Carl Jung: CW 7 “Two Essays on Analytical Psychology” – Quotations

Nature is often obscure or impenetrable, but she is not, like man, deceitful. We must therefore take it that the dream is just what it pretends to be, neither more nor less. If it shows something in a negative light, there is no reason for assuming that it is meant positively. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Page 162.

I am first and foremost a doctor and practising psychotherapist, and all my psychological formulations are based on the experiences gained in the hard course of my daily professional work. ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Page 18

Every individual needs revolution, inner division, overthrow of the existing order, and renewal, but not by forcing them upon his neighbors under the hypocritical cloak of Christian love or the sense of social responsibility or any of the other beautiful euphemisms for unconscious urges to personal power. Individual self-reflection return of the individual to the ground of human nature, to his own deepest being with its individual and social destiny—here is the beginning of a cure for the blindness which reigns at the present hour. – C.G. Jung, CW 7, Page 5

For Jung, the great benefit of active imagination is to ‘distinguish ourselves from the unconscious contents. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 373

I write about things which actually happen, and am not propounding methods of treatment’ ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Page 22

We should never identify ourselves with reason, for man is not and never will be a creature of reason alone, a fact to be noted by all pedantic culture-mongers. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para III

The old religions with their sublime and ridiculous, their friendly and fiendish symbols did not drop from the blue but were born of this human soul that dwells within us at this moment. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 326

Failure to adapt to this inner world is a negligence entailing just as serious consequences as ignorance and ineptitude in the outer world. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 326

Too much of the animal distorts the civilized man, too much civilization makes sick animals. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 32

Nerosis is self-division. Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 18

True education can only start from naked reality, not from a delusive ideal. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 93

Now, since the psychic process, like any other life-process, is not just a causal sequence, but is also a process with a teleological orientation, we might expect dreams to give us certain indicia about the objective causality as well as about the objective tendencies, because they are nothing less than self-portraits of the psychic life-process. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 210

The whole nature of man presupposes woman, both physically and spiritually. His system is tuned into woman from the start, just as it is prepared for a quite definite world where there is water, light, air, salt, carbohydrates etc. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Page 188.

Love is of fundamental importance in human life and of far greater significance than the individual suspects. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Page 218.

I call every interpretation which equates the dream images with real objects an interpretation on the objective level… Interpretation on the objective level is analytic, because it breaks down the dream content into memory-complexes that refer to external situations. ~Carl Jung; CW 7, para. 131.

In contrast to this is the interpretation which refers every part of the dream and all the actors in it back to the dreamer himself. This I call interpretation on the subjective level. Interpretation on the subjective level is synthetic, because it detaches the underlying memory-complexes from their external causes, regards them as tendencies or components of the subject, and reunites them with that subject. ~Carl Jung; CW 7, para. 131.

Only what is really oneself has the power to heal. ~Carl Jung; CW 7, Page 258

The Self is our life’s goal, for it is the completest expression of that fateful combination we call individuality. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, par. 404.

We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect; we apprehend it just as much by feeling. Therefore, the judgment of the intellect is, at best, only the half of truth, and must, if it be honest, also come to an understanding of its inadequacy. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Page 628.

If there is anything that we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could better be changed in ourselves. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Page 285.

The great problems of life — sexuality, of course, among others — are always related to the primordial images of the collective unconscious. These images are really balancing or compensating factors which correspond with the life presents in actuality. This is not to be marveled at, since these images are deposits representing the accumulated experience of thousands of years of struggle for adaptation and existence. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Page 271

Repression is a process that begins in early childhood under the moral influence of the environment and continues through life. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, para 202.

The idea of angels, archangels, “principalities and powers” in St. Paul, the archons of the Gnostics, the heavenly hierarchy of Dionysius the Areopagite, all come from the perception of the relative autonomy of the archetypes. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 104.

The idea of transformation and renewal by means of the serpent is a well-substantiated archetype. It is [a] healing [symbol] ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Par 184.

The afternoon of life is just as full of meaning as the morning; only, its meaning and purpose are different…. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 114.

Often, indeed, a false ambition survives, in that an old man wants to be a youth again, or at least feels he must behave like one, although in his heart he can no longer make believe. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Pages 74-75.

What youth found and must find outside; the man of life’s afternoon must find within himself. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Pages 74-75.

Everything human is relative, because everything rests on an inner polarity; for everything is a phenomenon of energy. Energy necessarily depends on a pre-existing polarity, without which there could be no energy. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Pages 74-75.

The growth of culture consists, as we know, is a progressive subjugation of the animal in man. It is a process of domestication which cannot be accomplished without rebellion on the part of the animal nature that thirsts for freedom. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Page 19.

Just as in the early Middle Ages finance was held in contempt because there was as yet no differentiated financial morality to suit each case, but only a mass morality, so today there is only a mass sexual morality. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Page 27.

A girl who has an illegitimate baby is condemned and nobody asks whether she is a decent human being or not. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Page 27.

Any form of love not sanctioned by law is considered immoral, whether between worth-while people or bounders. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Pages 27.

We are still so hypnotized by what happens that we forget how and to whom it happens, just as for the Middle Ages finance was nothing but glittering gold, fiercely coveted and therefore the devil. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Page 27.

Where love reigns, there is no will to power; and where the will to power is paramount, love is lacking. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Par. 78.

The idea of transformation and renewal by means of the serpent is a well-substantiated archetype. It is [a] healing [symbol] ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Par 184

There are things that are not yet true today, perhaps we dare not find them true, but tomorrow they may be. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 201.

Individualism means deliberately stressing and giving prominence to some supposed peculiarity. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 267f

[The Self] …might equally be called the God within us. Carl Jung, CW 7, Par. 399

Could the longing for a god be a passion welling up from our darkest, instinctual nature, a passion unswayed by any outside influences, deeper and stronger perhaps than the love for a human person? ~Carl Jung, CW 7, para 214.

No one who has undergone the process of assimilating the unconscious will deny that it gripped his very vitals and changed him. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 361

Disalliance with the unconscious is synonymous with loss of instinct and rootlessness. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 195

For the important thing is not to interpret and understand the fantasies, but primarily to experience them. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 342.

Neurosis is nothing less than an individual attempt, however unsuccessful, to solve a universal problem; indeed it cannot be otherwise, for a general problem, a “question,” is not an ens per se [thing in itself] but exists only in the hearts of individuals. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 438

Even the man whom we think we know best and who assures us himself that we understand him through and through is at bottom a stranger to us. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 363.

Life is born only of the spark of opposites. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 78

It should never be forgotten—and of this the Freudian school must be reminded—that morality was not brought down on tables of stone from Sinai and imposed on the people, but is a function of the human soul, as old as humanity itself. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 30.

The art of it consists only in allowing our invisible partner to make herself heard, in putting the mechanism of expression momentarily at her disposal, without being overcome by the distaste one naturally feels at playing such an apparently ludicrous game with oneself, or by doubts as to the genuineness of the voice of one’s interlocutor. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 323.

This remarkable capacity of the human psyche for change, expressed in the transcendent function, is the principal object of late medieval alchemistic philosophy, where it was expressed in terms of alchemical symbolism. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 360

It is only in modern times that the dream, this fleeting and insignificant-looking product of the psyche, has met with such profound contempt. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 21

A woman possessed by the animus is always in danger of losing her femininity, her adapted feminine persona, just as a man in like circumstances runs the risk of effeminacy. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 336

It [Dreams] leads straight to the deepest personal secrets, and is, therefore, an invaluable instrument in the hand of the physician and educator of the soul. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 25

It is sufficiently obvious that life, like any other process, has a beginning and an end and that every beginning is also the beginning of the end. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 34.

Individuation is an ineluctable psychological necessity. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 241.

We could therefore translate individuation as “coming to selfhood” or “self-realization.” ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 266

The aim of individuation is nothing less than to divest the self of the false wrappings of the persona on the one hand, and of the suggestive power of primordial images on the other. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 269

To find out what is truly individual in ourselves, profound reflection is needed; and suddenly we realize how uncommonly difficult the discovery of individuality is. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 242.

In other words, in order to undergo a far-reaching psychological development, neither outstanding intelligence nor any other talent is necessary, since in this development moral qualities can make up for intellectual shortcomings. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 198

Morality is not imposed from outside; we have it in ourselves from the start—not the law, but our moral nature without which the collective life of human society would be impossible. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Page 27.

We shall probably get nearest to the truth if we think of the conscious and personal psyche as resting upon the broad basis of an inherited and universal psychic disposition which is as such unconscious, and that our personal psyche bears the same relation to the collective psyche as the individual to society. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 234

The persona is a complicated system of relations between individual consciousness and society, fittingly enough a kind of mask, designed on the one hand to make a definite impression upon others, and, on the other, to conceal the true nature of the individual. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 305

A wrong functioning of the psyche can do much to injure the body, just as conversely a bodily illness can affect the psyche; for psyche and body are not separate entities, but one and the same life. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Page 115

Neurosis is intimately bound up with the problem of our time and really represents an unsuccessful attempt on the part of the individual to solve the general problem in his own person. Neurosis is self-division. Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 18

Unfortunately far too many of us talk about a man only as it would be desirable for him to be, never about the man as he really is. But the doctor has always to do with the real man, who remains obstinately himself until all sides of his reality are recognized. True education can only start from naked reality, not from a delusive ideal. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 93

In spite of all indignant protestations to the contrary, the fact remains that love (using the word in the wider sense which belongs to it by light and embraces more than sexuality), its problems and its conflicts, is of fundamental importance in human life and, as careful inquiry consistently shows, is of far greater significance than the individual suspects. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 14

It is the way of moralists not to put the slightest trust in God, as if they thought that the good tree of humanity flourished only by dint of being pruned, tied back, and trained on a trellis; whereas in fact Father Sun and Mother Earth have allowed it to grow for their delight in accordance with deep, wise laws. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 427

A little less hypocrisy and a little more tolerance towards oneself can only have good results in respect for our neighbour; for we are all too prone to transfer to our fellows the injustice and violence we inflict upon our own natures. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 439

If ever there was a time when self-reflection was the absolutely necessary and only right thing, it is now, in our present catastrophic epoch. Yet whoever reflects upon himself is bound to strike upon the frontiers of the unconscious, which contains what above all else he needs to know. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 4

New ideas, if they are not just a flash in the pan, generally require at least a generation to take root. Psychological innovations probably take much longer, since in this field more than in any other practically everybody sets himself up as an authority. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 8

The effect of the unconscious images has something fateful about it. Perhaps—who knows—these eternal images are what men mean by fate. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 183

Now, it is by no means the special prerogative of the Christian Church to try to make it possible for the individual to detach himself from his original, animal-like condition; the Church is simply the latest, and specifically Western, form of an instinctive striving that is probably as old as mankind itself. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 172

The popular saying, “Old so-and-so chose the right time to die,” comes from a sure sense of the secret psychological cause. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 194

All ages before ours believed in gods in some form or other. Only an unparalleled impoverishment in symbolism could enable us to rediscover the gods as psychic factors, which is to say, as archetypes of the unconscious. No doubt this discovery is hardly credible as yet. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Page 72

Love may be effectively used as a means for gaining the upper hand. Love and good behaviour are, from the standpoint of the power-instinct, known to be a choice means to this end. Virtuousness often serves to compel recognition from others ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 50

Love may summon forth unsuspected powers in the soul for which we had better be prepared ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 164

The term persona is really a very appropriate expression for this, for originally it meant the mask once worn by actors to indicate the role they played ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 245

If we endeavour to draw a precise distinction between what psychic material should be considered personal, and what impersonal, we soon find ourselves in the greatest dilemma, for by definition we have to say of the persona’s contents what we have said of the impersonal unconscious, namely, that it is collective ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 245

It is only because the persona represents a more or less arbitrary and fortuitous segment of the collective psyche that we can make the mistake of regarding it in toto as something individual. It is, as its name implies, only a mask of the collective psyche, a mask that feigns individuality, making others and oneself believe that one is individual, whereas one is simply acting a role through which the collective psyche speaks ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 245

When we analyse the persona we strip off the mask, and discover that what seemed to be individual is at bottom collective; in other words, that the persona was only a mask for the collective psyche ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 246

Fundamentally the persona is nothing real: it is a compromise between individual and society as to what a man should appear to be. He takes a name, earns a title, exercises a function, he is this or that ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 246

In a certain sense all this is real, yet in relation to the essential individuality of the person concerned it is only a secondary reality, a compromise formation, in making which others often have a greater share than he. The persona is a semblance, a two-dimensional reality, to give it a nickname ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 246

There is, after all, something individual in the peculiar choice and delineation of the persona, and that despite the exclusive identity of the ego-consciousness with the persona the unconscious Self, one’s real individuality, is always present and makes itself felt indirectly if not directly ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 247

Although the ego-consciousness is at first identical with the persona that compromise role in which we parade before the community, yet the unconscious Self can never be repressed to the point of extinction. Its influence is chiefly manifest in the special nature of the contrasting and compensating contents of the unconscious ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 247

Through the analysis of the personal unconscious, the conscious mind becomes suffused with collective material which brings with it the elements of individuality ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 247

In the case of a patient of Jung [a philosophy student] her analysis revealed a persona behind which her real and authentic being, her individual Self, lay hidden. Indeed, to the extent that she at first completely identified herself with her role, she was altogether unconscious of her real Self. She was still in her nebulous infantile world and had not yet discovered the real world at all. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 248

But as, through progressive analysis, she became conscious of the nature of her transference, the dreams began to materialize. They brought up bits of the collective unconscious, and that was the end of her infantile world and of all the heroics. She came to herself and to her own real potentialities ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 248

This is roughly the way things go in most cases, if the analysis is carried far enough. That the consciousness of her individuality should coincide exactly with the reactivation of an archaic god-image is not just as isolated coincidence, but a very frequent occurrence which, in my view, corresponds to an unconscious law. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 248

Temporal and spatial infinity

Enormous speed and extension of movement

“Astrological” associations

Telluric, lunar, and solar analogies

Changes in the proportions of the body, etc.

The obvious occurrence of mythological and religious motifs in a dream also points to the activity of the collective unconscious ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 250

The collective element is very often announced by peculiar symptoms, as for example by dreams where the dreamer is flying through space like a comet, or feels that he is the earth, or the sun, or a star; or else is of immense size, or dwarfishly small; or that he is dead, is in a strange place, is a stranger to himself, confused, mad, etc. Similarly, feelings of disorientation, of dizziness and the like, may appear along with symptoms of inflation. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 250

The forces that burst out of the collective psyche has a confusing and blinding effect. One result of the dissolution of the persona is a release of involuntary fantasy, which is apparently nothing else than the specific activity of the collective psyche. This activity throws up contents whose existence one had never suspected before. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 251

But as the influence of the collective unconscious increases, so the conscious mind loses its power of leadership. Imperceptibly it becomes the led, while an unconscious and impersonal process gradually takes control. Thus, without noticing it, the conscious personality is pushed about like a figure on a chess-board by an invisible player. It is this player who decides the game of fate, not the conscious mind and its plans. This is how the resolution of the transference, apparently so impossible to the conscious mind, was brought about [in my patient. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 251

The plunge into this process [disintegration of the persona] becomes unavoidable, whenever the necessity arises of overcoming an apparently insuperable difficulty. But when this inner adaptation becomes a problem, strange, irresistible attraction proceeds from the unconscious and exerts a powerful influence on the conscious direction of life. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 252

The predominance of unconscious influences, together with the associated disintegration of the persona and the deposition of the conscious mind from power, constitute a state of psychic disequilibrium which, in analytical treatment, is artificially induced for the therapeutic purpose of resolving a difficulty that might block further development. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 252

There are of course innumerable obstacles that can be overcome with good advice and a little moral support, aided by goodwill and understanding on the part of the patient. Excellent curative results can be obtained in this way. Cases are not uncommon where there is no need to breathe a word about the unconscious ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 252

But again, there are difficulties to which one can foresee no satisfactory solution. If in these cases the psychic equilibrium is not already disturbed before treatment begins, it will certainly be upset during the analysis, and sometimes without any interference by the doctor. It often seems as though these patients had only been waiting to find a trustworthy person in order to give up and collapse. Such a loss of balance is similar in principle to a psychotic disturbance; that is, it differs from the initial stages of mental illness only by the fact that it leads in the end to greater health, while the latter leads to yet greater destruction. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 252

It is a condition of panic; a letting go in face of apparently hopeless complications. Mostly it was preceded by desperate efforts to master the difficulty by force of will; then came the collapse, and the once guiding will crumble completely. The energy thus freed disappears from consciousness and falls into the unconscious. As a matter of fact, it is at these moments that the first signs of unconscious activity appear. Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 252

Hence I regard the loss of balance as purposive, since it replaces a defective consciousness, which is aiming all the time at the creation of a new balance and will moreover achieve this aim, provided that the conscious mind is capable of assimilating the contents produced by the unconscious, i.e., of understanding and digesting them ~Car Jung, CW 7, Para 253

If I were to attempt to put in a nutshell the difference between man and woman in this respect, i.e., what it is that characterizes the animus as opposed to the anima, I could only say this: as the anima produces moods, so the animus produces opinions; and as the moods of a man issue from a shadowy background, so the opinions of a woman rest on equally unconscious prior assumptions. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 331

The animus does not appear as one person, but as a plurality of persons. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 332

This collection of condemnatory judges, a sort of College of Preceptors, corresponds to a personification of the animus. The animus is rather like an assembly of fathers or dignitaries of some kind who lay down incontestable, “rational,” ex cathedra judgments. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 332

It goes without saying that the animus is just as often projected as the anima. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 333

It would be insufficient to characterize the animus merely as a conservative, collective conscience; he is also a neologist who, in flagrant contradiction to his correct opinions, has an extraordinary weakness for difficult and unfamiliar words which act as a pleasant substitute for the odious task of reflection. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 333

Men can be pretty venomous here, for it is an inescapable fact that the animus always plays up the anima—and vice versa, of course—so that all further discussion becomes pointless. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 334

Animus opinions are invariably collective, and they override individuals and individual judgments in exactly the same way as the anima thrusts her emotional anticipations and projections between man and wife. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 334

Without knowing it, such women are solely intent upon exasperating the man and are, in consequence, the more completely at the mercy of the animus. “Unfortunately I am always right,” one of these creatures once confessed to me. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 335

The animus does not belong to the function of conscious relationship; his function is rather to facilitate relations with the unconscious. Instead of the woman merely associating opinions with external situations—situations which she ought to think about consciously—the animus, as an associative function, should be directed inwards, where it could associate the contents of the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 336

The technique of coming to terms with the animus is the same in principle as in the case of the anima; only here the woman must learn to criticize and hold her opinions at a distance; not in order to repress them, but, by investigating their origins, to penetrate more deeply into the background, where she will then discover the primordial images, just as the man does in his dealings with the anima. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 336

The animus is the deposit, as it were, of all woman’s ancestral experiences of man—and not only that, he is also a creative and procreative being, not in the sense of masculine creativity, but in the sense that he brings forth something we might call the \6yos ffirepvarixos, the spermatic word. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 336

This would be the femme inspiratrice who, if falsely cultivated, can turn into the worst kind of dogmatist and high-handed pedagogue—a regular “animus hound,” as one of my women patients aptly expressed it. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 336

A woman possessed by the animus is always in danger of losing her femininity, her adapted feminine persona, just as a man in like circumstances runs the risk of effeminacy. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 337

In woman the compensating figure is of a masculine character and can therefore appropriately be termed the animus. If it was no easy task to describe what is meant by the anima, the difficulties become almost insuperable when we set out to describe the psychology of the animus. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 328

A passionate exclusiveness therefore attaches to the man’s anima, and an indefinite variety to the woman’s animus. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 338

Whereas the man has, floating before him, in clear outlines, the alluring form of a Circe or a Calypso, the animus is better expressed as a bevy of Flying Dutchmen or unknown wanderers from over the sea, never quite clearly grasped, protean, given to persistent and violent motion. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 338

I do not expect every reader to grasp right away what is meant by animus and anima. But I hope he will at least have gained the impression that it is not a question of anything “metaphysical,” but far rather of empirical facts which could equally well be expressed in rational and abstract language. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 340

If the unconscious simply rides roughshod over the conscious mind, a psychotic condition develops. If it can neither completely prevail nor yet be understood, the result is a conflict that cripples all further advance. But with this question, namely the understanding of the collective unconscious, we come to a formidable difficulty. Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 253

The dream is often occupied with apparently very silly details, thus producing an impression of absurdity, or else it is on the surface so unintelligible as to leave us thoroughly bewildered. Hence we always have to overcome a certain resistance before we can seriously set about disentangling the intricate web through patient work. But when at last we penetrate to its real meaning, we find ourselves deep in the dreamer’s secrets and discover with astonishment that an apparently quite senseless dream is in the highest degree significant, and that in reality it speaks only of important and serious matters. This discovery compels rather more respect for the so-called superstition that dreams have a meaning, to which the rationalistic temper of our age has hitherto given short shrift. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Page 24.

