Some Carl Jung Quotations

I was expected, Jung explained, never under any circumstances to allow myself to be irritated by his anger, nor by his occasional “grumbling,” his roarings and cursings! ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 102.

Jung’s health and vitality had been weakened by an attack of amoebic dysentery in India in 1938, and a severe cardiac infarct in 1944 was the next blow life dealt him. “It was then that life busted me, as sometimes it busts everyone!” ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 99.

The fatal illness of his wife Emma-she died in November 1955 -marked the time when his life was nearing its end. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 100.

When I took up my duties with Jung I had known him for about twenty years-my analysis with him began in 1937, a few months before he went to India. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 100.

Respect for life also characterized Jung’s analytical work. Worried or depressed patients hoped in vain for exhortation or comfort. Jung gave them something else: he wanted to get them to integrate the necessary suffering to their life. To soothe it away or exclude it would rob them of a vital experience, while the core of the depression would remain and soon enough provoke new suffering. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 103.

Any kind of “joyful Christianity” or sentimental prettification exasperated Jung to the limit. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 104.

Usually he enjoyed a wonderful, deep sleep, and plenty of it, the result not only of his good constitution but of his close and positive relationship with the unconscious. Sleep was the source of his psychic strength. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 105.

Jung was a good Swiss citizen. Nothing but illness could prevent him from casting his vote, even in old age, and every Swiss knows the sense of responsibility and consciousness of duty this entails. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 108.

Foreign newspapers came into the house on days of political crisis; and magazines, especially the English Listener and the American National Geographic Magazine and
the Atlantic Monthly, satisfied his need for information on political and other matters. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 108.

As a student he had to get his money, or at least part of it, from the sale of antiques belonging to a relative. Jung knew what poverty was. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 109.

But there was something else too: objects possessed for Jung, a meaning in themselves, so they had to be treated with special care. “Things take their revenge!” he once hurled threateningly at my head when I had mislaid or botched something-I no longer remember what. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 109.

For anyone like Jung, who devoted so much care and attention to them, objects began to animate themselves, living a life of their own. They would start talking, and communicate things that remain hidden from others. Objects are not always inert; sometimes they seem to join in the game of life, to reflect the mood and thoughts of people. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 109.

“‘You should make friends again with the nearest things,’ said Nietzsche and didn’t. He was wafted away on the great wind, drunk with his own words. Even things, thanks to the meaning immanent in them, answer us as we address them. They are socially minded and afford us delightful company in hours and days of loneliness.” ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 110.

Nobody enjoyed laughing as much as Jung; nobody made others laugh as he could. After the death of his wife his laughter became rarer and quieter. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 113.

His impatience was due not only to his temperament-astrologically he was a Leo- but also to his extreme sensitivity, which both enriched and burdened his life. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 114.

But then he became serious and began telling me about himself and the sensitiveness that had tormented him from early youth, how it had encumbered him in his relationships and made him unsure of himself, how ashamed it had made him feel, but how, because of this same impressionability, he had perceived beauties and experienced things other people scarcely dreamed of. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 115.

But whenever a concert pianist gave a recital on the grand piano at the house in Kushnacht-the last one was the Russian- Ania Dorfmann- he was impressed by Jung’s genuine feeling for music. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 116.

Once when in a consultation I wanted to tell him about my relation to my parents-the piece de resistance of a classic analysis-he wouldn’t let me get a word out. “Don’t waste your time! Anyway I know a person’s relation to his parents at first glance!” ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 116.

Burning letters in the beautiful old stove with green tiles which stood in his library was a solemn and at the same time cheerful occasion. Once, with the fire roaring, he smote the side of the stove with the flat of his hand, as though clapping an old friend on the shoulder, and remarked, laughing: “This fellow is my discretion!” ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 117.

That he could still remember the dreams of his earliest childhood when he was well over eighty is astonishing enough. After he had recounted them for the memoirs, notes of the same dream were found which he had written some forty years earlier, and they differed in not a single detail from the spoken versions. Sometimes even the wording was nearly the same. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 118.