up new plans for the fortification of his city, but he finds no peace. He wants to know what happens to man after death and he finally succeeds in evoking Enkidu’s spirit, which comes up from a hole in the earth and gives Gilgamesh very melancholy information ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 239

With this the epos ends. The ultimate victory is won by the cold-blooded animal [the unconscious] ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 239

Thus the Gilgamesh Epic describes the psychology of the power-complex testament to the fact that complexes are characteristic expressions of the psyche we find unmistakable traces of them in all peoples and in all epochs ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 209

The consciousness derived from that localization in the brain therefore probably retains these qualities of sensation and orientation. Peculiarly enough, the French and English psychologists of the early seventeenth and eighteenth centuries tried to derive consciousness from the senses as if it consisted solely of sense data. That is expressed by the famous formula Nihil est in intellectu quod non fuerit in sensu [“There is nothing in the mind that was not in the senses.”] You can observe something similar in modern psychological theories. Freud, for instance, does not derive the conscious from sense data, but he derives the unconscious from the conscious, which is along the same rational line ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 14

I would put it the reverse way [from Freud]: I would say the thing that comes first is obviously the unconscious and that consciousness really arises from an unconscious condition ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 15

In early childhood we are unconscious; the most important functions of an instinctive nature are unconscious, and consciousness is rather the product of the unconscious. It is a condition which demands a violent effort. You get tired from being conscious. You get exhausted by consciousness. It is an almost unnatural effort. When you observe primitives, for instance, you will see that on the slightest provocation or with no provocation whatever they doze off, they disappear. They sit for hours on end, and when you ask them, “What are you doing? What are you thinking?” they are offended, because they say, “Only a man that is crazy think she has thoughts in his head. We do not think.” If they think at all, it is rather in the belly or in the heart. Certain Negro tribes assure you that thoughts are in the belly because they only realize those thoughts which actually disturb the liver, intestines, or stomach. In other words, they are conscious only of emotional thoughts. Emotions and affects are always accompanied by obvious physiological innervations ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 15

The Pueblo Indians told me that all Americans are crazy, and of course I was somewhat astonished and asked them why. They said, “Well, they say they think in their heads. No sound man thinks in the head. We think in the heart.” They are just about in the Homeric age, when the diaphragm (phren = mind, soul) was the seat of psychic activity. That means a psychic localization of a different nature. Our concept of consciousness supposes thought to be in our most dignified head. But the Pueblo Indians derive consciousness from the intensity of feeling. Abstract thought does not exist for them. As the Pueblo Indians are sun-worshippers, I tried the argument of St. Augustine on them. I told them that God is not the sun but the one who made the sun. They could not accept this because they cannot go beyond the perceptions of their senses and their feelings. Therefore consciousness and thought to them are localized in the heart. To us, on the other hand, psychic activities are nothing. We hold that dreams and fantasies are localized “down below,” therefore there are people who speak of the sub-conscious mind, of the things that are below consciousness ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 16

These peculiar localizations play a great role in so-called primitive psychology, which is by no means primitive. For instance if you study Tantric Yoga and Hindu psychology you will find the most elaborate system of psychic layers, of localizations of consciousness up from the region of the perineum to the top of the head. These “centres” are the so-called chakras, and you not only find them in the teachings of yoga but can discover the same idea in old German alchemical books, which surely do not derive from a knowledge of yoga ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 17

The important fact about consciousness is that nothing can be conscious without an ego to which it refers. If something is not related to the ego then it is not conscious. Therefore you can define consciousness as a relation of psychic facts to the ego. What is that ego? The ego is a complex datum which is constituted first of all by a general awareness of your body, of your existence, and secondly by your memory data; you have a certain idea of having been, a long series of memories. Those two are the main constituents of what we call the ego. Therefore you can call the ego a complex of psychic facts. This complex has a great power of attraction, like a magnet; it attracts contents from the unconscious, from that dark realm of which we know nothing; it also attracts impressions from the outside, and when they enter into association with the ego they are conscious. If they do not, they are not conscious ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 18

My idea of the ego is that it is a sort of complex. Of course, the nearest and dearest complex which we cherish is our ego. It is always in the centre of our attention and of our desires, and it is the absolutely indispensable centre of consciousness. If the ego becomes split up, as in schizophrenia, all sense of values is gone, and also things become inaccessible for voluntary reproduction because the centre has split and certain parts of the psyche refer to one fragment of the ego and certain other contents to another fragment of the ego. Therefore, with a schizophrenic, you often see a rapid change from one personality into another ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 19

You can distinguish a number of functions in consciousness. They enable consciousness to become oriented in the field of ectopsychic facts and endopsychic facts. What I understand by the ectopsyche is a system of relationship between the contents of consciousness and facts and data coming in from the environment. It is a system of orientation which concerns my dealing with the external facts given to me by the function of my senses. The endopsyche, on the other hand, is a system of relationship between the contents of consciousness and postulated processes in the unconscious ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 20

Therefore the first function on that endopsychic side is memory. The function of memory, or reproduction, links us up with things that have faded out of consciousness, things that became subliminal or were cast away or repressed. What we call memory is this faculty to reproduce unconscious contents, and it is the first function we can clearly distinguish in its relationship between our consciousness and the contents that are actually not in view ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 39

The second endopsychic function is a more difficult problem. We are now getting into deep waters because here we are coming into darkness. I will give you the name first: the subjective components of conscious functions. I hope I can make it clear. For instance, when you meet a man you have not seen before, naturally you think something about him. You do not always think things you would be ready to tell him immediately; perhaps you think things that are untrue, that do not really apply. Clearly, they are subjective reactions. The same reactions take place with things and with situations ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 40

Every application of a conscious function, whatever the object might be, is always accompanied by subjective reactions which are more or less inadmissible or unjust or inaccurate. You are painfully aware that these things happen in you, but nobody likes to admit that he is subject to such phenomena. He prefers to leave them in the shadow, because that helps him assume that he is perfectly innocent and very nice and honest and straightforward and “only too willing,” etc., you know all the phrases. As a matter of fact, one is not ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 40

One has any amount of subjective reactions, but it is not quite becoming to admit these things. These reactions I call the subjective components. They are a very important part of our relations to our own inner side. There things get definitely painful ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 40

That is why we dislike entering this shadow-world of the ego. We do not like to look at the shadow-side of ourselves; therefore there are many people in our civilized society who have lost their shadow altogether, they have got rid of it. They are only two-dimensional; they have lost the third dimension, and with it they have usually lost the body ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 40

The body is a most doubtful friend because it produces things we do not like; there are too many things about the body which cannot be mentioned. The body is very often the personification of this shadow of the ego. Sometimes it forms the skeleton in the cupboard, and everybody naturally wants to get rid of such a thing. I think this makes sufficiently clear what I mean by subjective components. They are usually a sort of disposition to react in a certain way, and usually the disposition is not altogether favourable ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 40

You know the James-Lange theory of affect. I take emotion as affect, it is the same as “something affects you.” It does something to you. it interferes with you. Emotion is the thing that carries you away. You are thrown out of yourself; you are beside yourself as if an explosion had moved you out of yourself and put you beside yourself. There is a quite tangible physiological condition which can be observed at the same time. So the difference would be this: feeling has no physical or tangible physiological manifestations, while emotion is characterized by an altered physiological condition ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 46

You know that the James-Lange theory of affect says that you only get really emotional when you are aware of the physiological alteration of your general condition. You can observe this when you are in a situation where you would most probably be angry. You know you are going to be angry, and then you feel the blood rushing up into your head, and then are really angry, but not before. Before, you only know you are going to be angry, but when the blood rushes up into your head you are caught by your own anger, immediately the body is affected, and because you realize that you are getting excited, you are twice as angry as you ought to be. Then you are in a real emotion ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 46

But when you have feeling you have control. You are on top of the situation, and you can say, “I have a very nice feeling or a very bad feeling about it.” Everything is quiet and nothing happens. You can quietly inform somebody, “I hate you,” very nicely. But when you say it spitefully you have an emotion. To say it quietly will not cause an emotion, either in yourself or in the other person. Emotions are most contagious, they are the real carriers of mental contagion ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 46

Dr. Henry V. Dickens: May I ask, in continuation of that question, what is the relation in your view between affects and feelings? ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 47

Professor Jung: It is a question of degree. If you have a value which is overwhelmingly strong for you it will become an emotion at a certain point, namely, when it reaches such an intensity as to cause a physiological innervation. All our mental processes probably cause slight physiological disturbances which are so small that we have not the means to demonstrate them. But we have a pretty sensitive method by which to measure emotions, or the physiological part of them, and that is the psychogalvanic effect. It is based on the fact that the electrical resistance of the skin decreases under the influence of emotion. It does not decrease under the influence of feeling ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 48

I will give you an example. I made the following experiment with my former Professor at the Clinic. He functioned as my test partner, and I had him in the laboratory under the apparatus for measuring the psychogalvanic effect. I told him to imagine something which was intensely disagreeable to him but of which he knew I was not aware, something unknown to me yet known to him and exceedingly painful. So he did. He was well acquainted with such experiments and gifted with great power of concentration, so he concentrated on something, and there was almost no visible disturbance of the electrical resistance of the skin; the current did not increase at all. Then I thought I had a hunch. That very morning I had observed certain signs of something going on and I guessed it must be hellishly disagreeable to my chief. So I thought, “I am going to try something.” I simply said to him, “Was not that the case of So-and-So?” mentioning the name. Instantly there was a deluge of emotion. That was the emotion; the former reaction was the feeling ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 49

Professor Jung: You experience sometimes what you call “pathological” emotions, and there you observe most peculiar contents coming through as emotion: thoughts you have never thought before, sometimes terrible thoughts and fantasies. For instance, some people when they are very angry, instead of having the ordinary feelings of revenge and so on, have the most terrific fantasies of committing murder, cutting off the arms and legs of the enemy, and such things. Those are invading fragments of the unconscious, and if you take a fully developed pathological emotion it is really a state of eclipse of consciousness when people are raving mad for a while and do perfectly crazy things. That is an invasion. That would be a pathological case, but fantasies of this kind can also occur within the limits of normal. I have heard innocent people say, “I could cut him limb from limb,” and they actually do have these bloody fantasies; they would “smash the brains” of people, they imagine doing what in cold blood is merely said as a metaphor. When these fantasies get vivid and people are afraid of themselves, you speak of invasion ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 65

