Carl Jung on “Criminal” – Anthology
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People cannot stand having unnatural virtue around them all day, it makes them feel inferior and they may even be come criminals in order to compensate it. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 27Jan1939, Pages 66.
Each of us is on the cross between two criminals, one ascending to Heaven, the other descending into hell. Each of us is on the cross between two criminals, one ascending to Heaven, the other descending into hell. ~Carl Jung, The Black Books, Vol. VI, Page 240
I asked whether this made her sad. She answered, “No, because I try to see the criminal in me. My criminal [shadow] is to think that when I say something, this is of some use . . .. Hence my problem with speaking.” ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Homage to MLVF, Page xxix.
In Mexico they flayed a criminal every year, and the priest then got into the skin of the flayed victim, thus representing the god.
The symbolical meaning is that man must be denaturalized in order to attain to the god.
In all religions there is the same idea of the denaturalization of man in favor of the god, that the god may be born in man, or in witness of his power, his light. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 664
For instance, there was a rumor that the early Christians sacrificed children in their ceremonials.
The Romans told that story in order to disqualify the Christian heresy which was so horrible to them; for those Christians worshipped an awful god that was hanging on a cross, and that was only done to criminals. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 223
Misery does not always teach prayer by any means but far more often cursing, violence, and criminality. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 216.
E: “You heard what Salome said.”
I: “I cannot believe that you, the prophet, can recognize her as a daughter and a companion. Is she not engendered from heinous seed? Was she not vain greed and criminal lust?”
E: “But she loved a holy man.”
I: “And shamefully shed his precious blood.” ~Carl Jung, Red Book, Page 246
The other category, the minority, become hysterical when they try to be nice and normal. Those are the born criminals whom you cannot change. They are normal when they do wrong. We also do not feel quite right when we are behaving perfectly, we feel much better when we are doing a bit of wrong. That is because we are not perfect. The Hindus, when they build a temple, leave one corner unfinished; only the gods make something perfect, man never can. It is much better to know that one is not perfect, then one feels much better. So it is with these children, and so it is with our patients ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 209
We must never forget that Christ was an innovator and revolutionary, executed with criminals. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1539
Obviously, I had to tell this young gentleman what I thought of him. If we could have reached agreement on this point, treatment would have been possible. But if we had begun our work by ignoring the impossible basis of his life, it would have been useless. With views like his only a criminal can adapt to life. But this patient was not really a criminal, only a so-called intellectual who believed so much in the power of reason that he even thought he could unthink a wrong he had committed.
I believe firmly in the power and dignity of the intellect, but only if it does not violate the feeling-values. These are not just infantile resistances. This example shows what a decisive factor the personal contact is ~Carl Jung, CW 17, Para 183
I once saw a boy who violated his four-year-old sister when he was five, tried to kill his father when he was nine, but at the age of eighteen was developing into satisfactory normality, despite a diagnosis of incurable moral insanity. If the unbridled licentiousness to which such cases are sometimes prone is coupled with a good intelligence, and if there is no irreparable break with society, these patients can give up their criminal tendencies by using their heads. Nevertheless, it is to be observed that reason is a very flimsy barrier against pathological proclivities ~Carl Jung, CW 17, Para 136
The second group comprises Psychopathic Children. In cases of moral insanity the disorder is either congenital or due to organic injury of parts of the brain by wounding or disease. Such cases are incurable. Occasionally they become criminals and they have in them the seeds of habitual criminality ~Carl Jung, CW 17, Para 135
The causal significance of parental problems for the psyche of the child would be seriously misunderstood if they were always interpreted in an exaggeratedly personal way as moral problems. More often we seem to be dealing with some fate-like ethos beyond the reach of our conscious judgment. Such things as proletarian inclinations in the scions of noble families, outbursts of criminality in the offspring of the respectable or over-virtuous, a paralysing or impassioned laziness in the children of successful business men, are not just bits of life that have been left deliberately unlived, but compensations wrought by fate, functions of a natural ethos which casts down the high and mighty and exalts the humble.
