Carl Jung: CW 10 “Civilization in Transition” – Quotations

Our cerebral consciousness is like an actor who has forgotten that he is playing a role. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 332

And just as the material of the body that is ready for life has need of the psyche in order to be capable of life, so the psyche presupposes the living body in order that its images may live. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 618

For the Chinese, “spirit” does not signify order, meaning, and everything that is good: on the contrary, it is a fiery and sometimes dangerous power. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 939

It is a fact that cannot be denied the wickedness of others becomes our own wickedness because it kindles something evil in our own hearts. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 408

In the realm of consciousness we are our own masters; we seem to be the “factors” themselves. But if we step through the door of the shadow we discover with terror that we are the objects of unseen factors, ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 49

If only people could realize what an enrichment it is to find one’s own guilt, what a sense of honour and spiritual dignity! ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 416

The world is still full of betes noires and scapegoats, just as it formerly teemed with witches and werewolves. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 130

The wise man learns only from his own guilt. He will ask himself: Who am I that all this should happen to me? To find the answer to this fateful question he will look into his own heart. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 152

We never appreciate how dependent we are on lucky ideas—until we find to our distress that they will not come. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 305

The mere act of enlightenment may have destroyed the spirits of nature, but not the psychic factors that correspond to them, such as suggestibility, lack of criticism, fearfulness, propensity to superstition and prejudice—in short, all those qualities which make possession possible. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 431

All human control comes to an end when the individual is caught in a mass movement. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 395

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. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 315

Words like “Society” and “State” are so concretized that they are almost personified. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 554

It is not the will of individuals that moulds the destinies of nations, but supra-personal factors, the spirit and the earth, which work in mysterious ways and in unfathomable darkness. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 921

But it cannot be denied that in the course of the last two centuries Christianity, no less than Confucianism in China and Buddhism in India, has largely forfeited its educative activity. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 326

Most men are erotically blinded—they commit the unpardonable mistake of confusing Eros with sex. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 255

Resistance to the organized mass can be effected only by the man who is as well organized in his individuality as the mass itself. I fully realize that this proposition must sound well-nigh unintelligible to the man of today. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 43.

People go on blithely organizing and believing in the sovereign remedy of mass action, without the least consciousness of the fact that the most powerful organizations can be maintained only by the greatest ruthlessness of their leaders and the cheapest of slogans. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 40.

Instinct is anything but a blind and indefinite impulse, since it proves to be attuned and adapted to a definite external situation. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 49.

Just as the chaotic movements of the crowd, all ending in mutual frustration, are impelled in a definite direction by a dictatorial will, so the individual in his dissociated state needs a directing and ordering principle. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Pages 43-44.

The individual who is not anchored in God can offer no resistance on his own resources to the physical and moral blandishments of the world. For this he needs the evidence of inner, transcendent experience which alone can protect him from the otherwise inevitable submersion in the mass. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 258.

Just as man, as a social being, cannot in the long run exist without a tie to the community, so the individual will never find the real justification for his existence and his own spiritual and moral autonomy anywhere except in an extramundane principle capable of relativizing the overpowering influence of external factors. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 258.

Even domestic animals, to whom we erroneously deny a conscience, have complexes and moral reactions. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 446.

Archaic man believes it to be the sun, and civilized man believes it to be the eye—so far, at any rate, as he reflects at all and does not suffer from the disease of the poets. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 135

Great innovations never come from above; they come invariably from below, just as trees never grow from the sky downward, but upward from the earth. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 177

And it is just the people from the obscurer levels who follow the unconscious drive of the psyche; it is the much-derided, silent folk of the land, who are less infected with academic prejudices than the shining celebrities are wont to be. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 177

The primitives I observed in East Africa took it for granted that “big” dreams are dreamed only by “big” men – medicine-men, magicians, chiefs, etc. This may be true on a primitive level. But with us these dreams are dreamed also by simple people, more particularly when they have got themselves, mentally or spiritually, in a fix. ~Carl Jung. CW 10, Page 324.

`Even if the whole world were to fall to pieces, the unity of the psyche would never be shattered. And the wider and more numerous the fissures on the surface, the more the unity is strengthened in the depths. ~Carl Jung; CW 10, Para 310.

The danger that faces us today is that the whole of reality will be replaced by words. This accounts for that terrible lack of instinct in modern man, particularly the city-dweller. He lacks all contact with life and the breath of nature. He knows a rabbit or a cow only from the illustrated paper, the dictionary, or the movies, and thinks he knows what it is really like-and is then amazed that cowsheds “smell,” because the dictionary didn’t say so. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 882.

The struggle between light and darkness has broken out everywhere. The rift runs through the whole globe, and set the fire that is smoldering and glowing Germany ablaze wherever we look. The conflagration that broke out in Germany was the outcome of psychic conditions that are universal. Carl Jung, CW 10, para 485.

To confront a person with his shadow is to show him his own light. Once one has experienced a few times what it is like to stand judgingly between the opposites, one begins to understand what is meant by the self. Anyone who perceives his shadow and his light simultaneously sees himself from two sides and thus gets in the middle. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 872.

. . . the spirit is the life of the body seen from within, and the body the outward manifestation of the life of the spirit – the two being really one. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 195.

In some way or other we are part of a single, all-embracing psyche, a single “greatest man.” ~Carl Jung, CW 10: Page 175.

The man who has attained consciousness of the present is solitary. The “modern” man has at all times been so, for every step towards fuller consciousness removes him further from his original, purely animal participation mystique with the herd, from submersion in a common unconsciousness. Every step forward means tearing oneself loose from the maternal womb of unconsciousness in which the mass of men dwells. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 150

The art of interpreting dreams cannot be learnt from books. Methods and rules are good only when we can get along without them. Only the man who can do it anyway has real skill, only the man of understanding really understands. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 327

We still attribute to the other fellow all the evil and inferior qualities that we do not like to recognize in ourselves, and therefore have to criticize and attack him, when all that has happened is that an inferior “soul” has emigrated from one person to another. The world is still full of betes noires and scapegoats, just as it formerly teemed with witches and werewolves. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 130.

The marked tendency of the Western democracies to internal dissension is the very thing that could lead them to a more hopeful path. ~Carl Jung; CW 10; Page 225.

Any large company composed of wholly admirable persons has the morality and intelligence of an unwieldy, stupid and violent animal. ~Carl Jung; CW 10; Page 228

Archetypes are like riverbeds which dry up when the water deserts them, but which it can find again at any time. An archetype is like an old watercourse along which the water of life has flowed for centuries, digging a deep channel for itself. The longer it has flowed in this channel the more likely it is that sooner or later the water will return to its old bed. ~Carl Jung: CW 10, Page 395.

The heaping together of paintings by Old Masters in museums is a catastrophe; likewise, a collection of a hundred Great Brains makes one big fathead. ~Carl Jung; CW 10, Para 944.

The development of modern art with its seemingly nihilistic trend towards disintegration must be understood as the symptom and symbol of a mood of universal destruction and renewal that has set its mark on our age. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Pages 303-304.

It is possible to have an attitude to the external conditions of life only when there is a point of reference outside them. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, par. 506.

Even domestic animals, to whom we erroneously deny a conscience, have complexes and moral reactions. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 446.

Until now it has not truly and fundamentally been noted that our time, despite the prevalence of irreligiosity, is so to speak congenitally charged with the attainment of the Christian epoch, namely with the supremacy of the word, that Logos which the central figure of Christian faith represents. The word has literally become our God and has remained so” ~Carl Jung, CW 10, §554.

I tried to give a general view of the structure of the unconscious. Its contents, the archetypes, are as it were the hidden foundations of the conscious mind, or, to use another comparison, the roots which the psyche has sunk not only in the earth in the narrower sense but in the world in general. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 31.

Archetypes are systems of readiness for action, and at the same time images and emotions. They are inherited with the brain structure—indeed, they are its psychic aspect. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 31.

We shall have to reckon with quite unusual difficulties in dealing with it, and the first of these is that the archetype and its function must be understood far more as a part of man’s prehistoric, irrational psychology than as a rationally conceivable system. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 31.

Phylogenetically as well as ontogenetically we have grown up out of the dark confines of the earth; hence the factors that affected us most closely became archetypes, and it is these primordial images which influence us most directly, and therefore seem to be the most powerful. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 32.

I would like to suggest that every psychic reaction which is out of proportion to its precipitating cause should be investigated as to whether it may be conditioned at the same time by an archetype. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 32.

We should make the archetype responsible only for a definite, minimal, normal degree of fear; any pronounced increase, felt to be abnormal, must have special causes. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 33.

People measure their self-knowledge by what the average person in their social environment knows of himself, but not by the real psychic facts which are for the most part hidden from them. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Par. 491

The upheaval of our world and the upheaval of our consciousness are one and the same. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 177.

Thinking is difficult, therefore let the herd pronounce judgment! ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 344, Para 652.

Religion means dependence on and submission to the irrational facts of experience. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 505.

Where is a height without depth, and how can there be light that throws no shadow? There is no good that is not opposed by evil. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 271.

Think of nearly two thousand years of Christian Idealism followed, not by the return of the Messiah and the heavenly millennium, but by the World War among Christian nations with its barbed wire and poison gas. What a catastrophe in heaven and on earth! ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Pages 76-77

When you walk with naked feet, how can you ever forget the earth? ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page, Para 988

Therefore, never ask what a man does, but how he does it. If he does it from love or in the spirit of love, then he serves a god; and whatever he may do is not ours to judge, for it is ennobled. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 234

Love is a force of destiny whose power reaches from heaven to hell. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 198.

A man is ill, but the illness is nature’s attempt to heal him. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 361

From the illness itself we can learn so much for our recovery, and what the neurotic flings away as absolutely worthless contains the true gold we should never have found elsewhere. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 361

It is the privilege and the task of maturer people, who have passed the meridian of life, to create culture. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 272

Consciousness is a precondition of being. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 528

Knowledge of God is a transcendental problem. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 565

The attainment of consciousness was the most precious fruit of the tree of knowledge, the magical weapon which gave man victory over the earth, and which we hope will give him a still greater victory over himself. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 289

The fact that individual consciousness means separation and opposition is something that man has experienced countless times in his long history. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 290

Eternal truths are never true at any given moment in history. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 1004

If the individual is not truly regenerated in spirit, society cannot be either, for society is the sum total of individuals in need of redemption. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 536

In our strength we are independent and isolated, are masters of our own fate; in our weakness we are dependent and bound, and become unwilling instruments of fate, for here it is not the individual will that counts but the will of the species. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 261

But, precisely because the truest and most devoted love is also the most beautiful, let no man seek to make it easy. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 232

He is a sorry knight who shrinks from the difficulty of loving his lady. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 232

Love is like God: both give themselves only to their bravest knights. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 232

Every true and deep love is a sacrifice. The lover sacrifices all other possibilities, or rather, the illusion that such possibilities exist. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 231

When, towards middle life, the last gleam of childhood illusion fades—this it must be owned is true only of an almost ideal life, for many go as children to their graves—then the archetype of the mature man or woman emerges from the parental imago: an image of man as woman has known him from the beginning of time, and an image of woman that man carries within him eternally. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 74

A psychology of neurosis that sees only the negative elements empties out the baby with the bath-water, since it neglects the positive meaning and value of these “infantile”—i.e., creative—fantasies. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 355

Just as there is a relationship of mind to body, so there is a relationship of body to earth. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 19

A civilization does not decay, it regenerates. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 299

Was it not Meister Eckhart who said: “For this reason God is willing to bear the brunt of sins and often winks at them, mostly sending them to people for whom he has prepared some high destiny. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 440

Without guilt, unfortunately, there can be no psychic maturation and no widening of the spiritual horizon. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 440

I know people who feel that the strange power in their own psyche is something divine, for the very simple reason that it has given them an understanding of what is meant by religious experience. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 312.

They [Religions] express the whole range of the psychic problem in mighty images; they are the avowal and recognition of the soul, and at the same time the revelation of the soul’s nature. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 367

Mere continuation can be left to the animals, but inauguration is the prerogative of man, the one thing he can boast of that lifts him above the beasts. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 268

Unlived life is a destructive, irresistible force that works softly but inexorably. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 252

Here each of us must ask: Have I any religious experience and immediate relation to God, and hence that certainty which will keep me, as an individual, from dissolving in the crowd? Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 564

Religion, as the careful observation and taking account of certain invisible and uncontrollable factors, is an instinctive attitude peculiar to man, and its manifestations can be followed all through human history. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 512

A creed coincides with the established Church or, at any rate, forms a public institution whose members include not only true believers but vast numbers of people who can only be described as “indifferent” in matters of religion and who belong to it simply by force of habit. Here the difference between a creed and a religion becomes palpable. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 508.

Love has more than one thing in common with religious faith. It demands unconditional trust and expects absolute surrender. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 112

Just as nobody but the believer who surrenders himself wholly to God can partake of divine grace, so love reveals its highest mysteries and its wonder only to those who are capable of unqualified devotion and loyalty of feeling. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 112

The very fact that a man enters into a marriage on trial means that he is making a reservation; he wants to be sure of not burning his fingers, to risk nothing. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 112

Love is not cheap—let us therefore beware of cheapening it! ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 112

All our bad qualities, our egotism, our cowardice, our worldly wisdom, our cupidity—all these would persuade us not to take love seriously. But love will reward us only when we do. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 112

I must even regard it as a misfortune that nowadays the sexual question is spoken of as something distinct from love. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 112

The two questions should not be separated, for when there is a sexual problem it can be solved only by love. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 112

It is one of the most difficult and thankless of tasks to say anything of importance about the civilized man of today … for the speaker finds himself caught in the same presuppositions and is blinded by the same prejudices as those whom he wishes to view from a superior standpoint. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 104

He alone is modern who is fully conscious of the present. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 149

All human control comes to an end when the individual is caught in a mass movement. Then the archetypes begin to function, as happens also in the lives of individuals when they are confronted with situations that cannot be dealt with in any of the familiar ways. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 395

Resistance to the organized mass can be effected only by the man who is as well organized in his individuality as the mass itself. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 540

It is quite natural that with the triumph of the Goddess of Reason a general neuroticizing of modern man should set in, a dissociation of personality analogous to the splitting of the world today by the Iron Curtain. This boundary line bristling with barbed wire runs through the psyche of modern man, no matter on which side he lives. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 544

If only a world-wide consciousness could arise that all division and all fission are due to the splitting of opposites in the psyche, then we should know where to begin. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 575

The heaping together of paintings by Old Masters in museums is a catastrophe; likewise, a collection of a hundred Great Brains makes one big fathead. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 944

A million zeros joined together do not, unfortunately, add up to one. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 535

The principal and indeed the only thing that is wrong with the world is man. ~ Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 441

Let man but accumulate sufficient engines of destruction and the devil within him will soon be unable to resist putting them to their fated use. It is well known that fire-arms go off of themselves if only enough of them are together. ~Carl Jung, CW 10,

It is a fact that cannot be denied the wickedness of others becomes our own wickedness because it kindles something evil in our own hearts. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 408

All psychological facts which cannot be verified with the help of scientific apparatus and exact measurement are assertions and opinions, and, as such, are psychic realities. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para, 839

Dreams are impartial, spontaneous products of the unconscious psyche, outside the control of the will. They are pure nature; they show us the unvarnished, natural truth, and are therefore fitted, as nothing else is, to give us back an attitude that accords with our basic human nature when our consciousness has strayed too far from its foundations and run into an impasse. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 317

One should never forget that one dreams in the first place, and almost to the exclusion of all else, of oneself. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 321

It is amazing how people get caught in words. They imagine that the name postulates the thing—just as if we were doing the devil a serious wrong when we call him a neurosis! ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para

The personality of the patient demands all the resources of the doctor’s personality and not technical tricks. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 338

When the ego has been made a “seat of anxiety,” someone is running away from himself and will not admit it. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 360

The elementary fact that a person always thinks another’s psychology is identical with his own effectively prevents a correct understanding of feminine psychology. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 240

Women are increasingly aware that love alone can give them full stature, just as men are beginning to divine that only the spirit can give life its highest meaning. Both seek a psychic relationship, because love needs the spirit, and the spirit love, for its completion. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 269

The love of woman is not sentiment, as is a man’s, but a will that is at times terrifyingly unsentimental and can even force her to self-sacrifice. A man who is loved in this way cannot escape his inferior side, for he can only respond to the reality of her love with his own reality. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 261

In the eyes of the ordinary man, love in its true sense coincides with the institution of marriage, and outside marriage there is only adultery or “platonic” friendship. For woman, marriage is not an institution at all but a human love-relationship. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 255

Relationship is possible only if there is a psychic distance between people, in the same way that morality presupposes freedom. For this reason the unconscious tendency of woman aims at loosening the marriage structure, but not at the destruction of marriage and the family. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 273

Seldom or never does a marriage develop into an individual relationship smoothly and without crises. There is no birth of consciousness without pain. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 331

It is impossible to derive any philosophical system from the fundamental thoughts of primitive man. They provide only antinomies, but it is just these that are the inexhaustible source of all spiritual problems in all times and in all civilizations. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 144

Sexuality dished out as sexuality is brutish; but sexuality as an expression of love is hallowed. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 234

in his long history. And just as for the individual a time of dissociation is a time for sickness, so it is in the life of nations. We can hardly deny that ours is a time of dissociation and sickness. The political and social conditions, the fragmentation of religion and philosophy, the contending schools of modern art and modern psychology all have one meaning in this respect. And does anyone who is endowed with the slightest sense of responsibility feel any satisfaction at this turn of events? If we are honest, we must admit that no one feels quite comfortable in the present-day world; indeed, it becomes increasingly uncomfortable. The word “crisis,” so often heard, is a medical expression which always tells us that the sickness has reached a dangerous climax. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 290

So, too, man will be forced to develop his feminine side, to open his eyes to the psyche and to Eros, It is a task he can’ not avoid. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 125.