Professor Jung: It does not need to be a psychosis at all. It does not need to be pathological; you can observe such things in normal people when they are under the sway of a particular emotion. I once went through a very strong earthquake. It was the first time in my life I experienced an earthquake. I was simply overcome by the idea that the earth was not solid and that it was the skin of a huge animal that had shaken itself as a horse does. I was simply caught by that idea for a while. Then I came out of the fantasy remembering that that is exactly what the Japanese say about earthquakes: that the big salamander has turned over or changed its position, the salamander that is carrying the earth. Then I was satisfied that it was an archaic idea which had jumped into my consciousness. I thought it was remarkable; I did not quite think it was pathological ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 67

According to a Japanese legend, the namazu, a kind of catfish of monstrous size, carries on its back most of Japan, and when annoyed it moves its head or tail, thus provoking earthquakes. The legend is often depicted in Japanese art ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 67

For instance, people who are lively, sanguine, nice and kind in the manic phase, and do not think very much, suddenly become very thoughtful when the depression comes on, and then they have obsessive thoughts, and vice versa. I know several cases of intellectuals who have a manic-depressive disposition. In the manic phase they think freely, they are productive and very clear and very abstract. Then the depressive phase comes on, and they have obsessive feelings; they are obsessed by terrible moods, just moods, not thoughts. Those are, of course, psychological details. You see these things most clearly in cases of men of forty and a little bit more who have led a particular type of life, an intellectual life or a life of values, and suddenly that thing goes under and up comes just the contrary. There are very interesting cases like that ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 61

We have the famous literary illustrations, Nietzsche for instance. He is a most impressive example of a change of psychology into its opposite at middle age. In younger years he was the aphorist in the French style; in later years, at 38, in Thus Spake Zarathustra, he burst out in a Dionysian mood which was absolutely the contrary of everything he had written before ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 61

You know the James-Lange theory of affect. I take emotion as affect, it is the same as “something affects you.” It does something to you it interferes with you. Emotion is the thing that carries you away. You are thrown out of yourself; you are beside yourself as if an explosion had moved you out of yourself and put you beside yourself. There is a quite tangible physiological condition which can be observed at the same time. So the difference would be this: feeling has no physical or tangible physiological manifestations, while emotion is characterized by an altered physiological condition ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 46

If you are all alienists and I present to you a certain case, then you might say that that man is insane. I would say that that man is not insane for this reason, that as long as he can explain himself to me in such a way that I feel I have a contact with him that man is not crazy. To be crazy is a very relative conception ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 72

For instance, when a Negro behaves in a certain way we say, “Oh well, he’s only a Negro,” but if a white man behaves in the same way we say, “That man is crazy,” because a white man cannot behave like that. A Negro is expected to do such things but a white man does not do them. To be “crazy” is a social concept; we use social restrictions and definitions in order to distinguish mental disturbances ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 72

The sun-wheel is an exceedingly archaic idea, perhaps the oldest religious idea there is. We can trace it to the Mesolithic and Paleolithic ages, as the sculptures of Rhodesia prove. Now there were real wheels only in the Bronze Age; in the Paleolithic Age the wheel was not yet invented. The Rhodesian sun-wheel seems to be contemporary with very naturalistic animal-pictures, like the famous rhino with the tick-birds, a masterpiece of observation. The Rhodesian sun-wheel is therefore an original vision, presumably an archetypal sun-image. But this image is not a naturalistic one, for it is always divided into four or eight partitions. This image, a sort of divided circle, is a symbol which you find throughout the whole history of mankind as well as in the dreams of modern individuals. We might assume that the invention of the actual wheel started from this vision. Many of our inventions came from mythological anticipations and primordial images. For instance, the art of alchemy is the mother of modern chemistry. Our conscious scientific mind started in the matrix of the unconscious mind ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 81

In the dream of the Negro, the man on the wheel is a repetition of the Greek mythological motif of Ixion, who, on account of his offence against men and gods, was fastened by Zeus upon an incessantly turning wheel. I give you this example of a mythological motif in a dream merely in order to convey to you an idea of the collective unconscious ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 82

The deepest we can reach in our exploration of the unconscious mind is the layer where man is no longer a distinct individual, but where his mind widens out and merges into the mind of mankind not the conscious mind, but the unconscious mind of mankind, where we are all the same. As the body has its anatomical conformity in its two eyes and two ears and one heart and so on, with only slight individual differences, so has the mind its basic conformity. On this collective level we are no longer separate individuals, we are all one. You can understand this when you study the psychology of primitives. The outstanding fact about the primitive mentality is this lack of distinctiveness between individuals, this oneness of the subject with the object, this participation mystique, as Lévy-Bruhl terms it. Primitive mentality expresses the basic structure of the mind, that psychological layer which with us is the collective unconscious, that underlying level which is the same in all. Because the basic structure of the mind is the same in everybody, we cannot make distinctions when we experience on that level. There we do not know if something has happened to you or to me. In the underlying collective level there is a wholeness which cannot be dissected ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 87

ng said: “What you value is la clarté latine, la clarté de l’esprit Latin. That is because your thinking is inferior. The Latin thinker is inferior in comparison to the German thinker.” They cocked their ears, and I said: “But your feeling is unsurpassable, it is absolutely differentiated.” They said: “How is that?” I replied: “Go to a café or a vaudeville or a place where you hear songs and stage-plays and you will notice a very peculiar phenomenon. There are any number of very grotesque and cynical things and then suddenly something sentimental happens. A mother loses her child, there is a lost love, or something marvellously patriotic, and you must weep. For you, the salt and the sugar have to go together. But a German can stand a whole evening of sugar only. The Frenchman must have some salt in it. You meet a man and say: Enchanté de faire votre connaissance. You are not enchanté de faire sa connaissance at all; you are really feeling: `Oh go to the devil.’ But you are not disturbed, nor is he. But do not say to a German: Enchanté de faire votre connaissance, because he will believe it. A German will sell you a pair of sock-suspenders and not only expect, as is natural, to be paid for it. He also expects to be loved for it” ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 95

The German nation is characterized by the fact that its feeling function is inferior, it is not differentiated. If you say that to a German he is offended. I should be offended too. He is very attached to what he calls “Gemütlichkeit.” A room full of smoke in which everybody loves everybody that is gemütlich and that must not be disturbed. It has to be absolutely clear, just one note and no more. That is la clarté germanique du sentiment, and it is inferior. On the other hand, it is a gross offence to a Frenchman to say something paradoxical, because it is not clear. An English philosopher has said, “A superior mind is never quite clear.” That is true, and also superior feeling is never quite clear. You will only enjoy a feeling that is above board when it is slightly doubtful, and a thought that does not have a slight contradiction in it is not convincing ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 96

Everything that is highly toned is rather difficult to handle. If, for instance, something is very important to me, I begin to hesitate when I attempt to do it, and you have probably observed that when you ask me difficult questions I cannot answer them immediately because the subject is important and I have a long reaction time. I begin to stammer, and my memory does not supply the necessary material. Such disturbances are complex disturbances even if what I say does not come from a personal complex of mine. It is simply an important affair, and whatever has an intense feeling-tone is difficult to handle because such contents are somehow associated with physiological reactions, with the processes of the heart, the tonus of the blood vessels, the condition of the intestines, the breathing, and the innervation of the skin ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 148

Whenever there is a high tonus it is just as if that particular complex had a body of its own, as if it were localized in my body to a certain extent, and that makes it unwieldy, because something that irritates my body cannot be easily pushed away because it has its roots in my body and begins to pull at my nerves. Something that has little tonus and little emotional value can be easily brushed aside because it has no roots. It is not adherent or adhesive ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 148

That leads me to something very important the fact that a complex with its given tension or energy has the tendency to form a little personality of itself. It has a sort of body, a certain amount of its own physiology. It can upset the stomach. It upsets the breathing, it disturbs the heart in short, it behaves like a partial personality. For instance, when you want to say or do something and unfortunately a complex interferes with this intention, then you say or do something different from what you intended. You are simply interrupted, and your best intention gets upset by the complex, exactly as if you had been interfered with by a human being or by circumstances from outside. Under those conditions we really are forced to speak of the tendencies of complexes to act as if they were characterized by a certain amount of will-power ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 149

When you speak of will-power you naturally ask about the ego. Where then is the ego that belongs to the will-power of the complexes? We know our own ego-complex, which is supposed to be in full possession of the body. It is not, but let us assume that it is a centre in full possession of the body, that there is a focus which we call the ego, and that the ego has a will and can do something with its components. The ego also is an agglomeration of highly toned contents, so that in principle there is no difference between the ego-complex and any other complex ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 149

Because complexes have a certain will-power, a sort of ego, we find that in a schizophrenic condition they emancipate themselves from conscious control to such an extent that they become visible and audible. They appear as visions, they speak in voices which are like the voices of definite people. This personification of complexes is not in itself necessarily a pathological condition. In dreams, for instance, our complexes often appear in a personified form. And one can train oneself to such an extent that they [dream figures] become visible or audible also in a waking condition. It is part of a certain yoga training to split up consciousness into its components, each of which appears as a specific personality. In the psychology of our unconscious there are typical figures that have a definite life of their own ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 150

All this is explained by the fact that the so-called unity of consciousness is an illusion. It is really a wish-dream. We like to think that we are one; but we are not, most decidedly not. We are not really masters in our house. We like to believe in our will-power and in our energy and in what we can do; but when it comes to a real show-down we find that we can do it only to a certain extent, because we are hampered by those little devils the complexes. Complexes are autonomous groups of associations that have a tendency to move by themselves, to live their own life apart from our intentions. I hold that our personal unconscious, as well as the collective unconscious, consists of an indefinite, because unknown, number of complexes or fragmentary personalities ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para CW18 ¶ 151

This idea explains a lot. It explains, for instance, the simple fact that a poet has the capacity to dramatize and personify his mental contents. When he creates a character on the stage, or in his poem or drama or novel, he thinks it is merely a product of his imagination; but that character in a certain secret way has made itself. Any novelist or writer will deny that these characters have a psychological meaning, but as a matter of fact you know as well as I do that they have one. Therefore you can read a writer’s or novelist’s mind when you study the characters he creates ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 152

