Showing posts with label Aniela Jaffe. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Aniela Jaffe. Show all posts

Monday, March 5, 2018

Aniela Jaffe and Wolfgang Pauli Correspondence





To: A. Jaffe March 12, 1951

Dear Mrs. Jaffe,

Many thanks for sending me the Hoyle book review; I have quickly read it through and find that it gives a good picture of Hoyle and his book.

I know Hoyle quite well and attended his lecture in Zurich.

His mixture of fantasy and science I find in poor taste (I regard it as feminine-i.e., more precisely, I see Hoyle as a leeling type).

His "Background Matter" and his continuous creation of matter out of nothing strike me as sheer nonsense.

I see no reason to doubt the conservation of physical energy.

It is clear to me that this type of cosmogony is not physics but a projection of the unconscious.

Which takes me once again to the subject of my own essay on "background physics."!

Partly in connection with this, 1 should like to mention that recently I have thought more about "Symbols of the Nucleus" (according to C. C. Jung, symbols of the "Self" or "imagines Dei," and have had another look at A. Huxley's Perennial Philosophy.

It seems to me to have the same shortcomings as Theologia Deutsch (much admired by Huxley, actually), which I
have recently read: I do not see why the "ground" made the "fall in time" known as creation and how it can have the need to be perceived by human consciousness.

In other words, Huxley's premises are too straight-Buddhist Platonic for me and disregard Cusa's' coincidentia oppositorium and even the paradox of complementary pairs of opposites.

So far I know of only two religious philosophy systems that are logically free of contradiction:

One of them is the static-taoistic one (Lao-tse).

The other an evolutionary one, based essentially on an assumed reaction of human (or even prehuman) consciousness to the "nucleus" (you may say, to the “God-image.”)

In the latter case, I like to imagine it thus: That in this masculine-feminine symbol (cf. the essays by A. Jaffe) it is precisely the feminine part (matter, energy-see my essays on background physics) that captures the timeless-unchangeable in the “Chronos,” whereas the masculine part possibly capture the changeable.

Now I should like to ask you something about this last aspect:

Do you think that this is objectively correct, or do you look on such an idea more as characteristic of a masculine thinking type and his particular psychology?

As ever,

W PAULI ~Wolfgang Pauli, Atom and Archetype, Pages 73-74

Aniela Jaffe to Pauli

My dear Professor, [Kusnacht] 14 March 1951

Many thanks for returning the synchronicity paper.

Prof. Jung has not worked on it recently but is planning to go back to it.

As far as 1 know, however, this has nothing to do with physics.

1 should have returned the enclosure (with letter) a while ago, along with Prof. Jung's thanks.

Please excuse the delay.

I am always behind schedule at the moment.

With best greetings and wishes for a Happy Easter,

Yours sincerely, A. J. ~Wolfgang Pauli, Atom and Archetype, Pages 71-72

Sunday, March 4, 2018

Aniela Jaffe and Wolfgang Pauli Correspondence





To: A. Jaffe March 12, 1951

Dear Mrs. Jaffe,

Many thanks for sending me the Hoyle book review; I have quickly read it through and find that it gives a good picture of Hoyle and his book.

I know Hoyle quite well and attended his lecture in Zurich.

His mixture of fantasy and science I find in poor taste (I regard it as feminine-i.e., more precisely, I see Hoyle as a leeling type).

His "Background Matter" and his continuous creation of matter out of nothing strike me as sheer nonsense.

I see no reason to doubt the conservation of physical energy.

It is clear to me that this type of cosmogony is not physics but a projection of the unconscious.

Which takes me once again to the subject of my own essay on "background physics."!

Partly in connection with this, 1 should like to mention that recently I have thought more about "Symbols of the Nucleus" (according to C. C. Jung, symbols of the "Self" or "imagines Dei," and have had another look at A. Huxley's Perennial Philosophy.

It seems to me to have the same shortcomings as Theologia Deutsch (much admired by Huxley, actually), which I
have recently read: I do not see why the "ground" made the "fall in time" known as creation and how it can have the need to be perceived by human consciousness.

In other words, Huxley's premises are too straight-Buddhist Platonic for me and disregard Cusa's' coincidentia oppositorium and even the paradox of complementary pairs of opposites.