It is, unfortunately, only too clear that if the individual is not truly regenerated in spirit, society cannot be either, for society is the sum total of individuals in need of redemption. I can therefore see it only as a delusion when the Churches try—as apparently they do—to rope the individual into some social organization and reduce him to a condition of diminished responsibility, instead of raising him out of the torpid, mindless mass and making clear to him that he is the one important factor and that the salvation of the world consists in the salvation of the individual soul. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 536

Magic is the science of the jungle. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 63.

Anything that comes upon me with this intensity I experience as numinous, no matter whether I call it divine or devilish or just “fate.” ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 871

The unconscious is the only available source of religious experience. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 565

The carrier of this consciousness is the individual, who does not produce the psyche of his own volition but is, on the contrary, preformed by it and nourished by the gradual awakening of consciousness during childhood. If therefore the psyche is of overriding empirical importance, so also is the individual, who is the only immediate manifestation of the psyche. Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 528

Since the gods are without doubt personifications of psychic forces, to assert their metaphysical existence is as much an intellectual presumption as the opinion that they could ever be invented. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 387

The man who has attained consciousness of the present is solitary. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 150

None of us stands outside humanity’s black collective shadow. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 297

We should not try to “get rid” of a neurosis, but rather to experience what it means, what it has to teach, what its purpose is. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 179

A neurosis is truly removed only when it has removed the false attitude of the ego. We do not cure it—it cures us. A man is ill, but the illness is nature’s attempt to heal him, and what the neurotic flings away as absolutely worthless contains the true gold we should never have found elsewhere. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 361

What I am trying to make clear is the remarkable fact that the will cannot transgress the bounds of the psychic sphere: it cannot coerce the instinct, nor has it power over the spirit, in so far as we understand by this something more than the intellect. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Paras 371-381.

The art of interpreting dreams cannot be learnt from books. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 152.

No one who does not know himself can know others. And in each of us there is another whom we do not know. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 152.

What the Christian sacrament of baptism purports to do is a landmark of the utmost significance in the psychic development of mankind. Baptism endows the individual with a living soul. I do not mean that the baptismal rite in itself does this, by a unique and magical act. I mean that the idea of baptism lifts man out of his archaic identification with the world and transforms him into a being who stands above it. The fact that mankind has risen to the level of this idea is baptism in the deepest sense, for it means the birth of the spiritual man who transcends nature. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 136

But God himself cannot flourish if man’s soul is starved. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 275

It is not ethical principles, however lofty, or creeds, however orthodox, that lay the foundations for the freedom and autonomy of the individual, but simply and solely the empirical awareness, the incontrovertible experience of an intensely personal, reciprocal relationship between man and an extramundane authority which acts as a counterpoise to the “world” and its “reason.” ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 509

The tremendous compulsion towards goodness and the immense moral force of Christianity are not merely an argument in the latter’s favour, they are also a proof of the strength of its suppressed and repressed counterpart —the antichristian, barbarian element. The existence within us of something that can turn against us, that can become a serious matter for us, I regard not merely as a dangerous peculiarity, but as a valuable and congenial asset as well. It is a still untouched fortune, an uncorrupted treasure, a sign of youthfulness, an earnest of rebirth. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 20

Thus, the sickness of dissociation in our world is at the same time a process of recovery, or rather, the climax of a period of pregnancy which heralds the throes of birth. A time of dissociation such as prevailed during the Roman Empire is simultaneously an age of rebirth. Not without reason do we date our era from the age of Augustus, for that epoch saw the birth of the symbolical figure of Christ, who was invoked by the early Christians as the Fish, the Ruler of the aeon of Pisces which had just begun. He became the ruling spirit of the next two thousand years. Like the teacher of wisdom in Babylonian legend, Cannes, he rose up from the sea, from the primeval darkness, and brought a world-period to an end. It is true that he said, “I am come not to bring peace but a sword.” But that which brings division ultimately creates union. Therefore his teaching was one of all-uniting love. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 293

Belief is no adequate substitute for inner experience, and where this is absent even a strong faith which came miraculously as a gift of grace may depart equally miraculously. People call faith the true religious experience, but they do not stop to consider that actually it is a secondary phenomenon arising from the fact that something happened to us in the first place which instilled pistis into us—that is, trust and loyalty. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 521

Religion means dependence on and submission to the irrational facts of experience. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 505

For thousands of years the mind of man has worried about the sick soul, perhaps even earlier than it did about the sick body. The propitiation of gods, the perils of the soul and its salvation, these are not yesterday’s problems. Religions are psychotherapeutic systems in the truest sense of the word, and on the grandest scale. They express the whole range of the psychic problem in mighty images; they are the avowal and recognition of the soul, and at the same time the revelatio of the soul’s nature. From this universal foundation no human soul is cut off; only the individual consciousness that has lost its connection with the psychic totality remains caught in the illusion that the soul is a small circumscribed area, a fit subject for “scientific” theorizing. The loss of this great relationship is the prime evil of neurosis. ~Carl Jung, CW 10 Para 367

The reality of good and evil consists in things and situations that just happen to you, that are too big for you, where you are always facing death. Anything that comes upon me with this intensity I experience as numinous, no matter whether I call it divine or devilish or just “fate.” ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 871

Grounds for an unusually intense fear of death are nowadays not far to seek: they are obvious enough, the more so as all life that is senselessly wasted and misdirected means death too. This may account for the unnatural intensification of the fear of death in our time, when life has lost its deeper meaning for so many people, forcing them to exchange the life-preserving rhythm of the aeons for the dread ticking of the clock. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 696

We distinctly resent the idea of invisible and arbitrary forces, for it is not so long ago that we made our escape from that frightening world of dreams and superstitions, and constructed for ourselves a picture of the cosmos worthy of our rational consciousness—that latest and greatest achievement of man. We are now surrounded by a world that is obedient to rational laws. It is true that we do not know the causes of everything, but in time they will be discovered, and these discoveries will accord with our reasoned expectations. There are, to be sure, also chance occurrences, but they are merely accidental, and we do not doubt that they have a causality of their own. Chance happenings are repellent to the mind that loves order. They disturb the regular, predictable course of events in the most absurd and irritating way. We resent them as much as we resent invisible, arbitrary forces, for they remind us too much of Satanic imps or of the caprice of a deus ex machina. They are the worst enemies of our careful calculations and a continual threat to all our undertakings. Being admittedly contrary to reason, they deserve all our abuse, and yet we should not fail to give them their due. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 113

“The stars of thine own fate lie in thy breast,” says Seni to Wallenstein—a dictum that should satisfy all astrologers if we knew even a little about the secrets of the heart. But for this, so far, men have had little understanding. Nor would I dare to assert that things are any better today. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 9

Whether primitive or not, mankind always stands on the brink of actions it performs itself but does not control. The whole world wants peace and the whole world prepares for war, to take but one example. Mankind is powerless against mankind, and the gods, as ever, show it the ways of fate. Today we call the gods “factors,” which comes from facere, ‘to make.’ The makers stand behind the wings of the world-theatre. It is so in great things as in small. In the realm of consciousness we are our own masters; we seem to be the “factors” themselves. But if we step through the door of the shadow we discover with terror that we are the objects of unseen factors. ~Carl Jung CW 10 Para 49

It is dangerous to avow spiritual poverty, for the poor man has desires, and whoever has desires calls down some fatality on himself. A Swiss proverb puts it drastically: “Behind every rich man stands a devil, and behind every poor man two.” ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 28

In our strength we are independent and isolated, and are masters of our own fate; in our weakness we are dependent and bound, and become unwilling instruments of fate, for here it is not the individual will that counts but the will of the species. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para

Great innovations never come from above; they come invariably from below, just as trees never grow from the sky downward, but upward from the earth. The upheaval of our world and the upheaval of our consciousness are one and the same. Everything has become relative and therefore doubtful. And while man, hesitant and questioning, contemplates a world that is distracted with treaties of peace and pacts of friendship, with democracy and dictatorship, capitalism and Bolshevism, his spirit yearns for an answer that will allay the turmoil of doubt and uncertainty. And it is just the people from the obscurer levels who follow the unconscious drive of the psyche; it is the much-derided, silent folk of the land, who are less infected with academic prejudices than the shining celebrities are wont to be. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 177

The “present” is a thin surface stratum that is laid down in the great centres of civilization. If it is very thin, as in Tsarist Russia, it has no meaning, as events have shown. But once it has attained a certain strength, we can speak of civilization and progress, and then problems arise that are characteristic of an epoch. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 239

Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood? ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 266

The time is as great as one thinks it, and man grows to the stature of the time. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 945

The man of the present must work for the future and leave others to conserve the past. He is therefore not only a builder but also a destroyer. He and his world have both become questionable and ambiguous. The ways that the past shows him and the answers it gives to his questions are insufficient for the needs of the present. All the old, comfortable ways are blocked, new paths have been opened up, and new dangers have arisen of which the past knew nothing. It is proverbial that one never learns anything from history, and in regard to present-day problems it usually teaches us nothing. The new path has to be made through untrodden regions, without presuppositions and often, unfortunately, without piety. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 239

Sometimes, when we look back at history, it seems as though the present time had analogies with certain periods in the past, when great empires and civilizations had passed their zenith and were hastening irresistibly towards decay. But these analogies are deceptive, for there are always renaissances. What does move more clearly into the foreground is Europe’s position midway between the Asiatic East and the Anglo-Saxon—or shall we say American?—West. Europe now stands between two colossi, both uncouth in their form but implacably opposed to one another in their nature. They are profoundly different not only racially but in their ideals. In the West there is the maximum political freedom with the minimum personal freedom; in the East it is just the opposite. We see in the West a tremendous development of Europe’s technological and scientific tendencies, and in the Far East an awakening of all those spiritual forces which, in Europe, these tendencies hold in check. The power of the West is material, that of the East ideal. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 237

Western man has no need of more superiority over nature, whether outside or inside. He has both in almost devilish perfection. What he lacks is conscious recognition of his inferiority to the nature around and within him. He must learn that he may not do exactly as he wills. If he does not learn this, his own nature will destroy him. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 870

If you want to learn the greatest lesson India can teach you, wrap yourself in the cloak of your moral superiority, go to the Black Pagoda of Konarak, sit down in the shadow of the mighty ruin that is still covered with the most amazing collection of obscenities, read Murray’s cunning old Handbook^ for India, which tells you how to be properly shocked by this lamentable state of affairs, and how you should go into the temples in the evening, because in the lamplight they look if possible “more (and how beautifully!) wicked”; and then analyse carefully and with the utmost honesty all your reactions, feelings, and thoughts. It will take you quite a while, but in the end, if you have done good work, you will have learned something about yourself, and about the white man in general, which you have probably never heard from anyone else. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 1013

How totally different did the world appear to medieval man! For him the earth was eternally fixed and at rest in the centre of the universe, circled by a sun that solicitously bestowed its warmth. Men were all children of God under the loving care of the Most High, who prepared them for eternal blessedness; and all knew exactly what they should do and how they should conduct themselves in order to rise from a corruptible world to an incorruptible and joyous existence. Such a life no longer seems real to us, even in our dreams. Science has long ago torn this lovely veil to shreds. That age lies as far behind as childhood, when one’s own father was unquestionably the handsomest and strongest man on earth. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 162

Is a thing beautiful because I attribute beauty to it? Or is it the objective beauty of the thing that compels me to acknowledge it? As we know, great minds have wrestled with the problem whether it is the glorious sun that illuminates the world, or the sun-like human eye. Archaic man believes it to be the sun, and civilized man believes it to be the eye—so far, at any rate, as he reflects at all and does not suffer from the disease of the poets. He must de-psychize nature in order to dominate her; and in order to see his world objectively he must take back all his archaic projections. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 135

For the Chinese, “spirit” does not signify order, meaning, and everything that is good on the contrary, it is a fiery and sometimes dangerous power. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 939

I am convinced that a truly scientific attitude in psychology must lead to the conclusion that the dynamic processes o£ the psyche cannot be reduced to this or that concrete instinct—we should merely find ourselves back at the stage of the phlogiston theory. We shall be obliged to take the instincts as constituent parts of the psyche, and then abstract our principle of explanation from their mutual relationship. I have therefore pointed out that we would do well to posit a hypothetical quantity, an “energy,” as a psychological explanatory principle, and to call it “libido” in the classical sense of the word, without harbouring any prejudice with regard to its substantiality. With the help of such a quantity, the psychodynamic processes could be explained in an unobjectionable manner, without that unavoidable distortion which a concrete ground of explanation necessarily entails. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 7

The man who promises everything is sure to fulfil nothing, and everyone who promises too much is in danger of using evil means in order to carry out his promises, and is already on the road to perdition. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para, 413

The judgment of others is not in itself a standard of value, it may be no more than a useful piece of information. The individual has a right, indeed it is his duty, to set up and apply his own standard of value. In the last resort ethics are the concern of the individual. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 912

I am neither spurred on by excessive optimism nor in love with high ideals, but am merely concerned with the fate of the individual human being—that infinitesimal unit on whom a world depends, and in whom, if we read the meaning of the Christian message aright, even God seeks his goal. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 588

We say that it is egoistic or “morbid” to be preoccupied with oneself; one’s own company is the worst, “it makes you melancholy”—such are the glowing testimonials accorded to our human make-up. They are evidently deeply ingrained in our Western minds. Whoever thinks in this way has obviously never asked himself what possible pleasure other people could find in the company of such a miserable coward. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 323

Nothing in us ever remains quite uncontradicted, and consciousness can take up no position which will not call up, somewhere in the dark corners of the psyche, a negation or a compensatory effect, approval or resentment. The “other” in us always seems alien and unacceptable; but if we let ourselves be aggrieved the feeling sinks in, and we are the richer for this little bit of self-knowledge ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 918

Only a fool is interested in other people’s guilt, since he cannot alter it. The wise man learns only from his own guilt. He will ask himself: Who am I that all this should happen to me? To find the answer to this fateful question he will look into his own heart. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 152

It is just the beam in one’s own eye that enables one to detect the mote in one’s brother’s eye. The beam in one’s own eye does not prove that one’s brother has no mote in his. But the impairment of one’s own vision might easily give rise to a general theory that all motes are beams. The recognition and taking to heart of the subjective determination of knowledge in general, and of psychological knowledge in particular, are basic conditions for the scientific and impartial evaluation of a psyche different from that of the observing subject. These conditions are fulfilled only when the observer is sufficiently informed about the nature and scope of his own personality. He can, however, be sufficiently informed only when he has in large measure freed himself from the levelling influence of collective opinions and thereby arrived at a clear conception of his own individuality. ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 10

If only people could realize what an enrichment it is to find one’s own guilt, what a sense of honour and spiritual dignity! ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 416

Only an exceedingly naive and unconscious person could imagine that he is in a position to avoid sin. Psychology can no longer afford childish illusions of this kind; it must ensue the truth and declare that unconsciousness is not only no excuse but is actually one of the most heinous sins. Human law may exempt it from punishment, but Nature avenges herself more mercilessly, for it is nothing to her whether a man is conscious of his sin or not. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 676

Christ the ideal took upon himself the sins of the world. But if the ideal is wholly outside then the sins of the individual are also outside, and consequently he is more of a fragment than ever, since superficial misunderstanding conveniently enables him, quite literally, to “cast his sins upon Christ” and thus to evade his deepest responsibilities—which is contrary to the spirit of Christianity. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 9