Free association means that you open yourself to any amount and kind of associations and they naturally lead to your complexes. But then, you see, I do not want to know the complexes of my patients. That is uninteresting to me. I want to know what the dreams have to say about complexes, not what the complexes are. I want to know what a man’s unconscious is doing with his complexes, I want to know what he is preparing himself for. That is what I read out of the dreams ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 171

I do not apply the method of free association because my goal is not to know the complexes; I want to know what the dream is. Therefore I handle the dream as if it were a text which I do not understand properly, say a Latin or a Greek or a Sanskrit text, where certain words are unknown to me or the text is fragmentary, and I merely apply the ordinary method any philologist would apply in reading such a text ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 172

My idea is that the dream does not conceal; we simply do not understand its language. For instance, if I quote to you a Latin or a Greek passage some of you will not understand it, but that is not because the text dissimulates or conceals; it is because you do not know Greek or Latin. Likewise, when a patient seems confused, it does not necessarily mean that he is confused, but that the doctor does not understand his material. The assumption that the dream wants to conceal is a mere anthropomorphic idea. No philologist would ever think that a difficult Sanskrit or cuneiform inscription conceals. There is a very wise word of the Talmud which says that the dream is its own interpretation. The dream is the whole thing, and if you think there is something behind it, or that the dream has concealed something, there is no question but that you simply do not understand it ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 172

Their feeling is still contaminated with the mother, is still in the mother, identical with the mother, and they have mothers’ feelings; they have wonderful feelings for babies, for the interiors of houses and nice rooms and for a very orderly home. It sometimes happens that these individuals, when they have turned forty, discover a masculine feeling and then there is trouble ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 186

The feelings of a man are so to speak a woman’s and appear as such in dreams. I designate this figure by the term anima, because she is the personification of the inferior functions which relate a man to the collective unconscious. The collective unconscious as a whole presents itself to a man in feminine form. To a woman it appears in masculine form, and then I call it the animus. I chose the term anima because it has always been used for that very same psychological fact. The anima as a personification of the collective unconscious occurs in dreams over and over again. I have made long statistics about the anima figure in dreams. In this way one establishes these figures empirically ~Carl ung, CW18, Para 187

I hold and when I say I hold I have certain reasons for saying so that representations of psychic facts in images like the snake or the lizard or the crab or the mastodon or analogous animals also represent organic facts. For instance, the serpent very often represents the cerebro-spinal system, especially the lower centres of the brain, and particularly the medulla oblongata and spinal cord. The crab, on the other hand, having a sympathetic system only, represents chiefly the sympathicus and para-sympathicus of the abdomen; it is an abdominal thing. So if you translate the text of the dream it would read: if you go on like this your cerebro-spinal system and your sympathetic system will come up against you and snap you up. That is in fact what is happening. The symptoms of his neurosis express the rebellion of the sympathetic functions and of the cerebro-spinal system against his conscious attitude ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 194

The crab-lizard brings up the archetypal idea of the hero and the dragon as deadly enemies. But in certain myths you find the interesting fact that the hero is not connected with the dragon only by his fight. There are, on the contrary, indications that the hero is himself the dragon. In Scandinavian mythology the hero is recognized by the fact that he has snake’s eyes. He has snake’s eyes because he is a snake. There are many other myths and legends which contain the same idea. Cecrops, the founder of Athens, was a man above and a serpent below. The souls of heroes often appear after death in the form of serpents ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 195

But unlike the mythical hero he does not fight the dragon with a weapon, but with a wand. He says, “From its effect on the monster it seems that it is a magical wand.” He certainly does dispose of the crab in a magical way. The wand is another mythological symbol. It often contains a sexual allusion, and sexual magic is a means of protection against danger. You may remember, too, how during the earthquake at Messina nature produced certain instinctive reactions against the overwhelming destruction ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 197

The wand is an instrument, and instruments in dreams mean what they actually are, the devices of man to concretize his will. For instance, a knife is my will to cut; when I use a spear I prolong my arm, with a rifle I can project my action and my influence to a great distance; with a telescope I do the same as regards my sight. An instrument is a mechanism which represents my will, my intelligence, my capability, and my cunning. Instruments in dreams symbolize an analogous psychological mechanism. Now this dreamer’s instrument is a magic wand. He uses a marvellous thing by which he can spirit away the monster, that is, his lower nervous system. He can dispose of such nonsense in no time, and with no effort at all ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 198

The first dream occurred in the middle of August, and she told me this: “I see a wheel, and it is rolling down a road and it burns me.” That was all I could get out of her. I wanted her to draw a picture of it the next day, but she did not want to be bothered, so I left it. The other dream was about a week ago, and this time it was “a beetle that was pinching me.” That was all I could get about it. I do not know whether you would like to comment on them. The only thing I would like to add is that she knows the difference between a beetle and a crab. She is very fond of animals ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 202

Professor Jung: You have to consider that it is very difficult and not quite fair to comment on dreams of someone one does not know; but I will tell you as much as one can see from the symbolism. The beetle would, according to my idea, have to do with the sympathetic system. Therefore I should conclude from that dream that there are certain peculiar psychological processes going on in the child, which touch upon her sympathetic system, and this might arouse some intestinal or other abdominal disorder. The most cautious statement one could make would be to say that there is a certain accumulation of energy in the sympathetic system which causes slight disturbances. This is also borne out by the symbol of the fiery wheel. The wheel in her dream seems to be a sun-symbol, and in Tantric philosophy fire corresponds to the so-called manipura chakra, which is localized in the abdomen. In the prodromal symptoms of epilepsy you sometimes find the idea of a wheel revolving inside. This too expresses a manifestation of a sympathetic nature. The image of the revolving wheel reminds us of the wheel upon which Ixion was crucified. The dream of the little girl is an archetypal dream, one of those strange archetypal dreams children occasionally have ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 203

I explain these archetypal dreams of children by the fact that when consciousness begins to dawn, when the child begins to feel that he is, he is still close to the original psychological world from which he has just emerged: a condition of deep unconsciousness. Therefore you find with many children an awareness of the contents of the collective unconscious, a fact which in some Eastern beliefs is interpreted as reminiscence of a former existence. Tibetan philosophy, for instance, speaks of the “Bardo” existence and of the condition of the mind between death and birth. The idea of former existence is a projection of the psychological condition of early childhood. Very young children still have an awareness of mythological contents, and if these contents remain conscious too long, the individual is threatened by an incapacity for adaptation; he is haunted by a constant yearning to remain with or to return to the original vision. There are very beautiful descriptions of these experiences by mystics and poets ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 204

Usually at the age of four to six the veil of forgetfulness is drawn upon these experiences. However, I have seen cases of ethereal children, so to speak, who had an extraordinary awareness of these psychic facts and were living their life in archetypal dreams and could not adapt. Recently I saw a case of a little girl of ten who had some most amazing mythological dreams. Her father consulted me about these dreams. I could not tell him what I thought because they contained an uncanny prognosis. The little girl died a year later of an infectious disease. She had never been born entirely ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 205

They have two categories of children. The majority of them, when they come to the institution, feel ever so much better, they develop very nicely and normally and they eventually grow out of whatever their original evil was ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 209

The other category, the minority, become hysterical when they try to be nice and normal. Those are the born criminals whom you cannot change. They are normal when they do wrong. We also do not feel quite right when we are behaving perfectly, we feel much better when we are doing a bit of wrong. That is because we are not perfect. The Hindus, when they build a temple, leave one corner unfinished; only the gods make something perfect, man never can. It is much better to know that one is not perfect, then one feels much better. So it is with these children, and so it is with our patients ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 209

It is wrong to cheat people out of their fate and to help them to go beyond their level. If a man has it in him to be adapted, help him by all means; but if it is really his task not to be adapted, help him by all means not to be adapted, because then he is all right ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 209

Mystics are people who have a particularly vivid experience of the processes of the collective unconscious. Mystical experience is experience of archetypes ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 218

Question: Is there any difference between archetypal forms and mystical forms? ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 219

Professor Jung: I make no distinction between them. If you study the phenomenology of mystical experience you will come across some very interesting things. For instance, you all know that our Christian heaven is a masculine heaven and that the feminine element is only tolerated. The Mother of God is not divine, she is only the arch-saint. She intercedes for us at the throne of God but she is not part of the Deity. She does not belong to the Trinity ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 220

Now some Christian mystics have a different experience. For instance we have a Swiss mystic, Niklaus von der Flüe. He experienced a God and a Goddess. Then there was a mystic of the thirteenth century, Guillaume de Digulleville, who wrote the Pèlerinage de l’âme de Jésus Christ. Like Dante, he had a vision of the highest paradise as “le ciel d’or,” and there upon a throne one thousand times more bright than the sun sat le Roi, who is God himself, and beside him on a crystal throne of brownish hue, la Reine, presumably the Earth. This is a vision outside the Trinity idea, a mystical experience of an archetypal nature which includes the feminine principle. The Trinity is a dogmatic image based on an archetype of an exclusively masculine nature. In the Early Church the Gnostic interpretation of the Holy Ghost as feminine was declared a heresy ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 221

Professor Jung: In hysteria the dissociated personalities are still in a sort of interrelation, so that you always get the impression of a total person. With a hysterical case you can establish a rapport, you get a feeling reaction from the whole person. There is only a superficial division between certain memory compartments, but the basic personality is always present ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para CW18 ¶ 224

In the case of schizophrenia that is not so. There you encounter only fragments, there is nowhere a whole. Therefore, if you have a friend or a relative whom you have known well and who becomes insane, you will get a tremendous shock when you are confronted with a fragmentary personality which is completely split up. You can only deal with one fragment at a time; it is like a splinter of glass. You do not feel the continuity of the personality any longer. While with a hysterical case you think: if I could only wipe away that sort of obscuration or that sort of somnambulism then we should have the sum-total of the personality. But with schizophrenia it is a deep dissociation of personality; the fragments cannot come together any more ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 224