On paper the interpretation of a dream may look arbitrary, muddled, and spurious; but the same thing in reality can be a little drama of unsurpassed realism. To experience a dream and its interpretation is very different from having a tepid rehash set before you on paper. Everything about this psychology is, in the deepest sense, experience; the entire theory, even where it puts on the most abstract airs, is the direct outcome of something experienced. ~Carl CW 7: Page 199.

The vast majority of people are quite incapable of putting themselves individually into the mind of another. This is indeed a singularly rare art, and, truth to tell, it does not take us very far. Even the man whom we think we know best and who assures us himself that we understand him through and through is at bottom a stranger to us. He is different. The most we can do, and the best, is to have at least some inkling of his otherness, to respect it, and to guard against the outrageous stupidity of wishing to interpret it. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 363

For the primitive anything strange is hostile and evil. This line of division serves a purpose, which is why the normal person feels under no obligation to make these projections conscious, although they are dangerously illusory. War psychology has made this abundantly clear: everything my country does is good, everything the others do is bad. The centre of all iniquity is invariably found to lie a few miles behind the enemy lines. Because the individual has this same primitive psychology, every attempt to bring these age-old projections to consciousness is felt as irritating. Naturally one would like to have better relations with one’s fellows, but only on the condition that they live up to our expectations—in other words, that they become willing carriers of our projections. Yet if we make ourselves conscious of these projections, it may easily act as an impediment to our relations with others, for there is then no bridge of illusion across which love and hate can stream off so relievingly, and no way of disposing so simply and satisfactorily of all those alleged virtues that are intended to edify and improve others. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 517

What is true of humanity in general is also true of each individual, for humanity consists only of individuals. And as is the psychology of humanity so also is the psychology of the individual. The [first] World War brought a terrible reckoning with the rational intentions of civilization. What is called “will” in the individual is called “imperialism” in nations; for all will is a demonstration of power over fate, i.e., the exclusion of chance. Civilization is the rational, “purposeful” sublimation of free energies, brought about by will and intention. It is the same with the individual; and just as the idea of a world civilization received a fearful correction at the hands of war, so the individual must often learn in his life that so-called “disposable” energies are not his to dispose. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 74

This war has pitilessly revealed to civilized man that he is still a barbarian and has at the same time shown what an iron scourge lies in store for him if ever again he should be tempted to make his neighbour responsible for his own evil qualities. The psychology of the individual is reflected in the psychology of the nation. What the nation does is done also by each individual, and so long as the individual continues to do it, the nation will do likewise. Only a change in the attitude of the individual can initiate a change in the psychology of the nation. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 4

Human beings have one faculty which, though it is of the greatest utility for collective purposes, is most pernicious for individuation, and that is the faculty of imitation. Collective psychology cannot dispense with imitation, for without it all mass organizations, the State and the social order, are impossible. Society is organized, indeed, less by law than by the propensity to imitation, implying equally suggestibility, suggestion, and mental contagion. But we see every day how people use, or rather abuse, the mechanism of imitation for the purpose of personal differentiation: they are content to ape some eminent personality, some striking characteristic or mode of behaviour, thereby achieving an outward distinction from the circle in which they move. We could almost say that as a punishment for this the uniformity of their minds with those of their neighbours, already real enough, is intensified into an unconscious, compulsive bondage to the environment. As a rule these specious attempts at individual differentiation stiffen into a pose, and the imitator remains at the same level as he always was, only several degrees more sterile than before. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 242

The element of differentiation is the individual. All the highest achievements of virtue, as well as the blackest villainies, are individual. The larger a community is, and the more the sum total of collective factors peculiar to every large community rests on conservative prejudices detrimental to individuality, the more will the individual be morally and spiritually crushed, and, as a result, the one source of moral and spiritual progress for society is choked up. Naturally the only thing that can thrive in such an atmosphere is sociality and whatever is collective in the individual. Everything individual in him goes under, i.e., is doomed to repression. The individual elements lapse into the unconscious, where, by the law of necessity, they are transformed into something essentially baleful, destructive, and anarchical. Socially, this evil principle shows itself in the spectacular crimes—regicide and the like—perpetrated by certain prophetically-inclined individuals; but in the great mass of the community it remains in the background, and only manifests itself indirectly in the inexorable moral degeneration of society. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 240

It is a notorious fact that the morality of society as a whole is in inverse ratio to its size; for the greater the aggregation of individuals, the more the individual factors are blotted out, and with them morality, which rests entirely on the moral sense of the individual and the freedom necessary for this. Hence every man is, in a certain sense, unconsciously a worse man when he is in society than when acting alone; for he is carried by society and to that extent relieved of his individual responsibility. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 240

Any large company composed of wholly admirable persons has the morality and intelligence of an unwieldy, stupid, and violent animal. The bigger the organization, the more unavoidable is its immorality and blind stupidity {Senatus bestia, senatores boni viri). Society, by automatically stressing all the collective qualities in its individual representatives, puts a premium on mediocrity, on everything that settles down to vegetate in an easy, irresponsible way. Individuality will inevitably be driven to the wall. This process begins in school, continues at the university, and rules all departments in which the State has a hand. In a small social body, the individuality of its members is better safeguarded; and the greater is their relative freedom and the possibility of conscious responsibility. Without freedom there can be no morality. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 240

Our admiration for great organizations dwindles when once we become aware of the other side of the wonder: the tremendous piling up and accentuation of all that is primitive in man, and the unavoidable destruction of his individuality in the interests of the monstrosity that every great organization in fact is. The man of today, who resembles more or less the collective ideal, has made his heart into a den of murderers. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 240

The importance of personal prestige can hardly be overestimated, because the possibility of regressive dissolution in the collective psyche is a very real danger, not only for the outstanding individual but also for his followers. This possibility is most likely to occur when the goal of prestige —universal recognition—has been reached. The person then becomes a collective truth, and that is always the beginning of the end. To gain prestige is a positive achievement not only for the outstanding individual but also for the clan. The individual distinguishes himself by his deeds, the many by their renunciation of power. So long as this attitude needs to be fought for and defended against hostile influences, the achievement remains positive; but as soon as there are no more obstacles and universal recognition has been attained, prestige loses its positive value and usually becomes a dead letter. A schismatic movement then sets in, and the whole process begins again from the beginning. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 238

The office I hold is certainly my special activity; but it is also a collective factor that has come into existence historically through the cooperation of many people and whose dignity rests solely on collective approval. When, therefore, I identify myself with my office or title, I behave as though I myself were the whole complex of social factors of which that office consists, or as though I were not only the bearer of the office, but also and at the same time the approval of society. I have made an extraordinary extension of myself and have usurped qualities which are not in me but outside e. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 227

On closer examination one is always astonished to see how much of our so-called individual psychology is really collective. So much, indeed, that the individual traits are completely overshadowed by it. Since, however, individuation is an ineluctable psychological necessity, we can see from the ascendancy of the collective what very special attention must be paid to this delicate plant “individuality” if it is not to be completely smothered. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 241

We do not sufficiently distinguish between individualism and individuation. Individualism means deliberately stressing and giving prominence to some supposed peculiarity, rather than to collective considerations and obligations. But individuation means precisely the better and more complete fulfilment of the collective qualities of the human being, since adequate consideration of the peculiarity of the individual is more conducive to better social achievement than when the peculiarity is neglected or suppressed. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 268

Human imperfection is always a discord in the harmony of our ideals. Unfortunately, no one lives in the world as we desire it, but in the world of actuality where good and evil clash and destroy one another, where no creating or building can be done without dirtying one’s hands. Whenever things get really bad, there is always someone to assure us amid great applause that nothing has happened, and everything is in order. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 263

Society expects, and indeed must expect, every individual to play the part assigned to him as perfectly as possible. so that a man who is a parson must not only carry out his official functions objectively but must at all times and in all circumstances play the role of parson in a flawless manner. Society demands this as a kind of surety; each must stand at his post, here a cobbler, there a poet. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 305

Every calling or profession has its own characteristic persona. It is easy to study these things nowadays, when the photographs of public personalities so frequently appear in the press. A certain kind of behaviour is forced on them by the world, and professional people endeavour to come up to these expectations. Only, the danger is that they become identical with their personas—the professor with his text-book, the tenor with his voice. Then the damage is done; henceforth he lives exclusively against the background of his own biography. The garment of Deianeira has grown fast to his skin, and a desperate decision like that of Heracles is needed if he is to tear this Nessus shirt from his body and step into the consuming fire of the flame of immortality, in order to transform himself into what he really is. One could say, with a little exaggeration, that the persona is that which in reality one is not, but which oneself. A man cannot get rid of himself in favour of an artificial personality without punishment. Even the attempt to do so brings on, in all ordinary cases, unconscious reactions in the form of bad moods, affects, phobias, compulsive ideas, backslidings, vices, etc. The social “strong man” is in his private life often a mere child where his own states of feeling are concerned; his discipline in public (which he demands quite particularly of others) goes miserably to pieces in private. His “happiness in his work” assumes a woeful countenance at home; his “spotless” public morality looks strange indeed behind the mask—we will not mention deeds, but only fantasies, and the wives of such men would have a pretty tale to tell. As to his selfless altruism, his children have decided views about that. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 307

I once made the acquaintance of a very venerable personage—in fact, one might easily call him a saint. I stalked round him for three whole days, but never a mortal failing did I find in him. My feeling of inferiority grew ominous, and I was beginning to think seriously of how I might better myself. Then, on the fourth day, his wife came to consult me. Well, nothing of the sort has ever happened to me since. But this I did learn that any man who becomes one with his persona can cheerfully let all disturbances manifest themselves through his wife without her noticing it, though she pays for her self-sacrifice with a bad neurosis. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 306

It is a frightening thought that man also has a shadow side to him, consisting not just of little weaknesses, and foibles, but of a positively demonic dynamism. The individual seldom knows anything of this; to him, as an individual, it is incredible that he should ever in any circumstances go beyond himself. But let these harmless creatures form a mass, and there emerges a raging monster; and each individual is only one tiny cell in the monster’s body, so that for better or worse he must accompany it on its bloody rampages and even assist it to the utmost. Having a dark suspicion of these grim possibilities, man turns a blind eye to the shadow-side of human nature. Blindly he strives against the salutary dogma of original sin, which is yet so prodigiously true. Yes, he even hesitates to admit the conflict of which he is so painfully aware. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 35

We know that the wildest and most moving dramas are played not in the theatre but in the hearts of ordinary men and women who pass by without exciting attention, and who betray to the world nothing of the conflicts that rage within them except possibly by a nervous breakdown. What is so difficult for the layman to grasp is the fact that in most cases the patients themselves have no suspicion whatever of the internecine war raging in their unconscious. If we remember that there are many people who understand nothing at all about themselves, we shall be less surprised at the realization that there are also people who are utterly unaware of their actual conflicts. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 425

It is of course a fundamental mistake to imagine that when we see the non-value in a value or the untruth in a truth, the value or the truth ceases to exist. It has only become relative. Everything human is relative, because everything rests on an inner polarity; for everything is a phenomenon of energy. Energy necessarily depends on a preexisting polarity, without which there could be no energy. There must always be high and low, hot and cold, etc., so that the equilibrating process—which is energy—can take place. Therefore the tendency to deny all previous values in favour of their opposites is just as much of an exaggeration as the earlier one-sidedness. And in so far as it is a question of rejecting universally accepted and indubitable values, the result is a fatal loss. One who acts in this wav empties himself out with his values, as Nietzsche has already said. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 115

Dreams contain images and thought associations which we do not create with conscious intent. They arise spontaneously without our assistance and are representatives of a psychic activity withdrawn from our arbitrary will. Therefore the dream is, properly speaking, a highly objective, natural product of the psyche, from which we might expect indications, or at least hints, about certain basic trends in the psychic process. Now, since the psychic process, like any other life-process, is not just a causal sequence, but is also a process with a teleological orientation, we might expect dreams to give us certain indicia about the objective causality as well as about the objective tendencies, because they are nothing less than self-portraits of the psychic life-process. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 210

I call every interpretation which equates the dream images with real objects an interpretation on the objective level. In contrast to this is the interpretation which refers every part of the dream and all the actors in it back to the dreamer himself. This I call interpretation on the subjective level. Interpretation on the objective level is analytic, because it breaks down the dream content into memory complexes that refer to external situations. Interpretation on the subjective level is synthetic, because it detaches the underlying memory-complexes from their external causes, regards them as tendencies or components of the subject, and reunites them with that subject. In this case, therefore, all the contents of the dream are treated as symbols for subjective contents. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 130

He would be better advised to put away his scholar’s gown, bid farewell to his study, and wander with human heart through the world. There, in the horrors of prisons, lunatic asylums and hospitals, in drab suburban pubs, in brothels and gambling-hells, in the salons of the elegant, the Stock Exchanges, Socialist meetings, churches, revivalist gatherings and ecstatic sects, through love and hate, through the experience of passion in every form in his own body, he would reap richer stores of knowledge than text-books a foot thick could give him, and he will know how to doctor the sick with real knowledge of the human soul. ~Carl Jung, CW 7 Para 409

It is difficult to gauge the spirit of one’s own time; but, if we observe the trend of art, of style, and of public taste, and see what people read and write, what sort of societies they found, what “questions” are the order of the day, what the Philistines fight against, we shall find that in the long catalogue of our present social questions by no means the last is the so-called “sexual question.” This is discussed by men and women who challenge the existing sexual morality and who seek to throw off the burden of moral guilt which past centuries have heaped upon Eros. One cannot simply deny the existence of these endeavours nor condemn then as indefensible; they exist, and probably have adequate grounds for their existence. It is more interesting and more useful to examine carefully the underlying causes of these contemporary movements than to join in the lamentations of the professional mourners of morality who prophesy the moral downfall of humanity. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 427

Eros is a superhuman power which, like nature herself, allows itself to be conquered and exploited as though it were impotent. But triumph over nature is dearly paid for. Nature requires no explanations of principle but asks only for tolerance and wise measure. “Eros is a mighty daemon,” as the wise Diotima said to Socrates. We shall never get the better of him, or only to our own hurt. He is not the whole of our inward nature, though he is at least one of its essential aspects. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para note

Eros is a questionable fellow and will always remain so, whatever the legislation of the future may have to say about it. He belongs on one side to man’s primordial animal nature which will endure as long as man has an animal body. On the other side he is related to the highest forms of the spirit. But he only thrives when spirit and instinct are in right harmony. If one or the other aspect is lacking to him, the result is injury or at least a lopsidedness that may easily veer towards the pathological. Too much of the animal distorts the civilized man, too much civilization makes sick animals. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 32

No man is so entirely masculine that he has nothing feminine in him. The fact is, rather, that very masculine men have—carefully guarded and hidden—a very soft emotional life, often incorrectly described as “feminine.” A man counts it a virtue to repress his feminine traits as much as possible, just as a woman, at least until recently, considered it unbecoming to be “mannish.” The repression of feminine traits and inclinations naturally causes these contrasexual demands to accumulate in the unconscious. No less naturally, the imago of woman (the soul-image) becomes a receptacle for these demands, which is why a man, in his love-choice, is strongly tempted to win the woman who best corresponds to his own unconscious femininity—a woman, in short, who can unhesitatingly receive the projection of his soul. Although such a choice is often regarded and felt as altogether ideal, it may turn out that the man has manifestly married his own worst weakness. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 297

The persona, the ideal picture of a man as he should be, is inwardly compensated by feminine weakness, and as the individual outwardly plays the strong man, so he becomes inwardly a woman, i.e., the anima, for it is the anima that reacts to the persona. But because the inner world is dark and invisible to the extraverted consciousness, and because a man is all the less capable of conceiving his weaknesses the more he is identified with the persona, the persona’s counterpart, the anima, remains completely in the dark and is at once projected, so that our hero comes under the heel of his wife’s slipper. If this results in a considerable increase of her power, she will acquit herself none too well. She becomes inferior, thus providing her husband with the welcome proof that it is not he, the hero, who is inferior in private, but his wife. In return the wife can cherish the illusion, so attractive to many, that at least she has married a hero, unperturbed by her own uselessness. This little game of illusion is often taken to be the whole meaning of life. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 309

Our life is like the course of the sun. In the morning it gains continually in strength until it reaches the zenith heat of high noon. Then comes the enantiodromia the steady forward movement no longer denotes an increase, but a decrease, in strength. Thus our task in handling a young person is different from the task of handling an older person. In the former case, it is enough to clear away all the obstacles that hinder expansion and ascent; in the latter, we must nurture everything that assists the descent, ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 114