We psychologists have learned, through long and painful experience, that you deprive a man of his best resource when you help him to get rid of his complexes. You can only help him to become sufficiently aware of them and to start a conscious conflict within himself. In this way the complex becomes a focus of life. Anything that disappears from your psychological inventory is apt to turn up in the guise of a hostile neighbour, who will inevitably arouse your anger and make you aggressive. It is surely better to know that your worst enemy is right there in your own heart. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 456

The people who fancy they are sure of themselves are the ones who are truly unsure. Our whole life is unsure, so a feeling of unsureness is much nearer to the truth than the illusion and bluff of sureness. In the long run it is the better adapted man who triumphs, not the wrongly self-confident, who is at the mercy of dangers from without and within. ~Carl Jung, CW 10. Para 18

It seems to be very hard for people to live with riddles or to let them live, although one would think that life is so full of riddles as it is that a few more things we cannot answer would make no difference. But perhaps it is just this that is so unendurable, that there are irrational things in our own psyche which upset the conscious mind in its illusory certainties by confronting it with the riddle of its existence. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 307

The only thing that cannot be improved upon is morality, for every alteration of traditional morality is by definition an immorality. This bon mot has an edge to it, against which many an innovator has barked his shins. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 114

Nothing is so jealous as a truth. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 190

No doubt it is a great nuisance that mankind is not uniform but compounded of individuals whose psychic structure spreads them over a span of at least ten thousand years. Hence there is absolutely no truth that does not spell salvation to one person and damnation to another. All universalisms get stuck in this terrible dilemma, ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 36

For a moral man the ethical problem is a passionate question which has its roots in the deepest instinctual processes as well as in his most idealistic aspirations. The problem for him is devastatingly real. It is not surprising, therefore, that the answer likewise springs from the depths of his nature. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 289

Why do we always forget that there is nothing majestic or beautiful in the wide domain of human culture that did not grow originally from a lucky idea? What would become of mankind if nobody had lucky ideas anymore? It would be far truer to say that our consciousness is a sack which has nothing in it except what chances to fall into it. We never appreciate how dependent we are on lucky ideas—until we find to our distress that they will not come. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 305

The true genius nearly always intrudes and disturbs. He speaks to a temporal world out of a world eternal. He says the wrong things at the right time. Eternal truths are never true at any given moment in history. The process of transformation has to make a halt in order to digest and assimilate the utterly impractical things that the genius has produced from the storehouse of eternity. Yet the genius is the healer of his time, because anything he reveals of eternal truth is healing. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 1004

Nature, as we know, is not so lavish with her boons that she joins to a high intelligence the gifts of the heart also.As a rule, where one is present the other is missing, and where one capacity is present in perfection it is generally at the cost of all the others. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 569

Has it ever—except in the most benighted periods of history—been observed that a scientific truth needed to be elevated to the rank of a dogma? Truth can stand on its own feet, only shaky opinions require the support of dogmatization. Fanaticism is ever the brother of doubt, ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 335

The danger that faces us today is that the whole of reality will be replaced by words. This accounts for that terrible lack of instinct in modern man, particularly the city-dweller. He lacks all contact with life and the breath of nature. He knows a rabbit or a cow only from the illustrated paper, the dictionary, or the movies, and thinks he knows what it is really like—and is then amazed that cowsheds “smell,” because the dictionary didn’t say so. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 882

One o£ the most fundamental characteristics of every civilization is the quality of permanence, something created by man and wrested from the meaningless flux of nature. Every house, every bridge, every street, is a witness to the value of duration in the midst of change. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 923

He who is rooted in the soil endures. Alienation from the unconscious and from its historical conditions spells rootlessness. That is the danger that lies in wait for the conqueror of foreign lands, and for every individual who, through one-sided allegiance to any kind of -ism, loses touch with the dark, maternal, earthy ground of his being. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 103

No one can make history who is not willing to risk everything for it, to carry the experiment with his own life through to the bitter end, and to declare that his life is not a continuation of the past, but a new beginning. Mere continuation can be left to the animals, but inauguration is the prerogative of man, the one thing he can boast of that lifts him above the beasts. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 268

No man can begin with the present; he must slowly grow into it, for there would be no present but for the past. A young person has not yet acquired a past, therefore he has no present either. He does not create culture, he merely exists. It is the privilege and the task of maturer people, who have passed the meridian of life, to create culture. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 272

It is obvious that in handling “big” dreams intuitive guesswork will lead nowhere. Wide knowledge is required, such as a specialist ought to possess. But no dream can be interpreted with knowledge alone. This knowledge, furthermore, should not be dead material that has been memorized; it must possess a living quality, and be infused with the experience of the person who uses it. Of what use is philosophical knowledge in the head, if one is not also a philosopher at heart? ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 324

Most men are erotically blinded—they commit the unpardonable mistake of confusing Eros with sex. A man thinks he possesses a woman if he has her sexually. He never possesses her less, for to a woman the Eros-relationship is the real and decisive one. For her, marriage is a relationship with sex thrown in as an accompaniment. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 255

Traditionally, man is regarded as the marriage breaker. This legend comes from times long past, when men still had leisure to pursue all sorts of pastimes. But today life makes so many demands on men that the noble hidalgo, Don Juan, is to be seen nowhere save in the theatre. More than ever man loves his comfort, for ours is an age of neurasthenia, impotence, and easy chairs. There is no energy left for window-climbing and duels. If anything is to happen in the way of adultery it must not be too difficult. In no respect must it cost too much, hence the adventure can only be of a transitory kind. The man of today is thoroughly scared of jeopardizing marriage as an institution. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 248

Woman nowadays feels that there is no real security in marriage, for what does her husband’s faithfulness mean when she knows that his feelings and thoughts are running after others and that he is merely too calculating or too cowardly to follow them? What does her own faithfulness mean when she knows that she is simply using it to exploit her legal right of possession, and warping her own soul? She has intimations of a higher fidelity to the spirit and to a love beyond human weakness and imperfection. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 270

Do our legislators really know what “adultery” is? Is their definition of it the final embodiment of the truth? From the psychological standpoint, the only one that counts for a woman, it is a wretched piece of bungling, like everything else contrived by men for the purpose of codifying love. For a woman, love has nothing to do with “marital misconduct,” “extramarital intercourse,” “deception of the husband,” or any of the less savoury formulas invented by the erotically blind masculine intellect and echoed by the self-opinionated demon in woman.

Children have an almost uncanny instinct for the teacher’s personal shortcomings. They know the false from the true far better than one likes to admit. Therefore the teacher should watch his own psychic condition, so that he can spot the source of the trouble when anything goes wrong with the children entrusted to his care. He himself may easily be the unconscious cause of evil. Naturally we must not be too naive in this matter there are people, doctors as well as teachers, who secretly believe that a person in authority has the right to behave just as he likes, and that it is up to the child to adapt as best he may, because sooner or later he will have to adapt to real life which will treat him no better. Such people are convinced at heart that the only thing that matters is material success, and that the only real and effective moral restraint is the policeman behind the penal code. No doubt we are right to open the eyes and ears of our young people to the wide world, but it is the maddest of delusions to think that this really equips them for the task of living. It is the kind of training that enables a young person to adapt himself outwardly to the world and reality, but no one gives a thought to the necessity of adapting to the self, to the powers of the psyche, which are far mightier than all the Great Powers of the earth. A system of education does indeed exist, but it has its origins partly in antiquity and partly in the early Middle Ages. It styles itself the Christian Church. But it cannot be denied that in the course of the last two centuries Christianity, no less than Confucianism in China and Buddhism in India, has largely forfeited its educative activity. Human iniquity is not to blame for this, but rather a gradual and widespread spiritual change, the first symptom of which was the Reformation. It shattered the authority of the Church as a teacher, and thereafter the authoritarian principle itself began to crumble away. The inevitable consequence was an increase in the importance of the individual, which found expression in the modern ideals of humanity, social welfare, democracy, and equality. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 326

Nobody but the absolute believer in the inviolability of traditional marriage could perpetrate such breaches of good taste, just as only the believer in God can really blaspheme. Whoever doubts marriage in the first place cannot infringe against it; for him the legal definition is invalid because, like St. Paul, he feels himself beyond the law, on the higher plane of love. But because the believers in the law so frequently trespass against their own laws, whether from stupidity, temptation, or mere viciousness, the modern woman begins to wonder whether she too may not belong to the same category. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 265

Secretaries, typists, shop-girls, all are agents of this process, and through a million subterranean channels creeps the influence that is undermining marriage. For the desire of all these women is not to have sexual adventures only the stupid could believe that—but to get married. The possessors of that bliss must be ousted, not as a rule by naked force, but by that silent, obstinate desire which, as we know, has magical effects, like the fixed stare of a snake. This was ever the way of women. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 251

It is no longer a question of a few dozen voluntary or involuntary old maids here and there, but of millions. Our legislation and our social morality give no answer to this question. Or can the Church provide a satisfactory answer? Should we build gigantic nunneries to accommodate all these women? Or should tolerated prostitution be increased? Obviously this is impossible, since we are dealing neither with saints nor sinners but with ordinary women who cannot register their spiritual requirements with the police. They are decent women who want to marry, and if this is not possible, well—the next best thing. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 248

It is a bad sign when doctors begin writing books of advice on how to achieve the “perfect marriage.” Healthy people need no doctors. Marriage today has indeed become rather precarious. In America about a quarter of the marriages end in divorce. And the remarkable thing is that this time the scapegoat is not the man but the woman. She is the one who doubts and feels uncertain. It is not surprising that this is so, for in post-war Europe there is such an alarming surplus of unmarried women that it would be inconceivable if there were no reaction from that quarter. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 248

Since the aims of the second half of life are different from those of the first, to linger too long in the youthful attitude produces a division of the will. onsciousness still presses forward in obedience, as it were, to its own inertia, but the unconscious lags behind, because the strength and inner resolve needed for further expansion have been sapped. This disunity with oneself begets discontent, and since one is not conscious of the real state of things one generally projects the reasons for it upon one’s partner. A critical atmosphere thus develops, the necessary prelude to conscious realization. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 33i

Human relationship leads into the world of the psyche, into that intermediate realm between sense and spirit, which contains something of both and yet forfeits nothing of its own unique character. Into this territory a man must venture if he wishes to meet woman half way. Circumstances have forced her to acquire a number of masculine traits, so that she shall not remain caught in an antiquated, purely instinctual femininity, lost and alone in the world of men. So, too, man will be forced to develop his feminine side, to open his eyes to the psyche and to Eros. It is a task he cannot avoid, unless he prefers to go trailing after woman in a hopelessly boyish fashion, worshipping from afar but always in danger of being stowed away in her pocket. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 258

The masculinity of the woman and the femininity of the man are inferior, and it is regrettable that the full value of their personalities should be contaminated by something that is less valuable. On the other hand, the shadow belongs to the wholeness of the personality the strong man must somewhere be weak, somewhere the clever man must be stupid, otherwise he is too good to be true and falls back on pose and bluff. Is it not an old truth that woman loves the weaknesses of the strong man more than his strength, and the stupidity of the clever man more than his cleverness? ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 261

The question of relationship borders on a region that for a man is dark and painful. He can face this question only when the woman carries the burden of suffering, that is, when he is the “contained”—in other words, when she can imagine herself having a relationship with another man, and as a consequence suffering disunion within herself. Then it is she who has the painful problem, and he is not obliged to see his own, which is a great relief to him. In this situation he is not unlike a thief who, quite undeservedly, finds himself in the enviable position of having been forestalled by another thief who has been caught by the police. Suddenly he becomes an honourable, impartial onlooker. In any other situation a man always finds the discussion of personal relations painful and boring, just as his wife would find it boring if he examined her on the Critique of Pure Reason. For him, Eros is a shadowland which entangles him in his feminine unconscious, in something “psychic,” while for woman Logos is a deadly boring kind of sophistry if she is not actually repelled and frightened by it. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 256

Unconscious assumptions or opinions are the worst enemy of woman; they can even grow into a positively demonic passion that exasperates and disgusts men, and does the woman herself the greatest injury by gradually smothering the charm and meaning of her femininity and driving it into the background. Such a development naturally ends in profound psychological disunion, in short, in a neurosis. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 245

It is a woman’s outstanding characteristic that she can do anything for the love of a man. But those women who can achieve something important for the love of a thing are most exceptional, because this does not really agree with their nature. Love for a thing is a man’s prerogative. But since masculine and feminine elements are united in our human nature, a man can live in the feminine part of himself, and a woman in her masculine part. None the less the feminine element in man is only something in the background, as is the masculine element in woman. If one lives out the opposite sex in oneself one is living in one’s own background, and one’s real individuality suffers. A man should live as a man and a woman as a woman. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 243

What can a man say about woman, his own opposite? I mean of course something sensible, that is outside the sexual programme, free of resentment, illusion, and theory. Where is the man to be found capable of such superiority? Woman always stands just where the man’s shadow falls, so that he is only too liable to confuse the two. Then, when he tries to repair this misunderstanding, he overvalues her and believes her the most desirable thing in the world, ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 236

The discussion of the sexual problem is only a somewhat crude prelude to a far deeper question, and that is the question of the psychological relationships between the sexes. In comparison with this the other pales into insignificance, and with it we enter the real domain of woman. Woman’s psychology is founded on the principle of Eros, the great binder and loosener, whereas from ancient times the ruling principle ascribed to man is Logos. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 254

[All that pertains to the opposite sex] has a mysterious charm tinged with fear, perhaps even with disgust. For this reason its charm is particularly attractive and fascinating, even when it comes to us not directly from outside, in the guise of a woman, but from within, as a psychic influence—for instance in the form of a temptation to abandon oneself to a mood or an affect. ~Carl CW 10, Para 244

A conscientious doctor must be able to doubt all his skills and all his theories, otherwise he is be fooled by a system. But all systems mean bigotry and inhumanity. Neurosis —let there be no doubt about this—may be any number of things, but never a “nothing but.” It is the agony of a human soul in all its vast complexity—so vast, indeed, that any and every theory of neurosis is little better than a worthless sketch, unless it be a gigantic picture of the psyche which not even a hundred Fausts could conceive. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 357

The patient has not to learn how to get rid o£ his neurosis, but how to bear it. His illness is not a gratuitous and therefore meaningless burden; it is his own self, the “other” whom, from childish laziness or fear, or for some other reason, he was always seeking to exclude from his life. In this way, as Freud rightly says, we turn the ego into a “seat of anxiety,” which it would never be if we did not defend ourselves against ourselves so neurotically. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 360

Hidden in the neurosis is a bit of still undeveloped personality, a precious fragment of the psyche lacking which a man is condemned to resignation, bitterness, and everything else that is hostile to life. A psychology of neurosis that sees only the negative elements empties out the baby with the bath-water, since it neglects the positive meaning and value of these “infantile”—i.e., creative—fantasies. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 355

Infantilism, however, is something extremely ambiguous. First, it can be either genuine or purely symptomatic; and second, it can be either residuary or embryonic. There is an enormous difference between something that has remained infantile and something that is in the process of growth. Both can take an infantile or embryonic form, and more often than not it is impossible to tell at first glance whether we are dealing with a regrettably persistent fragment of infantile life or with a vitally important creative beginning. To deride these possibilities is to act like a dullard who does not know that the future is more important than the past. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 345

A neurosis is by no means merely a negative thing, it is also something positive. Only a soulless rationalism reinforced by a narrow materialistic outlook could possibly have overlooked this fact. In reality the neurosis contains the patient’s psyche, or at least an essential part of it; and if, as the rationalist pretends, the neurosis could be plucked from him like a bad tooth, he would have gained nothing but would have lost something very essential to him. That is to say, he would have lost as much as the thinker deprived of his doubt, or the moralist deprived of his temptation, or the brave man deprived of his fear. To lose a neurosis is to find oneself without an object; life loses its point and hence its meaning. This would not be a cure, it would be a regular amputation. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 355

It is presumptuous to think we can always say what is good or bad for the patient. Perhaps he knows something is really bad and does it anyway and then gets a bad conscience. From the therapeutic, that is to say empirical, point of view, this may be very good indeed for him. Perhaps he has to experience the power of evil and suffer accordingly, because only in that way can he give up his Pharisaic attitude to other people. Perhaps fate or the unconscious or God —call it what you will—had to give him a hard knock and roll him in the dirt, because only such a drastic experience could strike home, pull him out of his infantilism, and make him more mature. How can anyone find out how much he needs to be saved if he is quite sure that there is nothing he needs saving from? ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 867

Each new case that requires thorough treatment is pioneer work, and every trace of routine then proves to be a blind alley. Consequently the higher psychotherapy is a most exacting business, and sometimes it sets tasks which challenge not only our understanding or our sympathy but the whole man. The doctor is inclined to demand this total effort from his patients, yet he must realize that this same demand only works if he is aware that it also applies to himself. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 3II