Professor Jung: There are certain borderline cases where you can stitch the parts together if you can reintegrate the lost contents. I will tell you of a case I had: ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 226

A woman had been twice in a lunatic asylum with a typical schizophrenic attack. When she was brought to me she was better, but still in a state of hallucination. I saw that it was possible to reach the split-off parts. Then I began to go through every detail of the experiences which she had had in the lunatic asylum with her; we went through all the voices and all the delusions, and I explained every fact to her so that she could associate them with her consciousness. I showed her what these unconscious contents were that came up during her insanity, and because she was an intelligent person, I gave her books to read so that she acquired a great deal of knowledge, chiefly mythological knowledge, by which she herself could stitch the parts together. The breaking lines were still there, of course, and whenever afterwards she had a new wave of disintegration I told her to try to draw or paint a picture of that particular situation in order to have a picture of the whole of herself which objectified her condition, and so she did. She brought me quite a number of pictures she had made, which had helped her whenever she felt she was falling apart again ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 226

In this way I have kept her afloat for about twelve years, and she has had no more attacks which necessitated her seclusion in an asylum. She could always manage to ward off the attacks by objectifying their contents. She told me, moreover, that when she had made such a picture she went to her books and read a chapter about some of its main features, in order to bring it into general connection with mankind, with what people know, with the collective consciousness, and then she felt right again. She said she felt adapted and she was no longer at the mercy of the collective unconscious ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 226

All cases are not as accessible as that one, as you will realize. I cannot cure schizophrenia in principle. Occasionally by great good chance I can synthetize the fragments. But I do not like to do it because it is frightfully difficult work ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 227

Modern therapy is not much aware of this, but in ancient medicine it was well known that the raising of the personal disease to a higher and more impersonal level had a curative effect. In ancient Egypt, for instance, when a man was bitten by a snake, the priest-physician was called in, and he took from the temple library the manuscript about the myth of Ra and his mother Isis, and recited it. Isis had made a poisonous worm and hidden it in the sand, and the god Ra had stepped on the serpent and was bitten by it, so that he suffered terrible pain and was threatened with death. Therefore the gods caused Isis to work a spell which drew the poison out of him. The idea was that the patient would be so impressed by this narrative that he would be cured. To us this sounds quite impossible ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 230

In the East a great amount of practical therapy is built upon this principle of raising the mere personal ailment into a generally valid situation, and ancient Greek medicine also worked with the sa me method. Of course the collective image or its application has to be in accordance with the particular psychological condition of the patient 231

The myth or legend arises from the archetypal material which is constellated by the disease, and the psychological effect consists in connecting the patient with the general human meaning of his particular situation. Snakebite, for instance, is an archetypal situation, therefore you find it as a motif in any number of tales. If the archetypal situation underlying the illness can be expressed in the right way the patient is cured. If no adequate expression is found, the individual is thrown back upon himself, into the isolation of being ill; he is alone and has no connection with the world. But if he is shown that his particular ailment is not his ailment only, but a general ailment even a god’s ailment he is in the company of men and gods, and this knowledge produces a healing effect ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 231

Modern spiritual [healing] therapy uses the same principle: pain or illness is compared with the sufferings of Christ, and this idea gives consolation. The individual is lifted out of his miserable loneliness and represented as undergoing a heroic meaningful fate which is ultimately good for the whole world, like the suffering and death of a god. When an ancient Egyptian was shown that he was undergoing the fate of Ra, the sun-god, he was immediately ranked with the Pharaoh, who was the son and representative of the gods, and so the ordinary man was a god himself, and this brought such a release of energy that we can understand quite well how he was lifted out of his pain. In a particular frame of mind people can endure a great deal. Primitives can walk on glowing coals and inflict the most terrible injuries on themselves under certain circumstances without feeling any pain. And so it is quite likely that an impressive and adequate symbol can mobilize the forces of the unconscious to such an extent that even the nervous system becomes affected and the body begins to react in a normal way again ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 231

In the case of psychological suffering, which always isolates the individual from the herd of so-called normal people, it is also of the greatest importance to understand that the conflict is not a personal failure only, but at the same time a suffering common to all and a problem with which the whole epoch is burdened. This general point of view lifts the individual out of himself and connects him with humanity. The suffering does not even have to be a neurosis; we have the same feeling in very ordinary circumstances. If for instance you live in a well-to-do community, and you suddenly lose all your money, your natural reaction will be to think that it is terrible and shameful and that you are the only one who is such an ass as to lose his money. But if everybody loses his money it is quite another matter and you feel reconciled to it ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 232

Whenever archetypal figures appear in dreams, especially in the later stages of analysis, I explain to the patient that his case is not particular and personal, but that his psychology is approaching a level which is universally human. That outlook is very important, because a neurotic feels tremendously isolated and ashamed of his neurosis. But if he knows his problem to be general and not merely personal, it makes all the difference ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 233

Mythological dreams therefore are felt by us as a very alien element. But this is not so with a mentality nearer to the primordial psyche. Primitives pay great attention to such dreams and call them “big dreams” in contradistinction to ordinary ones. They feel that they are important and contain a general meaning. Therefore in a primitive community the dreamer feels bound to announce a big dream to the assembly of men, and a palaver is held over it ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 250

Such dreams were also announced to the Roman Senate. There is a story of a senator’s daughter in the first century B.C. who dreamed that the goddess Minerva had appeared to her and complained that the Roman people were neglecting her temple. The lady felt obliged to report the dream to the Senate, and the Senate voted a certain sum of money for the restoration of the temple ~Carl Jung, CW18, 250

A similar case is told of Sophocles, when a precious golden vessel had been stolen from the temple of Herakles. The god appeared to Sophocles in a dream and told him the name of the thief. After the third repetition of the dream, Sophocles felt obliged to inform the Areopagus. The man in question was seized, and in the course of the investigation he confessed and brought back the vessel ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 250

These mythological or collective dreams have a character which forces people instinctively to tell them. This instinct is quite appropriate, because such dreams do not belong to the individual; they have a collective meaning. They are true in themselves in general, and in particular they are true for people in certain circumstances. That is the reason why in antiquity and in the Middle Ages dreams were held in great esteem. It was felt that they expressed a collective human truth ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 250

Under every Christian church of the Middle Ages there is a secret place where in old times the mysteries were celebrated. What we now call the sacraments of the Church were the mysteria of early Christianity. In Provencal the crypt is called le musset, which means a secret; the word perhaps originates from mysteria and could mean mystery-place. In Aosta, where they speak a Provençal dialect, there is a musset under the cathedral ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 254

The crypt is probably taken over from the cult of Mithras. In Mithraism the main religious ceremony took place in a vault half sunk into the earth, and the community remained separated in the main church above. There were peepholes so that they could see and hear the priests and the elect ones chanting and celebrating their rites below, but they were not admitted to them. That was a privilege for the initiates ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 255

In the Christian church the separation of the baptistry from the main body of the building derives from the same idea, for baptism as well as the communion were mysteria of which one could not speak directly. One had to use a sort of allegorical allusion so as not to betray the secrets ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 255

The mystery also attached to the name of Christ, which therefore was not allowed to be mentioned; instead, he was referred to by the name of Ichthys, the Fish. You have probably seen reproductions of very early Christian paintings where Christ appears as the Fish. This secrecy connected with the holy name is probably the reason why the name of Christ is not mentioned in an early Christian document of about A.D. 140 known as The Shepherd of Hermas, which was an important part of the body of Christian literature recognized by the Church till about the fifth century. The writer of this book of visions, Hermas, is supposed to have been the brother of the Roman bishop Pius. The spiritual teacher who appears to Hermas is called the Poimen, the Shepherd, and not the Christ ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 255

You know that every church still has its baptismal font. This was originally the piscina, the pond, in which the initiates were bathed or symbolically drowned. After a figurative death in the baptismal bath they came out transformed quasi modo geniti, as reborn ones. So we can assume that the crypt or baptismal font has the meaning of a place of terror and death and also of rebirth, a place where dark initiations take place ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 256

The serpent in the cave is an image which often occurs in antiquity. It is important to realize that in classical antiquity, as in other civilizations, the serpent not only was an animal that aroused fear and represented danger, but also signified healing. Therefore Asklepios, the god of physicians, is connected with the serpent; you all know his emblem which is still in use. In the temples of Asklepios, the Asklepieia, which were the ancient clinics, there was a hole in the ground, covered by a stone, and in that hole lived the sacred serpent. There was a slot in the stone through which the people who came to the place of healing threw down the fee for the doctors. The snake was at the same time the cashier of the clinic and collector of gifts that were thrown down into its cave. During the great pestilence in the time of Diocletian the famous serpent of the Asklepieion at Epidaurus was brought to Rome as an antidote to the epidemic. It represented the god himself ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 257

The serpent is not only the god of healing; it also has the quality of wisdom and prophecy. The fountain of Castalia at Delphi was originally inhabited by a python. Apollo fought and overcame the python, and from that time Delphi was the seat of the famous oracle and Apollo its god, until he left half his powers to Dionysus, who later came in from the East. In the underworld, where the spirits of the dead live, snakes and water are always together, as we can read in Aristophanes’ The Frogs. The serpent in legend is often replaced by the dragon; the Latin draco simply means snake ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 258

Very often these caves, like the cave of Castalia, contain springs. These springs played a very important role in the cult of Mithras, from which many elements of the early Church originated. Porphyry relates that Zoroaster, the founder of the Persian religion, dedicated to Mithras a cave containing many springs. Those of you who have been to Germany and seen the Saalburg near Frankfurt will have noticed the spring near the grotto of Mithras. The cult of Mithras is always connected with a spring. There is a beautiful Mithraeum in Provence which has a large piscina with wonderful crystal-clear water, and in the background a rock on which is carved the Mithras Tauroktonosthe bull-killing Mithras. These sanctuaries were always a great scandal to the early Christians. They hated all these natural arrangements because they were no friends of nature ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 259

This material will give you an idea that the serpent in the cave full of water is an image that was generally known and played a great role in antiquity. As you have noticed, I have chosen all my examples exclusively from antiquity; I could have chosen other parallels from other civilizations, and you would find it was the same. The water in the depths represents the unconscious. In the depths as a rule is a treasure guarded by a serpent or a dragon ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 260