An inexperienced youth thinks one can let the old people go, because not much more can happen to them anyway they have their lives behind them and are no better than petrified pillars of the past. But it is a great mistake to suppose that the meaning of life is exhausted with the period of youth and expansion; that, for example, a woman who has passed the menopause is “finished.” The afternoon of life is just as full of meaning as the morning; only, its meaning and purpose are different. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 114

Man has two aims the first is the natural aim, the begetting of children and the business of protecting the brood; to this belongs the acquisition of money and social position. When this aim has been reached a new phase begins the cultural aim. For the attainment of the former we have the help of nature and, on top of that, education; for the attainment of the latter, little or nothing helps. Often, indeed, a false ambition survives, in that an old man wants to be a youth again, or at least feels he must behave like one, although in his heart he can no longer make believe. This is what makes the transition from the natural to the cultural phase so terribly difficult and bitter for many people; they cling to the illusion of youth or to their children, hoping to salvage in this way a last little scrap of youth. One sees it especially in mothers, who find their sole meaning in their children and imagine they will sink into a bottomless void when they have to give them up. No wonder that so many bad neuroses appear at the onset of life’s afternoon. It is a sort of second puberty, another “storm and stress” period, not infrequently accompanied by tempests of passion—the “dangerous age.” But the problems that crop up at this age are no longer to be solved by the old recipes the hand of this clock cannot be put back. What youth found and must find outside; the man of life’s afternoon must find within himself. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 114

The rapid development of the towns, with the specialization of work brought about by the extraordinary division of labour, the increasing industrialization of the countryside, and the growing sense of insecurity, deprive men of many opportunities for giving vent to their affective energies. The peasant’s alternating rhythm of work secures him unconscious satisfactions through its symbolical content—satisfactions which the factory workers and office employees do not know and can never enjoy. What do these know of his life with nature, of those grand moments when, as lord and fructifier of the earth, he drives his plough through the soil, and with a kingly gesture scatters the seed for the future harvest; of his rightful fear of the destructive power of the elements, of his joy in the fruitfulness of his wife, who bears him the daughters and sons who mean increased working-power and prosperity? From all this we city-dwellers, we modern machine-minders, are far removed. Is not the fairest and most natural of all satisfactions beginning to fail us, when we can no longer regard with unmixed joy the harvest of our own sowing, the “blessing” of children? ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 428

A man is a philosopher of genius only when he succeeds in transforming the primitive and wholly natural vision into an abstract idea belonging to the common stock of consciousness. This achievement, and this alone, constitutes his personal value, for which he may take credit without necessarily succumbing to inflation. The personal value lies entirely in the philosophical achievement, not in the primary vision. To the philosopher this vision comes as so much increment and is simply a part of the common property of mankind, in which, in principle, everyone has a share. The golden apples drop from the same tree, whether they be gathered by an imbecile locksmith’s apprentice or by a Schopenhauer. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 229

Morality was not brought down on tables of stone from Sinai and imposed on the people, but is a function of the human soul, as old as humanity itself. Morality is not imposed from outside; we have it in ourselves from the start —not the law, but our moral nature without which the collective life of human society would be impossible. That is why morality is found at all levels of society. It is the instinctive regulator of action which also governs the collective life of the herd. But moral laws are only valid within a compact human group. Beyond that, they cease. There the old truth runs: Homo homini lupus. With the growth of civilization we have succeeded in subjecting ever larger human groups to the rule of the same morality, without, however, having yet brought the moral code to prevail beyond the social frontiers, that is, in the free space between mutually independent societies. There, as of old, reign lawlessness and license and mad immorality—though of course it is only the enemy who dares to say it out loud. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 30

The sense of moral inferiority always indicates that the missing element is something which, to judge by his feeling about it, really ought not be missing, or which could be made conscious if only one took sufficient trouble. The moral inferiority does not come from a collision with the generally accepted and, in a sense, arbitrary moral law, but from the conflict with one’s own self which, for reasons of psychic equilibrium, demands that the deficit be redressed. Whenever a sense of moral inferiority appears, it indicates not only a need to assimilate an unconscious component, but also the possibility of such assimilation. In the last resort it is a man’s moral qualities which force him, either through direct recognition of the need or indirectly through a painful neurosis, to assimilate his unconscious self and to keep himself fully conscious. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 218

We always start with the naive assumption that we are masters in our own house. Hence we must first accustom ourselves to the thought that, in our most intimate psychic life as well, we live in a kind of house which has doors and windows to the world, but that, although the objects or contents of this world act upon us, they do not belong to us. For many people this hypothesis is by no means easy to conceive, just as they do not find it at all easy to understand and to accept the fact that their neighbour’s psychology is not necessarily identical with their own. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 329

Every individual needs revolution, inner division, overthrow of the existing order, and renewal, but not by forcing these things upon his neighbours under the hypocritical cloak of Christian love or the sense of social responsibility or any of the other beautiful euphemisms for unconscious urges to personal power. Individual self-reflection return of the individual to the ground of human nature, to his own deepest being with its individual and social destiny here is the beginning of a cure for that blindness which reigns at the present hour. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 5

Old Heraclitus, who was indeed a very great sage, discovered the most marvellous of all psychological laws: the regulative function of opposites. He called it enantiodromia, a running contrariwise, by which he meant that sooner or later everything runs into its opposite. Thus the rational attitude of culture necessarily runs into its opposite, namely the irrational devastation of culture. We should never identify ourselves with reason, for man is not and never will be a creature of reason alone, a fact to be noted by all pedantic culture-mongers. The irrational cannot be and must not be extirpated. The gods cannot and must not die. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para III

A man is only half understood when we know how everything in him came into being. If that were all, he could just as well have been dead years ago. As a living being he is not understood, for life does not have only a yesterday, nor is it explained by reducing today to yesterday. Life has also a tomorrow, and today is understood only when we can add to our knowledge of what was yesterday the beginnings of tomorrow. This is true of all life’s psychological expressions, even of pathological symptoms. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 67

It is the duty of one who goes his own way to inform society of what he finds on his voyage of discovery, be it cooling water for the thirsty or the sandy wastes of unfruitful error. The one helps, the other warns. Not the criticism of individual contemporaries will decide the truth or falsity of his discoveries, but future generations. There are things that are not yet true today, perhaps we dare not find them true, but tomorrow they may be. So every man whose fate it is to go his individual way must proceed with hopefulness and watchfulness, ever conscious of his loneliness and its dangers. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 201

Too many still look outwards, some believing in the illusion of victory and of victorious power, others in treaties and laws, and others again in the overthrow of the existing order. But still too few look inwards, to their own selves, and still too few ask themselves whether the ends of human society might not best be served if each man tried to abolish the old order in himself, and to practise in his own person and in his own inward state those precepts and victories which he preaches at every street-corner, instead of always expecting these things of his fellow men. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 5

From a consideration of the claims of the inner and outer worlds, or rather, from the conflict between them, the possible and the necessary follows. Unfortunately our Western mind, lacking all culture in this respect, has never yet devised a concept, nor even a name, for the union of opposites through the middle path, that most fundamental item of inward experience, which could respectably be set against the Chinese concept of Tao. It is at once the most individual fact and the most universal, the most legitimate fulfilment of the meaning of the individual’s life. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 327

The tragic counter play between inside and outside (depicted in Job and Faust as the wager with God) represents, at bottom, the energetics of the life process, the polar tension that is necessary for self-regulation. However different, to all intents and purposes, these opposing forces may be, their fundamental meaning and desire is the life of the individual they always fluctuate round this centre of balance. Just because they are inseparably related through opposition, they also unite in a mediatory meaning, which, willingly or unwillingly, is born out of the individual and is therefore divined by him. He has a strong feeling of what should be and what could be. To depart from this divination means error, aberration, illness. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 311

We know that there is no human foresight or wisdom that can prescribe direction to our life, except for small stretches of the way. This is of course true only of the “ordinary” type of life, not of the “heroic” type. The latter kind also exists, though it is much rarer. Here we are certainly not entitled to say that no marked direction can be given to life, or only for short distances. The heroic conduct of life is absolute—that is, it is oriented by fateful decisions, and the decision to go in a certain direction holds, sometimes, to the bitter end. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 72

Nature is aristocratic, but not in the sense of having reserved the possibility of differentiation exclusively for species high in the scale. So too with the possibility of psychic development: it is not reserved for specially gifted individuals. In other words, in order to undergo a far-reaching psychological development, neither outstanding intelligence nor any other talent is necessary, since in this development moral qualities can make up for intellectual shortcomings. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 198

Much indeed can be attained by the will, but, in view of the fate of certain markedly strong-willed personalities, it is a fundamental error to try to subject our own fate at all costs to our will. Our will is a function regulated by reflection; hence it is dependent on the quality of that reflection. This, if it really is reflection, is supposed to be rational, i.e., in accord with reason. But has it ever been shown, or will it ever be, that life and fate are in accord with reason, that they too are rational? We have on the contrary good grounds for supposing that they are irrational, or rather that in the last resort they are grounded beyond human reason. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 72

We know of course that when for one reason or another we feel out of sorts, we are liable to commit not only the minor follies, but something really dangerous which, given the right psychological moment, may well put an end to our lives. The popular saying, “Old so-and-so chose the right time to die,” comes from a sure sense of the secret psychological cause. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 194

Our life is indeed the same as it ever was. At all events, in our sense of the word it is not transitory; for the same physiological and psychological processes that have been man’s for hundreds of thousands of years still endure, instilling into our inmost hearts this profound intuition of the “eternal” continuity of the living. But the self, as an inclusive term that embraces our whole living organism, not only contains the deposit and totality of all past life, but is also a point of departure, the fertile soil from which all future life will spring. This premonition of futurity is as clearly impressed upon our innermost feelings as is the historical aspect. The idea of immortality follows legitimately from these psychological premises. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 303

The idea of God is an absolutely necessary psychological function of an irrational nature, which has nothing whatever to do with the question of God’s existence. The human intellect can never answer this question, still less give any proof of God. Moreover such proof is superfluous, for the idea of an all-powerful divine Being is present everywhere, unconsciously if not consciously, because it is an archetype. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 110

“The transition from morning to afternoon means a revaluation of the earlier values. There comes the urgent need to appreciate the value of the opposite of our former ideals, to perceive the error in our former convictions, to recognize the untruth in our former truth, and to feel how much antagonism and even hatred lay in what, until now, had passed for love. Not a few of those who are drawn into the conflict of opposites jettison everything that had previously seemed to them good and worth striving for; they try to live in complete opposition to their former ego. Changes of profession, divorces, religious convulsions, apostasies of every description, are the symptoms of this swing over to the opposite. The snag about a radical conversion into one’s opposite is that one’s former life suffers repression and thus produces just as unbalanced a state as existed before, when the counterparts of the conscious virtues and values were still repressed and unconscious. Just as before, perhaps, neurotic disorders arose because the opposing fantasies were unconscious, so now other disorders arise through the repression of former idols. It is of course a fundamental mistake to imagine that when we see the non-value in a value or the untruth in a truth, the value or the truth ceases to exist. It has only become relative. Everything human is relative, because everything rests on an inner polarity; for everything is a phenomenon of energy. Energy necessarily depends on a pre-existing polarity, without which there could be no energy. There must always be high and low, hot and cold, etc., so that the equilibrating process-which is energy can take place. Therefore the tendency to deny all previous values in favour of their opposites is just as much of an exaggeration as the earlier one-sidedness. And in so far as it is a question of rejecting universally accepted and indubitable values, the result is a fatal loss. One who acts in this way empties himself out with his values, as Nietzsche has already said. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 115

It seems to me their origin can only be explained by assuming them to be deposits of the constantly repeated experiences of humanity ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 109

…for the contents of the collective unconscious are not only residues of archaic, specifically human modes of functioning, but also the residues of functions from [our] animal ancestry, whose duration in time was infinitely greater than the relatively brief epoch of specifically human existence ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 159.

I [Jung] regard dreams not only as a valuable source of information but as an extraordinarily effective instrument of education ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 174

It is a process of domestication which cannot be accomplished without rebellion on the part of the animal nature [in man] that thirsts for freedom. From time to time there passes as it were a wave of frenzy through the ranks of men too long constrained within the limitations of their culture ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 17

Antiquity experienced it [the frenzy] in the Dionysian orgies that surged over from the East and became an essential and characteristic ingredient of classical culture ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 17

Morality is not imposed from outside; we have it in ourselves from the start not the law, but our moral nature without which the collective life of human society would be impossible. That is why morality is found at all levels of society ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 30

It is a notorious fact that the morality of a society as a whole is in inverse ratio to its size; for the greater the aggregation of individuals, the more the individual factors are blotted out, and with them morality, which rests entirely on the moral sense of the individual and the freedom necessary for this ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 240

The spirit of these orgies contributed not a little towards the development of the stoic ideal of asceticism in the innumerable sects and philosophical schools of the last century before Christ, which produced from the polytheistic chaos of that epoch the twin ascetic religions of Mithraism and Christianity ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 17

But the most important method of getting at the pathogenic conflicts is, as Freud was the first to show, through the analysis of dreams ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 20

Hence every man is, in a certain sense, unconsciously a worse man when he is in society than when acting alone; for he is carried by society and to that extent relieved of his individual responsibility ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 240

Society, by automatically stressing all the collective qualities in its individual representatives, puts a premium on mediocrity, on everything that settles down to vegetate in an easy, irresponsible way ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 240

Individuality will inevitably be driven to the wall. This process begins in school, continues at the university, and rules all departments in which the State has a hand ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 240

The man of today, who resembles more or less the collective ideal, has made his heart into a den of murderers, as can easily be proved by the analysis of his unconscious, even though he himself is not in the least disturbed by it ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 240

In so far as he is normally “adapted” to his environment, it is true that the greatest infamy on the part of his group will not disturb him, so long as the majority of his fellows steadfastly believe in the exalted morality of their social organization ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 240

It is the instinctive regulator of action which also governs the collective life of the herd. But moral laws are only valid within a compact human group. Beyond that, they cease ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 30

In a small social body, the individuality of its members is better safeguarded; and the greater is their relative freedom and the possibility of conscious responsibility ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 240

“Eros is a mighty daemon,” as the wise Diotima said to Socrates. We shall never get the better of him, or only to our own hurt. He is not the whole of our inward nature, though he is at least one of its essential aspects ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 33

Man can suffer only a certain amount of culture without injury. The endless dilemma of culture and nature is always a question of too much or too little, never of either-or. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 41

Faust shows in Part I what it means to accept instinct, and in Part II what it means to accept the ego and its weird unconscious world ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 43

Chance falls into the category of the irrational not as denoting something contrary to reason, but something beyond reason ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 774

It results from the irrationality of the events of life and fate, reigning everywhere, hence reason and the will that is grounded in reason are valid only up to a point ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 72

It has become abundantly clear to me that life can flow forward only along the path of the gradient. But there is no energy unless there is a tension of opposites; hence it is necessary to discover the opposite to the attitude of the conscious mind ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 78

The conscious mind is on top, the shadow underneath, and just as high always longs for low and hot for cold, so all consciousness, perhaps without being aware of it, seeks its unconscious opposite, lacking which it is doomed to stagnation, congestion, and ossification. Life is born only of the spark of opposites ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 78

The reflective nature of the introvert causes him always to think and consider before acting. This naturally makes him slow to act. His shyness and distrust of things induce hesitation, and so he always has difficulty in adapting to the external world ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 80

The two types therefore seem created for a symbiosis. The ones takes care of reflection [introvert], and the other sees to the initiative and practical action [extravert] ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 80

The essence of the inferior function is autonomy; it is independent, it attacks, it fascinates and so spins us about that we are no longer masters of ourselves and can no longer rightly distinguish between ourselves and others ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 85

The original method was hypnotism: either interrogation in a state of hypnotic concentration or else the spontaneous production of fantasies by the patient while in this state. This method is still occasionally employed, but compared with the present technique it is primitive and often unsatisfactory ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 20

This [identification with the collective psyche] amounts to an acceptance of “godlikeness,” but now exalted into a system. That is to say, one is the fortunate possessor of the great truth which was only waiting to be discovered, of the eschatological knowledge which spells the healing of the nations ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 476

But he thrives only when spirit and instinct are in right harmony. If one or the other aspect is lacking to him, the result is injury or at least a lopsidedness that may easily veer towards the pathological. Too much of the animal distorts the civilized man, too much civilization makes sick animals ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 32

This dilemma reveals the vast uncertainty that Eros holds for man. For, at the bottom, Eros is a superhuman power which, like nature herself, allows itself to be conquered and exploited as though it were impotent. But triumph over nature is dearly paid for. Nature requires no explanations of principle, but asks only for tolerance and wise measure ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 32

The universal similarity of human brains leads to the universal possibility of a uniform mental functioning. This functioning is the collective psyche. This can be subdivided into the collective mind and the collective soul ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 456

Inasmuch as there are differentiations corresponding to race, tribe, and even family, there is also a collective psyche limited to race, tribe, and family over and above the “universal” collective psyche ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 456

To borrow an expression from Pierre Janet, the collective psyche comprises the parties inférieures of the mental functions, that is to say those deep-rooted, well-nigh automatic portions of the individual psyche which are inherited and are to be found everywhere, and are thus impersonal or suprapersonal ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 456

Consciousness plus the personal unconscious constitutes the parties supérieures of the mental functions, those portions, therefore, that are developed ontogenetically and acquired as a result of personal differentiation ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 456

And that is what matters in practical treatment: that human beings should get a hold on their own lives, not that the principles by which they live should be proved rationally to be “right” ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 493

Sometimes it is enough to leave the unconscious to discover the new line, but this attitude is not to be recommended to the neurotic under all circumstances, although there are indeed cases where this is just what the patient needs to learn how to put his trust in so-called chance ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 501

However, it is not advisable to let oneself drift for any length of time; a watchful eye should at least be kept on the reactions of the unconscious, that is, on dreams, which indicate like a barometer the one-sidedness of our attitude ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 501

Unlike other psychologists, I therefore consider it necessary for the patient to remain in contact with his unconscious, even after analysis, if he wishes to avoid a relapse ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 501

Often enough I have observed an increase in the liability to physical illness, but only when the patients relish their condition and dwell on it too long ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 467

It is a process of domestication which cannot be accomplished without rebellion on the part of the animal nature that thirsts for freedom ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 427

This step beyond science is an unconditional requirement of the psychological development I have sought to depict, because without this postulate I could give no adequate formulation of the psychic processes that occur empirically ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 405

The Self could be characterized as a kind of compensation for the conflict between inside and outside. This formulation would not be unfitting, since the Self has somewhat the character of a result, of a goal attained, something that has come to pass very gradually and is experienced with much travail ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 404