Against this neither education nor psychotherapy is of any avail. The most they can do, if reasonably applied, is to encourage the child to fulfil the task imposed upon him by the natural ethos. The guilt of the parents is impersonal, and the child should pay for it no less impersonally ~Carl Jung, CW 17, Para 90
Re-immersion in the state of participation mystique is the secret of artistic creation and of the effect which great art has upon us, for at that level of experience it is no longer the weal or woe of the individual that counts, but the life of the collective. That is why every great work of art is objective and impersonal, and yet profoundly moving.
And that is also why the personal life of the artist is at most a help or a hindrance but is never essential to his creative task. He may go the way of the Philistine, a good citizen, a fool, or a criminal. His personal career may be interesting and inevitable, but it does not explain his art. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 162
When I say that the Germans are psychically ill it is surely kinder than saying that they are criminals. I have no wish to irritate the notorious sensitiveness of the hysteric, but there comes a time when we can no longer afford to gloss over all the painful symptoms and to help the patient forget what has happened, merely in order that his pathological condition should remain undisturbed. I would not like to insult the healthy-minded and decent German by suspecting him of being a coward who runs away from his own image ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 427
He [the pale criminal] simply will not and cannot admit that he is what he is; he cannot endure his own guilt, just as he could not help incurring it. He will stoop to every kind of self-deception if only he can escape the sight of himself. It is true that this happens everywhere, but nowhere does it appear to be such a national characteristic as in Germany ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 417
In reality, it always happens over a wide radius. The sensation aroused by a crime, the passionate interest in tracking down the criminal, the eagerness with which the court proceedings are followed, and so on, all go to prove the exciting effect which the crime has on everybody who is not abnormally dull or apathetic. Everybody joins in, feels the crime in his own being, tries to understand and explain it. Something is set aflame by that great fire of evil that flared up in the crime ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 408
A house, a family, even a village where a murder has been committed feels the psychological guilt and is made to feel it by the outside world. Would one take a room where one knows a man was murdered a few days before? Is it particularly pleasant to marry the sister or daughter of a criminal? ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 405
With the rise of consciousness since the Middle Ages he has been considerably reduced in stature, but in his stead there are human beings to whom we gratefully surrender our shadows. With what pleasure, for instance, we read newspaper reports of crime! A bona fide criminal becomes a popular figure because he unburdens in no small degree the conscience of his fellow men, for now they know once more where the evil is to be found. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 69
The lifting of personal repression at first brings purely personal contents into consciousness; but attached to them are the collective elements of the unconscious, the ever-present instincts, qualities, and ideas (images) as well as all those “statistical” quotas of average virtue and average vice which we recognize when we say, “Everyone has in him something of the criminal, the genius, and the saint” ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 236
In so far as through our unconscious we have a share in the historical collective psyche, we live naturally and unconsciously in a world of werewolves, demons, magicians, etc., for these are things which all previous ages have invested with tremendous affectivity. Equally we have a share in gods and devils, saviours and criminals; but it would be absurd to attribute these potentialities of the unconscious to ourselves personally ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 150
At the Aztec human sacrifices criminals played the part of gods: they were slaughtered and flayed, and the priests then wrapped themselves in the dripping pelts in order to represent the gods’ resurrection and renewal ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 503
But as the “father,” the representative of moral law, is not only an objective fact, but a subjective psychic factor in the son himself, the killing of the bull clearly denotes an overcoming of animal instinct, and at the same time a secret and furtive overcoming of the power of the law, and hence a criminal usurpation of justice. Since the better is always the enemy of the good, every drastic innovation is an infringement of what is traditionally right, and may sometimes even be a crime punishable by death ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 396
The pillory where criminals were scourged was also known as the Hekate; and to her, as to the Roman Trivia, were dedicated junctions of three roads, forked roads, and crossroads. Where the roads branch off or meet, dog-sacrifices were offered to her, and there too were thrown the bodies of the executed: the sacrifice occurs at the point of union ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 577