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JUNGIANS:
001 Thus the devil is a preliminary stage of individuation, in the negative it has the same goal as the divine quaternity, namely, wholeness.
Although it is still darkness, it already carries the germ of light within itself. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Page 372. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Page 372.
002 Therefore we say that if you give the little finger to the devil, he takes the whole arm, and finally the whole body. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Pages 93-94
003 It does not require much imagination to see what this involvement in the ways of the world means in the moral sense. Only an infantile person can pretend that evil is not at work everywhere, and the more unconscious he is, the more the devil drives him ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 255.
004 When you step into your own Hell, never think that you come like one suffering in beauty; or as a proud pariah, but you come like a stupid and curious fool and gaze in wonder at the scraps that have fallen from your table. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 262.
006 The difference between most people and myself is that for me the “dividing walls” are transparent.
That is my peculiarity.
Others find these walls so opaque that they see nothing behind them and therefore think nothing is there.
To some extent I perceive the processes going on in the background, and that gives me an inner certainty.
People who see nothing have no certainties and can draw no conclusions–or do not trust them even if they do.
I do not know what started me off perceiving the stream of life. Probably the unconscious itself. Or perhaps my early dreams.
They determined my course from the beginning.
Knowledge of processes in the background early shaped my relationship to the world.
Basically, that relationship was the same in my childhood as it is to this day.
As a child I felt myself to be alone, and I am stilI, because I know things and must hint at things which others apparently know nothing of, and for the most part do not want to know.
Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.
The loneliness began with the experiences of my early dreams, and reached its climax at the time I was working on the unconscious.
If a man knows more than others, he becomes lonely.
But loneliness is not necessarily inimical to companionship, for no one is more sensitive to companionship than the lonely man, and companionship thrives only when each individual remembers his individuality and does not identify himself with others. ~Carl Jung, MDR, Pages 355-356
007 To Fanny Bowditch
Dear Miss Bowditch, 22 October 1916
It is understandable that, as long as you look at other people and project your own psychology into them, you can never reach harmony with yourself.
I am afraid that the mere fact of my presence takes you away from yourself so that it will be necessary for you to devalue you: such an extent that you can concentrate your libido on your Own individuality.
I have no objection as long as this procedure serves your best interest.
I know that this is the way of not a few people.
However I must ask you for patience.
I have to enter military service at the end of the week and I shall return only at the beginning of December.
But then I am willing to start work with you.
I realize that under the circumstances you have described you feel the need to see clearly.
But your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart.
Without, everything seems discordant; only within does it coalesce into unity.
Who looks outside dreams; who looks inside awakes.
With best regards,
Yours sincerely,
- JUNG ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 33
008 We always require an outside point to stand on, in order to apply the lever of criticism.
This is especially so in psychology, where by the nature of the material we are much more subjectively involved than in any other science.
How, for example, can we become conscious of national peculiarities if we have never had the opportunity to regard our own nation from outside?
Regarding it from outside means regarding it from the standpoint of another nation.
To do so, we must acquire sufficient knowledge of the foreign collective psyche, and in the course of this process of assimilation we encounter all those incompatibilities which constitute the national bias and the national
peculiarity.
Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.
I understand England only when I see where I, as a Swiss, do not fit in.
I understand Europe, our greatest problem, only when I see where I as a European do not fit into the world. Through my acquaintance with many Americans, and my trips to and in America, I have obtained an enormous amount of insight into the European character; it has always seemed to me that there can be nothing more useful for a European than some time or another to look out at Europe from the top of a skyscraper.
When I contemplated for the first time the European spectacle from the Sahara, surrounded by a civilization which has more or less the same relationship to ours as Roman antiquity has to modern times, I became aware of how completely, even in America, I was still caught up and imprisoned in the cultural consciousness of the white man.