So too the Self is our life’s goal, for it is the completest expression of that fateful combination we call individuality, the full flowering not only of the single individual, but of the group, in which each adds his portion to the whole ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 404

he spirit of these orgies contributed not a little towards the development of the stoic ideal of asceticism in the innumerable sects and philosophical schools of the last century before Christ, which produced from the polytheistic chaos of that epoch the twin ascetic religions of Mithraism and Christianity ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 427

The fact is that the whole symbolism of initiation rises up, clear and unmistakable, in the unconscious contents. The objection that this is antiquated superstition and altogether unscientific is about as intelligent as remarking, in the presence of a cholera epidemic, that it is merely an infectious disease and exceedingly unhygienic ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 385

Hence the “magician” could only take possession of the ego only because the ego dreamed of victory over the anima. That dream was an encroachment, and every encroachment of the ego is followed by an encroachment from the unconscious ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 382

Consequently, if the ego drops its claim to victory, possession by the magician ceases automatically. But what happens to the mana? ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 382

Now when the anima loses her mana, what becomes of it? Clearly the man who has mastered the anima acquires her mana, in accordance with the primitive belief that when a man kills the mana-person he assimilates the other’s mana into his own body ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 376

In the case of a real settlement with the unconscious it is not a question of interpretation: it is a question of releasing unconscious processes and letting them come into the conscious mind in the form of fantasies ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 342

The animus is the deposit, as it were, of all woman’s ancestral experiences of man and not only that, he is also a creative and procreative being, not in the sense of masculine creativity, but in the sense that he brings forth something we might call the spermatic word ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 336

The aim of individuation is nothing less than to divest the Self of the false wrappings of the persona on the one hand, and the suggestive power of primordial images on the other ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 269

The moment of irruption can, however, be very sudden, so that consciousness is instantaneously flooded with extremely strange and apparently quite unsuspected contents. That is how it looks to the layman and even to the person concerned, but the experienced observer knows that psychological events are never sudden ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 270

In reality the irruption has been preparing for many years, often for half a lifetime, and already in childhood all sorts of remarkable signs could have been detected which, in more or less symbolic fashion, hinted at abnormal future developments ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 270

We should not, however, labor under the illusion that we have now discovered the real nature of the unconscious processes. We never succeed in getting further than the hypothetical “as if” ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 272

People who go illegitimately mooning after the infinite often have absurdly banal dreams which endeavor to damp down their ebullience. Thus, from the nature of the compensation, we can at once draw conclusions as to the seriousness and rightness of the conscious strivings ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 288

Even with us the collective dream has a feeling of importance about it that impels communication. It springs from a conflict of relationship and must therefore be built into our conscious relations, because it compensates these and not just some inner personal quirk ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 277

It is in fact one of the earliest and most universal acquisitions of humanity: it is nothing less than the conviction as to the concrete existence of a spirit-world ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 293

The spirit-world was certainly never an invention in the sense that fire-boring was an invention; it was far rather the experience, the conscious acceptance of a reality in no way inferior to that of the material world ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 293

The image is unconsciously projected, and when the parents die, the projected image goes on working as though it were a spirit existing on its own. The primitive then speaks of parental spirits who return by night (revenants), while the modern man calls it a father or mother complex ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 294

The more limited a man’s field of consciousness is, the more numerous the psychic contents (imagos) which meet him as quasi-external apparitions, either in the form of spirits, or as magical potencies projected upon living people (magicians, witches, etc.) ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 295

At a rather higher stage of development, where the idea of the soul already exists, not all the imagos continue to be projected (where this happens, even trees and stones talk), but one or the other complex has come near enough to consciousness to be felt as no longer strange, but as somehow “belonging” ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 295

A man counts it a virtue to repress his feminine traits as much as possible, just as a woman, at least until recently, considered it unbecoming to be “mannish.” The repression of feminine traits and inclinations naturally causes these contrasexual demands to accumulate in the unconscious ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 297

The “spotless” man of honor and public benefactor, whose tantrums and explosive moodiness terrify his wife and children. What is the anima doing here? ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 319

Whence does the anima obtain the power to wield such enchantment? On the analogy with the persona there must be values or some other important and influential factors lying in the background like seductive promises. In such matters we must guard against rationalizations ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 320

Thus the whole nature of man presupposes woman, both physically and spiritually. His system is tuned in to woman from the start, just as it is prepared for a quite definite world where there is water, light, air, salt, carbohydrates, etc. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 300

“High rests on low,” says Lao-tzu. An opposite forces its way up from inside; it is exactly as though the unconscious suppressed the ego with the very same power which drew the ego into the persona ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 308

The absence of resistance outwardly against the lure of the persona means a similar weakness inwardly against the influence of the unconscious ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 308

Outwardly an effective and powerful role is played, while inwardly an effeminate weakness develops in face of every influence coming from the unconscious. Moods, vagaries, timidity, even a limp sexuality (culminating in impotence), gradually gain the upper hand ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 308

In place of the parents, woman takes up her position as the most immediate environmental influence in the life of the adult man. She becomes his companion, she belongs to him in so far as she shares his life and is more or less the same age ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 296

Now, everything that is true of the persona and of all autonomous complexes in general also holds true of the anima. She likewise is a personality, and this is why she is so easily projected upon a woman. So long as the anima is unconscious she is always projected, for everything unconscious is projected ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 314

The first bearer of the soul-image is always the mother; later it is borne by those women who arouse the man’s feelings, whether in a positive or a negative sense. Because the mother is the first bearer of the soul-image, separation from her is a delicate and important matter of the greatest educational significance ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 314

The anima comes between them like a jealous mistress who tries to alienate the man from his family. An official post or any other advantageous social position can do the same thing, but there we can understand the force of the attraction ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 320

It could therefore be said just as truly that one should cultivate the art of conversing with oneself in the setting provided by an affect, as though the affect itself were speaking without regard to our rational criticism. So long as the affect is speaking, criticism must be withheld ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 323

These two examples of fantasy represent the positive activity of anima and animus. To the degree that the patient takes an active part, the personified figure of anima or animus will disappear. It becomes the function of relationship between conscious and unconscious ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 370

Anyone who identifies with the collective psyche or, in mythological terms, lets himself be devoured by the monster and vanishes in it, attains the treasure that the dragon guards, but he does so in spite of himself and to his own greatest harm ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 477

If we reduce this by analysis to something that is generally known, we destroy the true value of the symbol; but to attribute hermeneutic significance to it is consistent with its value and its meaning ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 492

Thus Freud’s sexual theory of neurosis is grounded on a true and factual principle. But it makes the mistake of being one-sided and exclusive; also it commits the imprudence of trying to lay hold of unconfinable Eros with the crude terminology of sex. In this respect Freud is a typical representative of the materialistic epoch, whose hope it was to solve the world riddle in a test-tube. Freud himself, with advancing years, admitted this lack of balance in his theory, and he opposed to Eros, whom he called libido, the destructive or death instinct ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 33

But the ecstatic by-passes the law of his own life and behaves, from the point of view of nature, improperly. This impropriety is the exclusive prerogative of man, whose consciousness and free will can occasionally loose themselves contra naturam from their roots in animal nature. It is the indispensable foundation of all culture, but also of spiritual sickness if exaggerated ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 41

I myself have known more than one person who owed his entire usefulness and reason for existence to a neurosis, which prevented all the critical follies in his life and forced him to a mode of living that developed his valuable potentialities. These might have been stifled had not the neurosis, with iron grip, held him to the place where he belonged ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 68

There are actually people who have the whole meaning of their life, their true significance, in the unconscious, while in the conscious mind is nothing but inveiglement and error. With others the case is reversed, and here neurosis has a different meaning. In these cases, but not in the former, a thorough going reduction is indicated ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 68

The question of the gradient is an eminently practical problem which crops up in most analyses. For instance, when in a favourable case the disposable energy, the so-called libido, does seize hold of a rational object, we think we have brought about the transformation through conscious exertion of the will. But in that we are deluded, because even the most strenuous exertions would not have sufficed had there not been present at the same time a gradient in that direction ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 77

When the man has made enough money, or if a fine legacy should drop from the skies and external necessity no longer presses, then they have time to occupy themselves with one another. Hitherto they stood back to back and defended themselves against necessity. But now they turn face to face and look for understanding only to discover that they have never understood one another. Each speaks a different language. Then the conflict between the two types begins ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 80

Let us suppose two youths are rambling in the country. They come to a fine castle; both want to see inside it. The introvert says, “I’d like to know what it’s like inside.” The extravert answers, “Right, let’s go in,” and makes for the gateway. The introvert draws back “Perhaps we aren’t allowed in,” says he, with visions of policemen, fines, and fierce dogs in the background. Whereupon the extravert answers, “Well, we can ask. They’ll let us in all right “with visions of kindly old watchmen, hospitable seigneurs, and the possibility of romantic adventures. On the strength of extraverted optimism they at length find themselves in the castle. But now comes the dénouement ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 81

The castle has been rebuilt inside, and contains nothing but a couple of rooms with a collection of old manuscripts. As it happens, old manuscripts are the chief joy of the introverted youth. Hardly has he caught sight of them than he becomes as one transformed. He loses himself in contemplation of the treasures, uttering cries of enthusiasm. He engages the caretaker in conversation so as to extract from him as much information as possible, and when the result is disappointing he asks to see the curator in order to propound his questions to him. His shyness has vanished, objects have taken on a seductive glamour, and the world wears a new face ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 81

But meanwhile the spirits of the extraverted youth are ebbing lower and lower. His face grows longer and he begins to yawn. No kindly watchmen are forthcoming here, no knightly hospitality, not a trace of romantic adventure only a castle made over into a museum. There are manuscripts enough to be seen at home. While the enthusiasm of the one rises, the spirits of the other fall, the castle bores him, the manuscripts remind him of a library, library is associated with university, university with studies and menacing examinations ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 81

Gradually a veil of gloom descends over the once so interesting and enticing castle. The object becomes negative. “Isn’t it marvellous,” cries the introvert, “to have stumbled on this wonderful collection?” “The place bores me to extinction,” replies the other with undisguised ill humour. This annoys the introvert, who secretly vows never again to go rambling with an extravert. The latter is annoyed with the other’s annoyance, and he thinks to himself that he always knew the fellow was an inconsiderate egotist who would, in his own selfish interest, waste all the lovely spring day that could be enjoyed so much better out of doors ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 81

A feeling which the person who has a secret need to be understood and recognized speaks of but does not really believe ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 226

Positive as well as negative occurrences can constellate the inferior counter-function. When this happens, sensitiveness appears. Sensitiveness is a sure sign of the presence of inferiority. This provides the psychological basis for discord and misunderstanding, not only as between two people, but also in ourselves ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 85

We have to distinguish between a personal unconscious and an impersonal or transpersonal unconscious. We speak of the latter also as the collective unconscious, because it is detached from anything personal and is common to all men, since its contents can be found everywhere, which is naturally not the case with the personal contents ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 103

The personal unconscious contains lost memories, painful ideas that are repressed (i.e., forgotten on purpose), subliminal perceptions, by which are meant sense-perceptions that were not strong enough to reach consciousness, and finally, contents that are not yet ripe for consciousness. It corresponds to the figure of the shadow so frequently met with in dreams ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 103

The personal layer ends at the earliest memories of infancy, but the collective layer comprises the pre-infantile period, that is, the residues of ancestral life. Whereas the memory-images of the personal unconscious are, as it were, filled out, because they are images personally experienced by the individual, the archetypes of the collective unconscious are not filled out because they are forms not personally experienced ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 118

When on the other hand, psychic energy regresses, going beyond even the period of early infancy, and breaks into the legacy of ancestral life, the mythological images are awakened: these are the archetypes. An interior spiritual world whose existence we never suspected opens out and displays contents which seem to stand in sharpest contrast to all our former ideas ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 118

These images are so intense that it is quite understandable why millions of cultivated persons should be taken in by theosophy and anthroposophy. This happens simply because such modern gnostic systems meet the need for expressing and formulating the wordless occurrences going on within ourselves better than any of the existing forms of Christianity, not excepting Catholicism ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 118

The primordial images [archetypes] are as much feelings as thoughts; indeed, they lead their own independent life rather in the manner of part-souls, as can easily be seen in those philosophical or Gnostic systems which rely on perception of the unconscious as the source of knowledge ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 104

In the Old Testament the magic power glows in the burning bush and in the countenance of Moses; in the Gospels it descends with the Holy Ghost in the form of fiery tongues from heaven. In Heraclitus it appears as world energy, as “ever-living fire”; among the Persians it is the fiery glow of haoma, divine grace; among the Stoics it is the original heat, the power of fate ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 108

So this idea has been stamped on the human brain for aeons. That is why it lies ready to hand in the unconscious of every man. Only, certain conditions are needed to cause it to appear. These conditions were evidently fulfilled in the case of Robert Mayer. The greatest and best thoughts of man shape themselves upon these primordial images as upon a blueprint ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 109

His energy, until now laid up in unserviceable and pathological forms, has come into its proper sphere. It is essential, in differentiating the ego from the non-ego, that a man should be firmly rooted in his ego-function; that is, he must fulfil his duty to life, so as to be in every respect a viable member of the community ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 113

As soon as we speak of the collective unconscious we find ourselves in a sphere, and concerned with a problem, which is altogether precluded in the practical analysis of young people or of those who have remained infantile too long ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 113

Wherever the father and mother imagos have still to be overcome, wherever there is a little bit of life still to be conquered, which is the natural possession of the average man, then we had better make no mention of the collective unconscious and the problem of opposites ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 113

But once the parental transferences and the youthful illusions have been mastered, or are at least ripe for mastery, then we must speak of these things. We are here outside the range of Freudian and Adlerian reductions; we are no longer concerned with how to remove the obstacles to a man’s profession, or to his marriage, or to anything that means a widening of his life, but are confronted with the task of finding a meaning that will enable him to continue living at allay meaning more than blank resignation and mournful retrospect ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 113

The interpretation of a change of place as a change of attitude is corroborated by forms of speech in certain primitive languages, where, for example, “I am thinking of going” is expressed as “I am at the place of (on the point of) going” ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 132

In so far as through our unconscious we have a share in the historical collective psyche, we live naturally and unconsciously in a world of werewolves, demons, magicians, etc., for these are things which all previous ages have invested with tremendous affectivity. Equally we have a share in gods and devils, saviours and criminals; but it would be absurd to attribute these potentialities of the unconscious to ourselves personally ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 150

It is therefore absolutely essential to make the sharpest possible demarcation between the personal and the impersonal attributes of the psyche. This is not to deny the sometimes very formidable existence of the contents of the collective unconscious, but only to stress that, as contents of the collective psyche, they are opposed to and different from the individual psyche ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 150

Thus the gods were disposed of. But the corresponding psychological function was by no means disposed of; it lapsed into the unconscious, and men were thereupon poisoned by the surplus of libido that had once been laid up in the cult of divine images. The devaluation and repression of so powerful a function as the religious function naturally has serious consequences for the psychology of the individual. The unconscious is prodigiously strengthened by this reflux of libido, and, through its archaic collective contents, begins to exercise a powerful influence on the conscious mind. The period of the Enlightenment closed, as we know, with the horrors of the French Revolution ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 150

On account of their affinity with physical phenomena, the archetypes usually appear in projection; and, because projections are unconscious, they appear on persons in the immediate environment, mostly in the form of abnormal over- or under-valuations which provoke misunderstandings, quarrels, fanaticisms, and follies of every description ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 152

Thus we say, “He makes a god of so-and-so,” or, “So-and-so is Mr. X’s bête noire.” In this way, too, there grow up modern myth-formations, i.e., fantastic rumours, suspicions, prejudices. The archetypes are therefore exceedingly important things with a powerful effect, meriting our closest attention. They must not be suppressed out of have, but must be very carefully weighed and considered, if only because of the danger of psychic infection they carry with them ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 152

Thus, when somebody projects the devil upon his neighbour, he does so because this person has something about him which makes the attachment of such an image possible. But this is not to say that the man is on that account a devil; on the contrary, he may be a particularly good fellow, but antipathetic to the maker of the projection, so that a “devilish” (i.e., dividing) effect arises between them ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 152

Nor need the projector necessarily be a devil, although he has to recognize that he has something just as devilish in himself, and has only stumbled upon it by projecting it. But that does not make him a devil; indeed he may be just as decent as the other man. The appearance of the devil in such a case simply means that the two people are at present incompatible: for which reason the unconscious forces them apart and keeps them away from each other. The devil is a variant of the “shadow” archetype, i.e., of the dangerous aspect of the unrecognized dark half of the personality ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 152

A good example of this is Gustav Meyrink’s Golem, also the Tibetan wizard in the same author’s Fledermäuse, who unleashes world war by magic. Naturally Meyrink learned nothing of this from me; he brought it independently out of his unconscious by clothing in words and imagery a feeling not unlike the one which my patient had projected upon me ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 153

This figure often appears as dark-skinned and of mongoloid type, and then it represents a negative and possibly dangerous aspect. Sometimes it can hardly be distinguished, if at all, from the shadow; but the more the magical note predominates, the easier it is to make the distinction, and this is not without relevance in so far as the demon can also have a very positive aspect as the “wise old man” ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 154

She has too little hold upon life to risk all at once a complete reversal of standpoint. The collective unconscious has fallen upon her and threatens to bear her away from a reality whose demands have not been adequately met. Accordingly, as the dream indicates, the collective unconscious had to be presented to her as something dangerous, otherwise she would have been only too ready to make it a refuge from the demands of life ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 161

He [the patient] had a particularly close tie with his mother. By this we are not to understand a particularly good or intense conscious relationship, but something in the nature of a secret, subterranean tie which expresses itself consciously, perhaps, only in the retarded development of character, i.e., in a relative infantilism ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 171

In the case of this young man the images of the collective unconscious play an entirely positive role, which comes from the fact that he has no really dangerous tendency to fall back on a fantasy-substitute for reality and to entrench himself behind it against life. The effect of these unconscious images has something fateful about it. Perhaps who knows? These eternal images are what men mean by fate ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 183

Viewed in this light, the homosexuality of adolescence is only a misunderstanding of the otherwise very appropriate need for masculine guidance. One might also say that the fear of incest which is based on the mother-complex extends to women in general; but in my opinion an immature man is quite right to be afraid of women, because his relations with women are generally disastrous ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 173

This natural process of individuation served me both as a model and guiding principle for my method of treatment. The unconscious compensation of a neurotic conscious attitude contains all the elements that could effectively and healthily correct the one-sidedness of the conscious mind, if these elements were made conscious, i.e., understood and integrated into it as realities ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 187

