Jung Society of Washington Quotations/Images
002 What is particularly noteworthy here is the consistent development of the central symbol.
We can hardly escape the feeling that the unconscious process moves spiral-wise round a centre, gradually getting closer, while the characteristics of the centre grow more and more distinct.
Or perhaps we could put it the other way round and say that the centre—itself virtually unknowable—acts like a magnet on the disparate materials and processes of the unconscious and gradually captures them as in a crystal lattice.
For this reason the centre is (in other cases) often pictured as a spider in its web (fig. 108), especially when the conscious attitude is still dominated by fear of unconscious processes.
But if the process is allowed to take its course, as it was in our case, then the central symbol, constantly renewing itself, will steadily and consistently force its way through the apparent chaos of the personal psyche and its dramatic entanglements, just as the great Bernoulli’s epitaph says of the spiral: “Eadem mutata resurgo.”
Accordingly we often find spiral representations of the centre, as for instance the serpent coiled round the creative point, the egg. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 325
002 This peculiarity of our time, which is certainly not of our conscious choosing, is the expression of the unconscious man within us who is changing.
Coming generations will have to take account of this momentous transformation if humanity is not to destroy itself through the might of its own technology and science. ~Carl Jung, Undiscovered Self, Page 77-78
003 He used to deplore the tendency of too many of his pupils to make dogma of such concepts, and once in exasperation remarked: “Thank God, I am Jung, and not a Jungian!”
This attitude was no late acquisition; it was with him from the beginning of his practice.
It was the individual patient that counted. Did the theory and the name stand up to that test or not?
When he began his work at Burghölzli he found such tools woefully inadequate.
At first he assumed it was his own ignorance that was at fault and in order to overcome this handicap read everything that had been published on the subject, including all fifty volumes of the Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Psychiatrie. ~Barbara Hannah, Jung: His Life and His Work, Page 78
004 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. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 236-237.
005 But in spite of all these advantages, it was a melancholy fact that psychiatric knowledge was almost nonexistent at the turn of the century, that is, empirical and psychiatric knowledge that could appeal to a mind like Jung’s and give him substantial help in how to treat the individual patients whom he found entrusted to his care at the hospital.
There was indeed plenty of theory with which to diagnose and label the patients, but terms and theory never appealed to Jung except as a temporary aid.
Speaking of the terms he himself gave to various aspects of the human psyche, he wrote, in his last long book, Mysterium Coniunctionis (published in 1955): “If such concepts provisionally serve to put the empirical material in order, they will have fulfilled their purpose.”
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.
Wherever the psyche is set violently oscillating by a numinous experience, there is a danger that the thread by which one hangs may be torn.
Should that happen, one man tumbles into an absolute affirmation, another into an equally absolute negation, Nirdvandva (freedom from opposites) is the Orient’s remedy for this. I have not forgotten that.
The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.
The numinosum is dangerous because it lures men to extremes, so that a modest truth is regarded as the truth and a minor mistake is equated with fatal error.
Tout passe yesterday’s truth is today’s deception, and yesterday’s false inference may be tomorrow’s revelation.
This is particularly so in psychological matters, of which, if truth were told, we still know very little.
We are still a long way from understanding what it signifies that nothing has any existence unless some small and oh, so transitory consciousness has become aware of it. ~Carl Jung, MDR, Page 154
006 The result of the Freudian method of elucidation is a minute elaboration of man’s shadow-side unexampled in any previous age.
It is the most effective antidote imaginable to all the idealistic illusions about the nature of man; and it is therefore no wonder that there arose on all sides the most violent opposition to Freud and his school.
I will not speak of the inveterate illusionists; I would merely point out that among the opponents of this method of explanation there are not a few who have no illusions about man’s shadow-side and yet object to a biased portrayal of man from the shadow-side alone.
After all, the essential thing is not the shadow but the body which casts it. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 145
007 But mystification can also arise from another source.
The real mystery does not behave mysteriously or secretively; it speaks a secret language, it adumbrates itself by a variety of images which all indicate its true nature.
I am not speaking of a secret personally guarded by someone, with a content known to its possessor, but of a mystery, a matter or circumstance which is “secret,” i.e., known only through vague hints but essentially unknown.
The real nature of matter was unknown to the alchemist: he knew it only in hints. In seeking to explore it he projected the unconscious into the darkness of matter in order to illuminate it. In order to explain the mystery of matter he projected yet another mystery—his own unknown psychic background—into what was to be explained: Obscurum per obscarius, ignotum per ignotius!
This procedure was not, of course, intentional; it was an involuntary occurrence. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 345
008 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. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 33
009 Anyone who has seen these things happen over and over again in every conceivable shade of dramatic intensity is bound to ponder.
He becomes aware how easy it is to overlook the regulating influences, and that he should endeavour to pay attention to the unconscious regulation which is so necessary for our mental and physical health.
Accordingly he will try to help himself by practising self-observation and self-criticism.
But mere self-observation and intellectual self-analysis are entirely inadequate as a means to establishing contact with the unconscious.
Although no human being can be spared bad experiences, everyone shrinks from risking them, especially if he sees any way by which they might be circumvented.
Knowledge of the regulating influences of the unconscious offers just such a possibility and actually does render much bad experience unnecessary.
We can avoid a great many detours that are distinguished by no particular attraction but only by tiresome conflicts.
It is bad enough to make detours and painful mistakes in unknown and unexplored territory, but to get lost in inhabited country on broad highways is merely exasperating.
What, then, are the means at our disposal of obtaining knowledge of the regulating factors? ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 165
010 This is a problem that often comes up when one meets one’s “otherside.”
The shadow usually contains values that are needed by consciousness, but that exist in a form that makes it difficult to integrate them into one’s life.
The passages and the large house in this dream also show that the dreamer does not yet know his own psychic dimensions and is not yet able to fill them out.
The shadow in this dream is typical for an introvert a man who tends to retire too much from outer life.)
In the case of an extravert, who is turned more toward outer objects and outer life, the shadow would look quite different. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Man and His Symbols, Page 170-171
011 For the sake of mental stability and even physiological health, the unconscious and the conscious must be integrally connected and thus move in parallel lines.
If they are split apart or “dissociated,” psychological disturbance follows.