The desire then grew in me to carry the historical comparisons still farther by descending to a still lower cultural level. ~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams Reflections, Page 246-247
009 Here the relationship remains within the bounds of the biological instinctive goal, the preservation of the species.
Since this goal is of a collective nature, the psychological link between husband and wife will also be essentially collective, and cannot be regarded as an individual relationship in the psychological sense.
We can only speak of this when the nature of the unconscious motivations has been recognized and the original identity broken down.
Seldom or never does a marriage develop into an individual relationship smoothly and without crises.
There is no birth of consciousness without pain. ~Carl Jung, CW 17, Para 331
010 To Kendig B. Cully
Dear Sir, 25 September 1937
You can learn a great deal of psychology through studying books, but you will find that this psychology is not very helpful m practical life.
A man entrusted with the care of souls ought to have a certain wisdom of life which does not consist of words only but chiefly of experience.
Such psychology, as I understand it, is not only a piece of knowledge but a certain wisdom of life at the same time.
If such a thing can be taught at all, it must be in the way of a personal experience of the human soul.
Such an experience is possible only when the teaching has a personal character, namely when you are personally taught and not generally.
In India since ancient times they have the custom that practically everybody of a certain education, at least, has a guru, a spiritual leader who teaches you and you alone what you ought to know.
Not everybody needs to know the same thing and this kind of knowledge can never be taught in the same way.
That is a thing which is utterly lacking in our universities: the relation of master and disciple.
And that is at the same time the thing which you ought to have and any of your colleagues who want to have a psychological preparation.
Anybody whose calling it is to guide souls should have his own soul guided first, so that he knows what it means to deal with the human soul.
Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.
It would not help you very much to study books only, though it is indispensable too.
But it would help you most to have a personal insight into the secrets of the human soul.
Otherwise everything remains a clever intellectual trick, consisting of empty words and leading to empty talk.
You may try to find out what I mean in my books and if you have a close friend, try to look behind his screen in order to discover yourself.
That would be a good beginning.
Sincerely yours,
C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 236-237.
011 Yet they have a nature that can be interpreted, for in all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order, in all caprice a fixed law, for everything that works is grounded on its opposite.
Thus the anima and life itself are meaningless in so far as they offer no interpretation.
Yet they have a nature that can be interpreted, for in all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order, in all caprice a fixed law, for everything that works is grounded on its opposite.
It takes man’s discriminating understanding, which breaks everything down. into antinomial judgments, to recognize this.
Once he comes to grips with the anima, her chaotic capriciousness will give him cause to suspect a secret order, to sense a plan, a meaning, a purpose over and above her nature, or even-we might almost be tempted to say-to “postulate” such a thing, though this would not be in accord with the truth.
For in actual reality we do not have at our command any power of cool reflection, nor does any science or philosophy help us, and the traditional teachings of religion do so only to a limited degree.
We are caught and entangled in aimless experience, and the judging intellect with its categories proves itself powerless.
Human interpretation fails, for a turbulent life-situation has arisen that refuses to fit any of the traditional meanings assigned to it.
It is a moment of collapse.
We sink into a final depth-Apuleius calls it “a kind of voluntary death.”
It is a surrender of our own powers, not artificially willed but forced upon us by nature; not a voluntary submission and humiliation decked in moral garb but an utter and unmistakable defeat crowned with the panic fear of demoralization.
Only when all props and crutches are broken, and no cover from the rear offers even the slightest hope of security, does it become possible for us to experience an archetype that up till then had lain hidden behind the meaningful nonsense played out by the anima.
This is the archetype of meaning) just as the anima is the archetype of life itself. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Page 32, Para 66.
011 Thus the anima and life itself are meaningless in so far as they offer no interpretation.
Yet they have a nature that can be interpreted, for in all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order, in all caprice a fixed law, for everything that works is grounded on its opposite.
It takes man’s discriminating understanding, which breaks everything down. into antinomial judgments, to recognize this.
