Carl Jung on how to look upon our “Thoughts.”
Philemon and other figures of my fantasies brought home to me the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life.
Philemon represented a force which was not myself.
In my fantasies I held conversations with him, and he said things which I had not consciously thought.
For I observed clearly that it was he who spoke, not I.
He said I treated thoughts as if I generated them myself, but in his view thoughts were like animals in the forest, or people in a room, or birds in the air, and added,
“If you should see people in a room, you would not think that you had made those people, or that you were responsible for them.”
It was he who taught me psychic objectivity, the reality of the psyche.
Through him the distinction was clarified between myself and the object of my thought.
He confronted me in an objective manner, and I understood that there is something in me which can say things that I do not know and do not intend, things which may even be directed against me. ~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections, Page 183.
Only then I learned psychological objectivity.
Only then could I say to a patient, ‘Be quiet, something is happening.?
There are such things as mice in a house.
You cannot say you are wrong when you have a thought.
For the understanding of the unconscious we must see our thoughts as events, as phenomena. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 249, Footnote 188.