To concern ourselves with dreams is a way of reflecting on ourselves—a way of self-reflection. It is not our ego-consciousness reflecting on itself; rather, it turns its attention to the objective actuality of the dream as a communication or message from the unconscious, unitary soul of humanity. It reflects not on the ego but on the self; it recollects that strange self, alien to the ego, which was ours from the beginning, the trunk from which the ego grew. It is alien to us because we have estranged ourselves from it through the aberrations of the conscious mind. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 318

A dream is nothing but a lucky idea that comes to us from the dark, all-unifying world of the psyche. What would be more natural, when we have lost ourselves amid the endless particulars and isolated details of the world’s surface, than to knock at the door of dreams and inquire of them the bearings which would bring us closer to the basic facts of human existence? Here we encounter the obstinate prejudice that dreams are so much froth, they are not real, they lie, they are mere wish-fulfilments. All this is but an excuse not to take dreams seriously, for that would be uncomfortable. Our intellectual hybris of consciousness loves isolation despite all its inconveniences, and for this reason people will do anything rather than admit that dreams are real and speak the truth. There are some saints who had very rude dreams. Where would their saintliness be, the very thing that exalts them above the vulgar rabble, if the obscenity of a dream were a real truth? But it is just the most squalid dreams that emphasize our blood-kinship with the rest of mankind, and most effectively damp down the arrogance born of an atrophy of the instincts. Even if the whole world were to fall to pieces, the unity of the psyche would never be shattered. And the wider and more numerous the fissures on the surface, the more this unity is strengthened in the depths. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 305

In each of us there is another whom we do not know. He speaks to us in dreams and tells us how differently he sees us from the way we see ourselves. When, therefore, we find ourselves in a difficult situation to which there is no solution, he can sometimes kindle a light that radically alters our attitude—the very attitude that led us into the difficult situation. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 325

One would do well to treat every dream as though it were a totally unknown object. Look at it from all sides, take it in your hand, carry it about with you, let your imagination play round it, and talk about it with other people. Primitives tell each other impressive dreams, in a public palaver if possible, and this custom is also attested in late antiquity, for all the ancient peoples attributed great significance to dreams. Treated in this way, the dream suggests all manner of ideas and associations which lead us closer to its meaning. The ascertainment of the meaning is, I need hardly point out, an entirely arbitrary affair, and this is where the hazards begin. Narrower or wider limits will be set to the meaning, according to one’s experience, temperament, and taste. Some people will be satisfied with little, for others much is still not enough. Also the meaning of the dream, or our interpretation of it, is largely dependent on the intentions of the interpreter, on what he expects the meaning to be or requires it to do. In eliciting the meaning he will involuntarily be guided by certain presuppositions, and it depends very much on the scrupulousness and honesty of the investigator whether he gains something by his interpretation or perhaps only becomes still more deeply entangled in his mistakes. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 320

As individuals we are not completely unique, but are like all other men. Hence a dream with a collective meaning is valid in the first place tor the dreamer, but it expresses at the same time the fact that his momentary problem is also the problem of other people. This is often of great practical importance, for there are countless people who are inwardly cut off from humanity and oppressed by the thought that nobody else has their problems. Or else they are those all-too-modest souls who, feeling themselves nonentities, have kept their claim to social recognition on too low a level. Moreover, every individual problem is somehow connected with the problem of the age, so that practically every subjective difficulty has to be viewed from the standpoint of the human situation as a whole. But this is permissible only when the dream really is a mythological one and makes use of collective symbols. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 323

Just as every Jew has a Christ complex, so every Negro has a white complex and every American a Negro complex. As a rule the coloured man would give anything to change his skin, and the white man hates to admit that he has been touched by the black. – Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 963

Even today the European, however highly developed, cannot live with impunity among the Negroes in Africa; their psychology gets into him unnoticed and unconsciously he becomes a Negro. There is no fighting against it. In Africa there is a well-known technical expression for this: ‘going black.’ It is no mere snobbery that the English should consider anyone born in the colonies, even though the best blood may run in his veins, ‘slightly inferior.’ There are facts to support this view.” ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 249

The Negro by his mere presence is a source of temperamental and mimetic infection, which the European can’t help noticing just as much as he sees the hopeless gap between the American and the African Negro. Racial infection is a most serious mental and moral problem where the primitive outnumbers the white man. America has this problem only in a relative degree, because the whites far outnumber the coloured. Apparently he can assimilate the primitive influence with little risk to himself. What would happen if there were a considerable increase in the coloured population is another matter. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 966

If, in addition to this, we bear in mind that the unconscious contains everything that is lacking to consciousness, that the unconscious therefore has a compensatory tendency, then we can begin to draw conclusions—provided, of course, that the dream does not come from too deep a psychic level. If it is a dream of this kind, it will as a rule contain mythological motifs, combinations of ideas or images which can be found in the myths of one’s own folk or in those of other races. The dream will then have a collective meaning, a meaning which is the common property of mankind. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 322

When we consider the infinite variety of dreams, it is difficult to conceive that there could ever be a method or a technical procedure which would lead to an infallible result. It is, indeed, a good thing that no valid method exists, for otherwise the meaning of the dream would be limited in advance and would lose precisely that virtue which makes dreams so valuable for therapeutic purposes —their ability to offer new points of view. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 319

The dream is a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses of the soul, opening into that cosmic night which was psyche long before there was any ego consciousness, and which will remain psyche no matter how far our ego-consciousness extends. For all ego-consciousness is isolated; because it separates and discriminates, it knows only particulars, and it sees only those that can be related to the ego. Its essence is limitation, even though it reach to the farthest nebulae among the stars. All consciousness separates; but in dreams we put on the likeness of that more universal, truer, more eternal man dwelling in the darkness of primordial night. There he is still the whole, and the whole is in him, indistinguishable from nature and bare of all egohood. It is from these all-uniting depths that the dream arises, be it never so childish, grotesque, and immoral. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 304

It is not only primitive man whose psychology is archaic. It is the psychology also of modern, civilized man, and not merely of individual “throw-backs” in modern society. On the contrary, every civilized human being, however high his conscious development, is still an archaic man at the deeper levels of his psyche. Just as the human body connects us with the mammals and displays numerous vestiges of earlier evolutionary stages going back even to the reptilian age, so the human psyche is a product of evolution which, when followed back to its origins, shows countless archaic traits. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 105

The psyche consists essentially of images. It is a series of images in the truest sense, not an accidental juxtaposition or sequence, but a structure that is throughout full of meaning and purpose; it is a “picturing” of vital activities. And just as the material of the body that is ready for life has need of the psyche in order to be capable of life, so the psyche presupposes the living body in order that its images may live. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 618

Without consciousness there would, practically speaking, be no world, for the world exists for us only in so far as it is consciously reflected by a psyche. Consciousness is a precondition of being. Thus the psyche is endowed with the dignity of a cosmic principle, which philosophically and in fact gives it a position co-equal with the principle of physical being. The carrier of this consciousness is the individual, who does not produce the psyche of his own volition but is, on the contrary, preformed by it and nourished by the gradual awakening of consciousness during childhood. If therefore the psyche is of overriding empirical importance, so also is the individual, who is the only immediate manifestation of the psyche. Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 528

The unconscious is the only available source of religious experience. This is certainly not to say that what we call the unconscious is identical with God or is set up in his place. It is simply the medium from which religious experience seems to flow. As to what the further cause of such experience might be, the answer to this lies beyond the range of human knowledge. Knowledge of God is a transcendental problem. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 565

It suits our hypertrophied and hybristic modern consciousness not to be mindful of the dangerous autonomy of the unconscious and to treat it negatively as an absence of consciousness. The hypothesis of invisible gods or daemons would be, psychologically, a far more appropriate formulation, even though it would be an anthropomorphic projection. But since the development of consciousness requires the withdrawal of all the projections we can lay our hands on, it is not possible to maintain any non-psychological doctrine about the gods. Since the gods are without doubt personifications of psychic forces, to assert their metaphysical existence is as much an intellectual presumption as the opinion that they could ever be invented. Not that “psychic forces” have anything to do with the conscious mind, fond as we are of playing with the idea that consciousness and psyche are identical. This is only another piece of intellectual presumption. “Psychic forces” have far more to do with the realm of the unconscious. Our mania for rational explanations obviously has its roots in our fear of metaphysics, for the two were always hostile brothers. Hence anything unexpected that approaches us from that dark realm is regarded either as coming from outside and therefore as real, or else as an hallucination and therefore not true. The idea that anything could be real or true which does not come from outside has hardly begun to dawn on. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 387

The primitive form of conscience is paradoxical to burn a heretic is on the one hand a pious and meritorious act as John Hus himself ironically recognized when, bound to the stake, he espied an old woman hobbling towards him with a bundle of faggots, and exclaimed, “O sancta simplicitas!”— and on the other hand a brutal manifestation of ruthless and savage lust for revenge, ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 845

Whatever name we may put to the psychic background, the fact remains that our consciousness is influenced by it in the highest degree, and all the more so the less we are conscious of it. The layman can hardly conceive how much his inclinations, moods, and decisions are influenced by the dark forces of his psyche, and how dangerous or helpful they may be in shaping his destiny. Our cerebral consciousness is like an actor who has forgotten that he is playing a role. But when the play comes to an end, he must remember his own subjective reality, for he can no longer continue to live as Julius Caesar or as Othello, but only as himself, from whom he has become estranged by a momentary sleight of consciousness. He must know once again that he was merely a figure on the stage who was playing a piece by Shakespeare, and that there was a producer as well as a director in the background who, as always, will have something very important to say about his acting, ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 332

Besides the “right” kind of conscience there is a “wrong” one, which exaggerates, perverts, and twists evil into good and good into evil just as our own scruples do; and it does so with the same compulsiveness and with the same emotional consequences as the “right” kind of conscience. Were it not for this paradox the question of conscience would present no problem we could then rely wholly on its decisions so far as morality is concerned. But since there is great and justified uncertainty in this regard, it needs unusual courage or—what amounts to the same thing—unshakable faith for a person simply to follow the dictates of his own conscience. As a rule one obeys only up to a certain point, which is determined in advance by the moral code. This is where those dreaded conflicts of duty begin. Generally they are answered according to the precepts of the moral code, but only in a very few cases are they really decided by an individual act of judgment. For as soon as the moral code ceases to act as a support, conscience easily succumbs to a fit of weakness, ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 835

“Conscience,” in ordinary usage, means the consciousness of a factor which in the case of a “good conscience” affirms that a decision or an act accords with moraUty and, if it does not, condemns it as “immoral.” This view, deriving as it does from the mores^ from what is customary, can properly be called “moral.” Distinct from this is the ethical form of conscience, which appears when two decisions or ways of acting, both affirmed to be moral and therefore regarded as “duties,” collide with one another. In these cases, not foreseen by the moral code because they are mostly very individual, a judgment is required which cannot properly be called “moral” or in accord with custom. Here the decision has no custom at its disposal on which it could rely. The deciding factor appears to be something else it proceeds not from the traditional moral code but from the unconscious foundation of the personality. The decision is drawn from dark and deep waters.It is true these conflicts of duty are solved very often and very conveniently by a decision in accordance with custom, that is, by suppressing one of the opposites. But this is not always so. If one is sufficiently conscientious the conflict is endured to the end, and a creative solution emerges which is produced by the constellated archetype and possesses that compelling authority not unjustly characterized as the voice of God. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 856

Where is a height without depth, and how can there be Hght that throws no shadow? There is no good that is not opposed by evil. “No man can be redeemed from a sin he has not committed,” says Carpocrates; a deep saying for all who wish to understand, and a golden opportunity for all those who prefer to draw false conclusions. What is down below is not just an excuse for more pleasure, but something we fear because it demands to play its part in the life of the more conscious and more complete man. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 271

The optimum of life is not to be found in crude egoism, for fundamentally man is so constituted that the pleasure he gives his neighbour is something essential to him. Nor can the optimum be reached by an unbridled craving for individualistic supremacy, for the collective element in man is so powerful that his longing for fellowship would destroy all pleasure in naked egoism. The optimum can be reached only through obedience to the tidal laws of the libido, by which systole alternates with diastole—laws which bring pleasure and the necessary limitations of pleasure, and also set us those individual life-tDoes neutral Switzerland, with its backward, earthy nature, fulfil any meaningful function in the European system? I think we must answer this question affirmatively. The answer to political or cultural questions need not be only: Progress and Change, but also: Stand still! Hold fast! These days one can doubt in good faith whether the condition of Europe shows any change for the better since the war. Opinions, as we know, are very divided, and we have just heard Spengler’s lamentations on the decline of the West. Progress can occasionally go down-hill, and in the face of a dangerously rapid tempo standing still can be a life-saver. Nations, too, get tired and long for political and social stabilization. The Pax Romana meant a good deal to the Roman Empire. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 922

There are two kinds of interference which cause the hackles of the Swiss to rise: political and spiritual. Everyone can understand why they should defend themselves to the utmost against political interference, and this utmost is the art of neutrality born of necessity. But why they should defend themselves against spiritual interference is rather more mysterious. It is, however, a fact, as I can confirm from my own experience. English, American, and German patients are far more open to new ideas than the Swiss. A new idea for the Swiss is always something of a risk; it is like an unknown, dangerous animal, which must if possible be circumvented or else approached with extreme caution. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 916

If it be true that we are the most backward, conservative, stiff-necked, self-righteous, smug, and churlish of all European nations, this would mean that in Switzerland the European is truly at home in his geographical and psychological centre. There he is attached to the earth, unconcerned, self-reliant, conservative, and backward—in other words, still intimately connected with the past, occupying a neutral position between the fluctuating and contradictory aspirations and opinions of the other nations or functions. That wouldn’t be a bad role for the Swiss to act as Europe’s centre of gravity. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 920

The revolution in our conscious outlook, brought about by the catastrophic results of the [first] World War, shows itself in our inner life by the shattering of our faith in ourselves and our own worth. We used to regard foreigners as political and moral reprobates, but the modern man is forced to recognize that he is politically and morally just like anyone else. Whereas formerly I believed it was my bounden duty to call others to order, I must now admit I need calling to order myself. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 162

The horror which the dictator States have of late brought upon mankind is nothing less than the culmination of all those atrocities of which our ancestors made themselves guilty in the not so distant past. Quite apart from the barbarities and blood baths perpetrated by the Christian nations among themselves throughout European history, the European has also to answer for all the crimes he has committed against the coloured races during the process of colonization. In this respect the white man carries a very heavy burden indeed. It shows us a picture of the common human shadow that could hardly be painted in blacker colours. The evil that comes to light in man and that undoubtedly dwells within him is of gigantic proportions. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 571

We need not be ashamed of ourselves as a nation, nor can we alter its character. Only the individual can alter or improve himself, provided he can outgrow his national prejudices in the course of his psychic development.
The national character is imprinted on a man as a fate he has not chosen—like a beautiful or an ugly body. It is not the will of individuals that moulds the destinies of nations, but supra-personal factors, the spirit and the earth, which work in mysterious ways and in unfathomable darkness. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 921

The mystery of the earth is no joke and no paradox. One only needs to see how, in America, the skull and pelvis measurements of all the European races begin to indianize themselves in the second generation of immigrants. That is the mystery of the American earth. The soil of every country holds some such mystery. We have an unconscious of this in the psyche: just as there is a relationship of mind to body, so there is a relationship of body to earth. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 18

The Swiss national character that has been built up over the centuries was not formed by chance; it is a meaningful response to the dangerously undermining influence of the environment. We Swiss should certainly understand why a mind like Keyserling’s judges us so harshly, but he should also understand that the very things he taxes us with belong to our most necessary possessions. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, CW 924

Our loveliest mountain, which dominates Switzerland far and wide, is called the Jungfrau—the “Virgin.” The Virgin Mary is the female patron saint of the Swiss. Of her Tertullian says: “. . . that virgin earth, not yet watered by the rains,” and Augustine: “Truth has arisen from the earth, because Christ is born of a virgin.” These are living reminders that the virgin mother is the earth. From olden times the astrological sign for Switzerland was either Virgo or Taurus; both are earth-signs, a sure indication that the earthy character of the Swiss had not escaped the old astrologers. From the earth-boundness of the Swiss come all their bad as well as their good qualities: their down-to earthness, their limited outlook, their non-spirituality, their parsimony, stolidity, stubbornness, dislike of foreigners, mistrustfulness, as well as that awful Schwizerdutsch and their refusal to be bothered, or to put it in political terms, their neutrality. Switzerland consists of numerous valleys, depressions in the earth’s crust, in which the settlements of man are embedded. Nowhere are there measureless plains, where it is a matter of indifference where a man lives; nowhere is there a coast against which the ocean beats with its lore of distant lands. Buried deep in the backbone of the continent, sunk in the earth, the Alpine dweller lives like a troglodyte, surrounded by more powerful nations that are linked with the wide world, that expand into colonies or can grow rich on the treasures of their soil. The Swiss cling to what they have, for the others, the more powerful ones, have grabbed everything else. Under no circumstances will the Swiss be robbed of their own. Their country is small, their possessions limited. If they lose what they have, what is going to replace it? ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 914