In order to recover the treasure the dragon has to be overcome. The treasure is of a very mysterious nature. It is connected with the serpent in a strange way; the peculiar nature of the serpent denotes the character of the treasure as though the two things were one. Often there is a golden snake with the treasure. Gold is something everyone is seeking, so we could say that it looks as if the serpent himself were the great treasure, the source of immense power ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 260

In early Greek Myths, for instance, the dweller in the cave is a hero, such as Cecrops, the founder of Athens. Above his half man and half woman, a hermaphrodite, but the lower part of his body is a serpent; he is clearly a monster. The same is said of Erechtheus, another mythical king of Athens ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 260

The cave or underworld represents a layer of the unconscious where there is no discrimination at all, not even a distinction between the male and the female, which is the first differentiation primitives make. They distinguish objects in this way, as we still do occasionally. Some keys, for instance, have a hole in the front, and some are solid. They are often called male and female keys. You know the Italian tiled roofs. The convex tiles are placed above and the concave ones underneath. The upper ones are called monks and the under ones the nuns. This is not an indecent joke to the Italians, but the quintessence of discrimination ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 261

When the unconscious brings together the male and the female, things become utterly indistinguishable and we cannot say any more whether they are male or female, just as Cecrops came from such a mythical distance that one could not say whether he was man or woman, human or serpent. So we see that the bottom of the cistern in our dream is characterized by a complete union of opposites. This is the primordial condition of things, and at the same time a most ideal achievement, because it is the union of elements eternally opposed. Conflict has come to rest, and everything is still or once again in the original state of indistinguishable harmony. You find the same idea in ancient Chinese philosophy. The ideal condition is named Tao, and it consists of the complete harmony between heaven and earth ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 262

On one side it is white with a black spot, and on the other it is black with a white spot. The white side is the hot, dry, fiery principle, the south; the black side is the cold, humid, dark principle, the north. The condition of Tao is the beginning of the world where nothing has yet begun and it is also the condition to be achieved by the attitude of superior wisdom. The idea of the union of the two opposite principles, of male and female, is an archetypal image ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 262

When the dreamer comes to these symbols he reaches the layer of complete unconsciousness, which is represented as the greatest treasure. It is the central motif in Wagner’s Parsifal that the spear should be restored to the Grail because they belong eternally together. This union is a symbol of complete fulfilment eternity before and after the creation of the world, a dormant condition. That is probably the thing which the desire of man is seeking. That is why he ventures into the cave of the dragon, to find that condition where consciousness and the unconscious are so completely united that he is neither conscious nor unconscious. Whenever the two are too much separated, consciousness seeks to unite them again by going down into the depths where they once were one. Thus you find in Tantric Yoga or Kundalini Yoga an attempt to reach the condition where Shiva is in eternal union with Shakti. Shiva is the eternally unextended point, and he is encircled by the female principle, Shakti, in the form of a serpent ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 263

We have traces of an analogous symbolism in Christian reports about the ancient mysteries. There is a report by a Bishop Asterios about Eleusis, and it says that every year the priest made the katabasis or descent into the cave. And the priest of Apollo and the priestess of Demeter, the earth mother, celebrated the hierosgamos, the sacred nuptials, for the fertilization of the earth. This is a Christian statement which is not substantiated. The initiates of the Eleusinian mysteries were sworn to the strictest secrecy; if they betrayed anything, they were punished with death. So we have practically no knowledge of their rites. We know, on the other hand, that during the mysteries of Demeter certain obscenities took place because they were thought good for the fertility of the earth. The distinguished ladies of Athens assembled, with the priestess of Demeter presiding. They had a good meal and plenty of wine and afterwards performed the rite of the aischrologia. That is, they had to tell indecent jokes. This was considered a religious duty because it was good for the fertility of the next season~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 264

A similar rite took place in Bubastis in Egypt at the time of the Isis mysteries. The inhabitants of the villages on the upper Nile came down in parties, and the women on the barges used to expose themselves to the women on the banks of the Nile. It was probably done for the same reason as the aischrologia, to ensure the fertility of the earth. You can read about it in Herodotus. In southern Germany as late as the nineteenth century, in order to increase the fertility of the soil, the peasant used to take his wife to his fields and have intercourse with her in a furrow. This is called sympathetic magic ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 264

The bowl is a vessel that receives or contains, and is therefore female. It is a symbol of the body which contains the anima, the breath and liquid of life, while the dagger has piercing, penetrating qualities and is therefore male. It cuts, it discriminates and divides, and so is a symbol of the masculine Logos principle ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 265

In our dream the dagger is said to be the key to Toledo. The idea of the key is often associated with the mysteries in the cave. In the cult of Mithras there is a peculiar kind of god, the key god Aion, whose presence could not be explained; but I think it is quite understandable. He is represented with the winged body of a man and the head of a lion, and he is encoiled by a snake which rises up over his head. You have a figure of him in the British Museum. He is Infinite Time and Long Duration; he is the supreme god of the Mithraic hierarchy and creates and destroys all things, the durée créatrice of Bergson. He is a sun-god. Leo is the zodiacal sign where the sun dwells in summer, while the snake symbolizes the winter or wet time. So Aion, the lion-headed god with the snake round his body, again represents the union of opposites, light and darkness, male and female, creation and destruction. The god is represented as having his arms crossed and holding a key in each hand. He is the spiritual father of St. Peter, for he too holds the keys. The keys which Aion is holding are the keys to the past and future ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 266

The ancient mystery cults are always connected with psychopompic deities. Some of these deities are equipped with the keys to the underworld, because as the guardians of the door they watch over the descent of the initiates into the darkness and are the leaders into the mysteries. Hecate is one of them ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 267

Projection is a general psychological mechanism that carries over subjective contents of any kind into the object. For instance, when I say, “The colour of this room is yellow,” that is a projection, because in the object itself there is no yellow; yellow is only in us. Colour is our subjective experience as you know. The same when I hear a sound, that is a projection, because sound does not exist in itself; it is a sound in my head, it is a psychic phenomenon which I project ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 313

Transference is usually a process that happens between two people and not between a human subject and a physical object, though there are exceptions; whereas the more general mechanism of projection, as we have seen, can just as well extend to physical objects. The mechanism of projection, whereby subjective contents are carried over into the object and appear as if belonging to it, is never a voluntary act, and transference, as a specific form of projection, is no exception to this rule. You cannot consciously and intentionally project, because then you know all the time that you are projecting your subjective contents; therefore you cannot locate them in the object, for you know that they really belong to you ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 314

Transference, strictly, as I have already said, is a projection which happens between two individuals and which, as a rule, is of an emotional and compulsory nature. Emotions in themselves are always in some degree overwhelming for the subject, because they are involuntary conditions which override the intentions of the ego. Moreover, they cling to the subject, and he cannot detach them from himself. Yet this involuntary condition of the subject is at the same time projected into the object, and through that a bond is established which cannot be broken, and exercises a compulsory influence upon the subject ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 316

Emotions are not detachable like ideas or thoughts, because they are identical with certain physical conditions and are thus deeply rooted in the heavy matter of the body. Therefore the emotion of the projected contents always forms a link, a sort of dynamic relationship, between the subject and the object and that is the transference. Naturally, this emotional link or bridge or elastic string can be positive or negative, as you know ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 317

The projection of emotional contents always has a peculiar influence. Emotions are contagious, because they are deeply rooted in the sympathetic system; hence the word “sympathicus.” Any process of an emotional kind immediately arouses similar processes in others. When you are in a crowd which is moved by an emotion, you cannot fail to be roused by that same emotion. Suppose you are in a country where a language is spoken which you don’t understand, and somebody makes a joke and people laugh, then you laugh too in an idiotic way, simply because you can’t refrain from laughing. Also when you are in a crowd which is politically excited you can’t help being excited too, even when you do not share their opinion at all, because emotion has this suggestive effect. The French psychologists have dealt with this “contagion mentale;” there are some very good books on the subject, especially The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, by Le Bon ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 318

In psychotherapy, even if the doctor is entirely detached from the emotional contents of the patient, the very fact that the patient has emotions has an effect upon him. And it is a great mistake if the doctor thinks he can lift himself out of it. He cannot do more than become conscious of the fact that he is affected. If he does not see that, he is too aloof and then he talks beside the point. It is even his duty to accept the emotions of the patient and to mirror them. That is the reason why I reject the idea of putting the patient upon a sofa and sitting behind him. I put my patients in front of me and I talk to them as one natural human being to another, and I expose myself completely and react with no restriction ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 319

I remember very well a case of an elderly woman of about fifty-eight a doctor too from the United States. She arrived in Zurich in a state of utter bewilderment. She was so confused at first I thought her half crazy, until I discovered that she had been in an analysis. She told me certain things she had done in her bewilderment, and it was quite obvious that she would never have done these things if her analyst had been a human being and not a mystical cipher who was sitting behind her, occasionally saying a wise word out of the clouds and never showing an emotion. So she go quite lost in her own mists and did some foolish things which he could easily have prevented her from doing if he had behaved like a human being ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 320

One always has to answer people in their main function, otherwise no contact is established. So, in order to be able to show my patients that their reactions have arrived in my system, I have to sit opposite them so that they can read the reactions in my face and can see that I am listening ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 321

The emotions of patients are always slightly contagious, and they are very contagious when the contents which the patient projects into the analyst are identical with the analyst’s own unconscious contents. Then they both fall into the same dark hole of unconsciousness, and get into the condition of participation. This is the phenomenon which Freud has described as counter-transference. It consists of mutual projecting into each other and being fastened together by mutual unconsciousness. Participation, as I have told you, is a characteristic of primitive psychology, that is, of a psychological level where there is no conscious discrimination between subject and object. Mutual unconsciousness is of course most confusing both to the analyst and to the patient; all orientation is lost, and the end of such an analysis is disaster ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 322

Even analysts are not absolutely perfect, and it can happen that they are occasionally unconscious in certain respects. Therefore long ago I stipulated that analysts ought to be analysed themselves; they should have a father confessor or a mother confessor. Even the Pope, for all his infallibility, has to confess regularly, and not to a monsignor or a cardinal but to an ordinary priest. If the analyst does not keep in touch with his unconscious objectively, there is no guarantee whatever that the patient will not fall into the unconscious of the analyst ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 323