In this respect, dream symbols are the essential message carriers from the instinctive to the rational parts of the human mind, and their interpretation enriches the poverty of consciousness so that it learns to understand again the forgotten language of the instincts. ~Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols, Page 37
012 Whereas ritual mandalas always display a definite style and a limited number of typical motifs as their content, individual mandalas make use of a well-nigh unlimited wealth of motifs and symbolic allusions
Whereas ritual mandalas always display a definite style and a limited number of typical motifs as their content, individual mandalas make use of a well-nigh unlimited wealth of motifs and symbolic allusions, from which it can easily be seen that they are endeavouring to express either the totality of the individual in his inner or outer experience of the world, or its essential point of reference.
Their object is the self in contradistinction to the ego, which is only the point of reference for consciousness, whereas the self comprises the totality of the psyche altogether, i.e., conscious and unconscious.
It is therefore not unusual for individual mandalas to display a division into a light and a dark half, together with their typical symbols.
An historical example of this kind is Jakob Bohme’s mandala, in his treatise XL Questions concerning the Soule.
It is at the same time an image of God and is designated as such.
This is not a matter of chance, for Indian philosophy, which developed the idea of the self, Atman or Purusha, to the highest degree, makes no distinction in principle between the human essence and the divine.
Correspondingly, in the Western mandala, the scintilla or soul-spark, the innermost divine essence of man, is characterized by symbols which can just as well express a God-image, namely the image of Deity unfolding in the world, in nature, and in man. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 717
013 The forlornness of consciousness in our world is due primarily to the loss of instinct, and the reason for this lies in the development of the human mind over the past aeon.
The forlornness of consciousness in our world is due primarily to the loss of instinct, and the reason for this lies in the development of the human mind over the past aeon.
The more power man had over nature, the more his knowledge and skill went to his head, and the deeper became his contempt for the merely natural and accidental, for that which is irrationally given – including the objective psyche, which is all that consciousness is not.
In contrast to the subjectivism of the conscious mind the unconscious is objective, manifesting itself mainly in the form of contrary feelings, fantasies, emotions, impulses and dreams, none of which one makes oneself but which come upon one objectively.
Even today psychology is still, for the most part, the science of conscious contents, measured as far as possible by collective standards.
The individual psyche has become a mere accident, a “random” phenomenon, while the unconscious, which can manifest itself only in the real, “irrationally given” human being, has been ignored altogether.
This was not the result of carelessness or of lack of knowledge, but of downright resistance to the mere possibility of there being a second psychic authority besides the ego.
It seems a positive menace to the ego that its monarchy can be doubted.
The religious person, on the other hand, is accustomed to the thought of not being sole master in his own house.
He believes that God, and not he himself, decides in the end.
But how many of us would dare to let the will of God decide, and which of us would not feel embarrassed if he had to say how far the decision came from God himself? ~Carl Jung, Undiscovered Self, Page 61
014 Although its bases are in themselves relatively unknown and unconscious, the ego is a conscious factor par excellence.
Although its bases are in themselves relatively unknown and unconscious, the ego is a conscious factor par excellence.
It is even acquired, empirically speaking, during the individual’s lifetime.
It seems to arise in the first place from the collision between the somatic factor and the environment, and, once established as a subject, it goes on developing from further collisions with the outer world and the inner. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 6
015 The only person who escapes the grim law of enantiodromia is the man who knows how to separate himself from the unconscious, not by repressing it—for then it simply attacks him from the rear—but by putting it clearly before him as that which he is not. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 112
016 It is undeniable that the artist’s personal psychology may occasionally be traced out in the roots and in the furthest ramifications of his work.
It was Freud’s great discovery that neuroses have a quite definite psychic cause, and that they originate in real or imagined emotional experiences in early childhood.
Some of his followers, in particular Rank and Stekel, adopted a similar approach and arrived at similar results.
It is undeniable that the artist’s personal psychology may occasionally be traced out in the roots and in the furthest ramifications of his work.
This view, that personal factors in many ways determine the artist’s choice of material and the form he gives it, is not in itself new.
Credit, however, is certainly due to the Freudian school for showing how far-reaching this influence is and the curious analogies to which it gives rise. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 155
017 The sin to be repented, of course, is unconsciousness.
St. Paul’s concept of (ignorantia) may not be too far removed from ayv&a-ia, since both mean the initial, unconscious condition of man. When God “looked down” on the times of ignorance, the Greek word used here, (Vulgate: despiciens) has the connotation *to disdain, despise.
At all events, Gnostic tradition says that when the highest God saw what miserable, unconscious creatures these human beings were whom the demiurge had created, who were not even able to walk upright, he immediately got the work of redemption under way.
And in the same passage in the Acts, Paul reminds the Athenians that they were “God’s offspring,” and that God, looking back disapprovingly on “the times of ignorance,” had sent the message to mankind, commanding “all men everywhere to repent.”
Because that earlier condition seemed to be altogether too wretched, the perdvoia (transformation of mind) took on the moral character of repentance of sins, with the result that the Vulgate could translate it as “poenitentiam agere.”
The sin to be repented, of course, is unconsciousness.
As we have seen, it is not only man who is in this condition, but also, according to the Gnostics, the God without consciousness.
This idea is more or less in line with the traditional Christian view that God was transformed during the passage from the Old Testament to the New, and, from being the God of wrath, changed into the God of Love a thought that is expressed very clearly by Nicolaus Caussin in the seventeenth century. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 299
018 Let us thank the life I have lived for all the happy and all the sad hours, for every joy, for every sadness. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 232
This life is the way, the long sought-after way to the unfathomable, which we call divine.
There is no other way, all other ways are false paths.
I found the right way, it led me to you, to my soul. I return, tempered and purified.
Do you still know me? How long the separation lasted!
Everything has become so different. And how did I find you? How strange my journey was!
What words should I use to tell you on what twisted paths a good star has guided me to you?
Give me your hand, my almost forgotten soul.
How warm the joy at seeing you again, you long disavowed soul. Life has led me back to you.
Let us thank the life I have lived for all the happy and all the sad hours, for every joy, for every sadness.
My soul, my journey should continue with you. I will wander with you and ascend to my solitude. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 232
019 The sole and natural carrier of life is the individual, and that is so throughout nature. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 224
If, then, man cannot exist without society, neither can he exist without oxygen, water, albumen, fat, and so forth.
Like these, society is one of the necessary conditions of his existence.
It would be ludicrous to maintain that man lives in order to breathe air. It is equally ludicrous to say that the individual exists for society.
“Society” is nothing more than a term, a concept for the symbiosis of a group of human beings.
A concept is not a carrier of life.
