My science was the only way I had of extricating myself from that chaos.
Carl Jung Depth Psychology Facebook Group
My science was the only way I had of extricating myself from that chaos.
Otherwise the material would have trapped me in its thicket, strangled me like jungle creepers.
I took great care to try to understand every single image, every item of my psychic inventory, and to classify them scientifically so far as this was possible and, above all, to realize them in actual life.
That is what we usually neglect to do. We allow the images to rise up, and maybe we wonder about them, but that is all.
We do not take the trouble to understand them, let alone draw ethical conclusions from them.
This stopping-short conjures up the negative effects of the unconscious. It is equally a grave mistake to think that it is enough to gain
some understanding of the images and that knowledge can here make a halt. Insight into them must be converted into an ethical obligation.
Not to do so is to fall prey to the power principle, and this produces dangerous effects which are destructive not only to others but even to the knower.
The images of the unconscious place a great responsibility upon a man.
Failure to understand diem, or a shirking of ethical responsibility, deprives him of his wholeness and imposes a painful fragmentariness on his life. ~Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Page 192-193