Once he comes to grips with the anima, her chaotic capriciousness will give him cause to suspect a secret order, to sense a plan, a meaning, a purpose over and above her nature, or even-we might almost be tempted to say-to “postulate” such a thing, though this would not be in accord with the truth.
For in actual reality we do not have at our command any power of cool reflection, nor does any science or philosophy help us, and the traditional teachings of religion do so only to a limited degree.
We are caught and entangled in aimless experience, and the judging intellect with its categories proves itself powerless.
Human interpretation fails, for a turbulent life-situation has arisen that refuses to fit any of the traditional meanings assigned to it.
It is a moment of collapse.
We sink into a final depth-Apuleius calls it “a kind of voluntary death.”
It is a surrender of our own powers, not artificially willed but forced upon us by nature; not a voluntary submission and humiliation decked in moral garb but an utter and unmistakable defeat crowned with the panic fear of demoralization.
Only when all props and crutches are broken, and no cover from the rear offers even the slightest hope of security, does it become possible for us to experience an archetype that up till then had lain hidden behind the meaningful nonsense played out by the anima.
This is the archetype of meaning) just as the anima is the archetype of life itself. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Page 32, Para 66.
012 Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 329.
In any case, we stand in need of a reorientation, a metanoia.
Touching evil brings with it the grave peril of succumbing to it.
We must, therefore, no longer succumb to anything at all, not even to good. A so-called good to which we succumb loses its ethical character.
Not that there is anything bad in it on that score, but to have succumbed to it may breed trouble.
Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism.
We must beware of thinking of good and evil as absolute opposites.
The criterion of ethical action can no longer consist in the simple view that good has the force of a categorical imperative, while so-called evil can resolutely be shunned.
Recognition of the reality of evil necessarily relativizes the good, and the evil likewise, converting both into halves of a paradoxical whole. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 329.
013 The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.
Yet it is not the doctor’s whole task to instruct or convince his patient; he must rather show him how the doctor reacts to his particular case.
For twist and turn the matter as we may, the relation between physician and patient remains personal within the frame of the impersonal, professional treatment.
We cannot by any device bring it about that the treatment is not the outcome of a mutual influence in which the whole being of the patient as well as that of the doctor plays its part.
Two primary factors come together in the treatment-that is, two persons, neither of whom is a fixed and determinable magnitude.
Their fields of consciousness may be quite clearly defined, but they bring with them besides an indefinitely extended sphere of unconsciousness.
For this reason the personalities of the doctor and patient have often more to do with the outcome of the treatment than what the doctor says or thinks-although we must not undervalue this latter factor as a disturbing or healing one.
The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.
We should expect the doctor to have an influence on the patient in every effective psychic treatment: but this influence can only take place when he too is affected by the patient.
You can exert no influence if you are not susceptible to influence.
It is futile for the doctor to shield himself from the influence of the patient and to surround himself with a smokescreen of fatherly and professional authority.
If he does so he merely forbids himself the use of a highly important organ of information, and the patient influences him unconsciously none the less.
The unconscious changes in the doctor which the patient thus brings about are well known to many psychotherapists; they are disturbances, or even iniuries, peculiar to the profession, which illustrate in a striking way the patient’s almost “chemical” influence.
One of the best known of them is the counter-transference which the transference evokes.
But the effects are often more subtle, and their nature is best conveyed by the old idea of the demon of sickness.
According to this a sufferer transmits his disease to a healthy person whose powers subdue the demon-but not without a negative influence upon the well-being of the healer. ~Carl Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, Page 49-50
015 The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases.
Each of us carries his own life-form—an indeterminable form which cannot be superseded by any other. ~Carl Jung; Modern Man in Search of a Soul; Pages 60-61.
016 Where love reigns, there is no will to power; and where the will to power is paramount, love is lacking. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 78
It has become abundantly clear to me that life can flow forward only along the path of the gradient.
But there is no energy unless there is a tension of opposites; hence it is necessary to discover the opposite to the attitude of the conscious mind.