The sole and natural carrier of life is the individual, and that is so throughout nature.
“Society” or “State” is an agglomeration of life-carriers and at the same time, as an organized form of these, an important condition of life.
It is therefore not quite true to say that the individual can exist only as a particle in society.
At all events man can live very much longer without the State than without air. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 224
020 These examples show that psychic symptoms need to be judged with the greatest caution.
This is also true of the various forms of transference and its contents.
They sometimes set the doctor almost insoluble problems or cause him all manner of worries which may go to the limits of the endurable and even beyond.
Particularly if he has a marked ethical personality and takes his psychological work seriously, this may lead to moral conflicts and divided loyalties whose real or supposed incompatibility has been the occasion of more than one disaster.
On the basis of long experience I would therefore like to warn against too much therapeutic enthusiasm.
Psychological work is full of snags, but it is just here that incompetents swarm.
The medical faculties are largely to blame for this, because for years they refused to admit the psyche among the aetiological factors of pathology, even though they had no other use for it.
Ignorance is certainly never a recommendation, but often the best knowledge is not enough either.
Therefore I say to the psychotherapist: let no day pass without humbly remembering that everything has still to be learned. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 464
021 Six weeks after his death my father appeared to me in a dream.
Suddenly he stood before me and said that he was coming back from his holiday.
He had made a good recovery and was now coming home.
I thought he would be annoyed with me for having moved into his room. But not a bit of it!
Nevertheless, I felt ashamed because I had imagined he was dead. Two days later the dream was repeated.
My father had recovered and was coming home, and again I reproached myself because I had thought he was dead.
Later I kept asking myself: “What does it mean that my father returns in dreams and that he seems so real?”
It was an unforgettable experience, and it forced me for the first time to think about life after death. ~Carl Jung, MDR, Page 96-97
022 Although this quaternio plays a considerable role in alchemy, it is not a product of alchemical speculation but an archetype which can be traced back to the primitive marriage class system (four-kin system).
As a quaternity it represents a whole judgment and formulates the psychic structure of man’s totality.
This expresses on the one hand the structure of the individual, i.e., a male or female ego in conjunction with the contrasexual unconscious, and on the other hand the ego’s relation to the other sex, without which the psychological individual remains incomplete. (By this I mean primarily a psychic relationship.)
But in this schema the idea of transformation, so characteristic of alchemy, is missing.
As a scientific discipline, empirical psychology is not in a position to establish whether the conscious ego ranks “higher” or “lower” than the anima, which, like the ego, has a positive and a negative aspect.
Science does not make value-judgments, and though psychology has a concept of “value” it is nothing but a concept of “intensity”: one complex of ideas has a higher value when its power of assimilation proves stronger than that of another.
The alchemical idea of transformation is rooted in a spiritual concept of value which takes the “transformed” as being more valuable, better, higher, more spiritual, etc., and the empirical psychologist has nothing to set against this.
But since evaluating and estimating are functions of feeling and nevertheless do play a role in psychology, value must somehow be taken into account.
This happens when an assertion or value-judgment is accepted as an intrinsic part of the description of an object. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 613
024 In order to explain this, I should use the following argument.
The mother-child relationship is certainly the deepest and most poignant one we know; in fact, for some time the child is, so to speak, a part of the mother’s body.
Later it is part of the psychic atmosphere of the mother for several years, and in this way everything original in the child is indissolubly blended with the mother-image.
This is true not only for the individual, but still more in a historical sense.
It is the absolute experience of our species, an organic truth as unequivocal as the relation of the sexes to one another.
Thus there is inherent in the archetype,
in the collectively inherited mother-image, the same extraordinary intensity of relationship which instinctively impels the child to cling to its mother.
With the passing of the years, the man grows naturally away from the mother—provided, of course, that he is no longer in a condition of almost animal-like primitivity and has attained some degree of consciousness and culture—but he does not outgrow the archetype in the same natural way.
If he is merely instinctive, his life will run on without choice, since freedom of will always presupposes consciousness.
It will proceed according to unconscious laws, and there will be no deviation from the archetype.
But, if consciousness is at all effective, conscious contents will always be overvalued to the detriment of the unconscious, and from this comes the illusion that in separating from the mother nothing has happened except that one has ceased to be the child of this individual woman.
Consciousness only recognizes contents that are individually acquired; hence it recognizes only the individual mother and does not know that she is at the same time the carrier and representative of the archetype, of the “eternal” mother.
Separation from the mother is sufficient only if the archetype is included, and the same is true of separation from the father. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 723
025 For such people it is technically very simple to note down the “other” voice in writing and to answer its statements from the standpoint of the ego.
It is exactly as if a dialogue were taking place between two human beings with equal rights, each of whom gives the other credit for a valid argument and considers it worthwhile to modify the conflicting standpoints by means of thorough comparison and discussion or else to distinguish them clearly from one another.
Since the way to agreement seldom stands open, in most cases a long conflict will have to be borne, demanding sacrifices from both sides.
Such a rapprochement could just as well take place between patient and analyst, the role of devil’s advocate easily falling to the latter.
The present day shows with appalling clarity how little able people are to let the other man’s argument count, although this capacity is a fundamental and indispensable condition for any human community.
Everyone who proposes to come to terms with himself must reckon with this basic problem.
For, to the degree that he does not admit the validity of the other person, he denies the “other” within himself the right to exist—and vice versa.
The capacity for inner dialogue is a touchstone for outer objectivity. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 187
026 Who, then, will blame her for hesitating?
Do not most men prefer to rest on their laurels rather than get into a hopeless conflict as to whether they shall or shall not make history?
In the end it boils down to this: is one prepared to break with tradition, to be “unhistorical” in order to make history, or not?
No one can make history who is not willing to risk everything for it, to carry the experiment with his own life through to the bitter end, and to declare that his life is not a continuation of the past, but a new beginning.
Mere continuation can be left to the animals, but inauguration is the prerogative of man, the one thing he can boast of that lifts him above the beasts. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 268
027 In order to do anything creative, we must be unhistorical. Creation begins today, it has no history and no cause, creation is always creation from nothing.
To be historical is a sort of sterility.
In order to do anything creative, we must be unhistorical.
Creation begins today, it has no history and no cause, creation is always creation from nothing.
To be historical is a sort of sterility.
It is nice to live as the ancestors have always lived, to live in the same house, eat the same food, sleep in the same beds, wear the same clothes.