Through his identification with the collective psyche a patient will infallibly try to force the demands of his unconscious upon others, for identity with the collective psyche always brings with it a feeling of universal validity—”godlikeness”—which completely ignores all differences in the personal psyche of his fellows. (The feeling of universal validity comes, of course, from the universality of the collective psyche.) A collective attitude naturally presupposes this same collective psyche in others. But that means a ruthless disregard not only of individual differences but also of differences of a more general kind within the collective psyche itself, as for example differences of race. This disregard for individuality obviously means the suffocation of the single individual, as a consequence of which the element of differentiation is obliterated from the community, ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 240

Far too little attention has been paid to the fact that, for all our irreligiousness, the distinguishing mark of the Christian epoch, its highest achievement, has become the congenital vice of our age: the supremacy of the word, of the Logos, which stands for the central figure of our Christian faith. The word has literally become our god, and so it has remained, even if we knew of Christianity only by hearsay. Words like “Society” and “State” are so concretized that they are almost personified. In the opinion of the man in the street, the “State,” far more than any king in history, is the inexhaustible giver of all good; the “State” is invoked, made responsible, grumbled at, and so on and so forth. Society is elevated to the rank of a supreme ethical principle; indeed, it is even credited with positively creative capacities. No one seems to notice that this worship of the word, which was necessary at a certain phase of man’s mental development, has a perilous shadow side. That is to say, the moment the word, as a result of centuries of education, attains universal validity, it severs its original connection with the divine Person. There is then a personified Church, a personified State; belief in the word becomes credulity, and the word itself an infernal slogan capable of any deception. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 554

The mass as such is always anonymous and always irresponsible. So-called leaders are the inevitable symptoms of a mass movement. The true leaders of mankind are always those who are capable of self-reflection, and who relieve the dead weight of the masses at least of their own weight, consciously holding aloof from the blind momentum of the mass in movement. But who can resist this all engulfing force of attraction, when each man clings to the next and each drags the other with him? Only one who is firmly rooted not only in the outside world but also in the world within. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para

Woman’s psychology is founded on the principle of Eros, the great binder and loosener, whereas from ancient times the ruling principle ascribed to man is Logos:

The concept of Eros could be expressed in modern terms as psychic relatedness, and that of Logos as objective interest. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 255

In the eyes of the ordinary man, love in its true sense coincides with the institution of marriage, and outside marriage there is only adultery or “platonic” friendship. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 255.

For woman, marriage is not an institution at all but a human love-relationshipat least that is what she would like to believe. (Since her Eros is not naïve but is mixed with other, unavowed motivesmarriage as a ladder to social position, etc.the principle cannot be applied in any absolute sense). ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 255

Marriage means to her an exclusive relationship. She can endure its exclusiveness all the more easily, without dying of ennui, inasmuch as she has children or near relatives with whom she has a no less intimate relationship than with her husband. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 255

The fact that she has no sexual relationship with these others means nothing, for the sexual relationship is of far less importance to her than the psychic relationship. It is enough that she and her husband both believe their relationship to be unique and exclusive. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 255

If the husband happens to be the “container” he feels suffocated by this exclusiveness, especially if he fails to notice that the exclusiveness of his wife is nothing but a pious fraud. In reality she is distributed among the children and among as many members of the family as possible, thus maintaining any number of intimate relationships. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 255

If her husband had anything like as many relationships with other people she would be mad with jealousy. Most men though, are erotically blindedthey commit the unpardonable mistake of confusing Eros with sex. A man thinks he possesses a woman if he has her sexually. He never possesses her less, for to a woman the Eros-relationship is the real and decisive one. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 255

For her, marriage is a relationship with sex thrown in as an accompaniment. Since sex is a formidable thing on account of its consequences, it is useful to have it in a safe place. But when it is less of a danger it also becomes less relevant, and then the question of relationship moves into the foreground ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 255

The strong man must somewhere be weak, somewhere the clever man must be stupid, otherwise he is too good to be true and falls back on pose and bluff. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 261

Is it not an old truth that woman loves the weaknesses of the strong man more than his strength, and the stupidity of the clever man more than his cleverness? Her love wants the whole mannot mere masculinity as such but also its negation. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 261

This reality is no fair semblance, but a faithful reflection of that eternal human nature which links together all humanity, a reflection of the heights and depths of human life which are common to us all. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 261

ust as the sea stretches its broad tongues between the continents and laps them round like islands, so our original unconsciousness presses round our individual consciousness. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 285

In the catastrophe of mental disease the storm-tide of the sea surges over the island and swallows it back into the depths. In neurotic disturbances there is at least a bursting of dikes, and the fruitful lowlands are laid waste by flood. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 285

Neurotics are all shore-dwellersthey are the most exposed to the dangers of the sea. So-called normal people live inland, on higher, drier ground, near placid lakes and streams. No flood however high reaches them, and the circumambient sea is so far away that they even deny its existence. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 285

Indeed, a person can be so identified with his ego that he loses the common bond of humanity and cuts himself off from all others. As nobody wants to be entirely like everybody else, this is quite a common occurrence. For primitive egoism, however, the standing rule is that it is never “I” who must change, but always the other fellow. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 285

Individual consciousness is surrounded by the treacherous sea of the unconscious. This consciousness of ours has the appearance of being stable and reliable, but in reality it is a fragile thing and rests on very insecure foundations. Often no more than a strong emotion is needed to upset the sensitive balance of consciousness. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 286

Our turns of speech are an indication of this. We say that a person was “beside himself” with rage, he “forgot himself completely,” one “couldn’t recognize him,” “the devil had got into him,” etc. Something makes you “jump out of your skin,” “drives you mad,” so that you “no longer know what you are doing.” All these familiar phrases show how easily our ego-consciousness is disrupted by affects. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 286

These disturbances do not show themselves only in acute form; often they are chronic and can bring about a lasting change of consciousness. As a result of some psychic upheaval whole tracts of our being can plunge back into the unconscious and vanish from the surface for years and decades. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 286

Permanent changes of character are not uncommon. We therefore say, quite correctly, that after some such experience a person was a “changed man.” These things happen not only to people with a bad heredity or to neurotics, but to normal people as well. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 286

Disturbances caused by affects are known technically as phenomena of dissociation, and are indicative of a psychic split. In every psychic conflict we can discern a split of this kind, which may go so far as to threaten the shattered structure of consciousness with complete disintegration. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 286

But even the inland dwellers, the inhabitants of the normal world who forgot the sea, do not live on firm ground. The soil is so friable that at any moment the sea can rush in through continental fissures and maroon them. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 287

Primitive man knows this danger not only from the life of his tribe but from his own psychology. The most important of these “perils of the soul,” as they are technically called, are loss of soul and possession Both are phenomena of dissociation. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 287

In the first case [loss of soul], he will say that a soul has wandered away from him, and in the second [case of possession], that a strange soul has taken up its abode in him, generally in some unpleasant form. This way of putting it may sound odd, but it describes exactly the symptoms which today we call phenomena of dissociation or schizoid states. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 287

They are not by any means purely pathological symptoms, for they are found just as much in normal people. They may take the form of fluctuations in the general feeling of well-being, irrational changes of mood, unpredictable affects, a sudden distaste for everything, psychic inertia, and so on. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 287

Even the schizoid phenomena that correspond to primitive possession can be observed in normal people. They, too, are not immune to the demon of passion; they, too, are liable to possession by an infatuation, a vice, or a one-sided conviction; and these are all things that dig a deep grave between them and those they hold most dear, and create an aching split in their own psyche. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 287

It is difficult to estimate the sickness of the age in which we live. But if we glance back at the clinical history of mankind, we shall find earlier bouts of sickness which are easier to survey. One of the worst attacks was the malaise that spread through the Roman world in the first centuries after Christ. The dissociation showed itself in an unexampled breakdown of the political and social conditions, in religious and philosophical dissension, and in a deplorable decline of the arts and sciences. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 291

If we reduced humanity as it then was to a single individual, we would see before us a highly differentiated personality who, after mastering his environment with sublime self-assurance, split himself up in the pursuit of his separate occupations and interests, forgetting his own origins and traditions, and even losing all memory of his former Self, so that he seemed to be now one thing and now another, and thus fell into a hopeless conflict with himself. In the end the conflict led to such a state of enfeeblement that the world he had conquered broke in like a devastating flood and completed the process of destruction. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 291

But let us go back for a moment to our earlier attempt to construct a single individual from the period of classical decay. I tried to show you how he disintegrated psychologically, how in a disastrous fit of weakness he lost control of his environment, and finally succumbed to the forces of destruction. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 291

Let us suppose that this man came to me for a consultation. I would make the following diagnosis: “You are suffering from overstrain as a result of your numerous activities and boundless extraversion. In the profusion and complexity of your business, personal, and human obligations you have lost your head. You are a kind of Ivar Kreuger, who is a typical representative of the modern European spirit. You must realize, my dear Sir, that you are rapidly going to the dogs” ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 291

Look at it from all sides, take it in your hand, carry it about with you, let your imagination play round it, and talk about it with other people. Primitives tell each other impressive dreams, in a public palaver if possible, and this custom is also attested in late antiquity, for all the ancient peoples attributed great significance to dreams. Treated in this way, the dream suggests all manner of ideas and associations which lead us closer to its meaning. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 291

The ascertainment of the meaning is, I need hardly point out, an entirely arbitrary affair, and this is where the hazards begin. Narrower or wider limits will be set to the meaning, according to one’s experience, temperament, and taste. Some people will be satisfied with little, for others much is still not enough. Also the meaning of the dream, or our interpretation of it, is largely dependent on the intentions of the interpreter, on what he expects the meaning to be or requires it to do. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 291

During the work of [dream-]interpretation one must abstain from all presuppositions that smack of superstition, such as, first and foremost, the notion that the protagonists in dreams are nothing other than these same persons in real life. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 321

One should never forget that one dreams in the first place, and almost to the exclusion of all else, of oneself. (Any exceptions are governed by quite definite rules, but I cannot go into this here). ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 321

If we acknowledge this truth we shall sometimes find ourselves faced with very interesting problems. I remember two instructive cases: one of my patients dreamed of a drunken tramp who lay in a ditch, and another of a drunken prostitute who rolled about in the gutter. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 321

The first patient was a theologian, the second a distinguished lady in high society. Both of them were outraged and horrified, and absolutely refused to admit that they had dreamed of themselves. I gave them both the well-meant advice that they should spend an hour in self-reflection, diligently and devoutly considering in what ways they were not much better than their drunken brother in the ditch and their drunken sister in the gutter. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 321

This does not contradict my earlier remark that we always dream of ourselves. As individuals we are not completely unique, but are like all other men. Hence a dream with a collective meaning is valid in the first place for the dreamer, but it expresses at the same time the fact that his momentary problem is also the problem of other people. This is often of great practical importance, for there are countless people who are inwardly cut off from humanity and oppressed by the thought that nobody else has their problems. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 321

Or else they are those all-too-modest souls who, feeling themselves nonentities, have kept their claim to social recognition on too low a level. Moreover, every individual problem is somehow connected with the problem of the age, so that practically every subjective difficulty has to be viewed from the standpoint of the human situation as a whole. But this is permissible only when the dream really is a mythological one and makes use of collective symbols. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 321

This is the unconscious Zeitgeist. It compensates the attitude of the conscious mind and anticipates changes to come. An excellent example of this is modern art: though seeming to deal with aesthetic problems, it is really performing a work of psychological education on the public by breaking down and destroying their previous aesthetic views of what is beautiful in form and meaningful in content ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 584

The pleasingness of the artistic product is replaced by chill abstractions of the most subjective nature which brusquely slam the door on the naïve and romantic delight in the senses and on the obligatory love for the object ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 584

This tells us, in plain and universal language, that the prophetic spirit of art has turned away from the old object-relationship towards the forth the time being dark chaos of subjectivisms ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 584

Certainly art, so far as we can judge of it, has not yet discovered in this darkness what it is that could hold all men together and give expression to their psychic wholeness. Since reflection seems to be needed for this purpose, it may be that such discoveries are reserved for other fields of endeavour ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 584

Great art till now has always derived its fruitfulness from myth, from the unconscious process of symbolization which continues through the ages and, as the primordial manifestation of the human spirit, will continue to be the root of all creation in the future ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 585

As the behaviour of the press is a sort of Gallup test with reference to world opinion, one must draw the conclusion that news affirming the existence of Ufos is welcome, but that scepticism seems to be undesirable. To believe that Ufos are real suits the general opinion, whereas disbelief is to be discouraged. This creates the impression that there is a tendency all over the world to believe in saucers and to want them to be real, unconsciously helped along by a press that otherwise has no sympathy with the phenomenon ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 589

As we know from ancient Egyptian history, they are manifestations of psychic changes which always appear at the end of one Platonic month and at the beginning of another ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 589

Apparently they are changes in the constellation of psychic dominants, of the archetypes, or “gods” as they used to be called, which bring about, or accompany, long-lasting transformations of the collective psyche. This transformation started in the historical era and left its traces first in the passing of the aeon of Taurus into that of Aries, and then of Aries into Pisces, whose beginning coincides with the rise of Christianity. We are now nearing that great change which may be expected when the spring-point enters Aquarius ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 589

Some time ago I published a statement in which I considered the nature of “Flying Saucers.” I came to the same conclusion as Edward J. Ruppelt, one-time chief of the American Air Force’s project for investigating Ufo reports. The conclusion is: something is seen, but one doesn’t know what ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 591

Such an object provokes, like nothing else, conscious and unconscious fantasies, the former giving rise to speculative conjectures and pure fabrications, and the latter supplying the mythological background inseparable from these provocative observations ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 593

Regarded in this light, the Ufo reports may seem to the sceptical mind to be rather like a story that is told all over the world, but differs from an ordinary rumour in that it is expressed in the form of visions, or perhaps owed its existence to them in the first place and is now kept alive by them. I would call this comparatively rare variation a visionary rumour It is closely akin to the collective visions of, say, the crusaders during the siege of Jerusalem, the troops at Mons in the first World War, the faithful followers of the pope at Fatima, Portugal, etc. Apart from collective visions, there are on record cases where one or more persons see something that physically is not there ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 597

The signal for the Ufo stories was given by the mysterious projectiles seen over Sweden during the last two years of the war attributed of course to the Russians and by the reports about “Foo fighters,” i.e., lights that accompanied the Allied bombers over Germany (Foo = feu). These were followed by the strange sightings of “Flying Saucers” in America. The impossibility of finding an earthly base for the Ufos and of explaining their physical peculiarities soon led to the conjecture of an extra-terrestrial origin. With this development the rumour got linked up with the psychology of the great panic that broke out in the United States just before the second World War, when a radio play, based on a novel by H. G. Wells, about Martians invading New York, caused a regular stampede and numerous car accidents. The play evidently hit the latent emotion connected with the imminence of war ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 599

But if it is a case of psychological projection, there must be a psychic cause for it. One can hardly suppose that anything of such worldwide incidence as the Ufo legend is purely fortuitous and of no importance whatever. The many thousands of individual testimonies must have an equally extensive causal basis. When an assertion of this kind is corroborated practically everywhere, we are driven to assume that a corresponding motive must be present everywhere, too ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 608

In addition, there are cases where the same collective cause produces identical or similar effects, i.e., the same visionary images and interpretations, in the very people who are least prepared for such phenomena and least inclined to believe in them. This fact gives the eyewitness accounts an air of particular credibility: it is usually emphasized that the witness is above suspicion because he was never distinguished for his lively imagination or credulousness but, on the contrary, for his cool judgment and critical reason ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 609

Considering the notorious camera-mindedness of Americans, it is surprising how few “authentic” photos of Ufos seem to exist, especially as many of them are said to have been observed for several hours at relatively close quarters. I myself happen to know someone who saw a Ufo with hundreds of other people in Guatemala. He had his camera with him, but in the excitement he completely forgot to take a photo, although it was daytime and the Ufo remained visible for an hour. I have no reason to doubt the honesty of his report. He has merely strengthened my impression that Ufos are somehow not photogenic ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 613

As one can see from all this, the observation and interpretation of Ufos have already led to the formation of a regular legend. Quite apart from the thousands of newspaper reports and articles there is now a whole literature on the subject, some of it humbug, some of it serious. The Ufos themselves, however, do not appear to have been impressed; as the latest observations show, they continue their way undeterred. Be that as it may, one thing is certain: they have become a living myth ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 614