It is only very seldom that a dream achieves such intensity that the shock is enough to throw the conscious mind out of the saddle. As a rule dreams are too feeble and too unintelligible to exercise a radical influence on consciousness. In consequence, the compensation runs underground in the unconscious and has no immediate effect. But it has some effect all the same; only, it is indirect in so far as the unconscious opposition will, if consistently ignored, arrange symptoms and situations which irresistibly thwart our conscious intentions ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 187

The aim of the treatment is therefore to understand and to appreciate, so far as practicable, dreams and all other manifestations of the unconscious, firstly in order to prevent the formation of an unconscious opposition which becomes more dangerous as time goes on, and secondly in order to make the fullest possible use of the healing factor of compensation ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 187

When a case is treated in the manner indicated, the initiative lies with the unconscious, but all criticism, choice, and decision lie with the conscious mind. If the decision is right, it will be confirmed by dreams indicative of progress; in the other event correction will follow from the side of the unconscious ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 189

The course of treatment is thus rather like a running conversation with the unconscious. That the correct interpretation of dreams is of paramount importance should be sufficiently clear from what has been said. But when, you may rightly ask, is one sure of the interpretation? Is there anything approaching a reliable criterion for the correctness of an interpretation? This question, happily, can be answered in the affirmative. If we have made a wrong interpretation, or if it is somehow incomplete, we may be able to see it from the next dream ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 189

Thus, for example, the earlier motif will be repeated in clearer form, or our interpretation may be deflated by some ironic paraphrase, or it may meet with straightforward violent opposition ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 189

Now supposing that these interpretations also go astray, the general inconclusiveness and futility of our procedure will make itself felt soon enough in the bleakness, sterility, and pointlessness of the undertaking, so that doctor and patient alike will be suffocated either by boredom or by doubt. Just as the reward of a correct interpretation is an uprush of life, so an incorrect one dooms them to deadlock, resistance, doubt, and mutual desiccation ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 189

A very large number of accidents of every description, more than people would ever guess, are of psychic causation, ranging from trivial mishaps like stumbling, banging oneself, burning one’s fingers, etc., to car smashes and catastrophes in the mountains: all these may be psychically caused and may sometimes have been preparing for weeks or even months ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 194

I have examined many cases of this kind, and often I could point to dreams which showed signs of a tendency to self-injury weeks beforehand. All those accidents that happen from so-called carelessness should be examined for such determinants ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 194

This activity should be thought of as completely autonomous only in pathological cases; normally it is co-ordinated with the conscious mind in a compensatory relationship ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 204

The progress of her life was thus held up, and that inner disunity so characteristic of a neurosis promptly made its appearance. The so-called normal person would probably be able to break the emotional bond in one or the other direction by a powerful act of will, or else and this is perhaps the more usual thing he would come through the difficulty unconsciously, on the smooth path of instinct, without ever being aware of the sort of conflict that lay behind his headaches or other physical discomforts ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 206

But any weakness of instinct (which may have many causes) is enough to hinder a smooth unconscious transition. Then all progress is delayed by conflict, and the resulting stasis of life is equivalent to a neurosis ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 206

In consequence of the standstill, psychic energy flows off in every conceivable direction, apparently quite uselessly. For instance, there are excessive innervations of the sympathetic system, which lead to nervous disorders of the stomach and intestines; or the vagus (and consequently the heart) is stimulated; or fantasies and memories, uninteresting enough in themselves, become overvalued and prey on the conscious mind (mountains out of molehills) ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 206

In this state a new motive is needed to put an end to the morbid suspension. Nature herself paves the way for this, unconsciously and indirectly, through the phenomenon of the transference (Freud). In the course of treatment the patient transfers the father-imago to the doctor, thus making him, in a sense, the father, and in the sense that he is not the father, also making him a substitute for the man she cannot reach. The doctor therefore becomes both a father and a kind of lover in other words, an object of conflict ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 206

In him the opposites are united, and for this reason he stands for a quasi-ideal solution of the conflict. Without in the least wishing it, he draws upon himself an over-valuation that is almost incredible to the outsider, for to the patient he seems like a saviour or a god ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 206

This way of speaking is not altogether so laughable as it sounds. It is indeed a bit much to be a father and lover at once. Nobody could possibly stand up to it in the long run, precisely because it is too much of a good thing. One would have to be a demigod at least to sustain such a role without a break, for all the time one would have to be the giver ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 206

To the patient in the state of transference, this provisional solution naturally seems ideal, but only at first; in the end she comes to a standstill that is just as bad as the neurotic conflict was. Fundamentally, nothing has yet happened that might lead to a real solution. The conflict has merely been transferred ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 206

Nevertheless a successful transference cant least temporarily cause the whole neurosis to disappear, and for this reason it has been very rightly recognized by Freud as a healing factor of first-rate importance, but, at the same time, as a provisional state only, for although it holds out the possibility of a cure, it is far from being the cure itself ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 206

But the energy of the transference is so strong that it gives one the impression of a vital instinct. That being so, what is the purpose of such fantasies? A careful examination and analysis of the dreams, revealed a very marked tendency in contrast to conscious criticism, which always seeks to reduce things to human proportions to endow the person of the doctor with superhuman attributes ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 214

He had to be gigantic, primordial, huger than the father, like the wind that sweeps over the earth was he then to be made into a god? Or, I said to myself, was it rather the case that the unconscious was trying to create a god out of the person of the doctor, as it were to free a vision of God from the veils of the personal, so that the transference to the person of the doctor was no more than a misunderstanding on the part of the conscious mind, a stupid trick played by “sound common sense”? ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 214

The analysis and conscious realization of unconscious contents engender a certain superior tolerance, thanks to which even relatively indigestible portions of one’s unconscious characterology can be accepted. This tolerance may look very wise and superior, but often it is no more than a grand gesture that brings all sorts of consequences in its train ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 224

Two spheres [the knowledge of good and evil] have been brought together which before were kept anxiously apart. After considerable resistances have been overcome, the union of opposites is successfully achieved, at least to all appearances ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 224

The deeper understanding thus gained, the juxtaposition of what was before separated [good and evil], and hence the apparent overcoming of the moral conflict, give rise to a feeling of superiority that may well be expressed by the term “godlikeness.” But this same juxtaposition of good and evil can have a very different effect on a different kind of temperament. Not everyone will feel himself a superman, holding in his hands the scales of good and evil. It may also seem as though he were a helpless object caught between hammer and anvil; not in the least a Hercules at the parting of the ways, but rather a rudderless ship buffeted between Scylla and Charybdis ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 224

For without knowing it, he is caught up in perhaps the greatest and most ancient of human conflicts, experiencing the throes of eternal principles in collision. Well might he feel himself like a Prometheus chained to the Caucasus, or as one crucified. This would be a “godlikeness” in suffering ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 224

Godlikeness is certainly not a scientific concept, although it aptly characterizes the psychological state in question. Nor do I imagine that every reader will immediately grasp the peculiar state of mind implied by “godlikeness.” The term belongs too exclusively to the sphere of belles-lettres. So I should probably be better advised to give a more circumspect description of this state ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 224

The insight and understanding, then, gained by the analysand usually reveal much to him that was before unconscious. He naturally applies this knowledge to his environment: in consequence he sees, or thinks he sees, many things that before were invisible. Since his knowledge was helpful to him, he readily assumes that it would be useful also to others ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 224

In this way he is liable to become arrogant; it may be well meant, but it is nonetheless annoying to other people. He feels as though he possesses a key that opens many, perhaps even all, doors ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 224

Psychoanalysis itself has this same bland unconsciousness of its limitations, as can clearly be seen from the way it meddles with works of art ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 224

Since human nature is not compounded wholly of light, but also abounds in shadows, the insight gained in practical analysis is often somewhat painful, the more so if, as is generally the case, one has previously neglected the other side. Hence there are people who take their newly won insight very much to heart, far too much in fact, quite forgetting that they are not unique in having a shadow-side. They allow themselves to get unduly depressed and are then inclined to doubt everything, finding nothing right anywhere ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 225

One man’s optimism makes him overweening, while another’s pessimism makes him over-anxious and despondent. Such are the forms which the great conflict takes when reduced to a smaller scale ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 225

)But even in these lesser proportions the essence of the conflict is easily recognized: the arrogance of the one and the despondency of the other share a common uncertainty as to their boundaries. The one is excessively expanded, the other excessively contracted. Their individual boundaries are in some way obliterated ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 225

If we now consider the fact that, as a result of psychic compensation, great humility stands very close to pride, and that “pride goeth before a fall,” we can easily discover behind the haughtiness certain traits of an anxious sense of inferiority ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 225

In fact we shall see clearly how his uncertainty forces the enthusiast to puff up his truths, of which he feels none to sure, and to win proselytes to his side in order that his followers may prove to himself the value and trustworthiness of his own convictions ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 225

Nor is he altogether so happy in his fund of knowledge as to be able to hold out alone; at bottom he feels isolated by it, and the secret fear of being left alone with it induces him to trot out his opinions and interpretations in and out of season, because only when convincing someone else does he feel safe from gnawing doubts ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 225

It is just the reverse with our despondent friend. The more he withdraws and hides himself, the greater becomes his secret need to be understood and recognized. Although he speaks of his inferiority he does not really believe it. There arises within him a defiant conviction of his unrecognized merits, and in consequence he is sensitive to the slightest disapprobation, always wearing the stricken air of one who is misunderstood and deprived of his rightful due. In this way he nurses a morbid pride and an insolent discontent which is the very last thing he wants and for which his environment has to pay all the more dearly ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 226

Both [states] are at once too small and too big; their individual mean, never very secure, now becomes shakier than ever. It sounds almost grotesque to describe such a state as “godlike.” But since each in his way steps beyond his human proportions, both of them are a little “superhuman” and therefore, figuratively speaking, godlike ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 227

If we wish to avoid the use of this metaphor [godlike], I would suggest that we speak instead of “psychic inflation.” The term seems to me appropriate in so far as the state we are discussing involves an extension of the personality beyond individual limits, in other words, a state of being puffed up. In such a state a man fills a space which normally he cannot fill. He can only fill it by appropriating to himself contents and qualities which properly exist for themselves alone and should therefore remain outside our bounds. What lies outside ourselves belongs either to someone else, or to everyone, or to no one ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 227

Since psychic inflation is by no means a phenomenon induced exclusively by analysis, but occurs just as often in ordinary life, we can investigate it equally well in other cases. A very common instance is the humourless way in which many men identify themselves with their business or their titles. The office I hold is certainly my special activity; but it is also a collective factor that has come into existence historically through the cooperation of many people and whose dignity rests solely on collective approval. When, therefore, I identify myself with my office or title, I behave as though I myself were the whole complex of social factors of which that office consists, or as though I were not only the bearer of the office, but also and at the same time the approval of society. I have made an extraordinary extension of myself and have usurped qualities which are not in me but outside me. L’état c’est moi [I am the state!] is the motto for such people ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 227

To borrow an expression from Pierre Janet, the collective psyche comprises the parties inférieures of the psychic functions, that is to say, those deep-rooted, well-nigh automatic portions of the individual psyche which are inherited and are to be found everywhere, and are thus impersonal or suprapersonal ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 235

Consciousness plus the personal unconscious constitutes the parties supérieures of the psychic functions, those portions, therefore, that are developed ontogenetically and acquired ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 235

Consequently, the individual who annexes the unconscious heritage of the collective psyche to what has accrued to him in the course of his ontogenetic development, as though it were part of the latter, enlarges the scope of his personality in an illegitimate way and suffers the consequences ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 235

In so far as the collective psyche comprises the parties inférieures of the psychic functions and thus forms the basis of every personality, it has the effect of crushing and devaluing the personality. This shows itself either in the aforementioned stifling of self-confidence or else in an unconscious heightening of the ego’s importance to the point of a pathological will to power ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 235

This discovery makes him therefore less individually unique, and more collective. His collectivization is not always a step to the bad; it may sometimes be a step to the good. There are people who repress their good qualities and consciously give free rein to their infantile desires ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 236

The lifting of personal repression at first brings purely personal contents into consciousness; but attached to them are the collective elements of the unconscious, the ever-present instincts, qualities, and ideas (images) as well as all those “statistical” quotas of average virtue and average vice which we recognize when we say, “Everyone has in him something of the criminal, the genius, and the saint” ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 236

If I were more of a therapist than an investigator, I would naturally be unable to check a certain optimism of judgment, because my eyes would then be glued to the number of cures. But my conscience as an investigator is concerned not with quantity but with quality ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 236

Nature is aristocratic, and one person of value outweighs ten lesser ones. My eye followed the valuable people, and from them I learned the dubiousness of the results of a purely personal analysis, and also to understand the reasons for this dubiousness ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 236

In primitives, development of personality, or more accurately, development of the person, is a question of magical prestige. The figure of the medicine-man or chief leads the way: both make themselves conspicuous by the singularity of their ornaments and their mode of life, expressive of their social roles ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 237

The singularity of his [the chief’s] outward tokens marks the individual off from the rest, and the segregation is still further enhanced by the possession of special ritual secrets. By these and similar means the primitive creates around him a shell, which might be called a persona (mask). Masks, as we know, are actually used among primitives in totem ceremoniesfor instance, as a means of enhancing or changing the personality. In this way the outstanding individual is apparently removed from the sphere of the collective psyche, and to the degree that he succeeds in identifying himself with his persona, he actually is removed. This removal means magical prestige ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 237

One could easily assert that the impelling motive in this development is the will to power. But that would be to forget that the building up of prestige is always a product of collective compromise: not only must there be one who wants prestige, there must also be a public seeking somebody on whom to confer prestige ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 237

That being so, it would be incorrect to say that a man creates prestige for himself out of his individual will to power; it is on the contrary an entirely collective affair. Since society as a whole needs the magically effective figure, it uses this need of the will to power in the individual, and the will to submit in the mass, as a vehicle, and thus brings about the creation of personal prestige. The latter is a phenomenon which, as the history of political institutions shows, is of the utmost importance for the comity of nations ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 237

To gain prestige is a positive achievement not only for the outstanding individual but also for the clan. The individual distinguishes himself by his deeds, the many by their renunciation of power. So long as this attitude needs to be fought for and defended against hostile influences, the achievement remains positive; but as soon as there are no more obstacles and universal recognition has been attained, prestige loses its positive value and usually becomes a dead letter. A schismatic movement then sets in, and the whole process begins again from the beginning ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 238

Because personality is of such paramount importance for the life of the community, everything likely to disturb its development is sensed as a danger. But the greatest danger of all is the premature dissolution of prestige by an invasion of the collective psyche. Absolute secrecy is one of the best known primitive means of exorcising this danger ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 239

Collective thinking and feeling and collective effort are far less of a strain than individual functioning and effort; hence there is always a great temptation to allow collective functioning to take the place of individual differentiation of the personality ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 239

Individuality will inevitably be driven to the wall. This process begins in school, continues at the university, and rules all departments in which the State has a hand ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 240

The collective instincts and fundamental forms of human thought and feeling whose activity is revealed by the analysis of the unconscious constitute, for the conscious personality, an acquisition which it cannot assimilate without considerable disturbance ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 241

It is therefore of the utmost importance in practical treatment to keep the integrity of the personality constantly in mind. For, if the collective psyche is taken to be the personal possession of the individual, it will result in a distortion or an overloading of the personality which is very difficult to deal with ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 241

Hence it is imperative to make a clear distinction between personal contents and those of the collective psyche. This distinction is far from easy, because the personal grows out of the collective psyche and is intimately bound up with it. So it is difficult to say exactly what contents are to be called personal and what collective ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 241

There is no doubt, for instance, that archaic symbolisms such as we frequently find in fantasies and dreams are collective factors. All basic instincts and basic forms of thought and feeling are collective. Everything that all men agree in regarding as universal is collective, likewise everything that is universally understood, universally found, universally said and done ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 241

On closer examination one is always astonished to see how much of our so-called individual psychology is really collective. So much, indeed, that the individual traits are completely overshadowed by it. Since, however, individuation is an ineluctable psychological necessity, we can see from the ascendancy [superior force] of the collective what very special attention must be paid to this delicate plant “individuality” if it is not to be completely smothered ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 241

Human beings have one faculty which, though it is of greatest utility for collective purposes, is most pernicious for individuation, and that is the faculty of imitation. Collective psychology cannot dispense with imitation, for without it all mass organizations, the State and the social order, are impossible ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 242

Society is organized, indeed, less by law than by the propensity to imitation, implying equally suggestibility, suggestion, and mental contagion ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 242

But we see every day how people use, or rather abuse, the mechanism of imitation for the purpose of personal differentiation: they are content to ape some eminent personality, some striking characteristic or mode of behaviour, thereby achieving an outward distinction from the circle in which they move ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 242

We could almost say that as a punishment for this uniformity of their minds with those of their neighbours, already real enough, is intensified into an unconscious, compulsive bondage to the environment. As a rule these specious attempts at individual differentiation stiffen into a pose, and the imitator remains at the same level as he always was, only several degrees more sterile than before ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 242

To find out what is truly individual in ourselves, profound reflection is needed; and suddenly we realize how uncommonly difficult the discovery of individuality is ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 242

I have shown that to annex the deeper layers of the unconscious, which I have called the collective unconscious, produces an enlargement of the personality leading to the state of inflation. This state is reached by simply continuing the analytical work, By continuing the analysis we add to the personal consciousness certain fundamental, general, and impersonal characteristics of humanity, thereby bringing about the inflation which might be regarded as one of the unpleasant consequences of becoming fully conscious ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 243

This phenomenon, which results from the extension of consciousness, is in no sense specific to analytical treatment. It occurs whenever people are overcome by knowledge or by some new realization, “Knowledge puffeth up,” Paul writes to the Corinthians, for the new knowledge had turned the heads of many, as indeed constantly happens ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 243

The inflation has nothing to do with the kind of knowledge, but simply and solely with the fact that any new knowledge can so seize hold of a weak head that he no longer sees and hears anything else. He is hypnotized by it, and instantly believes he has solved the riddle of the universe ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 243

But that is equivalent to almighty self-conceit. This process is such a general reaction that, in Genesis 2 : 17 , eating of the tree of knowledge is represented as a deadly sin. It may not be immediately apparent why greater consciousness followed by self-conceit should be a dangerous thing ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 243

Genesis represents the act of becoming conscious as a taboo infringement, as though knowledge meant that a sacrosanct barrier had been impiously overstepped. I think that Genesis is right in so far as every step towards greater consciousness is a kind of Promethean guilt: through knowledge, the gods are as it were robbed of their fire, that is, something that was the property of the unconscious powers is torn out of its natural context and subordinated to the whims of the conscious mind ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 243