I have nothing to say against that, it is awfully nice.
But it is an awkward fact that man has at times a fit of enterprise and then he is bound to do something different.
We don’t know whether it is better, but we have to do something about this thing that is bubbling up and wanting to create.
It is most natural, yet to that theologian it was a tremendous thing that anybody should dream of trying to go beyond history; he was afraid to step on the past and go beyond.
For then one faces the great question.
Therefore it needs the philosophy of the East, the enterprising spirit of the crusader, the longing of Ahasuerus, and the willingness to suffer like Christ.
Christ was utterly unhistorical, he was a rebel, in the eyes of the Jewish law he was most sinful.
And what are the theologians doing about him?
If they want to be true followers of Christ, they shall begin every day anew, they shall not repeat old words, they shall not say: “This is a revelation that once took place and since then God has been unable to do anything new.”
That is not true because the spirit is forever living and forever beginning something new, the spirit is creative.
At times the spirit goes to sleep and there is no tension for a while, but then it gathers up steam and creates an explosion, and that is utterly unhistorical. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 1035-1036
028 As against Freud’s view that the dream is essentially a wish-fulfilment, I hold with my friend and collaborator Alphonse Maeder that the dream is a spontaneous self-portrayal, in symbolic form, of the actual situation in the unconscious.
Our view coincides at this point with the conclusions of Silberer.
The agreement with Silberer is the more gratifying in that it came about as the result of mutually independent work. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 505
029 nobody can afford to look round and to wait for someone else to do what he is loath to do himself. ~Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols, Page 91
030 In this way, too, the matter-of-fact and the commonplace come to wear an altered countenance and can even acquire a new glamour. For it all depends on how we look at things, and not on how they are in themselves. The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it. ~Carl Jung, CW 17, Para 96
031 Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 143
032 We cannot change anything unless we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses. I am the oppressor of the person I condemn, not his friend and fellow sufferer.
I do not in the least mean to say that we must never pass judgment when we desire to help and improve.
But if the doctor wishes to help a human being he must be able to accept him as he is.
And he can do this in reality only when he has already seen and accepted himself as he is. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 519
033 This way of looking at things has long been familiar.
Everyone speaks of the “storms of youth” which yield to the “tranquility of age.”
We speak, too, of a “confirmed belief” after “battling with doubts,” of “relief from inner tension,” and soThis is the involuntary energic standpoint shared by everyone.
For the scientific psychologist, of course, it remains valueless so long as he feels no need to estimate psychological values, while for physiological psychology this problem does not arise at all.
Psychiatry, as opposed to psychology, is purely descriptive, and until recently it has not concerned itself at all about psychological causality, has in fact even denied it.
Analytical psychology, however, was obliged to take the energic standpoint into account, since the causal-mechanistic standpoint of Freudian psychoanalysis was not sufficient to do justice to psychological values.
Value requires for its explanation a quantitative concept, and a qualitative concept like sexuality can never serve as a substitute.
A qualitative concept is always the description of a thing, a substance; whereas a quantitative concept deals with relations of intensity and never with a substance or a thing.
A qualitative concept that does not designate a substance, a thing, or a fact is a more or less arbitrary exception, and as such I must count a qualitative, hypostatized concept of energy.
A scientific causal explanation now and then needs assumptions of this kind,
yet they must not be taken over merely for the purpose of making
an energic standpoint superfluous.
The same is true of the theory of energy, which at times shows a tendency to deny substance in order to become purely teleological or finalistic.
To substitute a qualitative concept for energy is inadmissible, for that would be a specification of energy, which is in fact a force.
This would be in biology vitalism, in psychology sexualism (Freud), or some other “ism,” in so far as it could be shown that the investigators reduced the energy of the total psyche to one definite force or drive.
But drives, as we have shown, are specific forms of energy.
Energy includes these in a higher concept of relation, and it cannot express anything else than the relations between psychological values. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 51
034 If you are in your solitude, and all the space around you has become cold and unending, then you have moved far from men, and at the same time you have come near to them as never before.
Selfish desire only apparently led you to men, but in reality it led you away from them and in the end to yourself, which to you and to others was the most remote.
But now, if you are in solitude, your God leads you to the God of others, and through that to the true neighbor, to the neighbor of the self in others.
If you are in yourself, you become aware of your incapacity.
You will see how little capable you are of imitating the heroes and of being a hero yourself.
So you will also no longer force others to become heroes.
Like you, they suffer from incapacity.
Incapacity, too, wants to live, but it will overthrow your Gods. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 245
035 But the greater the tension, the greater the potential.
Great energy springs from a correspondingly great tension of opposites.
It was to the constellation of the most powerful opposites within him that Paracelsus owed his almost daemonic energy, which was not an unalloyed gift of God but went hand in hand with his impetuous and quarrelsome temperament, his hastiness, impatience, discontentedness, and his arrogance.
Not for nothing was Paracelsus the prototype of Faust, whom Jacob Burckhardt once called “a great primordial image” in the soul of every German.
From Faust the line leads direct to Nietzsche, who was a Faustian man if ever there was one.
What still maintained the balance in the case of Paracelsus and Angelus Silesius —”I under God and God under me”—was lost in the twentieth century, and the scale sinks lower and lower under the weight of an ego that fancies itself more and more godlike.
Paracelsus shared with Angelus Silesius his inner piety and the touching but dangerous simplicity of his relationship to God.
But alongside this spirituality a countervailing chthonic spirit made itself felt to an almost frightening degree: there was no form of manticism and magic that Paracelsus did not practise himself or recommend to others.
Dabbling in these arts—no matter how enlightened one thinks one is—is not without its psychological dangers.
Magic always was and still is a source of fascination.
At the time of Paracelsus, certainly, the world teemed with marvels: everyone was conscious of the immediate presence of the dark forces of nature.
Astronomy and astrology were not yet separated.
Kepler still cast horoscopes.
Instead of chemistry there was only alchemy. Amulets, talismans, spells for healing wounds and diseases were taken as a matter of course.
A man so avid for knowledge as Paracelsus could not avoid a thorough investigation of all these things, only to discover that strange and remarkable effects resulted from their use.
But so far as I know he never uttered a clear warning about the psychic dangers of magic for the adept.
He even scoffed at the doctors because they understood nothing of magic.
But he does not mention that they kept away from it out of a quite justifiable fear.
And yet we know from the testimony of Conrad Gessner, of Zurich, that the very doctors whom Paracelsus attacked shunned magic on religious grounds and accused him and his pupils of sorcery.