It is interesting to see how this compensation by opposites also plays its part in the historical theories of neurosis: Freud’s theory espoused Eros, Adler’s the will to power.
Logically, the opposite of love is hate, and of Eros, Phobos (fear); but psychologically it is the will to power.
Where love reigns, there is no will to power; and where the will to power is paramount, love is lacking.
The one is but the shadow of the other: the man who adopts the standpoint of Eros finds his compensatory opposite in the will to power, and that of the man who puts the accent on power is Eros.
Seen from the one-sided point of view of the conscious attitude, the shadow is an inferior component of the personality and is consequently repressed through intensive resistance.
But the repressed content must be made conscious so as to produce a tension of opposites, without which no forward movement is possible.
The conscious mind is on top, the shadow underneath, and just as high always longs for low and hot for cold, so all consciousness, perhaps without being aware of it, seeks its unconscious opposite, lacking which it is doomed to stagnation, congestion, and ossification.
Life is born only of the spark of opposites. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 78
020 Real liberation comes not from glossing over or repressing painful states of feeling, but only from experiencing them to the full. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 587
On the days following, the patient was overcome by feelings of self-pity.
It became clear to her how much she regretted never having had any children.
She felt like a neglected animal or a lost child.
This mood grew into a regular Weltschmerz, and she felt like the “all-compassionate Tathagata” (Buddha).
Only when she had completely given way to these feelings could she bring herself to paint another picture.
Real liberation comes not from glossing over or repressing painful states of feeling, but only from experiencing them to the full. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 587
023 I am in doubt about myself as much as ever, the more so the more I try to say something definite.
It is even as though through familiarity with oneself one became still more alienated! ~Carl Jung, Jung Briefe, Page 38
I observe myself in the stillness of Bollingen, with the experience of almost eight decades now, and I have to admit that I have found no plain answer to myself.
I am in doubt about myself as much as ever, the more so the more I try to say something definite.
It is even as though through familiarity with oneself one became still more alienated! ~Carl Jung, Jung Briefe, Page 38
024 All the greatest and most important problems of life are fundamentally insoluble. They must be so, for they express the necessary polarity inherent in every self-regulating system. They can never be solved, but only outgrown. ~Carl Jung, CW 13, Para 18
Now and then it happened in my practice that a patient grew beyond himself because of unknown potentialities, and this became an experience of prime importance to me.
In the meantime, I had learned that all the greatest and most important problems of life are fundamentally insoluble.
They must be so, for they express the necessary polarity inherent in every self-regulating system.
They can never be solved, but only outgrown.
I therefore asked myself whether this outgrowing, this possibility of further psychic development, was not the normal thing, and whether getting stuck in a conflict was pathological.
Everyone must possess that higher level, at least in embryonic form, and must under favourable circumstances be able to develop this potentiality.
When I examined the course of development in patients who quietly, and as if unconsciously, outgrew themselves, I saw that their fates had something in common.
The new thing came to them from obscure possibilities either outside or inside themselves; they accepted it and grew with its help.
It seemed to me typical that some took the new thing from outside themselves, others from inside; or rather, that it grew into some persons from without, and into others from within.
But the new thing never came exclusively either from within or from without.
If it came from outside, it became a profound inner experience; if it came from inside, it became an outer happening.
In no case was it conjured into existence intentionally or by conscious willing, but rather seemed to be borne along on the stream of time. ~Carl Jung, CW 13, Para 18
030 In dreams ravens generally appear as thoughts with a melancholy tinge—sad thoughts.
You have probably seen pictures, painted by depressed people, that show a dark wood, a desert, a stormy sea, or black birds everywhere, and which refer to the sad, depressing thoughts one has in such a condition: I am nobody and will never get better, never get anywhere, etc.
The raven is therefore a destructive bird; but it is also God’s messenger, because there is such a thing as a creative depression.
If you admit those black thoughts—if you say, “Yes, perhaps I am nobody, but in what sense?”—you can dialogue with the unconscious.