The man who has usurped the new knowledge suffers, however, a transformation or enlargement of consciousness, which no longer resembles that of his fellow men. He has raised himself above the human level of his age (“ye shall become like unto God”), but in so doing has alienated himself from humanity. The pain of this loneliness is the vengeance of the gods, for never again can he return to mankind. He is, as the myth says, chained to the lonely cliffs of the Caucasus, forsaken of God and man ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 243

The term persona is really a very appropriate expression for this, for originally it meant the mask once worn by actors to indicate the role they played ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 245

Although the ego-consciousness is at first identical with the persona that compromise role in which we parade before the community yet the unconscious Self can never be repressed to the point of extinction. Its influence is chiefly manifest in the special nature of the contrasting and compensating contents of the unconscious ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 247

Through the analysis of the personal unconscious, the conscious mind becomes suffused with collective material which brings with it the elements of individuality ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 247

Once the personal repressions are lifted, the individuality and the collective psyche begin to emerge in a coalescent state, thus releasing the hitherto repressed personal fantasies. The fantasies and dreams which now appear assume a somewhat different aspect. An infallible sign of collective images seems to be the appearance of the The collective element is very often announced by peculiar symptoms, as for example by dreams where the dreamer is flying through space like a comet, or feels that he is the earth, or the sun, or a star; or else is of immense size, or dwarfishly small; or that he is dead, is in a strange place, is a stranger to himself, confused, mad, etc. Similarly, feelings of disorientation, of dizziness and the like, may appear along with symptoms of inflation ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 250

The plunge into this process [disintegration of the persona] becomes unavoidable, whenever the necessity arises of overcoming an apparently insuperable difficulty. But when this inner adaptation becomes a problem, a strange, irresistible attraction proceeds from the unconscious and exerts a powerful influence on the conscious direction of life ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 252

It is a condition of panic, a letting go in face of apparently hopeless complications. Mostly it was preceded by desperate efforts to master the difficulty by force of will; then came the collapse, and the once guiding will crumbles completely. The energy thus freed disappears from consciousness and falls into the unconscious. As a matter of fact, it is at these moments that the first signs of unconscious activity appear ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 252

Such an intellect is always trying to point out mistakes in others; it is pre-eminently critical, with a disagreeably personal undertone, yet it always wants to be considered objective ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 247

This invariably makes a man bad-tempered, particularly if, as so often happens, the criticism touches on some weak spot which, in the interests of fruitful discussion, were better avoided ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 247

But far from wishing the discussion to be fruitful, it is the unfortunate peculiarity of this feminine intellect to seek out a man’s weak spots, fasten on them, and exasperate him ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 247

This is not usually a conscious aim, but rather has the unconscious purpose of forcing a man into a superior position and thus making him an object of admiration. The man does not as a rule notice that he is having the role of the hero thrust upon him; he merely finds her taunts so odious that in future he will go a long way to avoid meeting the lady. In the end the only man who can stand her is the one who gives in at the start, and therefore has nothing wonderful about him ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 247

A collapse of the conscious attitude is no small matter. It always feels like the end of the world, as though everything had tumbled back into original chaos. One feels delivered up, disorientated, like a rudderless ship that is abandoned to the moods of the elements. So at least it seems. In reality, however, one has fallen back upon the collective unconscious, which now takes over the leadership ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 254

We could multiply examples of cases where, at the critical moment, a “saving” thought, a vision, an “inner voice,” came with an irresistible power of conviction and gave life a new direction. Probably we could mention just as many cases where the collapse meant a catastrophe that destroyed life, for at such moments morbid ideas are also liable to take root, or ideals wither away, which is no less disastrous ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 254

In the one case some psychic oddity develops, or a psychosis; in the other, a state of disorientation and demoralization. But once the unconscious contents break through into consciousness, filling it with their uncanny power of conviction, the question arises of how the individual will react? ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 254

Will he be overpowered by these contents? If so, it signifies a condition of paranoia or schizophrenia ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 254

Will the subject credulously accept them? If so, he may either become an eccentric with a taste for prophecy, or he may revert to an infantile attitude and be cut off from human society ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 254

(Will the subject reject the contents? If so, there is a regressive restoration of the persona ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 254

This formulation sounds very technical, and the reader may justifiably suppose that it has something to do with a complicated psychic reaction such as can be observed in the course of analytical treatment. It would, however, be a mistake to think that cases of this kind make their appearance only in analytical treatment. The process can be observed just as well, and often better, in other situations of life, namely in all those careers where there has been some violent and destructive intervention of fate ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 254

Every one, presumably, has suffered adverse turns of fortune, but mostly they are wounds that heal and leave no crippling mark. But here we are concerned with experiences that are destructive, that can smash a man completely or at least cripple him for good ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 254

Let us take as an example a business man who takes too great a risk and consequently becomes bankrupt. If he does not allow himself to be discouraged by this depressing experience, but, undismayed, keeps his former daring, perhaps with a little salutary caution added, his wound will be healed without permanent injury ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 254

But if, on the other hand, he goes to pieces, abjures all further risks, and laboriously tries to patch up his social reputation within the confines of a much more limited personality, doing inferior work with the mentality of a scared child, in a post far below him, then, technically speaking, he will have restored his persona in a regressive way. He will as a result of his fright have slipped back to an earlier phase of his personality; he will have demeaned himself, pretending that he is as he was before the crucial experience, though utterly unable even to think of repeating such a risk. Formerly perhaps he wanted more than he could accomplish; now he does not even dare to attempt what he has it in him to do ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 254

Such experiences occur in every walk of life and in every possible form, hence in psychological treatment also. Here again it is a question of widening the personality, of taking a risk on one’s circumstances or on one’s nature. What the critical experience is in actual treatment can be seen from the case of our philosophy student: it is the transference. As I have already indicated, it is possible for the patient to slip over the reef of the transference unconsciously, in which case it does not become an experience and nothing fundamental happens. The doctor, for the sake of mere convenience, might well wish for such patients. But if they are intelligent, the patients soon discover the existence of this problem for themselves. If then the doctor, as in the above case, is exalted into the father-lover and consequently has a flood of demands let loose against him, he must perforce think out ways and means of parrying the onslaught, without himself getting drawn into the maelstrom and without injury to the patient ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 255

A violent rupture of the transference may bring on a complete relapse, or worse; so the problem must be handled with great tact and foresight. Another possibility is the pious hope that “in time” the “nonsense” will stop of its own accord. Certainly everything stops in time, but it may be an unconscionably long time, and the difficulties may be so unbearable for both sides that one might as well give up the idea of time as a healing factor at once ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 255

There are indeed patients with whom it is, or seems to be, unrewarding to go to greater lengths; but there are also cases where these procedures cause senseless psychic injury. In the case of my [philosophy] student I dimly felt something of the sort, and I therefore abandoned my rationalistic attempts in order with ill-concealed mistrust to give nature a chance to correct what seemed to me to be her own foolishness. As already mentioned, this taught me something extraordinarily important, namely the existence of an unconscious self-regulation ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 257

Not only can the unconscious “wish,” it can also cancel its own wishes. This realization, of such immense importance for the integrity of the personality, must remain sealed to anyone who cannot get over the idea that it is simply a question of infantilism. The meaning and purpose he so eagerly desired he will see only as infantile maunderings. He will understand that his longing was absurd; he learns to be tolerant with himself, resigned ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 257

What can he do? Rather than face the conflict he will turn back and, as best he can, regressively restore his shattered persona, discounting all those hopes and expectations that had blossomed under the transference. He will become smaller, more limited, more rationalistic than he was before ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 257

Experience shows that the unconscious can be deprived of its energy only in part: it remains continually active, for it not only contains but is itself the source of the libido from which the psychic elements flow. It is therefore a delusion to think that by some sort of magical theory or method the unconscious can be finally emptied of libido and thus, as it were, eliminated ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 258

The regressive restoration of the persona is a possible course only for the man who owes the critical failure of his life to his own inflatedness. With diminished personality, he turns back to the measure he can fill. But in every other case resignation and self-belittlement are an evasion, which in the long run can be kept up only at the cost of neurotic sickliness ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 259

The second way [mode of reaction] leads to identification with the collective psyche. This would amount to acceptance of inflation, but now exalted into a system. That is to say, one would be the fortunate possessor of the great truth which was only waiting to be discovered, of the eschatological knowledge which spells the healing of the nations ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 260

This attitude is not necessarily megalomania in direct form, but in the milder and more familiar form of prophetic inspiration and desire for martyrdom ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 260

For weak-minded persons, who as often as not possess more than their fair share of ambition, vanity, and misplaced naïveté, the danger of yielding to this temptation is very great ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 260

Access to the collective psyche means a renewal of life for the individual, no matter whether this renewal is felt as pleasant or unpleasant. Everybody would like to hold fast to this renewal: one man because it enhances his life-feeling, another because it promises a rich harvest of knowledge, a third because he has discovered the key that will transform his whole life. Therefore all those who do not wish to deprive themselves of the great treasures that lie buried in the collective psyche will strive by every means possible to maintain their newly won connection with the primal source of life ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 260

Identification would seem to be the shortest road to this, for the dissolution of the persona in the collective psyche positively invites one t wed oneself with the abyss and blot out all memory in its embrace. This piece of mysticism is innate in all better men as the “longing for the mother,” the nostalgia for the source from which we came ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 260

As I have shown in my book on libido, there lie at the root of the regressive longing, which Freud conceives as “infantile fixation” or the “incest wish” a specific value and a specific need which are made explicit in myths. It is precisely the strongest and best among men, the heroes, who give way to their regressive longing and purposely expose themselves to the danger of being devoured by the monster of the maternal abyss. But if a man is a hero, he is a hero because, in the final reckoning, he did not let the monster devour him, but subdued it, not once but many times ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 261

Victory over the collective psyche alone yields the true value the capture of the hoard, the invincible weapon, the magic talisman, or whatever it be that the myth deems most desirable. Anyone who identifies with the collective psyche or, in mythological terms, lets himself be devoured by the monster and vanishes in it, attains the treasure that the dragon guards, but he does so in spite of himself and to his own greatest harm ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 261

Freud’s theory of neurosis offers a way of “combatting” the transference. The dependence of the patient is explained as an infantile sexual demand that takes the place of a rational application of sexuality ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 256

Similar advantages are offered by the Adlerian theory, which explains the transference as an infantile power-aim, and as a “security measure” ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 256

Both theories fit the neurotic mentality so neatly that every case of neurosis can be explained by both theories at once. This highly remarkable fact, which any unprejudiced observer is bound to corroborate, can only rest on the circumstance that Freud’s “infantile eroticism” and Adler’s “power drive” are one and the same thing, regardless of the clash of opinions between the two schools. It is simply a fragment of uncontrolled, and at first uncontrollable, primordial instinct that comes to light in the phenomenon of transference. The archaic fantasy-forms that gradually reach the surface of consciousness are only a further proof of this ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 256

I would not deny in general the existence of genuine prophets, but in the name of caution I would begin by doubting each individual case; for it is far too serious a matter for us lightly to accept a man as a genuine prophet. Every respectable prophet strives manfully against the unconscious pretensions of his role ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 262

When therefore a prophet appears at a moment’s notice, we would be better advised to contemplate a possible psychic disequilibrium ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 262

But besides the possibility of becoming a prophet, there is another alluring joy, subtler and apparently more legitimate: the joy of becoming a prophet’s disciple. This, for the vast majority of people, is an altogether ideal technique ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 263

Its advantages are: the odium dignitatis, the superhuman responsibility of the prophet, turns into the so much sweeter otium indignitatis ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 263

The disciple is unworthy; modestly he sits at the Master’s feet and guards against having ideas of his own. Mental laziness becomes a virtue; one can at least bask in the sun of a semidivine being. He can enjoy the archaism and infantilism of his unconscious fantasies without loss to himself, for all responsibility is laid at the Master’s door ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 263

Through his deification of the Master, the disciple, apparently without noticing it, waxes in stature; moreover, does he not possess the great truth not his own discovery, of course, but received straight from the Master’s hands? Naturally the disciples always stick together, not out of love, but for the very understandable purpose of effortlessly confirming their own convictions by engendering an air of collective agreement ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 263

Individualism means deliberately stressing and giving prominence to some supposed peculiarity, rather than to collective considerations and obligations ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 267

But individuation means precisely the better and more complete fulfilment of the collective qualities of the human being, since adequate consideration of the peculiarity of the individual is more conducive to better social performance than when the peculiarity is neglected or suppressed ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 267

The idiosyncrasy of an individual is not to be understood as any strangeness in his substance or in his components, but rather as a unique combination, or gradual differentiation, of functions and faculties which in themselves are universal. Every human face has a nose, two eyes, etc., but these universal factors are variable, and it is this variability which makes individual peculiarities possible ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 267

Individuation, therefore, can only mean a process of psychological development that fulfils the individual qualities given; in other words, it is a process by which a man becomes the definite, unique being he in fact is. In so doing he does not become “selfish” in the ordinary sense of the word, but is merely fulfilling the peculiarity of his nature, and this, as we have said, is vastly different from egotism or individualism ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 267

The great question now is: in what do these unconscious processes consist? And how are they constituted? Naturally, so long as they are unconscious, nothing can be said about them. But sometimes they manifest themselves, partly through symptoms, partly through actions, opinions, affects, fantasies, and dreams. Aided by such observational material we can draw indirect conclusions as to the momentary state and constitution of the unconscious processes and their development ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 272

We do know, however, that the unconscious never rests. It seems to be always at work, for even when we are asleep we dream. There are many people who declare that they never dream, but the probability is that they simply do not remember their dreams. It is significant that people who talk in their sleep mostly have no recollection either of the dream which started them talking, or even of the fact that they dreamed at all ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 273

Not a day passes but we make some slip of the tongue, or something slips our memory which at other times we know perfectly well, or we are seized by a mood whose cause we cannot trace, etc. These things are all symptoms of some consistent unconscious activity which becomes directly visible at night in dreams, but only occasionally breaks through the inhibitions imposed by our daytime consciousness ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 273

So far as our present experience goes, we can lay it down that the unconscious processes stand in a compensatory relation to the conscious mind. I expressly use the word “compensatory” and not the word “contrary,” because conscious and unconscious are not necessarily in opposition to one another, but complement one another to form a totality, which is the Self. According to this definition the Self is a quantity that is superordinate to the conscious ego. It embraces not only the conscious but also the unconscious psyche, and is therefore, so to speak, a personality which we also are ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 274

There is little hope of our ever being able to reach even approximate consciousness of the Self, since however much we may make conscious there will always exist an indeterminate and indeterminable amount of unconscious material which belongs to the totality of the Self. Hence the Self will always remain a superordinate quantity ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 274

The unconscious processes that compensate the conscious ego contain all those elements that are necessary for the self-regulation of the psyche as a whole. On the personal level, these are the not consciously recognized personal motives which appear in dreams, or the meaning of daily situations which we have overlooked, or conclusions we have failed to draw, or affects we have not permitted, or criticisms we have spared ourselves ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 275

But the more we become conscious of ourselves through self-knowledge, and act accordingly, the more the layer of the personal unconscious that is superimposed on the collective unconscious will be diminished. In this way there arises a consciousness which is no longer imprisoned in the petty, oversensitive, personal world of ego, but participates freely in the wider world of objective interests. This widened consciousness is no longer that touchy, egotistical bundle of personal wishes, fears, hopes, and ambitions which always has to be compensated or corrected by unconscious counter-tendencies; instead, it is a function of relationship to the world of objects, bringing the individual into absolute, binding, and indissoluble communion with the world at large ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 275

The complications arising at this stage are no longer egotistic wish-conflicts, but difficulties that concern others as much as oneself. At this stage it is fundamentally a question of collective problems, which have activated the collective unconscious because they require collective rather than personal compensation. We can now see that the unconscious produces contents which are valid not only for the person concerned, but for all others as well, in fact for a great many people and possibly for all ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 275

The processes of the collective unconscious are concerned not only with the more or less personal relations of an individual to his family or to a wider social group, but with his relations to society and to the human community in general. The more general and impersonal the condition that releases the unconscious reaction, the more significant, bizarre, and overwhelming will be the compensatory manifestation. It impels not just private communication, but drives people to revelations and confessions, and even to a dramatic representation of their fantasies ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 278

I will explain by an example how the unconscious manages to compensate relationships. A somewhat arrogant gentleman once came to me for treatment. He ran a business in partnership with his younger brother. Relations between the two brothers were very strained, and this was one of the essential causes of my patient’s neurosis. From the information he gave me, the real reason for the tension was not altogether clear. He had all kinds of criticisms to make of his brother, whose gifts he certainly did not show in a very favorable light. The brother frequently came into his dreams, always in the role of a Bismarck, Napoleon, or Julius Caesar. His house looked like the Vatican or Yildiz Kiosk. My patient’s unconscious evidently had the need to exalt the rank of the younger brother. From this I concluded that he was setting himself too high and his brother too low. The further course of analysis entirely justified this inference ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 279

The figures employed by the unconscious in our first case are of a definitely collective nature: they are universally recognized heroes. Here there are two possible interpretations: either my patient’s younger brother is a man of acknowledged and far-reaching collective importance, or my patient is overestimating his own importance not merely in relation to his brother but in relation to everybody else as well. Since the man’s extreme arrogance affected not only himself, but a far wider social group, the compensation availed itself of a collective image ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 283

Another patient, a young woman who clung to her mother in an extremely sentimental way, always had very sinister dreams about her. She appeared in the dreams as a witch, as a ghost, as a pursuing demon. The mother had spoilt her beyond all reason and had so blinded her by tenderness that the daughter had no conscious idea of her mother’s harmful influence. Hence the compensatory criticism exercised by the unconscious ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 280

The same is true of the second case. The “witch” is a collective image; hence we must conclude that the blind dependence of the young woman applied as much to the wider social group as it did to her mother personally. This was indeed the case, in so far as she was still living in an exclusively infantile world, where the world was identical with her parents. These examples deal with relations within the personal orbit ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 284

There are, however, impersonal relations which occasionally need unconscious compensation. In such cases collective images appear with a more or less mythological character. Moral, philosophical, and religious problems are, on account of their universal validity, the most likely to call for mythological compensation ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 284

The universal problem of evil and sin is another aspect of our impersonal relations to the world. Almost more than any other, therefore, this problem produces collective compensations. One of my patients, aged sixteen, had as the initial symptom of a severe compulsion neurosis the following dream: ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 285

It is a notorious fact that the compulsion neuroses, by reason of their meticulousness and ceremonial punctilio, not only have the surface appearance of a moral problem but are indeed brimful of inhuman beastliness and ruthless evil, against the integration of which the very delicately organized personality puts up a desperate struggle ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 286

This explains why so many things have to be performed in ceremonially “correct” style, as though to counteract the evil hovering in the background ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 286