Writing to Crato von Crafftheim about Paracelsus’s pupil Adam von Bodenstein, Gessner says:
“I know that most people of this kind are Arians and deny the divinity of Christ . . . Oporin in Basel, once a pupil of Theophrastus and his private assistant [familiaris], reported strange tales concerning the latter’s intercourse with demons. They are given to senseless astrology, geomancy, necromancy, and other forbidden arts. I myself suspect that they are the last of the Druids, those of the ancient Celts who were instructed for several years in underground places by demons. It is also certain that such things are done to this very day at Salamanca in Spain. From this school also arose the wandering scholars, as they are commonly called. The most famous of these was Faust, who died not so long ago.”
Elsewhere in the same letter Gessner writes:
“Theophrastus has assuredly been an impious man and a sorcerer [magus], and has had intercourse with demons.” ~Carl Jung, CW 13, Para 154
036
037 This a process that we can in any way observe.
We can neither measure nor weigh nor photograph it.
It is entirely beyond sense perception.
We have to do here with a purely psychic reality, which is transmitted to us only indirectly through personal statements.
One speaks of rebirth; one professes rebirth; one is filled with rebirth.
This we accept as sufficiently real. We are not concerned here with the question: is rebirth a tangible process of some sort?
We have to be content with its psychic reality.
I hasten to add that I am not alluding to the vulgar notion that anything “psychic” is either nothing at all or at best even more tenuous than a gas.
Quite the contrary; I am of the opinion that the psyche is the most tremendous fact of human life.
Indeed, it is the mother of all human facts; of civilization and of its destroyer, war.
All this is at first psychic and invisible.
So long as it is “merely” psychic it cannot be experienced by the senses, but is nonetheless indisputably real.
The mere fact that people talk about rebirth, and that there is such a concept at all, means that a store of psychic experiences designated by that term must actually exist.
What these experiences are like we can only infer from the statements that have been made about them.
So, if we want to find out what rebirth really is, we must turn to history in order to ascertain what “rebirth” has been understood to mean. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 206
038 You gain everything from the God whom you bear, but not his weapon, since he crushed it.
He who conquers needs weapons. But what else do you want to conquer?
You cannot conquer more than the earth. And what is the earth?
It is round all over and hangs like a drop in the cosmos.
You will not reach the sun, and your power will not even extend to the barren moon; you will conquer neither the sea, nor the snow on the poles, nor the sands of the desert, but only a few spots on the green earth.
You will not conquer anything for any length of time. Your power will turn into dust tomorrow, for above all-at the very least you must conquer death.
So do not be a fool, throw down your weapon. God himself smashed his weapon.
Armor is enough to protect you from fools who still suffer from the need to conquer.
God’s armor will make you invulnerable and invisible to the worst foo ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 283
039 Man, however, can never see this beginning; he always sees only one and not the other, or the other and not the one, but never that which the one as well as the other encloses in itself.
The point of origin is where the mind and the will stand still; it is a state of suspension that evokes my outrage, my defiance and eventually my greatest fear.
For I can see nothing anymore and can no longer want anything.
Or at least that is how it seems to me.
The way is a highly peculiar standstill of everything that was previously movement, it is a blind waiting, a doubtful listening and groping.
One is convinced that one will burst.
But the resolution is born from precisely this tension, and it almost always appears where one did not expect it. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 311
040 The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort.
To become conscious of It involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real.
This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge, and It therefore, as a rule, meets with considerable resistance. Indeed, self-knowledge as a psychotherapeutic measure frequently requires much painstaking work extending over a long period. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 14
041 The instincts operate most smoothly when there is no consciousness to conflict with them, or when what consciousness there is remains firmly attached to instinct.
This condition no longer applies even to primitive man, for everywhere we find psychic systems at work which are in some measure opposed to pure instinctuality.
And if a primitive tribe shows even the smallest traces of culture, we find that creative fantasy is continually engaged in producing analogies to instinctual processes in order to free the libido from sheer instinctuality by guiding it towards analogical ideas.
These systems have to be constituted in such a way that they offer the libido a kind of natural gradient.
For the libido does not incline to anything, otherwise it would be possible to turn it in any direction one chose.
But that is the case only with voluntary processes, and then only to a limited degree.
The libido has, as it were, a natural penchant: it is like water, which must have a gradient if it is to flow.
The nature of these analogies is therefore a serious problem because, as we have said, they must be ideas which attract the libido.
Their special character is, I believe, to be discerned in the fact that they are archetypes, that Is, universal and inherited patterns which, taken together, constitute the structure of the unconscious.
When Christ, for instance, speaks to Nicodemus of spirit and water, these are not just random ideas, but typical ones which have always exerted a powerful fascination on the mind.
Christ is here touching on the archetype, and that, if anything, will convince Nicodemus, for the archetypes are the forms or river-beds along which the current of psychic life has always flowed. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 337
042 The conflict between ethics and sex today is not just a collision between instinctuality and morality, but a struggle to give an instinct its rightful place in our lives, and to recognize in this instinct a power which seeks expression and evidently may not be trifled with, and therefore cannot be made to fit in with our well-meaning moral laws.
Sexuality is not mere instinctuality; it is an indisputably creative power that is not only the basic cause of our individual lives, but a very serious factor in our psychic life as well.
Today we know only too well the grave consequences that sexual disturbances can bring in their train.
We could call sexuality the spokesman of the instincts, which is why from the spiritual standpoint sex is the chief antagonist, not because sexual indulgence is in itself more immoral than excessive eating and drinking, avarice, tyranny, and other extravagances, but because the spirit senses in sexuality a counterpart equal and indeed akin to itself. For just as the spirit would press sexuality, like every other instinct, into its service, so sexuality has an ancient claim upon the spirit, which it once—in procreation, pregnancy, birth, and childhood—contained within itself, and whose passion the spirit can never dispense with in its creations.
Where would the spirit be if it had no peer among the instincts to oppose it? It would be nothing but an empty form.
A reasonable regard for the other instincts has become for us a self-evident necessity, but with sex it is different.
For us sex is still problematical, which means that on this point we have not reached a degree of consciousness that would enable us to do full justice to the instinct without appreciable moral injury.