We have here a golden opportunity of seeing how a legend is formed, and how in a difficult and dark time for humanity a miraculous tale grows up of an attempted intervention by extra-terrestrial “heavenly” powers and this at the very time when human fantasy is seriously considering the possibility of space travel and of visiting or even invading other planets ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 614

Sensationalism, love of adventure, technological audacity, intellectual curiosity may appear to be sufficient motives for our futuristic fantasies, but the impulse to spin such fantasies, especially when they take such a serious form witness the sputniks springs from an underlying cause, namely a situation of distress and the vital need that goes with it ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 615

What as a rule is seen is a body of round shape, disk-like or spherical, glowing or shining fierily in different colours, or, more seldom, a cigar-shaped or cylindrical figure of various sizes. It is reported that occasionally they are invisible to the naked eye but leave a “blip” on the radar screen. The round bodies in particular are figures such as the unconscious produces in dreams, visions, etc. ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 618

In this case they are to be regarded as symbols representing, in visual form, some thought that was not thought consciously, but is merely potentially present in the unconscious in invisible form and attains visibility only through the process of becoming conscious ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 618

The visible form, however, expresses the meaning of the unconscious content only approximately. In practice the meaning has to be completed by amplificatory interpretation. The unavoidable errors that result can be eliminated only through the principle of “waiting on events”; that is to say we obtain a consistent and readable text by comparing sequences of dreams dreamt by different individuals. The figures in a rumour can be subjected to the same principles of dream interpretation ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 618

If we apply them to the round object whether it be a disk or a sphere we at once get an analogy with the symbol of totality well known to all students of depth psychology, namely the mandala (Sanskrit for circle). This is not by any means a new invention, for it can be found in all epochs and in all places, always with the same meaning, and it reappears time and again, independently of tradition, in modern individuals as the “protective” or apotropaic circle, whether in the form of the prehistoric “sun wheel,” or the magic circle, or the alchemical microcosm, or a modern symbol of order, which organizes and embraces the psychic totality ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 619

In so far as the mandala encompasses, protects, and defends the psychic totality against outside influences and seeks to unite the inner opposites, it is at the same time a distinct individuation symbol and was known as such even to medieval alchemy ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 621

The soul was supposed to have the form of a sphere, on the analogy of Plato’s world-soul, and we meet the same symbol in modern dreams. This symbol, by reason of its antiquity, leads us to the heavenly spheres, to Plato’s “supra-celestial place” where the “Ideas” of all things are stored up ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 621

Hence there would be nothing against the naïve interpretation of Ufos as “souls.” Naturally they do not represent our modern conception of the psyche, but give an involuntary archetypal or mythological picture of an unconscious content, a rotundum, as the alchemists called it, that expresses the totality of the individual ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 621

I have defined this spontaneous image as a symbolical representation of the Self, by which I mean not the ego but the totality composed of the conscious and the unconscious. I am not alone in this, as the Hermetic philosophy of the Middle Ages had already arrived at very similar conclusions ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 621

If the round shining objects that appear in the sky be regarded as visions, we can hardly avoid interpreting them as archetypal images. They would then be involuntary, automatic projections based on instinct, and as little as any other psychic manifestations or symptoms can they be dismissed as meaningless and merely fortuitous ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 622

Anyone with the requisite historical and psychological knowledge knows that circular symbols have played an important role in every age; in our own sphere of culture, for instance, they were not only soul symbols but “God-images.” There is an old saying that “God is a circle whose centre is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.” God in his omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence is a totality symbol par excellence, something round, complete, and perfect. Epiphanies of this sort are, in the tradition, often associated with fire and light ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 622

On the antique level, therefore, the Ufos could easily be conceived as “gods.” They are impressive manifestations of totality whose simple, round form portrays the archetype of the Self, which as we know from experience plays the chief role in uniting apparently irreconcilable opposites and is therefore best suited to compensate the split-mindedness of our age. It has a particularly important role to play among the other archetypes in that it is primarily the regulator and orderer of chaotic states, giving the personality the greatest possible unity and wholeness ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 622

The dream describes, as the exposition of the initial situation, a mass panic as at an air-raid warning. A Ufo appears, having the form of a drop. A fluid body assumes the form of a drop when it is about to fall, from which it is clear that the Ufo is conceived as a liquid falling from the sky, like rain ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 628

From many of the reports, particularly the early ones, it is evident that the Ufos can appear suddenly and vanish equally suddenly. They can be tracked by radar but remain invisible to the eye, and conversely, can be seen by the eye but not detected by radar. Ufos can make themselves invisible at will, it is said, and must obviously consist of a substance that is visible at one moment and invisible the next ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 630

The nearest analogy to this is a volatile liquid which condenses out of an invisible state into the form of drops. In reading the old texts one can still feel the miracle of disappearance and reappearance which the alchemists beheld in the vaporization of water or quicksilver: for them it was the transformation of the “souls that had become water” (Heraclitus) into the invisible pneuma at the touch of Hermes’ wand, and their descent out of the empyrean into visible form again. Zosimos of Panopolis (third century A.D.) has left us a valuable document describing this transformation, which takes place in a cooking-vessel ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 630

The fantasies born of musing over the steaming cooking-pot one of the most ancient experiences of mankind may also be responsible for the sudden disappearance and reappearance of the Ufo ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 630

The plurality of Ufos, then, is a projection of a number of psychic images of wholeness which appear in the sky because on the one hand they represent archetypes charged with energy and on the other hand are not recognized as psychic factors ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 635

Very probably there is a phallic analogy in the dream, which, in accordance with the meaning of this exceedingly archaic symbol, gives the Ufo the character of something “procreative,” “fructifying,” and, in the broadest sense, “penetrating” ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 638

The dreamer does not flee from the menacing aspect of the Ufo, even when she sees it coming straight at her. During this confrontation the original spherical or lens-shaped aspect reappears in the form of a circular eye ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 639

Nowadays people who have an experience of this kind are more likely to go running to the doctor or psychiatrist than to the theologian. I have more than once been consulted by people who were terrified by their dreams and visions. They took them for symptoms of mental illness, possibly heralding insanity, whereas in reality they were “dreams sent by God,” real and genuine religious experiences that collided with a mind unprepared, ignorant, and profoundly prejudiced ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 642

The second dream differs from the first in that it brings out the dreamer’s inner relationship to the Ufo. The Ufo has marked her out and not only turns a searching eye upon her but irradiates her with magical heat, a synonym for her own inner affectivity ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 643

Fire is the symbolical equivalent of a very strong emotion or affect, which in this case comes upon her quite unexpectedly. In spite of her justifiable fear of the Ufo she held her ground, as though it were intrinsically harmless, but is now made to realize that it is capable of sending out a deadly heat, a statement we often meet with in the Ufo literature ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 643

This heat is a projection of her own unrealized emotion of a feeling that has intensified into a physical effect but remains unrecognized. Even her facial expression was altered (burnt) by it. This recalls not only the changed face of Moses but also that of Brother Klaus after his terrifying vision of God. It points to an “indelible” experience whose traces remain visible to others, because it has brought about a demonstrable change in the entire personality ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 643

Psychologically, of course, such an event betokens only a potential change; it has first to be integrated into consciousness. That is why Brother Klaus felt it necessary to spend long years in wearisome study and meditation until he succeeded in recognizing his terrifying vision as a vision of the Holy Trinity, in accordance with the spirit of the age ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 643

In this way he transformed the experience into an integrated conscious content that was intellectually and morally binding for him. This work has still to be done by the dreamer, and perhaps also by all those who see Ufos, dream of them, or spread rumours about them ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 643

The motif of the isolated “God’s eye,” which the unconscious proffers as an interpretation of the Ufo, can be found in ancient Egyptian mythology as the “eye of Horus,” who with its help healed the partial blinding of his father Osiris, caused by Set. The isolated God’s eye also appears in Christian iconography ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 645

The sexual aspect of the Ufos merits our attention, as it shows that a very powerful instinct like sexuality has its share in the structure of the phenomenon. It is probably no accident that in one of the dreams we have been discussing a feminine symbol appears, and in the other a masculine, in accordance with the reports of lens-shaped and cigar-shaped Ufos, for where one appears, we may also expect its partner ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 662

She thus creates an acute consciousness of sex, deleterious to weaker spirits but of advantage in promoting reflection and broadening the consciousness of the stronger ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 654

The worldly pomps of the Catholic Church for which she is reproached by the Protestants have the obvious purpose of holding the power of the spirit visibly before the natural power-instinct. This is infinitely more effective than the best logical arguments, which no one likes following ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 654

Only the tiniest fraction of the population learns anything from reflection; everything else consists in the suggestive power of ocular evidence ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 654

Spiders, like all animals that are not warm-blooded or have no cerebrospinal nervous system, function in dreams as symbols of a profoundly alien psychic world ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 671

So far as I can see, they express contents which, though active, are unable to reach consciousness; they have not yet entered the sphere of the cerebrospinal nervous system but are as though lodged in the deeper-lying sympathetic and parasympathetic systems ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 671

In this connection I remember the dream of a patient who had the greatest difficulty in conceiving the idea of the supraordinate totality of the psyche and felt the utmost resistance to it. He had picked up the idea from one of my books but, characteristically enough, was unable to distinguish between the ego and the Self, and, because of his hereditary taint, was threatened with a pathological inflation ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 671

In such cases there is a real weakness of the ego, which cannot therefore afford any suggestion of taking second place, as that would fatally emphasize its littleness and has to be avoided at all costs. Illusions, however, are inimical to life, because they are unhealthy and sooner or later trip you up. The dream therefore attempts a kind of corrective, which, like the Delphic oracle, turns out to be ambivalent. It says in effect: “What is troubling you in the head (attic) is, though you may not know it, a rare jewel. It is like an animal that is strange to you, forming symbolically the centre of many concentric circles, reminiscent of the centre of a large or small world, like the eye of God in medieval pictures of the universe” ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 672

Confronted with this, a healthy mind would fight against identification with the centre, because of the danger of paranoiac God-likeness ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 672

Anyone who gets into this spider’s net is wrapped round like a cocoon and robbed of his own life. He is isolated from his fellows, so that they can no longer reach him, nor he them. He lives in the loneliness of the world creator, who is everything and has nothing outside himself ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 672

If, on top of all this, you have had an insane father, there is the danger that you will begin to “spin” yourself, and for this reason the spider has a sinister aspect that should not be overlooked ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 672

For his everyday life man seems to need no instincts, especially when he is convinced of the sovereign power of his will. He ignores the meaning of instinct and devalues it to the point of atrophy, not seeing how much he endangers his very existence through loss of instinct ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 679

When therefore dreams emphasize instinct they are trying to fill a perilous gap in our adaptation to life ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 679

Deviations from instinct show themselves in the form of affects, which in dreams are likewise expressed by animals. Hence uncontrolled affects are rightly regarded as bestial or primitive and should be avoided ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 680

But we cannot do this [avoid uncontrolled affects] without repressing them, that is, without a splitting of consciousness. In reality we can never escape their power ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 680

Somewhere or other they will continue to operate even though they cannot be found in consciousness. At worst they manifest themselves in a neurosis or in an unconscious “arrangement” of inexplicable mishaps ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 680

The saint, who seems exempt from these weaknesses, pays for his immunity with suffering and abnegation of the earthly man, without which of course he would not be a saint. The lives of holy men show that the two sides cancel out. None can escape the chain of suffering that leads to sickness, old age and death ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 680

We can and should, for the sake of our humanity, “control” our affects and keep them in check, but we should know that we have to pay dearly for it. The choice of currency in which we wish to pay the tribute is sometimes even left to us ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 680

Remaining down below and subordinating ourselves to a theriomorphic symbol, which seems very like an insult to our human dignity, means no more than that we should remain conscious of these simple truths and never forget that in point of anatomy and psychology the earthly man, for all his high flights, is first cousin to the anthropoids ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 681

Should it be granted to him, however, to develop into something higher without crippling his nature, he is reminded that this transformation is not his to command, for he is dependent on factors he cannot influence ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 681

He [death] is the great perfector, drawing his inexorable line under the balance-sheet of human life. In him alone is wholeness one way or another attained. Death is the end of the empirical man and the goal of the spiritual man, as the perspicacious Heraclitus says: “It is to Hades that they rage and celebrate their feasts” ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 695

Everything that is not yet where it ought to be, that has not yet gone where it ought to have gone, fears the end, the final reckoning. We avoid as long as possible making ourselves conscious of those things which wholeness still lacks, thus preventing ourselves from becoming conscious of the Self and preparing for death. The Self then remains in projection ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 695

What is the use of a compensation that, because of its symbolic form, is not understood by the conscious mind? Apart from those not so uncommon cases where only a little reflection is needed to understand the meaning of a dream, we can take it as a general rule that the compensation is not immediately obvious and is therefore easily overlooked ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 732

The language of the unconscious does not have the intentional clarity of conscious language; it is a condensation of numerous data, many of them subliminal, whose connection with conscious contents is not known. These data do not take the form of a directed judgment, but follow an instinctive, archaic “pattern” which, because of its mythological character, is not recognized by the reasoning mind ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 732

The reaction of the unconscious is a natural phenomenon that is not concerned to benefit or guide the personal human being, but is regulated exclusively by the demands of psychic equilibrium. Thus there are times when, as I have often seen, a dream that is not understood can still have a compensatory effect, even though as a rule conscious understanding is required on the alchemical principle “Quod natura relinquit imperfectum, ars perficit” (what nature leaves imperfect, the art perfects) ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 732

Were this not so, human reflection and effort would be superfluous. For its part, the conscious mind often proves incapable of recognizing the full scope and significance of certain vital situations it has created for itself, and so challenges the unconscious to bring up the subliminal context, which, however, is written not in rational language but in an archaic one with two or more meanings ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 732

Since the metaphors it uses reach far back into the history of the human mind, its interpreters will need historical knowledge in order to understand its meaning ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 732

Instead, it has to turn its attention to the individual exceptions, which are murdered by statistics. The human psyche attains its true meaning not in the average but in the unique, and this does not count in a scientific procedure ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 744

Rhine’s experiments have taught us, if practical experience has not already done so, that the improbable does occur, and that our picture of the world only tallies with reality when the improbable has a place in it ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 744

This point of view is anathema to the exclusively scientific attitude, despite the fact that without exceptions there would be no statistics at all. Moreover, in actual reality the exceptions are almost more important than the rule ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 744

The psychological effect is very like that of the Rorschach test, where a purely fortuitous and irrational picture appeals to the irrational powers of the imagination and brings the observer’s unconscious into play. When his extraverted interest is snubbed in this way it falls back on the “subjective factor” and increases the latter’s energy charge, a phenomenon that was observed very clearly in the original word association tests ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 753

The isolated stimulus word uttered by an experimenter bewilders and embarrasses the subject because it may have more than one meaning ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 753

He does not quite know what to answer, and this accounts for the extraordinary variety of answers in these tests and what is more important for the large number of disturbed reactions which are caused by the intrusion of unconscious contents ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 753

The rebuffing of interest by unintelligibility results in its introversion and a constellation of the unconscious. Modern art has the same effect ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 754

We can therefore attribute to modern art a conscious or unconscious intention to turn the beholder’s eyes away from the intelligible and enjoyable world of the senses and to enforce a revelation of the unconscious as a kind of substitute for the loss of human surroundings ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 754

This is also the intention of the [word] association experiment and the Rorschach test: they are meant to supply information concerning the background of consciousness, and this they do with great success ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 754

The experimental setup of modern art is evidently the same: it faces the observer with the question, “How will you react? What do you think? What kind of fantasy will come up?” In other words, modern art is less concerned with the pictures it produces than with the observer and his involuntary reactions ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 754

He peers at the colours on the canvas, his interest is aroused, but all he can discover is a product that defies human understanding. He feels disappointed, and already he is thrown back on a subjective reaction which vents itself in all sorts of exclamations ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 754

Anyone who knows how to interpret these will learn a lot about the subjective disposition of the observer but next to nothing about the painting as such. For him it is no more than a psychological test ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 754

This may sound disparaging, but only for those who regard the subjective factor merely as a source of discomfort. But if they are interested in their own psyches, they will try to submit their constellated complexes to closer scrutiny ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 754

In its attempt to leave the world of visible and intelligible appearances and to float in the boundlessness of chaos, modern art, to a still greater degree than the psychological tests, evokes complexes which have sloughed off their usual personal aspect and appear as what they originally were, namely primordial forms of the instincts. They are of a suprapersonal, collective-unconscious nature ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 755

Personal complexes arise wherever there are conflicts with the instinctual disposition. These are the points of faulty adaptation, and their sensitiveness releases affects which tear the mask of adaptedness off the face of civilized man ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 755

