Carl Jung on “Revenge” – Anthology
Revenge is human. God does not know revenge. He knows only power and creation. He commands and you act. Your anxieties are laughable, there is only one road, the military road of the Godhead. ~The Dead One, The Black Books, Vol. V, Page 252
There are cases where it is better not to interfere; we must fulfil our duty as doctors, but the fact remains that some people are not meant to be cured, they are not fitted for life and if you step in and interfere fate always takes its revenge on you. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Page 27.
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.
It can also have the nuance of `lasciviousness.’ St. Augustine aptly defines libido as a “general term for all desire” and says: There is a lust for revenge, which is called rage; a lust for having money, which is called avarice; a lust for victory at all costs, which is called stubbornness; a lust for self-glorification, which is called boastfulness. There are many and varied kinds of lust (De Civitate Dei, XIV, xv.) ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 186
From this account of the Creation we learn that Ea, the son of the watery deep and god of wisdom, has overthrown Apsu. Apsu is the progenitor of the great gods, so Ea has conquered the father. But Tiamat, the mother of the gods, plots revenge, and arrays herself for battle against them ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 375
The extraverted intuitive exempts himself from the restrictions of reason only to fall victim to neurotic compulsions in the form of over-subtle ratiocinations, hairsplitting dialectics, and a compulsive tie to the sensation aroused by the object. His conscious attitude towards both sensation and object is one of ruthless superiority. Not that he means to be ruthless or superior he simply does not see the object that everyone else sees and rides roughshod over it, just as the sensation type has no eyes for its soul. But sooner or later the object takes revenge in the form of compulsive hypochondriacal ideas, phobias, and every imaginable kind of absurd bodily sensation ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 615
But the moon can equally well be the injured brother of the sun, for at night affect-laden and evil thoughts of power and revenge may disturb sleep. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 330
Experience shows that the archetype, as a natural phenomenon, has a morally ambivalent character, or rather, it possesses no moral quality in itself but is amoral, like the Yahwistic God-image, and acquires moral qualities only through the act of cognition. Thus Yahweh is both just and unjust, kindly and cruel, truthful and deceitful.
This is eminently true of the archetype as well. That is why the primitive form of conscience is paradoxical: to burn a heretic is on the one hand a pious and meritorious act as John Hus himself ironically recognized when, bound to the stake, he espied an old woman hobbling towards him with a bundle of faggots, and exclaimed, “0 sancta simplicitas!” and on the other hand a brutal manifestation of ruthless and savage lust for revenge. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 846
This lost bit of nature seeks revenge and returns in faked, distorted form, for instance as a tango epidemic, as Futurism, Dadaism, and all the other crazes and crudities in which our age abounds ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 44
The primitive form of conscience is paradoxical to burn a heretic is on the one hand a pious and meritorious act as John Hus himself ironically recognized when, bound to the stake, he espied an old woman hobbling towards him with a bundle of faggots, and exclaimed, “O sancta simplicitas!”— and on the other hand a brutal manifestation of ruthless and savage lust for revenge, ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 845
What this child seemed to feel most was the unconscious of her father. If a man has no real relations with his wife, then obviously he seeks another outlet. And if he is not conscious of what he is seeking, or if he represses fantasies of that kind, his interest will regress on the one side to the memory-image of his mother, and on the other side it invariably fastens on his daughter, if there is one. This is what might be called unconscious incest.
You can hardly hold a man responsible for his unconsciousness, but the fact remains that in this matter nature knows neither patience nor pity and takes her revenge directly or indirectly through illness and unlucky accidents of all kinds. Unfortunately, it is almost a collective ideal for men and women to be as unconscious as possible in the ticklish affairs of love.
But behind the mask of respectability and faithfulness the full fury of neglected love falls upon the children. You cannot blame the ordinary individual, as you cannot expect people to know the attitude they ought to adopt and how they are to solve their love problems within the framework of present-day ideals and conventions. Mostly they know only the negative measures of negligence, procrastination, suppression, and repression. And to know of anything better is admittedly very difficult ~Carl Jung, CW 17, Para 218
You experience sometimes what you call “pathological” emotions, and there you observe most peculiar contents coming through as emotion: thoughts you have never thought before, sometimes terrible thoughts and fantasies. For instance, some people when they are very angry, instead of having the ordinary feelings of revenge and so on, have the most terrific fantasies of committing murder, cutting off the arms and legs of the enemy, and such things. Those are invading fragments of the unconscious, and if you take a fully developed pathological
it is really a state of eclipse of consciousness when people are raving mad for a while and do perfectly crazy things. That is an invasion. That would be a pathological case, but fantasies of this kind can also occur within the limits of normal. I have heard innocent people say, “I could cut him limb from limb,” and they actually do have these bloody fantasies; they would “smash the brains” of people, they imagine doing what in cold blood is merely said as a metaphor. When these fantasies get vivid and people are afraid of themselves, you speak of invasion ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 65
My mind is torn to its very depths. I, who had to be a tower of strength for many weak people, am the weakest of all. Will you forgive me for being as I am? For offending you by being like this, and forgetting my duties as a doctor towards you? Will you understand that I am one of the weakest and most unstable of human beings? And will you never take revenge on me for that, either in words, or in thoughts or feelings? ~Carl Jung to Sabina Spielrein, December 4, 1908
Onkel [Jung] said that one cannot always tell Linda [Fierz-David] the truth, that her annoyance with people who are ill is a revenge she takes because she had tuberculosis once and had had to spend years in Davos. ~Katy Cabot, Jung My Mother and I, Page 274
The way forward, as I see it, is certainly as hard as it is dangerous. I actually fear that all our repressed instincts, all our desires for power and revenge, all our mindlessness and hidden brutality will be realized here. Indeed the ongoing development of the Jews failed precisely because, on the one hand, they were united in a collective-religious bond and, on the other, they were under pressure from other nations as individuals. After the emancipation they caught up unnaturally quickly and powerfully with the Western trend toward the individual (secularization, rationalization, extraversion, the break with the continuity of the past). ~Erich Neumann, Life and Work of Erich Neumann, Page 124
On April 14, 1918, Jung wrote to Josef Lang regarding a letter he had received from Moltzer in which she had accused him of trying to destroy her relationship with Lang in a “thirst for revenge.” ~The Black Books, Vol. I, Page 64
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