So far I know of only two religious philosophy systems that are logically free of contradiction:

One of them is the static-taoistic one (Lao-tse).

The other an evolutionary one, based essentially on an assumed reaction of human (or even prehuman) consciousness to the "nucleus" (you may say, to the “God-image.”)

In the latter case, I like to imagine it thus: That in this masculine-feminine symbol (cf. the essays by A. Jaffe) it is precisely the feminine part (matter, energy-see my essays on background physics) that captures the timeless-unchangeable in the “Chronos,” whereas the masculine part possibly capture the changeable.

Now I should like to ask you something about this last aspect:

Do you think that this is objectively correct, or do you look on such an idea more as characteristic of a masculine thinking type and his particular psychology?

As ever,

W PAULI ~Wolfgang Pauli, Atom and Archetype, Pages 73-74

Aniela Jaffe to Pauli

My dear Professor, [Kusnacht] 14 March 1951

Many thanks for returning the synchronicity paper.

Prof. Jung has not worked on it recently but is planning to go back to it.

As far as 1 know, however, this has nothing to do with physics.

1 should have returned the enclosure (with letter) a while ago, along with Prof. Jung's thanks.

Please excuse the delay.

I am always behind schedule at the moment.

With best greetings and wishes for a Happy Easter,

Yours sincerely, A. J. ~Wolfgang Pauli, Atom and Archetype, Pages 71-72

Sunday, November 12, 2017

Dear Mrs. Jaffe: As you are so interested in the story of Baeck and Jung,




Dear Mrs. Jaffe: Jerusalem 7 May 1963

As you are so interested in the story of Baeck and Jung, I will write it down for your benefit and have no objection to being cited by you in this matter.

In the summer of 1947 Leo Baeck was in Jerusalem. I had then just received for the first time an invitation to the Eranos meeting in Ascona, evidently at Jung's suggestion, and I asked Baeck whether I should accept it, as I had heard and read many protests about Jung's behavior in the Nazi period.

Baeck said: "You must go, absolutely!" and in the course of our conversation told me the following story.

He too had been put off by Jung's reputation resulting from those well-known articles in the years 1933-34, precisely because he knew Jung very well from the Darmstadt meetings of the School of Wisdom and would never have credited him with any Nazi and anti-Semitic sentiments.

When, after his release from Theresienstadt, he returned to Switzerland for the first time (I think it was 1946), he therefore did not call on Jung in Zurich.

But it came to Jung's ears that he was in the city and Jung sent a message begging him to visit him, which he, Baeck, declined because of those happenings.

Whereupon Jung came to his hotel and they had an extremely lively talk lasting two hours, during which Baeck reproached him with all the things he had heard. Jung defended himself by an appeal to the special conditions in Germany but at the same time confessed to him: "Well, I slipped up"-probably referring to the Nazis and his expectation that something great might after all emerge.

This remark, "I slipped up," which Baeck repeated to me several times, remains vividly in my memory.

Baeck said that in this talk they cleared up everything that had come between them and that they parted from one another reconciled again.

Because of this explanation of Baeck's I accepted the invitation to Eranos when it came a second time.

Yours sincerely,

G. Scholem ~Jung’s Last Years, Pages 97-98.

Monday, November 6, 2017

Carl Jung Quotations from: “Jung’s Last Years” by Aniela Jaffe




“Jung’s Last Years” by Aniela Jaffe:

I was expected, Jung explained, never under any circumstances to allow myself to be irritated by his anger, nor by his occasional "grumbling," his roarings and cursings! ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 102.

Jung's health and vitality had been weakened by an attack of amoebic dysentery in India in 1938, and a severe cardiac infarct in 1944 was the next blow life dealt him. "It was then that life busted me, as sometimes it busts everyone!" ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 99.

The fatal illness of his wife Emma-she died in November 1955 -marked the time when his life was nearing its end. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 100.

When I took up my duties with Jung I had known him for about twenty years-my analysis with him began in 1937, a few months before he went to India. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 100.

Respect for life also characterized Jung’s analytical work. Worried or depressed patients hoped in vain for exhortation or comfort. Jung gave them something else: he wanted to get them to integrate the necessary suffering to their life. To soothe it away or exclude it would rob them of a vital experience, while the core of the depression would remain and soon enough provoke new suffering. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 103.