This also seems to be the goal that modern art is indirectly aiming at. For all the appearance of extreme arbitrariness and boundless chaos, the loss of beauty and meaning is compensated by a strengthening of the unconscious. And since this is not chaotic but pertains to the natural order of things, it is to be expected that forms and patterns will arise which are indicative of this order ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 755

As the illustration shows, this sighting was made in Basel. The dark colour of the Ufos may be due to their having been seen against the light of the rising sun. Some of them were bright and fiery. Their speed and irregular motion are typical Ufo features ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 759

This broadsheet (fig. 404.06) relates the story of a “very frightful spectacle” seen by “numerous men and women” at sunrise on April 14, 1561. They saw “globes” of a blood-red, bluish, or black colour, or “plates” in large numbers near the sun, “some three in a row, now and then four in a square, also some standing alone. And amongst these globes some blood-coloured crosses were seen.” They all began to fight one another.” This went on for about an hour. Then “they all fellas one sees in the picture from the sun and sky down to the earth, as if everything were on fire, then it slowly faded away on the earth, producing a lot of steam.” Underneath the globes was a long object, “shaped like a great black spear.” Naturally this “spectacle” was interpreted as a divine warning ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 760

This report, as the reader will have noted, contains certain details already known to us. Above all the “tubes,” which are analogous to the cylindrical objects in the Ufo reports. These, in Ufo language, are the “mother-ships” which are said to carry the smaller, lens-shaped Ufos for long distances. The picture shows them in operation, releasing Ufos or taking them on board. Especially important, though lacking in the modern Ufo reports, are the indubitable quaternities, seen sometimes as simple crosses, sometimes as disks in the form of a cross, that is, as regular mandalas. There also seems to be a hint of the 3 + 1 motif in the dilemma of three and four. The militaristic interpretation is as characteristic of the sixteenth century as the technological one is of ours. The tubes are cannons and the globes cannonballs, and the shooting to and from of the globes is an artillery engagement. The great black spearhead, as well as the spearshafts (?), seem to represent the masculine element, especially in its “penetrating” capacity. Similar things are reported in the Ufo literature ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 761

The emphasis on the cross motif is striking. The Christian meaning of the cross can hardly be considered here, since we are dealing with a natural phenomenon, a swarm of round objects in violent motion, shooting in opposite directions and reminding the reporter of a battle. If the Ufos were living organisms, one would think of a swarm of insects rising with the sun, not to fight one another but to mate and celebrate the marriage flight. Here the cross signifies a union of opposites (vertical and horizontal), a “crossing”; as a plus sign, it is also a joining together, an addition. Where the globes are coupled together to form quaternities, they have given rise to the crossed marriage quaternio, which I have discussed in my “Psychology of the Transference.” It forms the model for the primitive “cross cousin marriage,” but is also an individuation symbol, the union of the “four” ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 762

Columns of smoke rise up from the place where the cannonballs have fallen, reminding us of Tanguy’s picture. The moment of sunrise, the Aurora consurgens (Aquinas, Boehme), suggests the revelation of the light. Both reports have clear analogies not only with one another but also with the modern saucer stories and with the individual products of the unconscious today ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 763

This seventeenth-century woodcut (fig. 404.07) , possibly representing a Rosicrucian illumination, comes from a source unknown to me. On the right it shows the familiar world. The pilgrim, who is evidently on a pélerinage de l’âme [pilgrimage of the soul], has broken through the star-strewn rim of his world and behold another, supernatural universe filled with what look like layers of cloud or mountain ranges. In it appear the wheels of Ezekiel and disks or rainbowlike figures, obviously representing the “heavenly spheres.” In these symbols we have a prototype of the Ufo vision, which is vouchsafed to the illuminati. They cannot be heavenly bodies belonging to our empirical world, but are projected “rotunda” from the inner, four-dimensional world ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 764

This picture (fig. 404.08) comes from the Rupertsberg Codex Scivias, written by Hildegard of Bingen (12th cent.). It shows the quickening or “animation” of the child in the body of the mother. From a higher world an influx enters the foetus. This upper world has a remarkable quadratic form divided into three to correspond with the Trinity, but, unlike the latter, which is supposed to consist of three equal parts, the middle section is different from the other two. It contains round objects, whereas the other two are characterized by the eye motif. Like the wheels of Ezekiel, the little rotunda are associated with eyes ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 765

As Hildegard’s text states, the radiance of the “countless eyes” (there are in reality twenty-four in each section) means “God’s knowledge,” that is, his seeing and knowing, with reference to the seven eyes of God that “run to and from through the whole earth” (Zech. 4 : 10) ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 766

The rotunda, on the other hand, are God’s deeds, such as the sending of his son as a saviour. Hildegard adds: “All, the bad as well as the good, appear in God’s knowledge, for it is not ever clouded round by any darkness.” The souls of men are “fireballs”, so presumably the soul of Christ was also such a ball, for Hildegard interprets her vision not with reference to the growth of a human child only, but with particular reference to Christ and the Mother of God ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 766

The square divided into three stands for the Holy Ghost entering into the child. The procreative aspect of the Holy Ghost unites the Godhead with matter, as is clear from the sacred legend. The intermediate forms between spirit and matter are obviously the rotunda, early stages of animated bodies, filling the middle section of the square. There are thirty of them, and, however accidental this may be, the number 30 (days of the month) suggests the moon, ruler of the hylical world, whereas twenty-four (hours of the day) suggests the sun, the king. This indicates the motif of the coniunctio (* and *)an instance of that unconscious readiness which later came to expression in Cusanus’ definition of God as a complexio oppositorum ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 766

In the miniature the rotunda are fire-coloured, the fiery seeds from which human beings will sprout, a sort of pneumatic roe. This comparison is justified in so far as alchemy compares the rotunda to fish’s eyes. The eyes of a fish are always open, like the eyes of God. They are synonymous with the scintillae, “soul-sparks.” It is just possible that these alchemical allusions crept into Hildegard’s text via the atoms of Democritus (spiritus insert us atomis). Another such source may be responsible for the squareness of the Holy Ghost ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 766

The square, being a quaternity, is a totality symbol in alchemy. Having four corners it signifies the earth, whereas a circular form is attributed to the spirit. Earth is feminine, spirit masculine. The square as a symbol of the spiritual world is certainly most unusual, but becomes more intelligible when we take Hildegard’s sex into account. This remarkable symbolism is reflected in the squaring of the coniunctio oppositorum. “Squareness” in alchemy is an important feature of the unitary substance, the Mercurius Philosophorum sive quadratus, and characterizes its chthonic nature, which it possesses along with spirituality (spiritus mercurialis) ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 767

They [numbers] are an aspect of the physically real as well as of the psychically imaginary. They do not only count and measure, and are not merely quantitative; they also make qualitative statements and are therefore a mysterious something midway between myth and reality, partly discovered and partly invented ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 777

quations, for instance, that were invented as pure mathematical formulae have subsequently proved to be formulations of the quantitative behaviour of physical things ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 777

Conversely, owing to their individual qualities, numbers can be vehicles for psychic processes in the unconscious. The structure of the mandala, for instance, is intrinsically mathematical. We may exclaim with the mathematician Jacobi: “In the Olympian host Number eternally reigns” ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 777

Thus it is a fact of singular importance that number also characterizes the “personal” nature of the mediating figure, that it appears as a mediator. From the psychological standpoint, and having regard to the limits set to all scientific knowledge, I have called the mediating or “uniting” symbol which necessarily proceeds from a sufficiently great tension of opposites the “Self.” I chose this term in order to make clear that I am concerned primarily with the formulation of empirical facts and not with dubious incursions into metaphysics ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 779

There I would trespass upon all manner of religious convictions. Living in the West, I would have to say Christ instead of “Self,” in the Near East it would be Khidr, in the Far East atman or Tao or the Buddha, in the Far West maybe a hare or Mondamin, and in cabalism it would be Tifereth ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 779

That there is something beyond the borderline, beyond the frontiers of knowledge, is shown by the archetypes and, most clearly of all, by numbers, which this side of the border are quantities but on the other side are autonomous psychic entities, capable of making qualitative statements which manifest themselves in a priori patterns of order ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 780

These patterns include not only causally explicable phenomena like dream-symbols and such, but remarkable relativizations of time and space which simply cannot be explained causally ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 780

They are the parapsychological phenomena which I have summed up under the term “synchronicity” and which have been statistically investigated by Rhine. The positive results of his experiments elevate these phenomena to the rank of undeniable facts ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 780

This brings us a little nearer to understanding the mystery of psychophysical parallelism, for we now know that a factor exists which mediates between the apparent incommensurability of body and psyche, giving matter a kind of “psychic” faculty and the psyche a kind of “materiality,” by means of which the one can work on the other ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 780

That the body can work on the psyche seems to be a truism, but strictly speaking all we know is that any bodily defect or illness also expresses itself psychically. Naturally this assumption only holds good if, contrary to the popular materialistic view, the psyche is credited with an existence of its own ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 780

But materialism in its turn cannot explain how chemical changes can produce a psyche. Both views, the materialistic as well as the spiritualistic, are metaphysical prejudices ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 780

It accords better with experience to suppose that living matter has a psychic aspect, and the psyche a physical aspect. If we give due consideration to the facts of parapsychology, then the hypothesis of the psychic aspect must be extended beyond the sphere of biochemical processes to matter in general. In that case all reality would be grounded on an as yet unknown substrate possessing material and at the same time psychic qualities. In view of the trend of modern theoretical physics, this assumption should arouse fewer resistances than before ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 780

The peculiarity of “conscience” is that it is a knowledge of, or certainty about, the emotional value of the ideas we have concerning the motives of our actions. According to this definition, conscience is a complex phenomenon consisting on the one hand in an elementary act of the will, or in an impulse to act for which no conscious reason can be given, and on the other hand in a judgment grounded on rational feeling ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 825

This judgment is a value judgment, and it differs from an intellectual judgment in that, besides having an objective, general, and impartial character, it reveals the subjective point of reference. A value judgment always implicates the subject, presupposing that something is good or beautiful for me ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 825

that it is good or beautiful for certain other people, this is not necessarily a value judgment but may just as well be an intellectual statement of fact. Conscience, therefore, is made up of two layers, the lower one comprising a particular psychic event, while the upper one is a kind of superstructure representing the positive or negative judgment of the subject ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 825

For example, a business man I knew was made what looked like a perfectly serious and honourable offer which, it turned out much later, would have involved him in a disastrous fraud had he accepted it. The following night after he received this offer, which as I say seemed to him quite acceptable, he dreamt that his hands and forearms were covered with black dirt. He could see no connection with the events of the previous day, because he was unable to admit to himself that the offer had touched him on the vulnerable spot: his expectation of a good business deal. I warned him about this, and he was careful enough to take certain precautions which did in fact save him from more serious harm ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 826

In this instance the classical characteristic of conscience, the conscientia peccati (“consciousness of sin”), is missing. Accordingly the specific feeling-tone of a bad conscience is missing too ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 827

From this we learn one important fact: the moral evaluation of an action, which expresses itself in the specific feeling-tone of the accompanying ideas, is not always dependent on consciousness but may function without it. Freud put forward the hypothesis that in these cases there is a repression exerted by a psychic factor, the so-called superego ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 828

It was these and similar experiences which led Freud to endow the superego with special significance. The Freudian superego is not, however, a natural and inherited part of the psyche’s structure; it is rather the consciously acquired stock of traditional customs, the “moral code” as incorporated, for instance, in the Ten Commandments ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 830

In view of the fact that dreams lead astray as much as they exhort, it seems doubtful whether what appears to be a judgment of conscience should be evaluated as such in other words, whether we should attribute to the unconscious a function which appears moral to us ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 835

John says: “Try the spirits whether they are of God” (I John 4 : 1), an admonition we could profitably apply to ourselves. Since olden times conscience has been understood by many people less as a psychic function than as a divine intervention; indeed, its dictates were regarded as vox Dei, the voice of God ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 839

Since, then, the phenomenon of conscience in itself does not coincide with the moral code, but is anterior to it, transcends its contents and, as already mentioned, can also be “false,” the view of conscience as the voice of God becomes an extremely delicate problem ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 840

Conscience no matter on what it is based commands the individual to obey his inner voice even at the risk of going astray. We can refuse to obey this command by an appeal to the moral code and the moral views on which it is founded, though with an uncomfortable feeling of having been disloyal ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 841

Primitive man regards the autonomy of the psyche as demonism and magic. This, we consider, is only what one would expect in primitive society. On closer inspection one finds, however, that the civilized man of antiquity, such as Socrates, still had his daemon and that there was a widespread and natural belief in superhuman beings who, we would suppose today, were personifications of projected unconscious contents ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 843

The psychologist can criticize metaphysics as a human assertion, but he is not in a position to make such assertions himself. He can only establish that these assertions exist as a kind of exclamation, well knowing that neither one nor the other can be proved right and objectively valid, although he must acknowledge the legitimacy of subjective assertions as such ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 845

Both forms of conscience the right and the false, stem from the same source, and both therefore have approximately the same power of conviction. This is also apparent in the symbolic designation of Christ as Lucifer (`“bringer of light”), lion, raven (or nycticorax: night-heron), serpent, son of God, etc., all of which he shares with Satan; in the idea that the good father-god of Christianity is so vindictive that it takes the cruel sacrifice of his son to reconcile him to humanity; in the belief that the Summum Bonum has a tendency to lead such an inferior and helpless creature as man into temptation, only to consign him to eternal damnation if he is not astute enough to spot the divine trap ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 846

The reduction of the act of conscience to a collision with the archetype is, by and large, a tenable explanation. On the other hand we must admit that the psychoid archetype, that is, its irrepresentable and unconscious essence, is not just a postulate only, but possesses qualities of a parapsychological nature which I have grouped together under the term “synchronicity” ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 849

Good and evil are in themselves principles, and we must bear in mind that a principle exists long before us and extends far beyond us ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 859

When we speak of good and evil we are speaking concretely of something whose deepest qualities are in reality unknown to us. Whether it is experienced as evil and sinful depends, furthermore, on our subjective judgment, as also does the extent and gravity of the sin ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 860

To confront a person with his shadow is to show him his own light. Once one has experienced a few times what it is like to stand judgingly between the opposites, one begins to understand what is meant by the Self. Anyone who perceives his shadow and his light simultaneously sees himself from two sides and thus gets in the middle ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 872

That is the secret of the Eastern attitude: observing the opposites teaches the Easterner the character of Maya. It gives reality the glint of illusion. Behind the opposites and in the opposites is true reality, which sees and comprehends the whole ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 873

The Indian calls this Atman. Reflecting on ourselves we can say, “I am he who speaks good and evil,” or better, “I am he through whom good and evil are spoken. The one who is in me, who voices the principles, uses me as a means of expression. He speaks through me” ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 873

This corresponds to what the Indian calls Atman that which, figuratively speaking, “breathes through” me. Not through me alone, but through all; for it is not only the individual Atman but Atman-Purusha, the universal Atman, the pneuma, who breathes through all ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 873

We use the word “Self” for this, contrasting it with the little ego. From what I have said it will be clear that this Self is not just a rather more conscious or intensified ego, as the words “self-conscious,” “self-satisfied,” etc. might lead one to suppose. What is meant by the Self is not only in me but in all beings, like the Atman, like Tao. It is psychic totality ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 873

A patient should not be regarded as an inferior being whom one lays on a couch while one sits behind him like a god, letting a word drop now and then. Everything suggestive of illness should be avoided. The patient is tending in this direction anyway and would like nothing better than to take refuge in illness: “now I can give up, now I must just lie there, now I am good and sick.” Illness too is a solution of sorts, a way of disposing of life’s problems: “I am ill, now the doctor must help!” ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 881

As a therapist I mustn’t be naïve. Unless the patient should really be in bed he should be treated like a normal person, indeed like a partner. That provides a sound basis for the treatment ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 881

People often come to me expecting me to let loose some medical magic. Then they are disappointed when I treat them as normal people and myself act like a normal man. One patient had experienced only the strong silent god sitting behind the couch. As soon as I began to talk to her she said astonished, almost horrified: “But you’re expressing your affects, you’re even telling me what you think!” Naturally I have affects and show them. Nothing is more important than this: every human being should be taken as a real human being and treated according to his peculiarities ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 881

What are called esoteric secrets are mostly artificial secrets, not real ones. Man needs to have secrets, and since he has no notion of the real ones he fakes them ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 886

But the real [secrets] come to him [man] out of the depths of the unconscious, and then he may reveal things which he ought really to have kept secret. Here again we see the numinous character of the reality in the background. It is not we who have secrets, it is the real secrets that have us ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 886

Laughing is a very important emotional expression and one learns a lot about character from a careful observation of the way people laugh ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 953