One has, of course, all sorts of ideas about transference, and we are all somewhat prejudiced by the definition which Freud has given; one is inclined to think that it is always a matter of erotic transference. But my experience has not confirmed the theory that it is erotic contents or infantile things exclusively that are projected. According to my experience, anything can be a matter for projection, and the erotic transference is just one of the many possible forms of transference. There are many other contents in the human unconscious which are also of a highly emotional nature, and they can project themselves just as well as sexuality. All activated contents of the unconscious have the tendency to appear in projection. It is even the rule that an unconscious content which is constellated shows itself first as a projection. Any activated archetype can appear in projection, either into an external situation, or into people, or into circumstances in short, into all sorts of objects. There are even transferences to animals and to things ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 324

The intensity of the transference relationship is always equivalent to the importance of its contents to the subject. If it is a particularly intense transference, we can be sure that the contents of the projection, once they are extracted and made conscious, will prove to be just as important to the patient as the transference was. When a transference collapses it does not vanish into the air; its intensity, or a corresponding amount of energy, will appear in another place, for instance in another relationship, or in some other important psychological form. For the intensity of the transference is an intense emotion which is really the property of the patient. If the transference is dissolved, all that projected energy falls back into the subject, and he is then in possession of the treasure which formerly, in the transference, had simply been wasted ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 327

Now we have to say a few words about the aetiology of the transference. Transference can be an entirely spontaneous and unprovoked reaction, a sort of “love at first sight.” Of course transference should never be misunderstood as love; it has nothing to do with love whatever. Transference only misuses love. It may appear as if transference were love, and inexperienced analysts make the mistake of taking it for love, and the patient makes the same mistake and says that he is in love with the analyst. But he is not in love at all ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 328

Occasionally a transference can even spring up before the first sight, that is before or outside the treatment. And if it happens to a person who does not come for analysis afterwards, we cannot find out the reasons. But this shows all the more that it has nothing whatever to do with the real personality of the analyst ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 329

Usually a transference establishes itself only during the analysis. Very often it is caused by a difficulty in making contact, in establishing emotional harmony between the doctor and the patient what the French psychologists at the time of hypnotic and suggestion therapy used to call “le rapport.” A good rapport means that the doctor and patient are getting on well together, that they can really talk to each other and that there is a certain amount of mutual confidence ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 331

This often happens to people who habitually resist other human beings either because of an inferiority complex or because of megalomania, or for other reasons and who are psychologically very isolated. Then, out of fear of getting lost, their nature causes a violent effort of the emotions to attach themselves to the analyst. They are in despair that perhaps he too will not understand them; so they try to propitiate either the circumstances, or the analyst, or their own unwillingness by a sort of sexual attraction ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 332

All these compensatory phenomena can be turned round and be applied to the analyst as well. Suppose, for instance, that an analyst has to treat a woman who does not particularly interest him, but suddenly he discovers that he has a sexual fantasy about her. Now I don’t wish it on analysts that they should have such fantasies, but if they do they had better realize it, because it is important information from their unconscious that their human contact with the patient is not good, that there is a disturbance of rapport. Therefore the analyst’s unconscious makes up for the lack of a decent human rapport by forcing a fantasy upon him in order to cover the distance and to build a bridge. These fantasies can be visual, they can be a certain feeling or a sensation a sexual sensation, for instance. They are invariably a sign that the analyst’s attitude to the patient is wrong, that he overvalues him or undervalues him or that he does not pay the right attention. That correction of his attitude can also be expressed by dreams. So if you dream of a patient, always pay attention and try to see whether the dream is showing you where you may be wrong. Patients are tremendously grateful when you are honest in that respect, and they feel it very much when you are dishonest or neglectful ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 333

There is another reason for over-compensation by transference in the case of patients with an utterly auto-erotic attitude; patients who are shut away in auto-erotic insulation and have a thick coat of armour, or a thick wall and moat around them. Yet they have a desperate need for human contact, and they naturally begin to crave for a human being outside the walls. But they don’t do anything about it. They won’t lift a finger, and neither will they allow anybody to approach them, and from this attitude they get a terrible transference. Such transferences cannot be touched, because the patients are too well defended on all sides. On the contrary, if you try to do something about the transference, they feel it as a sort of aggression, and they defend themselves still more. So you must leave these people to roast in their own fat until they are satisfied and come voluntarily out of their fortress. Of course they will complain like anything about your lack of understanding and so on, but the only thing you can do is to be patient and say, “Well, you are inside, you show nothing, and as long as you don’t show anything I can do nothing either” ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 338

In such a case the transference can come almost to the boiling point, because only a strong flame will cause the person to leave his castle. Of course that means a great outburst; but the outburst must be borne quietly by the doctor, and the patient will later on be very thankful that he has not been taken literally ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 339

These initial dreams are often most instructive. Therefore I always ask a new patient when he first comes to me: “Did you know some time ago that you were coming? Have you met me before? Have you had a dream lately, perhaps last night?” because if he did, it gives me most valuable information about his attitude. And when you keep in close touch with the unconscious you can turn many a difficult corner. A transference is always a hindrance; it is never an advantage. You cure in spite of the transference, not because of it ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 349

Those are some of the reasons for a transference. The general psychological reason for projection is always an activated unconscious that seeks expression. The intensity of the transference is equivalent to the importance of the projected content. A strong transference of a violent nature corresponds to a fiery content; it contains something important, something of great value to the patient. But as long as it is projected, the analyst seems to embody this most precious and important thing. He can’t help being in this unfortunate position, but he has to give that value back to the patient, and the analysis is not finished until the patient has integrated the treasure. So, if a patient projects the saviour complex into you, for instance, you have to give back to him nothing less than a saviour whatever that means. But you are not the saviour most certainly not ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 352

It is a typical occupational hazard of the psychotherapist to become psychically infected and poisoned by the projections to which he is exposed. He has to be continually on his guard against inflation. But the poison does not only affect him psychologically; it may even disturb his sympathetic system. I have observed quite a number of the most extraordinary cases of physical illness among psychotherapists, illness which does not fit in with the known medical symptomatology, and which I ascribe to the effect of this continuous onslaught of projections from which the analyst does not discriminate his own psychology. The peculiar emotional condition of the patient does have a contagious effect. One could almost say it arouses similar vibrations in the nervous system of the analyst, and therefore, like alienists, psychotherapists are apt to become a little queer. One should bear that problem in mind. It very definitely belongs to the problem of transference ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 356

I remember a patient I had to treat over a period of nine years. I saw him only for a few weeks each year, as he lived abroad. From the start I knew what his real trouble was, but I also saw how the least attempt to get closer to the truth was met by a violent reaction and a self-defense that threatened complete rupture between us. Whether I liked it or not, I had to do my best to maintain the rapport and to follow his inclination, supported by his dreams, though this led the discussion away from the central problem that, according to all reasonable expectations, should have been discussed. It went so far that I often accused myself of leading my patient astray, and only the fact that his condition slowly but clearly improved prevented me from confronting him brutally with the truth ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 515

In the tenth year, however, the patient declared himself cured and freed from all symptoms. I was surprised and ready to doubt his statement, because theoretically he could not be cured. Noticing my astonishment, he smiled and said: “And now I want to thank you quite particularly for your unfailing tact and patience in helping me to circumvent the painful cause of my neurosis. I am now ready to tell you everything about it. If I had been able to do so I would have told you right out at the first consultation. But that would have destroyed my rapport with you, and where would I have been then? I would have been morally bankrupt and would have lost the ground from under my feet, having nothing to stand on. In the course of the years I have learnt to trust you, and as my confidence grew my condition improved. I improved because my belief in myself was restored, and now I am strong enough to discuss the problem that was destroying me” ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 516

He then made a devastatingly frank confession, which showed me the reasons for the peculiar course our treatment had followed. The original shock had been such that he could not face it alone. It needed the two of us, and that was the therapeutic task, not the fulfilment of theoretical presuppositions ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 517

From cases like this I learnt to follow the lines already indicated in the material presented by the patient and in his disposition, rather than commit myself to general theoretical considerations that might not be applicable to that particular case. The practical knowledge of human nature I have accumulated in the course of sixty years has taught me to regard each case as a new experience, for which, first of all, I have to seek the individual approach. Sometimes I have not hesitated to plunge into a careful study of infantile events and fantasies; at other times I have begun at the top, even if this meant soaring into a mist of most unlikely metaphysical speculations. It all depends on whether I am able to learn the language of the patient and follow the gropings of his unconscious towards the light. Some demand one thing and some another. Such are the differences between individuals ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 518

Meaning and purposefulness are not prerogatives of the conscious mind; they operate through the whole of living nature. There is no difference in principle between organic and psychic formations. As a plant produces its flower, so the psyche creates its symbols. Every dream is evidence of this process ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 512

Thus, through dreams, intuitions, impulses, and other spontaneous happenings, instinctive forces influence the activity of consciousness. Whether that influence is for better or worse depends on the actual contents of the unconscious ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 512

If the dream contains too many things that normally ought to be conscious, then its function becomes twisted and prejudiced; motives appear that are not based on true instincts, but owe their activity to the fact that they have been consigned to the unconscious by repression or neglect. They overlay, as it were, the normal unconscious psyche and distort its natural symbol-producing function ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 512

Obviously the dream was telling the young man what he ought to do, and the old man what he was still doing. While it encouraged the hesitant young man, the old one would be only too glad to risk the jump. But that still-flickering spirit of adventure was just his greatest trouble ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 519

This example shows how the interpretation of dreams and symbols depends largely on the individual disposition of the dreamer. Symbols have not one meaning only but several, and often they even characterize a pair of opposites, as does, for instance, the stella matutina, the morning star, which is a well-known symbol of Christ and at the same time of the devil (Lucifer). The same applies to the lion. The correct interpretation depends on the context, i.e., the associations connected with the image, and on the actual condition of the dreamer’s mind ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 520

But if archetypes were ideas that originated in our conscious mind or were acquired by it, one would certainly understand them, and would not be astonished and bewildered when they appear in consciousness. I can remember many cases of people who have consulted me because they were baffled by their own or their children’s dreams. The reason was that the dreams contained images that would not be traced to anything they remembered, and they could not explain where their children could have picked up such strange and incomprehensible ideas ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 524