Any kind of "joyful Christianity" or sentimental prettification exasperated Jung to the limit. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 104.

Usually he enjoyed a wonderful, deep sleep, and plenty of it, the result not only of his good constitution but of his close and positive relationship with the unconscious. Sleep was the source of his psychic strength. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 105.

Jung was a good Swiss citizen. Nothing but illness could prevent him from casting his vote, even in old age, and every Swiss knows the sense of responsibility and consciousness of duty this entails. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 108.

Jung belonged to the "freethinking" or Democratic party. It may be remarked parenthetically that he supported women's right to vote, a right hitherto non-existent in Switzerland and a subject of fervent disputes. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 108.

Foreign newspapers came into the house on days of political crisis; and magazines, especially the English Listener and the American National Geographic Magazine and
the Atlantic Monthly, satisfied his need for information on political and other matters. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 108.

As a student he had to get his money, or at least part of it, from the sale of antiques belonging to a relative. Jung knew what poverty was. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 109.

But there was something else too: objects possessed for Jung, a meaning in themselves, so they had to be treated with special care. "Things take their revenge!" he once hurled threateningly at my head when I had mislaid or botched something-I no longer remember what. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 109.

For anyone like Jung, who devoted so much care and attention to them, objects began to animate themselves, living a life of their own. They would start talking, and communicate things that remain hidden from others. Objects are not always inert; sometimes they seem to join in the game of life, to reflect the mood and thoughts of people. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 109.

"'You should make friends again with the nearest things,' said Nietzsche and didn't. He was wafted away on the great wind, drunk with his own words. Even things, thanks to the meaning immanent in them, answer us as we address them. They are socially minded and afford us delightful company in hours and days of loneliness." ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 110.

Nobody enjoyed laughing as much as Jung; nobody made others laugh as he could. After the death of his wife his laughter became rarer and quieter. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 113.

His impatience was due not only to his temperament-astrologically he was a Leo- but also to his extreme sensitivity, which both enriched and burdened his life. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 114.

But then he became serious and began telling me about himself and the sensitiveness that had tormented him from early youth, how it had encumbered him in his relationships and made him unsure of himself, how ashamed it had made him feel, but how, because of this same impressionability, he had perceived beauties and experienced things other people scarcely dreamed of. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 115.

But whenever a concert pianist gave a recital on the grand piano at the house in Kushnacht-the last one was the Russian- Ania Dorfmann- he was impressed by Jung's genuine feeling for music. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 116.

Once when in a consultation I wanted to tell him about my relation to my parents-the piece de resistance of a classic analysis-he wouldn't let me get a word out. "Don't waste your time! Anyway I know a person's relation to his parents at first glance!" ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 116.

Burning letters in the beautiful old stove with green tiles which stood in his library was a solemn and at the same time cheerful occasion. Once, with the fire roaring, he smote the side of the stove with the flat of his hand, as though clapping an old friend on the shoulder, and remarked, laughing: "This fellow is my discretion!" ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 117.

That he could still remember the dreams of his earliest childhood when he was well over eighty is astonishing enough. After he had recounted them for the memoirs, notes of the same dream were found which he had written some forty years earlier, and they differed in not a single detail from the spoken versions. Sometimes even the wording was nearly the same. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 118.

"Thank God my memory does not burden me with personal things.!!-he [Jung] used to exclaim with relief. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 118.

These [Eranos] "wall sessions" were the unforgettable highlights of the summer. They acquired a different character when Erich Neumann, of Tel-Aviv, was there, for then a dialogue developed between the two, and we listened. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 119.

Not so Jung: no question of letting the plan drop! Of course I must go on the trip, I had also to accept the risk of danger. The unconscious was nature, and like nature it could either help man or destroy him. What mattered was that he should try to confront nature consciously, to fathom it and transform it. That was the whole venture of life. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 121.

Before--going—to Africa in 1926 he learned Swahili, which stood him in good stead during palavers with the natives in Kenya and Uganda. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 122.

He [Jung] had no Hebrew, which he regretted very much, especially after he became acquainted with the texts of Jewish mysticism, which he would have liked to have read in the original. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 122.