There are people who suffer from a crippled laughter. It’s just painful to see them laugh and the sound of that shrill, evil, compressed rattle almost makes you sick ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 953

America as a nation can laugh, and that means a lot. There is still a childlikeness, a soundness of emotion, an immediate rapport with your fellow being 953

This laughter goes hand in hand with a remarkable vivacity and a great ease of expression. Americans are great talkers ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 954

Gossip and chattering spill over into monstrously big newspapers. The talking goes on even when you are reading ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 954

The style of “good” American writing is a talking style. When it is not too flat, it is just as refreshing and exhilarating for us Europeans as your laughter. But often, alas, it is just chattering, the vibrating noise of a big ant-heap ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 954

One of the greatest advantages of the American language is its slang. I am far from sniffing at American slang, on the contrary I like it profoundly. Slang means a language in the making, a thing fully alive. Its images are not worn-out and worm-eaten metaphors, pale reflections hallowed by immemorial age, smooth, correct, and concise conventions, but figures full of life, carrying all the stamina of their earthly origin, and the incomparable flavour of local conditions peculiar to the strange and unprejudiced soil of a new country ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 955

One feels a new current of strange life in the flow of the old English language, and one wonders where it comes from. Is it the new country only? I doubt it ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 955

There is a marked tendency in America to sexual promiscuity, which shows not only in the frequency of divorces but quite particularly in the peculiar liberation from sex prejudices in the younger generation ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 958

As an inevitable consequence the individual rapport between the sexes will suffer. An easy access never calls forth and therefore never develops the values of character, and at the same time it is a most serious obstacle to any deeper mutual understanding ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 958

Such an understanding, without which no real love can exist, is reached only by overcoming all the difficulties due to the psychological difference between the sexes. Promiscuity paralyses all these efforts by offering easy opportunities of escape. Individual rapport becomes quite superfluous ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 958

But the more a so-called unprejudiced freedom and easy promiscuity prevail, the more love becomes flat and degenerates into transitory sex interludes. The most recent developments in the field of sexual morality tend toward sexual primitivity, analogous to the instability of the moral habits of primitive peoples, where under the influence of collective emotion all sex taboos instantly disappear ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 958

It would be difficult not to see that the coloured [African American] man, with his primitive motility, his expressive emotionality, his childlike directness, his sense of music and rhythm, his funny and picturesque language, has infected the American “behaviour.” As any psychologist and any doctor knows, nothing is more contagious than tics, stammering, choreic movements, signs of emotion, above all laughter and peculiarities of speech. Even if your mind and heart are elsewhere, even if you don’t understand a joke in a foreign language, you can’t help smiling when everybody else smiles ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 965

Stammering can have a most infectious quality, so that you hardly can refrain from imitating it involuntarily ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 965

Melody and rhythm are most insidious, they can obsess you for days, and as to language it is most disturbing how its metaphors and different ways of pronunciation affect you, beginning with some apologetic quotation, and then because you just can’t help it ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 965

Sometimes you can catch it in a formula, sometimes the genius is more elusive, yet nonetheless it is indescribably present as a sort of atmosphere that permeates everything, the look of the people, their speech, behaviour, clothing, smell, their interests, ideals, politics, philosophy, art, and even their religion ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 972

In a well-defined civilization with a solid historical background, such as for instance the French, you can easily discover the keynote of the French esprit: it is “la gloire,” a most marked prestige psychology in its noblest as well as its most ridiculous forms. You find it in their speech, gestures, beliefs, in the style of everything, in politics and even in science ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 972

In Germany it is the “Idea” that is impersonated by everybody. There are no ordinary human beings, you are “Herr Professor” or “Herr Geheimrat,” “Herr Oberrechnungsrat,” and even longer things than that. Sometimes the German idea is right and sometimes it is wrong, but it never ceases to be an idea whether it belongs to the highest philosophy or is merely a foolish bias. Even when you die in Germany, you don’t die in mere human misery, you die in the ideal form of “Hausbesitzersgattin” or something of the sort ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 973

England’s innermost truth and at the same time her most valuable contribution to the assets of the human family is the “gentleman,” rescued from the dusty chivalry of the early Middle Ages and now penetrating into the remotest corner of modern English life. It is an ultimate principle that never fails to carry conviction, the shining armour of the perfect knight in soul and body, and the miserable coffin of poor natural feelings ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 974

America has a principle or idea or attitude, but it is surely not money. Often, when I was searching through the conscious and the unconscious mind of my American patients and pupils, I found something which I can only describe as a sort of Heroic Ideal ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 976

The [American’s] most idealistic effort is concerned with bringing out the best in every man, and when you find a good man you naturally support him and push him on, until at last he is liable to collapse from sheer exertion, success, and triumph. It is done in every family, where ambitious mothers egg their boys on with the idea that they must be heroes of some sort, or you find it in the factory, where the whole system anxiously tries to get the best man into the best place ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 976

Or again in the schools where every child is trained to be brave, courageous, efficient, and a “good sport,” a hero in short. There is no record which people will not kill themselves to break, even if it is the most appalling nonsense. The moving pictures abound with heroes of every description ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 976

American applause holds the world’s record. The “great” and “famous” man gets mobbed by enthusiastic crowds, whatever he may be “great” in; even Valentino got his full share. In Germany you are great if your titles are two yards long, in England if you are a gentleman as well, in France if you coincide with the prestige of the country ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 976

In small countries there is, as a rule, no greatness when you are alive, because things need to be small, therefore it is usually posthumous. America is perhaps the only country where “greatness” is unrestricted, because it expresses the most fundamental hopes, desires, ambitions, and convictions of the nation ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 976

In comparison, Islam seems to be a superior, more spiritual, and more advanced religion. Its mosques are pure and beautiful, and of course wholly Asiatic. There is not much mind about it, but a great deal of feeling. The cult is one wailing outcry for the All-Merciful. It is a desire, an ardent longing and even greed for God; I would not call it love ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 990

But there is love, the most poetic, most exquisite love of beauty in these old Moguls. In a world of tyranny and cruelty, a heavenly dream crystallized in stone: the Taj Mahal. I cannot conceal my unmitigated admiration for this supreme flower, for this jewel beyond price, and I marvel at that love which discovered the genius of Shah Jehan and used it as an instrument of self-realization. This is the one place in the world where the alasall too invisible and all too jealously guarded beauty of the Islamic Eros has been revealed by a well-nigh divine miracle. It is the delicate secret of the rose gardens of Shiraz and of the silent patios of Arabian palaces, torn out of the heart of a great lover by a cruel and incurable loss ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 990

The mosques of the Moguls and their tombs may be pure and austere, their divans, or audience halls, may be of impeccable beauty, but the Taj Mahal is a revelation. It is thoroughly un-Indian. It is more like a plant that could thrive and flower in the rich Indian earth as it could nowhere else. It is Eros in its purest form; there is nothing mysterious, nothing symbolic about it. It is the sublime expression of human love for a human being ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 990

It is common knowledge that mankind can never remain on an apex of illumination and spiritual endeavour. Buddha was an untimely intruder, upsetting the historical process, which afterwards got the better of him ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 1003

Indian religion is like a vimana, or pagoda. The gods climb over one another like ants, from the elephants carved on the base to the abstract lotus which crowns the top of the building. In the long run, the gods become philosophical concepts ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 1003

Buddha, a spiritual pioneer for the whole world, said, and tried to make it true, that the enlightened man is even the teacher and redeemer of his gods (not their stupid denier, as Western “enlightenment” will have it) ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 1003

This was obviously too much, because the Indian mind was not at all ready to integrate the gods to such an extent as to make them psychologically dependent upon man’s mental condition. How Buddha himself could obtain such insight without losing himself in a complete mental inflation borders on a miracle. (But any genius is a miracle) ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 1003

Buddha disturbed the historical process by interfering with the slow transformation of the gods into ideas. The true genius nearly always intrudes and disturbs. He speaks to a temporal world out of a world eternal. Thus he says the wrong things at the right time. Eternal truths are never true at any given moment in history ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 1004

The process of transformation has to make a halt in order to digest and assimilate the utterly impractical things that the genius has produced from the storehouse of eternity. Yet the genius is the healer of his time, because anything he reveals of eternal truth is healing ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 1004

The remote goal of the transformation process, however, is very much what Buddha intended. But to get there is possible neither in one generation nor in ten. It obviously takes much longer, thousands of years at all events, since the intended transformation cannot be realized without an enormous development of human consciousness. It can only be “believed,” which is what Buddha’s, as well as Christ’s, followers obviously did, assuming as “believers” always do that belief is the whole thing ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 1005

Belief is a great thing, to be sure, but it is a substitute for a conscious reality which the Christians wisely relegate to a life in the hereafter. This “hereafter” is really the intended future of mankind, anticipated by religious intuition ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 1005

The Indian does not fish out infinitesimal details from the universe. His ambition is to have a vision of the whole. He does not yet know that you can screw the living world up tightly between two concepts. Did you ever stop to think how much of the conqueror (not to say thief or robber) lies in that very term “concept”? It comes from the Latin concipere, `to take something by grasping it thoroughly.’ That is how we get at the world ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 1012

But Indian “thinking” is an increase of vision and not a predatory raid into the yet unconquered realms of nature ~Carl Jung, CW10, Para 1012

The rapid and worldwide growth of a psychological interest over the last two decades shows unmistakably that modern man is turning his attention from outward material things to his own inner processes. Expressionism in art prophetically anticipated this subjective development, for all art intuitively apprehends coming changes in the collective unconsciousness. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 167

The psychological interest of the present time is an indication that modern man expects something from the psyche which the outer world has not given him: doubtless something which our religion ought to contain, but no longer does contain, at least for modern man. For him the various forms of religion no longer appear to come from within, from the psyche; they seem more like items from the inventory of the outside world. No spirit not of this world vouchsafes him inner revelation; instead, he tries on a variety of religions and beliefs as if they were Sunday attire, only to lay them aside again like worn-out clothes. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 168

Yet he is somehow fascinated by the almost pathological manifestations from the hinterland of the psyche, difficult though it is to explain how something which all previous ages have rejected should suddenly become interesting. That there is a general interest in these matters cannot be denied, however much it offends against good taste. I am not thinking merely of the interest. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 169

I am not thinking merely of the interest taken in psychology as a science, or of the still narrower interest in the psychoanalysis of Freud, but of the widespread and ever-growing interest in all sorts of psychic phenomena, including spiritualism, astrology, Theosophy, parapsychology, and so forth. The world has seen nothing like it since the end of the seventeenth century. We can compare it only to the flowering of Gnostic thought in the first and second centuries after Christ. The spiritual currents of our time have, in fact, a deep affinity with Gnosticism. There is even an “Église gnostique de la France,” and I know of two schools in Germany which openly declare themselves Gnostic. The most impressive movement numerically is undoubtedly Theosophy, together with its continental sister, Anthroposophy; these are pure Gnosticism in Hindu dress. Compared with them the interest in scientific psychology is negligible. What is striking about these Gnostic systems is that they are based exclusively on the manifestations of the unconscious, and that their moral teachings penetrate into the dark side of life, as is clearly shown by the refurbished European version of Kundalini yoga. The same is true of parapsychology, as everyone acquainted with this subject will agree. The passionate interest in these movements undoubtedly arises from psychic energy which can no longer be invested in obsolete religious forms. For this reason such movements have a genuinely religious character, even when they pretend to be scientific. It changes nothing when Rudolf Steiner calls his Anthroposophy “spiritual science,” or when Mrs. Eddy invents a “Christian Science.” These attempts at concealment merely show that religion has grown suspect – almost as suspect as politics and world-reform. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 170

I do not believe that I am going too far when I say that modern man, in contrast to his nineteenth-century brother, turns to the psyche with very great expectations, and does so without reference to any traditional creed but rather with a view to Gnostic experience. The fact that all the movements I have mentioned give themselves a scientific veneer is not just a grotesque caricature or a masquerade, but a positive sign that they are actually pursuing “science,” i.e., knowledge , instead of faith , which is the essence of the Western forms of religion. Modern man abhors faith and the religions based upon it. He holds them valid only so far as their knowledge-content seems to accord with his own experience of the psychic background. He wants to know – to experience for himself. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 171

The age of discovery has only just come to an end in our day, when no part of the earth remains unexplored; it began when men would no longer believe that the Hyperboreans were one-footed monsters, or something of that kind, but wanted to find out and see with their own eyes what existed beyond the boundaries of the known world. Our age is apparently setting out to discover what exists in the psyche beyond consciousness. The question asked in every spiritualistic circle is: What happens after the medium has lost consciousness? Every Theosophist asks: What shall I experience at the higher levels of consciousness? The question which every astrologer asks is: What are the operative forces that determine my fate despite my conscious intention? And every psychoanalyst wants to know: What are the unconscious drives behind the neurosis? ~Carl Jung CW 10, Para 172

Our age wants to experience the psyche for itself. It wants original experience and not assumptions, though it is willing to make use of all the existing assumptions as a means to this end, including those of the recognized religions and the authentic sciences. The European of yesterday will feel a slight shudder run down his spine when he gazes more deeply in to these delvings. Not only does he consider the subject of this so-called research obscure and shuddersome, but even the methods employed seem to him a shocking misuse of man’s finest intellectual attainments. What is the professional astronomer to say when he is told that at least a thousand times more horoscopes are cast today than were cast three hundred years ago? What will the educator and advocate of philosophical enlightenment say about the fact that the world has not grown poorer by a single superstition since the days of antiquity? Freud himself, the founder of psychoanalysis, has taken the greatest pains to throw as glaring a light as possible on the dirt and darkness and evil of the psychic background, and to interpret it in such a way as to make us lose all desire to look for anything behind it except refuse and smut. He did not succeed, and his attempt at deterrence has even brought about the exact opposite – an admiration for all this filth. Such a perverse phenomenon would normally be inexplicable were it not that even the scatologists are drawn by the secret fascination of the psyche. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 173

There can be no doubt that from the beginning of the nineteenth century – ever since the time of the French Revolution – the psyche has moved more and more into the foreground of man’s interest, and with a steadily increasing power of attraction. The enthronement of the Goddess of Reason in Notre Dame seems to have been a symbolic gesture of great significance for the Western world – rather like the hewing down of Wotan’s oak by Christian missionaries. On both occasions no avenging bolt from heaven struck the blasphemer down. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 174

It is certainly more than an amusing freak of history that just at the time of the Revolution a Frenchman, Anquetil du Perron, should be living in India and, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, brought back with him a translation of the Oupnek’hat , a collection of fifty Upanishads, which gave the West its first deep insight into the baffling mind of the East. To the historian this is a mere coincidence independent of the historical nexus of cause and effect. My medical bias prevents me from seeing it simply as an accident. Everything happened in accordance with a psychological law which is unfailingly valid in personal affairs. If anything of importance is devalued in our conscious life, and perishes – so runs the law – there arises a compensation in the unconscious. We may see in this an analogy to the conservation of energy in the physical world, for our psychic processes also have a quantitative, energic aspect. No psychic value can disappear without being replaced by another of equivalent intensity. This is a fundamental rule which is repeatedly verified in the daily practice of the psychotherapist and never fails. The doctor in me refuses point blank to consider the life of a people as something that does not conform to psychological law. For him the psyche of a people is only a somewhat more complex structure than the psyche of an individual. Moreover, has not a poet spoken of the “nations of his soul”? And quite correctly, it seems to me, for in one of its aspects the psyche is not individual, but is derived from the nation, from the collectivity, from humanity even. In some way or other we are part of a single, all-embracing psyche, a single “greatest man,” the homo maximus , to quote Swedenborg. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 175

And so we can draw a parallel: just as in me, a single individual, the darkness calls forth a helpful light, so it does in the psychic life of a people. In the crowds that poured into Notre Dame, bent on destruction, dark and nameless forces were at work that swept the individual off his feet; these forces worked also upon Anquetil du Perron and provoked an answer which has come down in history and speaks to us through the mouths of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. For he brought the Eastern mind to the West, and its influence upon us we cannot as yet measure. Let us beware of underestimating it! So far, indeed, there is little of it to be seen on the intellectual surface: a handful of orientalists, one or two Buddhist enthusiasts, a few sombre celebrities like Madame Blavatsky and Annie Besant with her Krishnamurti. These manifestations are like tiny scattered islands in the ocean of mankind; in reality they are the peaks of submarine mountain-ranges. The cultural Philistines believed until recently that astrology had been disposed of long since and was something that could safely be laughed at. But today, rising out of the social deeps, it knocks at the doors of the universities from which it was banished some three hundred years ago. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 176

Carl Jung Depth Psychology

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Carl Jung: CW 10 “Civilization in Transition” – Quotations