These people were highly educated persons, sometimes psychiatrists themselves. One of them was a professor who had a sudden vision and thought he was crazy. He came to me in a state of complete panic. I simply took a four-hundred-year-old volume from the shelf and showed him an old woodcut that depicted his vision. “You don’t need to be crazy,” I told him. “They knew all about your vision four hundred years ago.” Whereupon he sat down entirely deflated but once more normal ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 524

Our conscious thoughts often concern themselves with the future and its possibilities, and so does the unconscious and its dreams. There has long been a world-wide belief that the chief function of dreams is prognostication of the future. In antiquity, and still in the Middle Ages, dreams played their part in medical prognosis. I can confirm from a modern dream the prognosis, or rather precognition, in an old dream quoted by Artemidoros of Daldis, in the second century A.D. He relates that a man dreamt he saw his father die in the flames of a house on fire. Not long afterwards, he himself died of a phlegmone (fire, high fever), presumably pneumonia. Now it so happened that a colleague of mine was suffering from a deadly gangrenous fever in fact, a phlegmone. A former patient of his, who had no knowledge of the nature of the doctor’s illness, dreamt that the doctor was perishing in a great fire. The dream occurred three weeks before the doctor died, at a time when he had just entered hospital and the disease was only at its beginning. The dreamer knew nothing but the bare fact that the doctor was ill and had entered hospital ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 544

They [instincts] are thus forced to assert themselves in an indirect way, through what Janet called automatisms. These take the form of symptoms in the case of a neurosis or, in normal cases, of incidents of various kinds, like unaccountable moods, unexpected forgetfulness, mistakes in speech, and so on. Such manifestations show very clearly the autonomy of the archetypes ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 560

It is easy to believe that one is master in one’s own house, but, as long as we are unable to control our emotions and moods, or to be conscious of the myriad secret ways in which unconscious factors insinuate themselves into our arrangements and decisions, we are certainly not the masters. On the contrary, we have so much reason for uncertainty that it will be better to look twice at what we are doing ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 560

The former [natural] symbols are derived from the unconscious contents of the psyche, and they therefore represent an enormous number of variations on the basic archetypal motifs. In many cases, they can be traced back to their archaic roots, i.e., to ideas and images that we meet in the most ancient records and in primitive societies. In this respect, I should like to call the reader’s attention to such books as Mircea Eliade’s study of shamanism, where a great many illuminating examples may be found ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 578

“Cultural” symbols, on the other hand, are those that have expressed “eternal truths” or are still in use in many religions. They have gone through many transformations and even a process of more or less conscious elaboration, and in this way have become the représentations collectives of civilized societies. Nevertheless, they have retained much of their original numinosity, and they function as positive or negative “prejudices” with which the psychologist has to reckon very seriously ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 579

Nobody can dismiss these numinous factors on merely rational grounds. They are important constituents of our mental make-up and vital forces in the building up of human society, and they cannot be eradicated without serious loss. When they are repressed or neglected, their specific energy disappears into the unconscious with unpredictable consequences. The energy that appears to have been lost revives and intensifies whatever is uppermost in the unconscious tendencies, perhaps, that have hitherto had no chance to express themselves, or have not been allowed an uninhibited existence in our consciousness. They form an ever-present destructive “shadow.” Even tendencies that might be able to exert a beneficial influence turn into veritable demons when they are repressed. This is why many well-meaning people are understandably afraid of the unconscious, and incidentally of psychology ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 580

If, for instance, one has to deal with a dream in which the number 13 occurs, the question is: Does the dreamer habitually believe in the unfavourable nature of the number, or does the dream merely allude to people who still indulge in such superstitions? The answer will make a great difference to the interpretation. In the former case, the dreamer is still under the spell of the unlucky 13, and therefore will feel most uncomfortable in room no. 13 or sitting at a table with thirteen people. In the latter case, 13 may not be more than a chiding or disparaging remark. In one case it is a still numinous representation; in the other it is stripped of its original emotionality and has assumed the innocuous character of a mere piece of indifferent information ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 588

This illustrates the way in which archetypes appear in practical experience. In the first case they appear in their original form they are images and at the same time emotions. One can speak of an archetype only when these two aspects coincide. When there is only an image, it is merely a word-picture, like a corpuscle with no electric charge. It is then of little consequence, just a word and nothing more. But if the image is charged with numinosity, that is, with psychic energy, then it becomes dynamic and will produce consequences ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para CW18 ¶ 589

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. The word alone is a mere abstraction, an exchangeable coin in intellectual commerce. But the archetype is living matter. It is not limitlessly exchangeable but always belongs to the economy of a living individual, from which it cannot be detached and used arbitrarily for different ends. It cannot be explained in just any way, but only in the one that is indicated by that particular individual. Thus the symbol of the cross, in the case of a good Christian, can be interpreted only in the Christian way unless the dream produces very strong reasons to the contrary, and even then the specifically Christian meaning should not be lost sight of ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 589

The mere use of words is futile if you do not know what they stand for. This is particularly true in psychology, where we speak of archetypes like the anima and animus, the wise old man, the great mother, and so on. You can know about all the saints, sages, prophets, and other godly men, and all the great mothers of the world, but if they are mere images whose numinosity you have never experienced, it will be as if you were talking in a dream, for you do not know what you are talking about. The words you use are empty and valueless, and they gain life and meaning only when you try to learn about their numinosity, their relationship to the living individual. Then only do you begin to understand that the names mean very little, but that the way they are related to you is all-important ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 590

The symbol-producing function of our dreams is an attempt to bring original mind back to consciousness, where it has never been before, and where it has never undergone critical self-reaction. We have been that mind, but we have never known it. We got rid of it before understanding it. It rose from its cradle, shedding its primitive characteristics like cumbersome and valueless husks. It looks as if the unconscious represented the deposit of these remnants. Dreams and their symbols continually refer to them, as if they intended to bring back all the old primitive things from which the mind freed itself in the course of its evolution: illusions, childish fantasies, archaic thought-forms, primitive instincts. This is in reality the case, and it explains the resistance, even fear and horror, one experiences in approaching the unconscious. One is shocked less by the primitivity of its contents than by their emotionality. They are not merely neutral or indifferent, they are so charged with affect that they are often exceedingly uncomfortable. They can even cause real panic, and the more they are repressed the more they spread through the whole personality in the form of a neurosis ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 591

It is just their emotionality, however, that gives them such a vital importance. It is as if a man who has lived through a period of life in an unconscious state should suddenly realize that there is a gap in his memory that important events seem to have taken place that he cannot remember. In so far as he assumes that the psyche is an exclusively personal affair (and this is the usual assumption), he will try to retrieve the apparently lost infantile memories. But the gaps in his childhood memories are merely the symptoms of a much greater loss, the loss of the primitive psyche the psyche that lived and functioned before it was reflected by consciousness ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 592

As the evolution of the embryonic body repeats its prehistory, so the mind grows up through the series of its prehistoric stages. Dreams seem to consider it their main task to bring back a sort of recollection of the prehistoric as well as the infantile world, right down to the level of the most primitive instincts, as if such memories were a priceless treasure. And these memories can indeed have a remarkably healing effect in certain cases, as Freud saw long ago ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 593

This observation confirms the view that an infantile memory-gap (a so-called amnesia) amounts to a definite loss and that its recovery brings an increase in vitality and well-being. Since we measure a child’s psychic life by the paucity and simplicity of its conscious contents, we do not appreciate the far-reaching complexities of the infantile mind that stem from its original identity with the prehistoric psyche. That “original mind” is just as much present and still functioning in the child as the evolutionary stages are in the embryo. If the reader remembers what I said earlier about the child who made a present of her dreams to her father, he will get a good idea of what I mean ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 593

In infantile amnesia, one finds strange admixtures of mythological fragments that also often appear in later psychoses. Images of this kind are highly numinous and therefore very important. If such recollections reappear in adult life, they may in some cases cause profound psychological disturbances, while in other people they can produce astonishing cures or religious conversions. Often they bring back a piece of life, missing for a long time, that enriches the life of an individual ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 594

The recollection of infantile memories and the reproduction of archetypal modes of psychic functioning create a wider horizon and a greater extension of consciousness, provided that one succeeds in assimilating and integrating the lost and regained contents. Since they are not neutral, their assimilation will modify the personality, even as they themselves will have to undergo certain alterations ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 595

In this part of the individuation process the interpretation of symbols plays an important practical role; for the symbols are natural attempts to reconcile and reunite often widely separated opposites, as is apparent from the contradictory nature of many symbols. It would be a particularly obnoxious error in this work of assimilation if the interpreter were to take only the conscious memories as “true” or “real,” while considering the archetypal contents as merely fantastic representations ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 595

Dreams and their ambiguous symbols owe their forms on the one hand to repressed contents and on the other to archetypes. They thus have two aspects and enable one to interpret in two ways: one lays the emphasis either on their personal or on their archetypal aspect. The former shows the morbid influence of repression and infantile wishes, while the latter points to the sound instinctive basis ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 595

Not only is the existence of archetypes denied, but even those people who do admit their existence usually treat them as if they were mere images and forget that they are living entities that make up a great part of the human psyche. As soon as the interpreter strips them of their numinosity, they lose their life and become mere words. It is then easy enough to link them together with other mythological representations, and so the process of limitless substitution begins; one glides from archetype to archetype, everything means everything, and one has reduced the whole process to absurdity. All the corpses in the world are chemically identical, but living individuals are not ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 596

It is true that the forms of archetypes are to a considerable extent interchangeable, but their numinosity is and remains a fact. It represents the value of an archetypal event. This emotional value must be kept in mind and allowed for throughout the whole intellectual process of interpretation. The risk of losing it is great, because thinking and feeling are so diametrically opposed that thinking abolishes feeling-values and vice versa. Psychology is the only science that has to take the factor of value (feeling) into account, since it forms the link between psychic events on the one hand, and meaning and life on the other ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 596