After the death of his [Jung] wife, his four daughters and his daughter-in-law-each the center of a large family of her own-took turns staying with him for a while, to keep him company. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 122.

It was obvious that dictating letters tired him, but they took an important place in his life. As his libido stopped flowing into the production of scientific works, they became a receptacle for his creative ideas, and so their number continually increased in his later years. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 123.

But at bottom he understood and accepted his "outsiderness," because he knew that his ideas expected too much of his contemporaries. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 124.

Jung was all the more pleased and grateful for the successful interviews, such as those with Mircea Eliade, Georges Duplain, Georg Gerster, Gordon Young, Richard Evans, and John Freeman. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 125.

A distinguishing mark of his [Jung’s] correspondence is that the great bulk of it was conducted with people unknown to him. Letters to the well-known or famous were in the minority. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 125.

It was one of Jung's exaggerations to say that the "man of the people" understood him better than the intellectuals,… ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 125.

It was a particular joy to him that an abbess in Alsace read his "Answer to Job" with her nuns. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 126.

When Jung was writing, he enclosed himself in an invisible shell. Nothing could distract him or break through his concentration; it was a cardinal law that he was never under any circumstances to be spoken to while writing. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 128.

Very early on Jung had taken to giving the typescripts to his pupils to read before sending them to the printer. All criticisms, all suggestions for changes, cuts or additions were carefully weighed and were generally accepted. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 128.

“Jung smoked a water-cooled pipe.” “By choice he smoked Granger tobacco.” ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 129.

The [Tobacco] mixture was kept in a dark bronze box, which for some unaccountable reason bore the name "Habbakuk." ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 129.

Jung was no cigarette smoker, but after luncheon he allowed himself a Brazilian cigar, which he would offer also to his friends. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 129.

We had been sitting on the terrace shortly before his death, after a stroke had made speaking infinitely difficult for him. Even then he wanted to be told about what was going on in
the world, about the letters, people, telephone calls, and gave brief indications of answers, hints of thoughts. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 130.

Jung liked playing patience. He had no compunction, now and then, in an emergency, in helping fate a little by switching the cards around. The game had to come out, dammit! The scandalization of others who caught him out in such unabashed cheating did not disturb him in the slightest, it may even have spiced his enjoyment. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 131.

He liked English thrillers, but Simenon was his favorite. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 131.

For Jung the figure of the detective was a modern version of the alchemical Mercurius, solver of all riddles, and he was entertained by his heroic deeds. He also enjoyed science fiction. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 131.

There was the laughing head of the trickster that Jung said looked like Balzac, and a naked female form with arms outstretched towards a mare-he called it Pegasus. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 133.

There was also a relief of a bear with a ball and one of a snake. Thus these stones lived. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 135.

Then followed a simple but delicious meal: soup-generally an enriched . Knorr or Maggi packet-soup-a dish filled with an abundance of cheeses, butter, bread, and fruit. A cup of coffee and sometimes a liqueur ended the meal. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 135.

“It is well known that Jung was a connoisseur of wine.” “Cocktails he detested.” ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 135.

Jung died in his house in Kusnacht, amid the great images that filled his soul. As the thought of death had been his familiar for many decades, it did not come as an enemy, although he
was familiar also with the pain caused by the finite11ess of life. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 135.

The spectacle of eternal nature makes me painfully aware of my weakness and perishability, and I find no joy in imagining an equanimity in conspectu mortis. As I once dreamt, my will to live is a glowing daimon, who sometimes makes the consciousness of my mortality hellish difficult for me. One can, at most, save face like the unjust steward, and then not always, so that my lord wouldn't find even that much to commend. But the daimon reeks nothing of that, for life. At the core is steel on stone. ~Carl Jung, Jung’s Last Years, Page 136.

For relaxation, Jung played solitaire in the evenings, occasionally "helping fate a little by switching the cards around" in "unabashed cheating." ~Aniela Jaffe, Last Years, Pages 114-115.

We had been sitting on the terrace shortly before his death, after a stroke had made speaking infinitely difficult for him. Even then he wanted to be told about what was going on in the world, about the letters, people, telephone calls, and gave brief indications of answers, hints of thoughts. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 130.