A depression is best overcome by going into it, not fighting it—the radio and the Reader’s Digest only make it worse! It is much better to let such black thoughts come up and to dialogue with them.
Then very often they become the bread bringers and connect us with God.
A depression is really meant to reconnect one with the divine principle.
The hermits went voluntarily into a depression and introverted with it, which meant not knowing anything anymore and being quite stranded.
In such a condition the depressing thoughts bring the divine bread, which explains why the raven has a strange double aspect in mythology.
Rational consciousness needs to be dimmed by a depression in order that the new light may be found, with new creative possibilities. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, The Feminine in Fairy Tales, Page 116
031 Jung writes that women with a negative mother complex often miss the first half of life; they walk past it in a dream.
Life to them is a constant source of annoyance and irritation.
But if they can overcome this negative mother complex, they have a good chance in the second half of rediscovering life with the youthful spontaneity missed in the first half.
For though, as Jung says in the last paragraph, a part of life has been lost, its meaning has been saved.
That is the tragedy of such women, but they can get to the turning point, and in the second half of life have their hands healed and can stretch them out for what they want—not from the animus or from the ego, but, according to nature, simply stretch out their hands toward something they love.
Though it is infinitely simple, it is extremely difficult, for it is the one thing the woman with a negative mother complex cannot do; it needs God’s help.
Even the analyst cannot help her —it must one day just happen, and this is generally when there has been sufficient suffering.
One cannot escape one’s fate; the whole pain of it must be accepted, and one day the infinitely simple solution comes. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, The Feminine in Fairy Tales, Page 84
032 The motif of the veil is an archetypal one. You could say that the deepest
religious experiences have to be kept secret and by nature remain secret, and it would be most destructive to tell them to anyone else.
The person who knows more than the others is, by that very fact, unendurable for society and a black sheep—that is quite natural.
For example, in a quarrel each party thinks he is right and the other wrong, but an onlooker cannot take sides, for he realizes that for both it is a shadow problem and that the shadow is being projected.
The onlooker may be accused of cowardice, because he refrains from acting, but the person who sees further must keep out and be ready to accept the unpleasant role of a coward, because of the shadow projection in both parties.
In collectivity this may look like a lack of backbone and an inability to take a stand on the right side, but no explanation is possible, for that would only bring an attack by both parties.
There the veil has to be used. The process of individuation often imposes a certain discretion. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, The Feminine in Fairy Tales, Page 87
033 If this situation is dramatized, as the unconscious usually dramatizes it, then there appears before you on the psychological stage a man living regressively, seeking his childhood and his mother, fleeing from a cold cruel world which denies him understanding.
Often a mother appears beside him who apparently shows not the slightest concern that her little son should become a man, but who, with tireless and self-immolating effort, neglects nothing that might hinder him from growing up and marrying.
You behold the secret conspiracy between mother and son, and how each helps the other to betray life. ~Carl Jung , CW 9ii, Para 21
034 Question: Why is it that so few people follow their own star? Why is the star such a heavy burden?
Marie-Louise Von Franz: Because following your own star means isolation, not knowing where to go, having to find out a completely new way for yourself instead of just going on the trodden path everybody else runs along.
That’s why there’s always been a tendency in humans to project the uniqueness and the greatness of their own inner self onto outer personalities and become the servants, the devoted servants, admirers, and imitators of outer personalities.
It is much easier to admire a great personality and become a pupil or follower of a guru or a religious prophet, or an admirer of a big, official personality-a president of the United States-or live your life for some military general whom you admire.
That is much easier than following your own star. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 50
036
Hence it is of the greatest importance that the ego should be anchored in the world of consciousness and that consciousness should be reinforced by a very precise adaptation.
For this, certain virtues like attention, conscientiousness, patience, etc., are of great value on the moral side, just as accurate observation of the symptomatology of the unconscious and objective self-criticism are valuable on the intellectual side. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 46