Freud is not only a scientific investigator of sexuality, but also its champion; therefore, having regard to the great importance of the sexual problem, I recognize the moral justification of his concept of sexuality even though I cannot accept it scientifically. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 107
043 The spirit of evil is fear, negation, the adversary who opposes life in its struggle for eternal duration and thwarts every great deed, who infuses into the body the poison of weakness and age through the treacherous bite of the serpent; he is the spirit of regression, who threatens us with bondage to the mother and with dissolution and extinction in the unconscious.
For the hero, fear is a challenge and a task, because only boldness can deliver from fear.
And if the risk is not taken, the meaning of life is somehow violated, and the whole future is condemned to hopeless staleness, to a drab grey lit only by will-o’-the-wisps. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 551
044 It is difficult to be a saint, because even a patient and longsuffering nature will not readily endure such a high degree of differentiation and defends itself in its own way.
The constant companion of sanctity is temptation, without which no true saint can live.
We know that these temptations can pass off unconsciously, so that only their equivalents reach consciousness in the form of symptoms.
We know, too, that Herz traditionally rhymes with Schmerz.
It is a well-known fact that hysterics substitute a physical pain for a psychic pain which is not felt because repressed.
Catherina Emmerich’s biographer has understood this more or less correctly, but her own interpretation of the pain is based, as usual, on a projection: it is always the others who secretly say all sorts of wicked things about her, and this is the cause of her pains.
The facts of the matter are rather different: the renunciation of all life’s joys, this fading before the flower, is always painful, and especially painful are the unfulfilled desires and the attempts of nature to break through the barrier of repression, without which no such differentiation would be possible.
The gossip and sarcastic gibes of the sisters very naturally pick on these painful things, so that it must seem to the saint as if her difficulties came from there.
She could hardly know that gossip is very apt to take over the role of the unconscious, and, like a skilled adversary, always aims at the chinks in our armour of which we know nothing. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 436
045 It would seem that one can pursue any science with the intellect alone except psychology, whose subject- the psyche has more than the two aspects mediated by sense-perception and thinking.
The function of value feeling is an integral part of our conscious orientation and ought not to be missing in a psychological judgment of any scope, otherwise the model we are trying to build of the real process will be incomplete.
Every psychic process has a value quality attached to it, namely its feeling-tone.
This indicates the degree to which the subject is affected by the process or how much it means to him (in so far as the process reaches consciousness at all).
It is through the “affect” that the subject becomes involved and so comes to feel the whole weight of reality.
The difference amounts roughly to that between a severe illness which one reads about in a textbook and the real illness which one has.
In psychology one possesses nothing unless one has experienced it in reality.
Hence a purely intellectual insight is not enough, because one knows only the words and not the substance of the thing from inside. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 61
046 Yet things are not quite so simple as that.
Eros is a questionable fellow and will always remain so, whatever the legislation of the future may have to say about it.
He belongs on one side to man’s primordial animal nature which will endure as long as man has an animal body.
On the other side he is related to the highest forms of the spirit. But he thrives only when spirit and instinct are in right harmony.
If one or the other aspect is lacking to him, the result is injury or at least a lopsidedness that may easily veer towards the pathological.
Too much of the animal distorts the civilized man, too much civilization makes sick animals.
This dilemma reveals the vast uncertainty that Eros holds for man.
For, at bottom, Eros is a superhuman power which, like nature herself, allows itself to be conquered and exploited as though it were impotent.
But triumph over nature is dearly paid for.
Nature requires no explanations of principle, but asks only for tolerance and wise measure. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 32
047 Dr. Jung: That is true, and that is a positive criterion for the fact that this must be a vision.
Her dreams were full of feeling, she was afraid, excited, she played music. In that last dream of the graveyard in France there was an intense feeling atmosphere.
But this series of images is completely devoid of it, which can only come from the fact that this vision is not the exclusive work of the unconscious; otherwise there would be a mood in it.
Her conscious attitude excludes her feeling, and from that fact you can see how these fantasies are produced.
It is first of all her unconscious that operates; she does not know what is going to happen.
If I asked her what she was going to see next, she would not have the faintest idea; the images that appear are sudden and unexpected, which proves the activity of the unconscious.
But the unconscious, as we have seen from her dreams, is very emotional, it is full of feeling.
And the reason that does not appear is that another factor is operating, her consciousness; since her conscious attitude is intellectual, that extinguishes the feeling.
So the original picture which the unconscious is trying to bring up is peculiarly denaturalized by the searchlight of the intellectual consciousness, and what you see is a sort of compromise between the unconscious and the conscious functions.
Mind you, she is not consciously blotting out the feeling, because she is in the primitive condition where she only perceives things.
Her conscious thinking is still there, but it is exteriorized; it is as if she had left her intellectual apparatus outside in the night somewhere, and somebody else were now playing upon it.
It is apparently left to the guidance of the unconscious, and the two together make a series of pictures of a peculiarly unfeeling nature, in spite of the emotional unconscious being its main substance. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 99-100
048 No man is so entirely masculine that he has nothing feminine in him.
The fact is, rather, that very masculine men have—carefully guarded and hidden—a very soft emotional life, often incorrectly described as “feminine.”
A man counts it a virtue to repress his feminine traits as much as possible, just as a woman, at least until recently, considered it unbecoming to be “mannish.”
The repression of feminine traits and inclinations naturally causes these contrasexual demands to accumulate in the unconscious.
No less naturally, the imago of woman (the soul-image) becomes a receptacle for these demands, which is why a man, in his love-choice, is strongly tempted to win the woman who best corresponds to his own unconscious femininity—a woman, in short, who can unhesitatingly receive the projection of his soul.
Although such a choice is often regarded and felt as altogether ideal, it may turn out that the man has manifestly married his own worst weakness. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 297
049 It is often tragic to see how blatantly a man bungles his own life and the lives of others yet remains totally incapable of seeing how much the whole tragedy originates in himself, and how he continually feeds it and keeps it going.
Not consciously, of course for consciously he is engaged in bewailing and cursing a faithless world that recedes further and further into the distance.
Rather, it is an unconscious factor which spins the illusions that veil his world. And what is being spun is a cocoon, which in the end will completely envelop him. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, CW 18
050 The attempts that have been made, during the last three hundred years, to grasp the psyche are all part and parcel of that tremendous expansion of knowledge which has brought the universe nearer to us in a way that staggers the imagination.
The thousandfold magnifications made possible by the electron microscope vie with the five hundred million light-year distances which the telescope travels.
Psychology is still a long way from a development similar to that which the other natural sciences have undergone; also, as we have seen, it has been much less able to shake off the trammels of philosophy.
