I was the first to raise the question of the relation between psychotherapy and religion
Letters Volume II
To the Rev. Kenneth Gordon Lafleur
Dear Sir, 11 June 1960
Thank you very much for your friendly letter.
I am glad to know that my ideas met an echo in yourself.
One sentence in your letter has puzzled me.
You write:
“I hope that you will not be too discouraged concerning the possibility of religion’s part in the necessary process of individuation of personality.”
I don’t see where you get the impression that I might be discouraged in this respect, since I was the first to emphasize the enormous role religion plays particularly in the individuation process, as I was the first to raise the question of the relation between psychotherapy and religion in its practical aspects.
I should hardly risk all these misunderstandings if I had been discouraged.
I can tell you moreover that it needed some courage to deal with the religious question at all.
I should appreciate it therefore all the more if you could kindly enlighten me about the meaning of the sentence quoted above.
Yours sincerely,
C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 566
Carl Jung Depth Psychology Blog
In sleep, fantasy takes the form of dreams. But in waking life, too, we continue to dream beneath the thresh- old of consciousness, especially when under the influence of repressed or other unconscious complexes. ~Carl Jung; “Problems of Modern Psychotherapy” (1929). In CW 16: The Practice of Psychotherapy; Page 125.
The dream shows the inner truth and reality of the patient as it really is: not as I conjecture it to be, and not as he would like it to be, but as it is. Carl Jung; “The Practical Use of Dream Analysis” (1934). In CW 16: The Practice of Psychotherapy; Page 304.
The dream is specifically the utterance of the unconscious. Just as the psyche has a diurnal side which we call consciousness, so also it has a nocturnal side: the unconscious psychic activity which we apprehend as dreamlike fantasy. Carl Jung; “The Practical Use of Dream Analysis” (1934). In CW 16: The Practice of Psychotherapy; Page 317.
The unconscious is not a demoniacal monster, but a natural entity which, as far as moral sense, aesthetic taste, and intellectual judgment go, is completely neutral. It only becomes dangerous when our conscious attitude to it is hopelessly wrong. To the degree that we repress it, its danger increases. Carl Jung; The Practical Use of Dream Analysis; CW 16: The Practice of Psychotherapy; Page 329.
The unconscious is not just evil by nature, it is also the source of the highest good: not only dark but also light, not only bestial, semihuman, and demonic but superhuman, spiritual, and, in the classical sense of the word, “divine.” Carl Jung; The Practice of Psychotherapy; Page 364.
For two personalities to meet is like mixing two chemical substances: if there is any combination at all, both are transformed. Carl Jung, CW 18, The Practice of Psychotherapy, Para 163.
To be “normal” is the ideal aim for the unsuccessful, for all those who are still below the general level of adaptation. But for people of more than average ability, people who never found it difficult to gain successes and to accomplish their share of the world’s work-for them the moral compulsion to be nothing but normal signifies the bed of Procrustes-deadly and insupportable boredom, a hell of sterility and hopelessness. Carl Jung; CW 16: The Practice of Psychotherapy; P. 161.
Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain.” Carl Jung, CW 16, The Practice of Psychotherapy, Para 181.
To be “normal” is the ideal aim for the unsuccessful, for all those who are still below the general level of adaptation. Carl Jung, The Practice of Psychotherapy, Page 69.
Our civilization is still young, and young civilizations need all the arts of the animal-tamer to make the defiant barbarian and the savage in us more or less tractable. Carl Jung, The Practice of Psychotherapy, Page 75.
Hence, unless we prefer to be made fools of by our illusions, we shall, by carefully analyzing every fascination, extract from it a portion of our own personality, like a quintessence, and slowly come to recognize that we meet ourselves time an d again in a thousand disguises on the path of life. Carl Jung, The Practice of Psychotherapy, Page 316.