After this dream the neurosis started, and its essential feature was that the patient had, as he put it, to keep himself in a “provisional” or “uncontaminated” state of purity. For this purpose he either severed or made “invalid” all contact with the world and with everything that reminded him of the transitoriness of human existence, by means of lunatic formalities, scrupulous cleansing ceremonies, and the anxious observance of innumerable rules and regulations of an unbelievable complexity. Even before the patient had any suspicion of the hellish existence that lay before him, the dream showed him that if he wanted to come down to earth again there would have to be a pact with evil ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 286

There is what one might call a legitimate and an illegitimate interest in impersonal problems. Excursions of this kind are legitimate only when they arise from the deepest and truest needs of the individual; illegitimate when they are either mere intellectual curiosity or a flight from unpleasant reality. In the latter case the unconscious produces all too human and purely personal compensations, whose manifest aim is to bring the conscious mind back to ordinary reality ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 288

Its mentality [the unconscious] is an instinctive one; it has no differentiated functions, and it does not “think” as we understand “thinking.” It simply creates an image that answers to the conscious situation. This image contains as much thought as feeling, and is anything rather than a product of rationalistic reflection. Such an image would be better described as an artist’s vision ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 289

I have always started from the view that the unconscious simply reacts to the conscious contents, albeit in a very significant way, but that it lacks initiative. It is, however, far from my intention to give the impression that the unconscious is merely reactive in all cases. On the contrary, there is a host of experiences which seem to prove that the unconscious is not only spontaneous but can actually take the lead. There are innumerable cases of people who lingered on in a pettifogging unconsciousness, only to become neurotic in the end. Thanks to the neurosis contrived by the unconscious, they are shaken out of their apathy, and this in spite of their own laziness and often desperate resistance ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 290

Yet it would, in my view, be wrong to suppose that in such cases the unconscious is working to a deliberate and concerted plan and is striving to realize certain definite ends. I have found nothing to support this assumption. The driving force, so far as it is possible for us to grasp it, seems to be in essence only an urge towards self-realization ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 291

The Elgonyi, natives of the Elgon forests, of central Africa, explained to me that there are two kinds of dreams: the ordinary dream of the little man, and the “big vision” that only the great man has, e.g., the medicine-man or chief. Little dreams are of no account, but if a man has a “big dream” he summons the whole tribe in order to tell it to everybody ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 276

How is a man to know whether his dream is a “big” or a “little” one? He knows it by an instinctive feeling of significance. He feels so overwhelmed by the impression it makes that he would never think of keeping the dream to himself. He has to tell it, on the psychologically correct assumption that it is of general significance ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 277

I doubt whether primitives exist anywhere who are not acquainted with magical influence or a magical substance. (“Magical” is simply another word for “psychic.”) It would also appear that practically all primitives are aware of the existence of spirits. “Spirit” is a psychic fact. Just as we distinguish our own bodiliness from bodies that are strange to us, so primitives if they have any notion of “souls” at all distinguish between their own souls and the spirits, which are felt as strange and as “not belonging” ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 293

They [spirits] are objects of outward perception, whereas their own soul (or one of several souls where a plurality is assumed), though believed to be essentially akin to the spirits, is not usually an object of so-called sensible perception. After death the soul (or one of the plurality of souls) becomes a spirit which survives the dead man, and often it shows a marked deterioration of character that partly contradicts the notion of personal immortality ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 293

The Bataks, of Sumatra, go so far as to assert that the people who were good in this life turn into malign and dangerous spirits. Nearly everything that the primitives say about the tricks which the spirits play on the living, and the general picture they give of the revenants, corresponds down to the last detail with the phenomena established by spiritualistic experience ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 293

Just as the communications from the “Beyond” can be seen to be the activities of broken-off bits of the psyche, so these primitive spirits are manifestations of unconscious complexes. The importance that modern psychology attaches to the “parental complex” is a direct continuation of primitive man’s experience of the dangerous power of the ancestral spirits ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 293

Even the error of judgment which leads him unthinkingly to assume that the spirits are realities of the external world is carried on in our assumption (which is only partially correct) that the real parents are responsible for the parental complex. In the old trauma theory of Freudian psychoanalysis, and in other quarters as well, this assumption even passed for a scientific explanation. (It was in order to avoid this confusion that I advocated the term “parental imago”) ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 293

The simple soul is of course quite unaware of the fact that his nearest relations, who exercise immediate influence over him, create in him an image which is only partly a replica of themselves, while its other part is compounded of elements derived from himself. The imago is built up of parental influences plus the specific reactions of the child; it is therefore an image that reflects the object with very considerable qualifications. Naturally, the simple soul believes that his parents are as he sees them ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 294

Nevertheless, the feeling that it “belongs” is not at first sufficiently strong for the complex to be sensed as a subjective content of consciousness. It remains in a sort of no man’s land between conscious and unconscious, in the half-shadow, in part belonging or akin to the conscious subject, in part an autonomous being, and meeting consciousness as such ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 295

At all events it is not necessarily obedient to the subject’s intentions, it may even be of a higher order, more often than not a source of inspiration or warning, or of “supernatural” information ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 295

Psychologically such a content could be explained as a partly autonomous complex that is not yet fully integrated. The archaic souls, the ba and ka of the Egyptians, are complexes of this kind. At a still higher level, and particularly among the civilized peoples of the West, this complex is invariably of the feminine gender anima and psychea fact for which deeper and cogent reasons are not lacking ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 295

She is not of a superior order, either by virtue of age, authority, or physical strength. She is, however, a very influential factor and, like the parents, she produces an imago of a relatively autonomous nature not an imago to be split off like that of the parents, but one that has to be kept associated with consciousness ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 296

Woman, with her very dissimilar psychology, is and always has been a source of information about things for which a man has no eyes. She can be his inspiration; her intuitive capacity, often superior to man’s, can give him timely warning, and her feeling, always directed towards the personal, can show him ways which his own less personally accented feeling would never have discovered ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 296

Here, without a doubt, is one of the main sources for the feminine quality of the soul. But it does not seem to be the only source. No man is so entirely masculine that he has nothing feminine in him. The fact is, rather, that very masculine men have carefully guarded and hidden very soft emotional life, often incorrectly described as “feminine” ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 297

No less naturally, the imago of woman (the soul-image) becomes a receptacle for these demands, which is why a man, in his love-choice, is strongly tempted to win the woman who best corresponds to his own unconscious femininity woman, in short, who can unhesitatingly receive the projection of his soul. Although such a choice is often regarded and felt as altogether ideal, it may turn out that the man has manifestly married his own worse weakness. This would explain some highly remarkable conjunctions ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 297

It is very difficult for a man to distinguish himself from his anima, the more so because she is invisible. Indeed, he has first to contend with the prejudice that everything is coming from inside him springs from the truest depths of his being. The “strong man” will perhaps concede that in private life he is singularly undisciplined, but that, he says, is just his “weakness” with which, as it were, he proclaims his solidarity ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 310

Now there is in this tendency a cultural legacy that is not to be despised; for when a man recognizes that his ideal persona is responsible for his anything but ideal anima, his ideals are shattered, the world becomes ambiguous, he becomes ambiguous even to himself. He is seized by doubts about goodness, and what is worse, he doubts his own good intentions ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 310

Accordingly among primitives we find a large number of rites designed to organize this separation. The mere fact of becoming adult, and of outward separation, is not enough; impressive initiations into the “men’s house” and ceremonies of rebirth are still needed in order to make the separation from the mother (and hence from childhood) entirely effective ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 314

Just as the father acts as a protection against the dangers of the external world and thus serves his son as a model persona, so the mother protects him against the dangers that threaten from the darkness of his psyche. In the puberty rites, therefore, the initiate receives instruction about these things of “the other side,” so that he is put in a position to dispense with his mother’s protection ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 315

The modern civilized man has to forego this primitive but nonetheless admirable system of education. The consequence is that the anima, in the form of the mother-imago, is transferred to the wife; and the man, as soon as he marries, becomes childish, sentimental, dependent, and subservient, or else truculent, tyrannical, hypersensitive, always thinking about the prestige of his superior masculinity. The last is of course merely the reverse of the first ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 316

The safeguard against the unconscious, which is what his mother meant to him, is not replaced by anything in the modern man’s education; unconsciously, therefore, his ideal of marriage is so arranged that his wife has to take over the magical role of the mother. Under the cloak of the ideally exclusive marriage he is really seeking his mother’s protection, and thus he plays into the hands of his wife’s possessive instincts. His fear of the dark incalculable power of the unconscious gives his wife an illegitimate authority over him, and forges such a dangerously close union that the marriage is permanently on the brink of explosion from internal tensioner else, out of protest, he flies to the other extreme, with the same results ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 316

If the good spirits have not utterly forsaken him, he will after a time notice his isolation, and in his loneliness he will begin to understand how he caused the estrangement. Perhaps, aghast at himself, he will ask, “What sort of devil has got into me? “without of course seeing the meaning of this metaphor. Then follow remorse, reconciliation, oblivion, repression, and, in next to no time, a new explosion ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 320

Clearly, the anima is trying to enforce a separation. This tendency is in nobody’s interest. The anima comes between them like a jealous mistress who tries to alienate the man from his family. An official post or any other advantageous social position can do the same thing, but there we can understand the force of the attraction ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 320

Our first thought is that the man of honor is on the lookout for another woman [roving eye]. That might Beit might even be arranged by the anima as the most effective means to the desired end. Such an arrangement should not be misconstrued as an end in itself, for the blameless gentlemen who is correctly married according to the law can be just as correctly divorced according to the law, which does not alter his fundamental attitude one iota. The old picture has merely received a new frame ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 320

As a matter of fact, this arrangement is a very common method of implementing a separation and of hampering a final solution. Therefore it is more reason Carl Jung, CW 7, Para able not to assume that such an obvious possibility is the end-purpose of the separation. We would be better advised to investigate what is behind the tendencies of the anima 321

The first step is what I would call the objectivation of the anima, that is, the strict refusal to regard the trend towards separation as a weakness of one’s own. Only when this has been done can one face the anima with the question, “Why do you want this separation?” To put the question in this personal way has the great advantage of recognizing the anima as a personality, and of making a relationship possible. The more personally she is taken the better ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 321

The form of the world into which he is born is already inborn in him as a virtual image. Likewise parents, wife, children, birth, and death are inborn in him as virtual images, as psychic aptitudes. These a priori categories have by nature a collective character; they are images of parents, wife, and children in general, and are not individual predestinations ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 300

We must therefore think of these virtual images as lacking in solid content, hence as unconscious. They only acquire solidity, influence, and eventual consciousness in the encounter with empirical facts, which touch the unconscious aptitude and quicken it to life. They are in a sense the deposits of all our ancestral experiences, but they are not the experiences themselves ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 300

So at least it seems to us, in the present limited state of our knowledge. (I must confess that I have never yet found infallible evidence for the inheritance of memory images, but I do not regard it as positively precluded that in addition to these collective deposits which contain nothing specifically individual, there may also be inherited memories that are individually determined) ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 300

The “spotless” man of honor and public benefactor, whose tantrums and explosive moodiness terrify his wife and children. What is the anima doing here? ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 319

We can see it at once, if we just allow things to take their natural course. Wife and children will become estranged; a vacuum will form about him. At first he will bewail the hardheartedness of his family, and will behave if possible even more vilely than before. That will make the estrangement absolute ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 320

As a matter of fact, this arrangement is a very common method of implementing a separation and of hampering a final solution. Therefore it is more reasonable not to assume that such an obvious possibility is the end-purpose of the separation. We would be better advised to investigate what is behind the tendencies of the anima ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 321

Starting from the fact that in a state of affect one often surrenders involuntarily to the truths of the other side, would it not be far better to make use of an affect so as to give the other side an opportunity to speak? ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 323

But once it has presented its case, we should begin criticizing as conscientiously as though a real person closely connected with us were or interlocutor ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 323

Nor should the matter rest there, but statement and answer must follow one another until a satisfactory end to the discussion is reached. Whether the result is satisfactory or not, only subjective feeling can decide. Any humbug is of course quite useless. Scrupulous honesty with oneself and no rash anticipation of what the other side might conceivably say are the indispensable conditions of this technique for educating the anima ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 323

We must therefore expect the unconscious of woman to show aspects essentially different from those found in man. If I were to attempt to put in a nutshell the difference between man and woman in this respect, i.e., what it is that characterizes the animus as opposed to the anima, I could only say this: as the anima produces moods, so the animus produces opinions: and as the moods of a man issue from a shadowy background, so the opinions of a woman rest on equally unconscious prior assumptions ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 331

Animus opinions very often have the character of solid convictions that are not lightly shaken, or of principles whose validity is seemingly unassailable. If we analyse these opinions, we immediately come upon unconscious assumptions whose existence must first be inferred; that is to say, the opinions are apparently conceived as though such assumptions existed. But in reality the opinions are not thought out at all; they exist ready made, and they are held so positively and with so much conviction that the woman never has the shadow of a doubt about them ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 331

With regard to the plurality of the animus as distinguished from what we might call the “uni-personality” of the anima, this remarkable fact seems to me to be a correlate of the conscious attitude. The conscious attitude of woman is in general far more exclusively personal than that of man. Her world is made up of fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, husbands and children. The rest of the world consists likewise of families, who nod to each other but are, in the main, interested essentially in themselves ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 338

The man’s world is the nation, the state, business concerns, etc. His family is simply a means to an end, one of the foundations of the state, and his wife is not necessarily the woman for him (at any rate not as the woman means it when she says “my man”). The general means more to him than the personal; his world consists of a multitude of co-ordinated factors, whereas her world, outside her husband, terminates in a sort of cosmic mist. A passionate exclusiveness therefore attaches to the man’s anima, and an indefinite variety to the woman’s animus ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 338

Whereas the man has, floating before him, in clear outlines, the significant form of a Circe or a Calypso, the animus is better expressed as a bevy of Flying Dutchmen or unknown wanderers from over the sea, never quite clearly grasped, protean, given to persistent and violent motion. These personifications appear especially in dreams, though in concrete reality they can be famous tenors, boxing champions, or great men in far-away, unknown cities ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 338

These two crepuscular figures of the dark hinterland of the psyche truly the semi-grotesque “guardians of the threshold,” to use the pompous jargon of theosophy can assume an almost inexhaustible number of shapes, enough to fill whole volumes. Their complicated transformations are as rich and strange as the world itself, as manifold as the limitless variety of their conscious correlate, the persona. They inhabit the twilight sphere, and we can just make out that the autonomous complex of anima and animus is essentially a psychological function that has usurped, or rather retained, a “personality” only because this function is itself autonomous and undeveloped ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 339

But already we can see how it is possible to break up the personifications, since by making them conscious we convert them into bridges to the unconscious ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 339

It is because we are not using them purposefully as functions that they remain personified complexes. So long as they are in this state they must be accepted as relatively independent personalities ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 339

They cannot be integrated into consciousness while their contents remain unknown. The purpose of the dialectical process is to bring these contents into the light; and only when this task has been completed, and the conscious mind has become sufficiently familiar with the unconscious processes reflected in the anima, will the anima be felt simply as a function ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 339

Psychic abnormalities then develop, states of possession ranging in degree from ordinary moods and “ideas” to psychoses. All these states are characterized by one and the same fact that an unknown “something” has taken possession of a smaller or greater portion of the psyche and asserts its hateful and harmful existence undeterred by all our insight, reason, and energy, thereby proclaiming the power of the unconscious over the conscious mind, the sovereign power of possession. In this state the possessed part of the psyche generally develops an animus or anima psychology. The woman’s incubus consists of a host of masculine demons; the man’s succubus is a vampire ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 370

This particular concept of a soul which, according to the conscious attitude, either exists by itself or disappears in a function, has, as anyone can see, not the remotest connection with the Christian concept of the soul ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 371

One would be inclined to suppose that the animus, like the anima, personifies itself in a single figure, But this, as experience shows, is true only up to a point, because another factor unexpectedly makes its appearance, which brings about an essentially different situation from that existing in man ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 332

The animus does not appear as one person, but as a plurality of persons. In H. G. Wells’ novel Christina Alberta’s Father, the heroine, in all that she does or does not do, is constantly under the surveillance of a supreme moral authority, which tells her with remorseless precision and dry matter-of-factness what she is doing and for what motives ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 332

Wells calls this authority a “Court of Conscience.” This collection of condemnatory judges, a sort of College of Preceptors, corresponds to a personification of the animus. The animus is rather like an assembly of fathers or dignitaries of some kind who lay down incontestable, “rational,” ex cathedra judgments ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 332

On closer examination these exacting judgments turn out to be largely sayings and opinions scraped together more or less unconsciously from childhood on, and compressed into a canon of average truth, justice, and reasonableness, a compendium of preconceptions which, whenever a conscious and competent judgment is lacking (as not infrequently happens) instantly obliges with an opinion. Sometimes these opinions take the form of so-called sound common sense, sometimes they appear as principles which are like a travesty of education: “People have always done it like this,” or “Everybody says it is like that” ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 332

It goes without saying that the animus is just as often projected as the anima. The men who are particularly suited to these projections are either walking replicas of God himself, who know all about everything, or else they are misunderstood word-addicts with a vast and windy vocabulary at their command, who translate common or garden reality into the terminology of the sublime ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 333

Like the anima, the animus is a jealous lover. He is an adept at putting, in place of the real man, an opinion about him, the exceedingly disputable grounds for which are never submitted to criticism. Animus opinions are invariably collective, and they override individuals and individual judgments in exactly the same way as the anima thrusts her emotional anticipations and projections between man and wife ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 334

If the woman happens to be pretty, these animus opinions have for the man something rather touching and childlike about them, which makes him adopt a benevolent, fatherly, professorial manner. But if the woman does not stir his sentimental side, and competence is expected of her rather than appealing helplessness and stupidity, then her animus opinions irritate the man to death, chiefly because they are based on nothing but opinion for opinion’s sake, and “everybody has a right to his own opinions.” Men can be pretty venomous here, for it is an inescapable fact that the animus always plays up the anima and vice versa, of courses that all further discussion becomes pointless ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 334

In intellectual women the animus encourages a critical disputatiousness and would-be highbrowism, which, however, consists essentially in harping on some irrelevant weak point and nonsensically making it the main one. Or a perfectly lucid discussion gets tangled up in the most maddening way through the introduction of a quite different and if possible perverse point of view ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 335

However, all these traits, as familiar as they are unsavory, are simply and solely due to the extraversion of the animus. The animus does not belong to the function of conscious relationship; his function is rather to facilitate relations with the unconscious. Instead of the woman merely associating opinions with external situations which she ought to think about consciously the animus, as an associative function, should be directed inwards, where it could associate the contents of the unconscious ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 336