All the same, every science is a function of the psyche, and all knowledge is rooted in it.
The psyche is the greatest of all cosmic wonders and the sine qua non of the world as an object. It is in the highest degree odd that Western man, with but very few—and ever fewer exceptions, apparently pays so little regard to this fact.
Swamped by the knowledge of external objects, the subject of all knowledge has been temporarily eclipsed to the point of seeming nonexistence. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 357
051 The general function of dreams is to try to restore our psychological balance by producing dream material that re-establishes, in a subtle way, the total psychic equilibrium.
This is what I call the complementary (or compensatory) role of dreams in our psychic make-up.
It explains why people who have unrealistic ideas or too high an opinion of themselves, or who make grandiose plans out of proportion to their real capacities, have dreams of flying or falling.
The dream compensates for the deficiencies of their personalities, and at the same time it warns them of the dangers in their present course.
If the warnings of the dream are disregarded, real accidents may take their place.
The victim may fall downstairs or may have a motor accident. ~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams Reflections, Page 161-162
052 I was never able to agree with Freud that the dream is a “facade” behind which its meaning lies hidden a meaning already known but maliciously, so to speak, withheld from consciousness.
To me dreams are a part of nature, which harbors no intention to deceive, but expresses something as best it can, just as a plant grows or an animal seeks its food as best it can.
These forms of life, too, have no wish to deceive our eyes, but we may deceive ourselves because our eyes are shortsighted.
Or we hear amiss because our ears are rather deaf but it is not our ears that wish to deceive us.
Long before I met Freud I regarded the unconscious, and dreams, which are its direct exponents, as natural processes to which no arbitrariness can be attributed, and above all no legerdemain.
I knew no reasons for the assumption that the tricks of consciousness can be extended to the natural processes of the unconscious.
On the contrary, daily experience taught me what intense resistance the unconscious opposes to the tendencies of the conscious mind. ~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams Reflections, Page 161-162
053 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; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 356.
054 Thus, language, in its origin and essence, is simply a system of signs or symbols that denote real occurrences or their echo in the human soul.
We must emphatically agree with Anatole France when he says:
What is thinking? And how does one think?
We think with words; that in itself is sensual and brings us back to nature. Think of it!
a metaphysician has nothing with which to build his world system except the perfected cries of monkeys and dogs.
What he calls profound speculation and transcendental method is merely the stringing together, in an arbitrary order, of onomatopoeic cries of hunger, fear, and love from the primeval forests, to which have become attached, little by little, meanings that are believed to be abstract merely because they are loosely used.
Have no fear that the succession of little cries, extinct or enfeebled, that composes a book of philosophy will teach us so much about the universe that we can no longer go on living in it. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 13
055 Often the hands know how to solve a riddle with which the intellect has wrestled in vain. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 180
056 At the same time it is an event that was repeated many times in history, for instance in the case of Caesar and Brutus. Through the myth is extremely old it is still a subject for repetition, as it expresses the simple fact that envy does not let mankind sleep in peace ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 42
057 Dr. Jung: The scarab, the kheper-ra, has always symbolized the rebirth of the sun, as our patient knows. Green means verdant or vegetation, spring is a spiritual rebirth.
Moreover, rebirth symbolism always means a new uniting of opposites in the process of transformation.
But to bring pairs of opposites together in a static condition is a sort of compromise.
One says sadly: “Alas, yes, black is white and white is black,” and that causes a sort of indifferent mixture, an apathetic standstill.
The union is only correct when the opposites grow together in a living progress. You see, the young men nearly ruin themselves here, wounding themselves till the blood pours into the earth.
They are also sacrificed in a way, as the dwarfs are buried alive; the pairs of opposites are injured, they lose their power, and then they unite. Through the sacrificial blood from above, flowing down upon the corpses of the dwarfs below, the scarab is created.
The scarab is a symbol of the union of the opposites, and it is here a rebirth symbol brought about by the activity of the animus.
This is like a mystery play, it is an anticipation of what should happen; it is as if the unconscious were saying to this woman:
“The meaning of what I am showing you is really a mystery of rebirth, it means life, but not as you understand it; the vision says you ran away from the mystery of rebirth because you misunderstood it, you thought that pain should not be, or that fire should not be, and so you cheated yourself; what is being performed before your eyes is what should be.” ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Vol. II, Page 648-649
058 The earliest origins of modern psychotherapy known to history lie in archaic shamanism and in the practices of the medicine men of primitive peoples.
In civilized societies the priest is primarily the guardian of existing collective ritual and tradition; among primitive peoples, however, the figure of the shaman is characterized by individual experience of the world of spirits (which today we call the unconscious) and his main function is the healing of personal illnesses and disturbances in the life of the collective.
He heals the sufferer by means of his own trance, he leads the dead into the “realm of the shadows” and serves as mediator between them and their gods; in a way he watches over their “souls.”
“The shaman,” says Eliade, “is the great specialist in the human soul; he alone ‘sees’ it, for he knows its ‘form’ and its destiny.”
His gift of moving freely among the powers of the beyond is sometimes a family inheritance but is more often rooted in an individual experience of vocation.
This is generally heralded by a period of psychic disorientation.
When called, he sets himself apart, turns contemplative; often he receives his call through a dream experience.
Sometimes he falls ill, physically, and is not restored to health until he begins to shamanize.
The shaman is, however, psychically essentially normal, though usually more sensitive and more excitable than other people.
(The Romans speak of genus irritabile vatum, the excitable race of seers.) ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung His Myth in Our Time, Page 99
059 The following reflections are my way of attempting to solve this problem.
The conflict between nature and spirit is itself a reflection of the paradox of psychic life.
This reveals a physical and a spiritual aspect which appear a contradiction because, ultimately, we do not understand the nature of psychic life itself.
Whenever, with our human understanding, we want to make a statement about something which in the last analysis we have not grasped and cannot grasp, then we must, if we are honest, be willing to contradict ourselves, we must pull this something into its antithetical parts in order to be able to deal with it at all.
The conflict between the physical and the spiritual aspects only shows that psychic life is in the last analysis an incomprehensible “something.”
Without a doubt it is our only immediate experience.
All that I experience is psychic.
Even physical pain is a psychic image which I experience; my sense impressions—for all that they force upon me a world of impenetrable objects occupying space—are psychic images, and these alone constitute my immediate experience, for they alone are the immediate objects of my consciousness.
