Carl Jung Quotations

Suppose a patient comes to me with a great conflict and I say to him, “Read the Tao Tê Ching” or “Throw your sorrows on Christ.” It is splendid advice, but what does it mean to the patient in helping his conflict? Nothing. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 87

If we release the energy of the collective unconscious until we have no more, then we arrive at differentiation. The archetypes are sources of energy. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 99

If people who have no views of life catch hold of an archetypal idea, say a religious idea, they become efficient. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 99

Moral views do not touch the collective unconscious. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 99

Within the realm of willpower we have choice, but beyond that no choice at all. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 99

As I am an introverted intellectual my anima contains feeling [that is] quite blind. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 100

In my case the anima contains not only Salome, but some of the serpent, which is sensation as well. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 100

With Freud, the unconscious is always pouring out unacceptable material into the conscious, and the conscious has difficulty in taking up this material and represses it, and there is no balance. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 100

In the history of Gnosis, this figure plays a great role, and every sect claims to have been founded by such a one. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 101

Christ is not quite suitable; he is too young to be the Mahatma. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 101

When you think of a snake, you are always in touch with racial instinct. Horses and monkeys have snake phobia, as man has. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 102

The serpent shows the way to hidden things and expresses the introverting libido, which leads man to go beyond the point of safety, and beyond the limits of consciousness, as expressed by the deep crater. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 102

The serpent leads the psychological movement apparently astray into the kingdom of shadows, dead and wrong images, but also into the earth, into concretization. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 102

Inasmuch as the serpent leads into the shadows, it has the function of the anima; it leads you into the depths, it connects the above and the below. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 102

He [Elijah] said I treated thoughts as if I generated them myself, but, according to his views, thoughts were like animals in a forest, or people in a room, or birds in the air. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 103

For the understanding of the unconscious we must see our thoughts as events, as phenomena. We must have perfect objectivity. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 103

We went far up, and reached a cyclopean wall, boulders piled up in a great ring. I thought, “Ha, this is a Druidic sacred place.” We entered through an opening, and found ourselves in a large place, with a mound[ed] Druid altar. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 104

The animal face which I felt mine transformed into was the famous [Deus] Leontocephalus of the Mithraic mysteries, the figure which is represented with a snake coiled around the man, the snake’s head resting on the man’s head, and the face of the man that of a lion. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 104

It is the famous symbolism of the vessel, a symbolism that survives till 1925—see Parsifal. It is the Holy Grail, called the Vase of Sin (see King: The Gnostics and Their Remains). Also it is a symbol of the early Gnostics. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 107

You may remember that Cumont remarks that if something had happened to disrupt Christianity in the third century, the world would be Mithraic today. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 108

This picture is typical of masculine psychology: consciousness above, sex below, nothing in the middle. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 109

As soon as horizontal forms show in design it is the appearance of the rational functions, because they are on our earth. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 110

The pictures show a marked influence from the East, which is generally characteristic of American psychology as opposed to European. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 111

In itself this religion [Mithraic] is as antiquated as can be. It is only relatively important as being the brother of Christianity, which has assimilated some elements from it. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 112