Just as a man brings forth his work as a complete creation out of his inner feminine nature, so the inner masculine side of a woman brings forth creative seeds which have the power to fertilize the feminine side of the man. This would be the femme inspiratrice who, if falsely cultivated, can turn into the worst kind of dogmatist and high-handed pedagogue regular “animus hound,” as one of my women patients aptly expressed it ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 336

A woman possessed by the animus is always in danger of losing her femininity, her adapted feminine persona, just as a man in like circumstances runs the risk of effeminacy. These psychic changes of sex are due entirely to the fact that a function which belongs inside has been turned outside. The reason for this perversion is clearly the failure to give adequate recognition to an inner world which stands autonomously opposed to the outer world, and makes just as serious demands on our capacity for adaptation ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 337

We can try our hand at interpreting these fantasies, if we like. In many cases it may be quite important for the patient to have some idea of the meaning of the fantasies produced. But it is of vital importance that he should experience them to the full and, in so far as intellectual understanding belongs to the totality of experience, also understand them ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 342

Yet I would not give priority to understanding. Naturally the doctor must be able to assist the patient in his understanding, but, since he will not and indeed cannot understand everything, the doctor should assiduously guard against clever feats of interpretation. For the important thing is not to interpret and understand the fantasies, but primarily to experience them ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 342

Alfred Kubin has described what he, as an artist, experienced of the unconscious. It is an artistic experience which, in the deeper meaning of human experience, is incomplete. The vision is experienced artistically, but not humanly. By “human” experience I mean that the person of the author should not just be included passively in the vision, but that he should face the figures of the vision actively and reactively, with full consciousness. But a real settlement with the unconscious demands a firmly opposed conscious standpoint ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 342

Not only is it [individuation] desirable, it is absolutely indispensable because, through his [the individual’s] contamination with others, he falls into situations and commits actions which bring him into disharmony with himself. From all states of unconscious contamination and non-differentiation there is begotten a compulsion to be and to act in a way contrary to one’s own nature ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 373

Accordingly a man can neither be at one with himself nor accept responsibility for himself. He feels himself to be in a degrading, unfree, unethical condition. But the disharmony with himself is precisely the neurotic and intolerable condition from which he seeks to be delivered, and deliverance from this condition will come only when he can be and act as he feels is conformable with his true Self ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 373

People have a feeling for these things, dim and uncertain at first, but growing ever stronger and clearer with progressive development. When a man can say of his states and actions, “As I am, so I act,” he can be at one with himself, even though it be difficult, and he can accept responsibility for himself even though he struggles against it. We must recognize that nothing is more difficult to bear with than oneself. (“You sought the heaviest burden, and found yourself,” says Nietzsche.) Yet even this most difficult of achievements becomes possible if we can distinguish ourselves from the unconscious contents ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 373

With the attainment of this goal [the conquest of the anima] it becomes possible to disengage the ego from all its entanglements with collectivity and the collective unconscious. Through this process the anima forfeits the daemonic power of an autonomous complex; she can no longer exercise the power of possession, since she is depotentiated. She is no longer the guardian of treasures unknown; no longer Kundry, daemonic Messenger of the Grail, half divine and half animal; no longer is the soul to be called “Mistress,” but a psychological function of an intuitive nature, akin to what the primitives mean when they say, “He has gone into the forest to talk with the spirits” or “My snake spoke with me” or, in the mythological language of infancy, “A little bird told me” ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 374

Those of my readers who know Rider Haggard’s description of “She-who-must-be-obeyed” will surely recall the magical power of this personality. “She” is a mana-personality, a being full of some occult and bewitching quality (mana), endowed with magical knowledge and power. All these attributes naturally have their source in the naïve projection of an unconscious self-knowledge which, expressed in less poetic terms, would run somewhat as follows: “I recognize that there is some psychic factor active in me which eludes my conscious will in the most incredible manner. It can put extraordinary ideas into my head, induce in me unwanted and unwelcome moods and emotions, lead me to astonishing actions for which I can accept no responsibility, upset my relations with other people in a very irritating way, etc. I feel powerless against this fact and, what is worse, I am in love with it, so that all I can do is marvel,” (Poets often call this the “artistic temperament,” unpoetical folk excuse themselves in other ways) ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 375

Well then: who is it that has integrated the anima? Obviously the conscious ego, and therefore the ego has taken over the mana. Thus the ego becomes a mana-personality. But the mana-personality is a dominant of the collective unconscious, the well-known archetype of the mighty man in the form of hero, chief, magician, medicine-man, saint, the ruler of men and spirits, the friend of God ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 377

This masculine collective figure who now rises out of the dark background and takes possession of the conscious personality entails a psychic danger of a subtle nature, for by inflating the conscious mind it can destroy everything that was gained by coming to terms with the anima. It is therefore of no little practical importance to know that in the hierarchy of the unconscious the anima occupies the lowest rank, only one of many possible figures, and that her subjection constellates another collective figure which now takes over her mana ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 378

Actually it is the figure of the magician, as I will call it for short, who attracts the mana to himself, i.e., the autonomous valency of the anima. Only in so far as I unconsciously identify with his figure can I imagine that I myself possess the anima’s mana. But I will infallibly do so under these circumstances ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 378

The figure of the magician has a no less dangerous equivalent in women: a sublime, matriarchal figure, the Great Mother, the All-Merciful, who understands everything, forgives everything, who always acts for the best, living only for others and never seeking her own interests, the discoverer of the great love, just as the magician is the mouthpiece of the ultimate truth. And just as the great love is never appreciated, so the great wisdom is never understood. Neither, of course, can stand the sight of the other ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 379

Here is cause for serious misunderstanding, for without a doubt it is a question of inflation. The ego has appropriated something that does not belong to it. But how has it appropriated the mana? If it was really the ego that conquered the anima, then the mana does indeed belong to it, and it would be correct to conclude that one has become important. But why does not this importance, the mana, work upon others? That would surely be an essential criterion! It does not work because one has not in fact become important, but merely become adulterated with an archetype, another unconscious figure ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 380

Hence we must conclude that the ego never conquered the anima at all and therefore has not acquired the mana. All that has happened is a new adulteration, this time with a figure of the same sex corresponding to the father-imago, and possessed of even greater power. From the power that binds all creatures none is free. Except the man who wins self-mastery. ( Goethe, “Die Geheimnisse: Ein Fragment,” lines 191-192 ). Thus he becomes a superman, superior to all powers, a demigod at the very least. “I and the Father are one “this mighty avowal in all its awful ambiguity is born of just such a psychological moment ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 380

In the face of this, our pitiable limited ego, if it has but a spark of self-knowledge, can only draw back and rapidly drop all pretence of power and importance. It was a delusion: the conscious mind has not become master of the unconscious, and the anima has forfeited her tyrannical power only to the extent that the ego was able to come to terms with the unconscious. This accommodation, however, was not a victory of the conscious over the unconscious, but the establishment of a balance of power between the two worlds ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 381

Who or what becomes mana when even the magician can no longer work magic? So far we only know that neither the conscious nor the unconscious has mana, for it is certain that when the ego makes no claim to power there is no possession, that is to say, the unconscious too loses its ascendency. In this situation the mana must have fallen to something that is both conscious and unconscious, or else neither. This something is the desired “midpoint” of the personality, that ineffable something betwixt the opposites, or else that which unites them, or the result of conflict, or the product of energic tension: the coming to birth of personality, a profoundly individual step forward, the next stage ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 382

All primitive groups and tribes that are in any way organized have their rites of initiation, often very highly developed, which play an extraordinarily important part in their social and religious life. Through these ceremonies boys are made men, and girls women. The Kavirondos stigmatize those who do not submit to circumcision and excision as “animals.” This shows that the initiation ceremonies are a magical means of leading man from the animal state to the human state. They are clearly transformation mysteries of the greatest spiritual significance ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 384

Very often the initiands are subjected to excruciating treatment, and at the same time the tribal mysteries are imparted to them, the laws and hierarchy of the tribe on the one hand, and on the other the cosmogonic and mythical doctrines ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 384

Initiations have survived among all cultures. In Greece the ancient Eleusinian mysteries were preserved, it seems, right into the seventh century of our era. Rome was flooded with mystery religions. Of these Christianity was one, and even in its present form it still preserves the old initiation ceremonies, somewhat faded and degenerated, in the rites of baptism, confirmation, and communion. Hence nobody is in a position to deny the enormous historical importance of initiations ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 384

Modern men have absolutely nothing to compare with this (consider the testimonies of the ancients in regard to the Eleusinian mysteries). Freemasonry, l’Église gnostique de la France, legendary Rosicrucians, theosophy, and so forth are all feeble substitutes for something that were better marked up in red letters on the historical casualty list ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 385

The point is not cannot be too emphatic about this whether the initiation symbols are objective truths, but whether these unconscious contents are or are not the equivalents of initiation practices, and whether they do or do not influence the human psyche. Nor is it a question of whether they are desirable or not. It is enough that they exist and that they work ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 385

I have called this center the Self. Intellectually the Self is no more than a psychological concept, a construct that serves to express an unknowable essence which we cannot grasp as such, since by definition it transcends our powers of comprehension. It might equally well be called the “God within us.” The beginnings of our whole psychic life seem to be inextricably rooted in this point, and all our highest and ultimate purposes seem to be striving towards it. This paradox is unavoidable, as always, when we try to define something that lies beyond the bourn [limit] of our understanding ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 399

The Self, as an inclusive term that embraces our whole living organism, not only contains the deposit and totality of all past life, but is also a point of departure, the fertile soil from which all future life will spring. This premonition of futurity is as clearly impressed upon our innermost feelings as is the historical aspect. The idea of immortality follows legitimately from these psychological premises ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 303

Sensing the Self as something irrational, as an indefinable existent, to which the ego is neither opposed nor subjected, but merely attached, and about which it revolves very much as the earth revolves round the sun thus we come to the goal of individuation. I use the word “sensing” in order to indicate the apperceptive character of the relation between ego and Self. In this relation nothing is knowable, because we can say nothing about the contents of the Self ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 405

The ego is the only content of the Self that we do know. The individuated ego senses itself as the object of an unknown and superordinate subject. It seems to me that our psychological inquiry must come to a stop here, for the idea of a Self is itself a transcendental postulate which, although justifiable psychologically, does not allow of scientific proof ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 405

At the very least, therefore, the Self can claim the value of an hypothesis analogous to that of the structure of the atom. And even though we should once again be enmeshed in an image, it is none the less powerfully alive, and its interpretation quite exceeds my powers. I have no doubt at all that it is an image, but one in which we are contained ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 405

A second wave of Dionysian licentiousness swept over the West at the Renaissance. It is difficult to gauge the spirit of one’s own time; but, if we observe the trend of art, of style, and of public taste, and see what people read and write, what sort of societies they found, what “questions” are the order of the day, what the Philistines fight against, we shall find that in the long catalogue of our present social questions by no means the last is the so-called “sexual question” ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 427

These are satisfactions which the factory workers and office employees do not know and can never enjoy. What do these know of his life with nature, of those grand moments when, as lord and fructifier of the earth, he drives his plough through the soil, and with a kingly gesture scatters the seed for the future harvest ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 428

What do they know of his rightful fear of the destructive power of the elements, of his joy in the fruitfulness of his wife who bears him the daughters and sons who mean increased working-power and prosperity? ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 428

From all this we city-dwellers, we modern machine-minders, are far removed. Is not the fairest and most natural of all satisfactions beginning to fail us, when we can no longer regard with unmixed joy the harvest of our own sowing, the “blessing” of children? Can such a state of affairs bring satisfaction? ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 428

Man possesses in the unconscious a fine flair for the spirit of his time; he divines his possibilities and feels in his heart the instability of present-day morality, no longer supported by living religious conviction. Here is the source of most of our [erotic] conflicts. The urge to freedom beats upon the weakening barriers of morality: we are in a state of temptation, we want and do not want. And because we want and yet cannot think out what it is we really want, the [erotic] conflict is largely unconscious, and thence comes neurosis ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 430

Neurosis, therefore is intimately bound up with the problem of our time and really represents an unsuccessful attempt on the part of the individual to solve the general problem in his own person. Neurosis is self-division. In most people the cause of the division is that the conscious mind wants to hang on to its moral ideal, while the unconscious strives after its in the contemporary sense unmoral ideal which the conscious mind [steadfastly] tries to deny ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 430

Hypnotism: an interrogation in a state of hypnotic concentration or else the spontaneous production of fantasies by the patient while in this state method, however, too primitive and therefore unsatisfactory ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 432

Word association method: a procedure primarily of theoretical and experimental value, its results giving a comprehensive though superficial grasp of the unconscious conflict or “complex” ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 432

Dream analysis: a third method to discover what is happening in the unconscious more penetrating and effective technique than hypnotism or the association method ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 432

We always find in the patient a conflict which at a certain point is connected with the great problems of society. Hence, when the analysis is pushed to this point, the apparently individual conflict of the patient is revealed as a universal conflict of his environment and epoch ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 438

Neurosis is thus nothing less than an individual attempt, however unsuccessful, to solve a universal problem; indeed it cannot be otherwise, for a general problem, a “question,” is not an ens per se, but exists only in the hearts of individuals ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 438

“The question” that troubles the patient is whether you like it or not the “sexual” question, or more precisely, the problem of present-day sexual morality. His increased demand for life and the joy of life, for glowing reality, can stand the necessary limitations that reality itself imposes, but not the arbitrary, ill-supported prohibitions of present-day morality, which would curb too much the creative spirit rising up from the depths of the animal darkness ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 438

The neurotic has the soul of a child who bears ill with arbitrary restrictions whose meaning he does not see; he tries to make this morality his own, but falls into profound division and disunity with himself: one side of him wants to suppress, the other longs to be freehand this struggle goes by the name of neurosis ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 438

Were the conflict clearly conscious in all its parts, it would never give rise to neurotic symptoms; these occur only when we cannot see the other side of our nature and the urgency of its problems. Only under these conditions does the symptom appear, and it helps to give expression to the unrecognized side of the psyche. The symptom is therefore an indirect expression of unrecognized desires which, when conscious, come into violent conflict with our moral convictions ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 438

This [childish] apprehension shows how little trust we place in the efficacy of our moral principles. People pretend that only morality holds men back from unbridled licence ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 439

But a much more effective regulator is necessity, which sets bounds far more real and persuasive than any moral precepts. It is true that analysis liberates the animal instincts, though not, as many would have it, with a view to giving them unbridled power, but rather to put them to higher uses, so far as this is possible for the individual concerned and so far as he requires such “sublimation” ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 439

It is under all circumstances an advantage to be in full possession of one’s personality, otherwise the repressed portions of the personality will only crop up as a hindrance elsewhere, not just at some unimportant point, but at the very spot where we are most sensitive: this worm always rots the core ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 439

It is precisely the strongest and the best among men, the heroes, who give way to their regressive longing and purposely expose themselves to the danger of being devoured by the monster of the maternal abyss. But if a man is a hero, he is a hero because, in the final reckoning, he did not let the monster devour him, but subdued it, not once but many times ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 477

The essence of hermeneutics, an art widely practised in former times, consists in adding further analogies to the one already supplied by the symbol: in the first place subjective analogies produced at random by the patient, then objective analogies provided by the analyst out of his general knowledge ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 493

This procedure widens and enriches the initial symbol, and the final outcome is an infinitely complex and variegated picture the elements of which can be reduced to their respective tertian comparationis. Certain lines of psychological development then stand out that are at once individual and collective. There is no science on earth by which these lines could be proved “right” ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 493

I am persuaded that the true end of analysis is reached when the patient has gained an adequate knowledge of the methods by which he can maintain contact with the unconscious, and has acquired a psychological understanding sufficient for him to discern the direction of his life-line at the moment. Without this his conscious mind will not be able to follow the currents of libido and consciously sustain the individuality he has achieved. A patient who has had any serious neurosis needs to be equipped in this way if he is to persevere in his cure ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 501

I would like to present the reader with another fantasy-fragment from a woman. The difference from the previous example leaps to the eye: here the experience is total, the observer takes an active part and thus makes the process her own. The material in this case is very extensive, culminating in a profound transformation of personality. The fragment comes from a late phase of personal development and is an organic part of a long and continuous series of transformations which have as their goal the attainment of the mid-point of the personality ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 364

It may not be immediately apparent what is meant by a “mid-point of the personality.” I will therefore try to outline this problem in a few words. If we picture the conscious mind, with the ego as its center, as being opposed to the unconscious, and if we now add to our mental picture the process of assimilating the unconscious, we can think of this assimilation as a kind of approximation of conscious and unconscious, where the center of the total personality no longer coincides with the ego, but with a point midway between the conscious and the unconscious. This would be the point of new equilibrium, a new centering of the total personality, a virtual center which, on account of its focal position between conscious and unconscious, ensures for the personality a new and more solid foundation ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 365

At all events the unprejudiced reader will recognize at once the idea of a “mid-point” that is reached by a kind of climb (mountaineering, effort, struggle, etc.) ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 367

He will also recognize without difficulty the famous medieval conundrum of the squaring of the circle, which belongs to the field of alchemy. Here it takes its rightful place as a symbol of individuation ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 367

The total personality is indicated by the four cardinal points, the four gods, i.e., the four functions which give bearings in psychic space, and also by the circle enclosing the whole ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 367

Overcoming the four gods who threaten to smother the individual signifies liberation from identification with the four functions, a fourfold nirdvandva (“free from opposites”) followed by an approximation to the circle, to undivided wholeness ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 367

Through her active participation the patient merges herself in the unconscious processes, and she gains possession of them by allowing them to possess her. In this way she joins the conscious to the unconscious. The result is ascension in the flame, transmutation in the alchemical heat, the genesis of the “subtle spirit.” That is the transcendent function born of the union of opposites ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 368

The dream presents itself to us as a more or less unintelligible jumble of elements not at first conscious and only recognized afterwards through their associations. It should be added that not all parts of the dream have a recognizable quality from which their conscious character can be deduced; they are often, and indeed mostly, unrecognizable at first. Only afterwards does it occur to us that we have consciously experienced this or that part of the dream. From this standpoint alone we may regard the dream as a product of unconscious origin ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 324

A second wave of Dionysian licentiousness swept over the West at the Renaissance. It is difficult to gauge the spirit of one’s own time; but in the succession of revolutionary questions to which the last half century gave birth, there was the “sexual question,” and this has fathered a whole new species of literature. In this “movement” are rooted the beginnings of psychoanalysis, on whose theories it exerted a very one-sided influence ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 17

Carl Jung Depth Psychology

For Educational Purposes Only

Carl Jung: CW 7 “Two Essays on Analytical Psychology” – Quotations

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