My own psyche even transforms and falsifies reality, and it does this to such a degree that I must resort to artificial means to determine what things are like apart from myself.
Then I discover that a sound is a vibration of air of such and such a frequency, or that a colour is a wave of light of such and such a length.
We are in truth so wrapped about by psychic images that we cannot penetrate at all to the essence of things external to ourselves.
All our knowledge consists of the stuff of the psyche which, because it alone is immediate, is superlatively real.
Here, then, is a reality to which the psychologist can appeal—namely, psychic reality. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 680
060 We are all familiar with the sources of the problems that arise in the period of youth.
For most people it is the demands of life which harshly put an end to the dream of childhood.
If the individual is sufficiently well prepared, the transition to a profession or career can take place smoothly.
But if he clings to illusions that are contrary to reality, then problems will surely arise.
No one can take the step into life without making certain assumptions, and occasionally these assumptions are false—that is, they do not fit the conditions into which one is thrown.
Often it is a question of exaggerated expectations, underestimation of difficulties, unjustified optimism, or a negative attitude.
One could compile quite a list of the false assumptions that give rise to the first conscious problems. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 761
061 Since there is no nag that cannot be ridden to death, all theories of neurosis and methods of treatment are a dubious affair.
So I always find it cheering when businesslike physicians and fashionable consultants aver that they treat patients along the lines of “Adler,” or of “Kunkel,” or of “Freud,” or even of “Jung.”
There simply is not and cannot be any such treatment, and even if there could be, one would be on the surest road to failure.
When I treat Mr. X, I have of necessity to use method X, just as with Mrs. Z I have to use method Z.
This means that the method of treatment is determined primarily by the nature of the case.
All our psychological experiences, all points of view whatsoever, no matter from what theory they derive, may be of use on the right occasion.
A doctrinal system like that of Freud or Adler consists on the one hand of technical rules, and on the other of the pet emotive ideas of its author.
Still under the spell of the old pathology, which unconsciously regarded diseases as distinct “entia” in the Paracelsian sense, each of them thought it possible to describe a neurosis as if it presented a specific and clearly defined clinical picture.
In the same way doctors still hoped to capture the essence of the neurosis with doctrinaire classifications and to express it in simple formulae.
Such an endeavour was rewarding up to a point, but it only thrust all the unessential features of the neurosis to the forefront, and thus covered up the one aspect that is essential, namely the fact that this illness is always an intensely individual phenomenon.
The real and effective treatment of neurosis is always individual, and for this reason the stubborn application of a particular theory or method must be characterized as basically wrong.
If it has become evident anywhere that there are not so much illnesses as ill people, this is manifestly the case in neurosis.
Here we meet with the most individual clinical pictures it is possible to imagine, and not only that, but we frequently find in the neuroses contents or components of personality which are far more characteristic of the patient as an individual than the somewhat colourless figure he is all too likely to cut in civilian life.
Because the neuroses are so extraordinarily individualistic, their theoretical formulation is an impossibly difficult task, as it can only refer to the collective features, i.e., those common to many individuals.
But that is precisely the least important thing about the illness, or rather, it is totally irrelevant.
Apart from this difficulty there is something else to be considered, the fact, namely, that nearly every psychological principle, every truth relating to the psyche, must, if it is to be made absolutely true, immediately be reversed.
Thus one is neurotic because one has repressions or because one does not have repressions; because one’s head is full of infantile sex fantasies or because one has no fantasies; because one is childishly unadapted to one’s environment or because one is adapted too exclusively to the environment; because one does or because one does not live by the pleasure principle; because one is too unconscious or because one is too conscious; because one is selfish or because one exists too little as a self; and so on.
These antinomies, which can be multiplied at will, show how difficult and thankless is the task of theory-building in psychology. ~Carl Jung, CW 17, Para 203
062 The hallmarks of spirit are, firstly, the principle of spontaneous movement and activity; secondly, the spontaneous capacity to produce images independently of sense perception; and thirdly, the autonomous and sovereign manipulation of these images.
This spiritual entity approaches primitive man from outside; but with increasing development it gets lodged in man’s consciousness and becomes a subordinate function, thus apparently forfeiting its original character of autonomy.
That character is now retained only in the most conservative views, namely in the religions.
The descent of spirit into the sphere of human consciousness is expressed in the myth of the divine νοϋς caught in the embrace of φύσις.
This process, continuing over the ages, is probably an unavoidable necessity, and the religions would find themselves in a very forlorn situation if they believed in the attempt to hold up evolution.
Their task, if they are well advised, is not to impede the ineluctable march of events, but to guide it in such a way that it can proceed without fatal injury to the soul.
The religions should therefore constantly recall to us the origin and original character of the spirit, lest man should forget what he is drawing into himself and with what he is filling his consciousness.
He himself did not create the spirit, rather the spirit makes him creative, always spurring him on, giving him lucky ideas, staying power, “enthusiasm” and “inspiration.”
So much, indeed, does it permeate his whole being that he is in gravest danger of thinking that he actually created the spirit and that he “has” it.
In reality, however, the primordial phenomenon of the spirit takes possession of him, and, while appearing to be the willing object of human intentions, it binds his freedom, just as the physical world does, with a thousand chains and becomes an obsessive idee-force.
Spirit threatens the naive-minded man with inflation, of which our own times have given us the most horribly instructive examples.
The danger becomes all the greater the more our interest fastens upon external objects and the more we forget that the differentiation of our relation to nature should go hand in hand with a correspondingly differentiated relation to the spirit, so as to establish the necessary balance.
If the outer object is not offset by an inner, unbridled materialism results, coupled with maniacal arrogance or else the extinction of the autonomous personality, which is in any case the ideal of the totalitarian mass state. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 393
063 The separation of psychology from the basic assumptions of biology is purely artificial, because the human psyche lives in indissoluble union with the body.
And since these biological assumptions hold good not only for man but for the whole world of living things, the scientific foundation on which they rest obtains a validity far exceeding that of a psychological judgment, which is valid only in the realm of consciousness.
It is therefore no matter for surprise if the psychologist is often inclined to fall back on the security of the biological standpoint and to borrow freely from physiology and the theory of instinct.
Nor is it astonishing to find a widely accepted point of view which regards psychology as merely a chapter in physiology.
Although psychology rightly claims autonomy in its own special field of research,
it must recognize a far-reaching correspondence between its facts and the data of biology. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 232