This answer hits the nail on the head. We are so captivated by and entangled in our subjective consciousness that we have simply forgotten the age-old fact that God speaks chiefly through dreams and visions. The Buddhist discards the world of unconscious fantasies as “distractions” and useless illusions; the Christian puts his Church and his Bible between himself and his unconscious; and the rationalist intellectual does not yet know that his consciousness is not his total psyche, in spite of the fact that for more than seventy years the unconscious has been a basic scientific concept that is indispensable to any serious student of psychology ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 601

As a philosophical and metaphysical concept, the unconscious occurs fairly early, for instance as “petites perceptions” in Leibniz, “eternal unconscious” in Schelling, “unconscious Will” in Schopenhauer and as the “divine Absolute” in von Hartmann ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 1143

In the academic psychology of the nineteenth century, the unconscious occurs as a basic theoretical concept in Theodor Lipps, who defines it as the “psychic reality which must necessarily be thought to underlie the existence of a conscious content;” and in F. H.W. Myers and William James, who stress the importance of an unconscious psyche. With Theodor Fechner, the unconscious becomes an empirical concept. Nevertheless, the empirical approach to the unconscious may properly be said to date from quite recent times, since up to the turn of the century the psyche was usually identified with consciousness, and this made the idea of the unconscious appear untenable (Wundt) ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 1144

Freud later expanded the concept of the unconscious by calling it the “id” in contradistinction to the conscious ego. (The term derives from Groddeck.) The id represents the natural unconscious dynamism of man, while the ego forms that part of the id which is modified under the influence of the environment or is replaced by the reality principle. In working out the relations between the ego and the id, Freud discovered that the ego contains not only conscious but also unconscious contents, and he was therefore compelled to frame a concept to characterize the unconscious portion of the ego, which he called the “super-ego” or “ego-ideal.” He regarded this as the representative of the parental authority, as the successor of the Oedipus complex, that impels the ego to restrain the id. It manifests itself as conscience, which, invested with the authority of collective morality, continues to display the character of the father. The super-ego accounts for the activity of the censor in dreams ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 1152

Although Alfred Adler is usually included among the founders of depth psychology, his school of individual psychology represents only a partial continuation of the line of research initiated by his teacher Freud. Confronted with the same empirical material, Adler considered it from an entirely different point of view. For him, the primary aetiological factor was not sexuality but the power-drive. The neurotic individual appeared to him to be in conflict with society, with the result that his spontaneous development was blocked. On this view the individual never exists for himself alone; he maintains his psychic existence only within the community ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 1153

In contrast to the emphasis Freud laid on instinctual strivings, Adler stressed the importance of environmental factors as possible causes of neurosis. Neurotic symptoms and disturbances of personality were the result of a morbidly intensified valuation of the ego, which, instead of adapting to reality, develops a system of “guiding fictions.” This hypothesis gives expression to a finalistic viewpoint diametrically opposed to the causal-reductive method of Freud, in that it emphasizes the direction towards a goal ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 1153

Each individual chooses a guiding line as a basic pattern for the organization of all psychic contents. Among the possible guiding fictions, Adler attached special importance to the winning of superiority and power over others, the urge “to be on top.” The original source of this misguided ambition lies in a deep-rooted feeling of inferiority, necessitating an over-compensation in the form of security. A primary organ-inferiority, or inferiority of the constitution as a whole, often proves to be an aetiological factor. Environmental influences in early childhood play their part in building up this psychic mechanism, since it is then that the foundations are laid for the development of the guiding fiction. The fiction of future superiority is maintained by tendentiously distorting all valuations and giving undue importance to being “on top” as opposed to “underneath,” “masculine” as opposed to “feminine,” a tendency which finds its clearest expression in the so-called “masculine protest” ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 1153

In 1907 Jung became personally acquainted with Freud, and derived from him a wealth of insights, particularly in regard to dream psychology and the treatment of neurosis. But in certain respects he arrived at views which differed from those of Freud. Experience did not seem to him to justify Freud’s sexual theory of neurosis, and still less that of schizophrenia. The conception of the unconscious needed to be broadened, inasmuch as the unconscious was not just a product of repression but was the creative matrix of consciousness ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 1156

Equally, he [Jung] was of the opinion that the unconscious could not be explained in personalistic terms, as a merely personal phenomenon, but that it was also in part collective. Accordingly, he rejected the view that it possessed a merely instinctual nature, as well as rejecting the wish-fulfillment theory of dreams. Instead, he emphasized the compensatory function of the unconscious processes and their teleological character ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 1156

For the wish-fulfillment theory he substituted the concept of development of personality and development of consciousness, holding that the unconscious does not consist only of morally incompatible wishes but is largely composed of hitherto undeveloped, unconscious portions of the personality which strive for integration in the wholeness of the individual ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 1156

In the neurotic, this process of realization is manifested in the conflict between the relatively mature side of the personality and the side which Freud rightly described as infantile. The conflict has at first a purely personal character and can be explained personalistically, as the patients themselves do, and moreover in a manner which agrees both in principle and in detail with the Freudian explanation. Their standpoint is a purely personal and egoistic one, and takes no account of the collective factors, this being the very reason why they are ill ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 1156

In schizophrenics, on the other hand, the collective contents of the unconscious predominate strongly in the form of mythological motifs. Freud could not subscribe to these modifications of his views, so Jung and he parted company ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 1156

The unconscious is a living psychic entity which, it seems, is relatively autonomous, behaving as if it were a personality with intentions of its own. At any rate it would be quite wrong to think of the unconscious as mere “material,” or as a passive object to be used or exploited. Equally, its biological function is not just a mechanical one, in the sense that it is merely complementary to consciousness. It has far more the character of compensation, that is, an intelligent choice of means aiming not only at the restoration of the psychic equilibrium but at an advance towards wholeness ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 1418

The reaction of the unconscious is far from being merely passive; it takes the initiative in a creative way, and sometimes its purposive activity predominates over its customary reactivity ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 1418

As a partner in the process of conscious differentiation, it does not act as a mere opponent, for the revelation of its contents enriches consciousness and assists differentiation. A hostile opposition takes place only when consciousness obstinately clings to its one-sidedness and insists on its arbitrary standpoint, as always happens when there is a repression and, in consequence, a partial dissociation of consciousness ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 1418

Such being the behaviour of the unconscious, the process of coming to terms with it, in the ethical sense, acquires a special character. The process does not consist in dealing with a given “material,” but in negotiating with a psychic minority (or majority, as the case may be) that has equal rights ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 1419

For this reason the author [Jung] compares the relation to the unconscious with a parliamentary democracy, whereas the old ethic unconsciously imitates, or actually prefers, the procedure of an absolute monarchy or a tyrannical one-party system. Through the new ethic, the ego-consciousness is ousted from its central position in a psyche organized on the lines of a monarchy or totalitarian state, its place being taken by wholeness or the Self, which is now recognized as central. The Self was of course always at the centre, and always acted as the hidden director ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 1419

Gnosticism long ago projected this state of affairs into the heavens, in the form of a metaphysical drama: ego-consciousness appearing as the vain demiurge, who fancies himself the sole creator of the world and the Self as the highest, unknowable God, whose emanation the demiurge is. The union of conscious and unconscious in the individuation process, the real core of the ethical problem, was projected in the form of a drama of redemption and, in some Gnostic systems, consisted in the demiurge’s discovery and recognition of the highest God ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 1419

This parallel may serve to indicate the magnitude of the problem we are concerned with, and to throw into relief the special character of the confrontation with the unconscious on an ethic plane. The problem is indeed a vital one. This may explain why the question of a new ethic is of such serious and urgent concern to the author, [Jung], who argues his case with a boldness and passion well matched by his penetrating insight and thoughtfulness ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 1420

One has only to think of the Jewish-Gnostic presuppositions in Paul’s writings and of the immense influence of the “gnostic” gospel of John. Apart also from these important witnesses, and in spite of being persecuted, branded as heresy, and pronounced dead within the realm of the Church, Gnosticism did not die out at once by any means ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 1480

Gnosticism’s philosophical and psychological aspects went on developing in alchemy up to the time of Goethe, and the Jewish syncretism of the age of Philo found its continuation within orthodox Judaism in the Kabbala. Both these trends, if not exactly forestages of the modern psychology of the unconscious, are at all events well-nigh inexhaustible sources of knowledge for the psychologist. This is no accident inasmuch as parallel phenomena to the empirically established contents of the collective unconscious underlie the earliest Gnostic systems. The archetypal motifs of the unconscious are the psychic source of Gnostic ideas, of delusional ideas (especially of the paranoid schizophrenic forms), of symbol-formation in dreams, and of active imagination in the course of an analytical treatment of neurosis ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 1480

If the tradition were concerned with a person characterized rather by individual and more or less unique traits, to whom few or no legends, miraculous deeds, and exploits or relations or parallels with mythological figures were attached, there would be no reason to suppose the presence of an archetype ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 1519

If on the other hand the biography of the person concerned contains mythical motifs and parallels, and if posterity has added elements that are clearly mythological, then there is no longer any doubt that we are dealing with an archetype ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 1519

It is unnecessary to continue this long list of phenomena of assimilation which follow without interruption, so to speak, from the remotest times to our own day. This proves irrefutably that Elijah is a living archetype. In psychology, we call it a constellated archetype, that is to say one that is more or less generally active, giving birth to new forms of assimilation. One of these phenomena was the choice of Carmel for the foundation of the first convent in the twelfth century. The mountain had long been a numinous place as the seat of the Canaanite deities Baal and Astarte. (Cf. the duality of Elijah, the transformation into a hetaira.) YHWH supplants them as inhabitant of the sacred place (Eli-yah like Khadir a kind of personification of YHWH or Allah. Cf. the temperament and the fire of the prophet!). The numinous inhabitant of Carmel is chosen as the patron of the order. The choice is curious and unprecedented ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 1529

According to the empirical rule, an archetype becomes active and chooses itself when a certain lack in the conscious sphere calls for a compensation on the part of the unconscious. What is lacking on the conscious side is the immediate relation with God: in so far as Elijah is an angelic being fortified with divine power, having the magic name of Eli-YHWH, delivered from corruptibility, omniscient and omnipresent, he represents the ideal compensation not only for Christians but for Jews and Moslems also ~Carl Jung, CW18, Para 1529