Jung liked playing patience. He had no compunction, now and then, in an emergency, in helping fate a little by switching the cards around. The game had to come out, dammit! The scandalization of others who caught him out in such unabashed cheating did not disturb him in the slightest, it may even have spiced his enjoyment. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 131.

He liked English thrillers, but Simenon was his favorite. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 131.

For Jung the figure of the detective was a modern version of the alchemical Mercurius, solver of all riddles, and he was entertained by his heroic deeds. He also enjoyed science fiction. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 131.

There was the laughing head of the trickster that Jung said looked like Balzac, and a naked female form with arms outstretched towards a mare-he called it Pegasus. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 133.

There was also a relief of a bear with a ball and one of a snake. Thus these stones lived. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 135.

Then followed a simple but delicious meal: soup-generally an enriched . Knorr or Maggi packet-soup-a dish filled with an abundance of cheeses, butter, bread, and fruit. A cup of coffee and sometimes a liqueur ended the meal. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 135.

“It is well known that Jung was a connoisseur of wine.” “Cocktails he detested.” ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 135.

Jung died in his house in Kushnacht, amid the great images that filled his soul. As the thought of death had been his familiar for many decades, it did not come as an enemy, although he
was familiar also with the pain caused by the finiteness of life. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 135.

The spectacle of eternal nature makes me painfully aware of my weakness and perishability, and I find no joy in imagining an equanimity in conspectu mortis. As I once dreamt, my
will to live is a glowing daimon, who sometimes makes the consciousness of my mortality hellish difficult for me. One can, at most, save face like the unjust steward, and then not
always, so that my lord wouldn't find even that much to commend. But the daimon reeks nothing of that, for life. At the core is steel on stone. ~Carl Jung, Jung’s Last Years, Page 136.

''It is exceedingly difficult to write anything definite or descriptive about the progression of psychological states. It always seemed to me as if the real milestones were certain symbolic events characterized by a strong emotional tone. " ~Carl Jung, Jung’s Last Years, Page 137.

"At that moment I heard from outside and above me my mother's voice. She called out, 'Yes, just look at him. That is the man-eater!' That intensified my terror still more, and I awoke sweating and scared to death.' ~Carl Jung, Jung’s Last Years, Page 137.

I had to obey an inner law which was imposed on me and left me no freedom of choice…. . . A creative person has little power over his own life. He is not free. He is captive and driven by his daimon .... This lack of freedom has been a great sorrow to me. ~Carl Jung, Jung’s Last Years, Page 141.

'' A few weeks later I returned to school, and never suffered another attack. The whole bag of tricks was over and done with! That was when I learned what a neurosis is." ~Carl Jung, Jung’s Last Years, Page 143.

"For the time being I am undergoing the curse of letter-writing. Only through submission to detestable duties can one gain a certain feeling of liberation which induces a creative mood. In the long run one 1 cannot steal creation.'' ~Carl Jung, Jung’s Last Years, Page 143.

"The high degree of assurance and composure that distinguish you [Freud] is not yet mine generally speaking .... Countless things that are commonplaces for you are still brand new experiences for me, which I have to relive afterwards until they tear me to pieces." ~Carl Jung, Jung’s Last Years, Page 144.

"And let those who go down with the sunset way do so with open eyes, for it is a sacrifice which daunts even the gods." ~Carl Jung, Jung’s Last Years, Page 150.

"After the parting of ways with Freud, a period of uncertainty began for me. It would be no exaggeration to call it a state of disorientation. I felt totally suspended in mid-air, for I had not yet found my own footing." ~Carl Jung, Jung’s Last Years, Page 150.

"I had wanted to go on with the scientific analysis of myths which I had begun in Symbols of Transformation. That was still my goal-but I must not think of that! I was being compelled to go through the process of the unconscious. I had to let myself be carried along by the current, without a notion of where it would lead me." ~Carl Jung, Jung’s Last Years, Page 153.

... I had no choice but to return to it and take up once more that child's life with his childish games. This moment was a turning point in my fate, but I gave in only after endless resistance and with a sense of resignation. For it was a painfully humiliating experience to realize that there was nothing to be done except play childish games. ~Carl Jung, Jung’s Last Years, Page 153

A few years later the dream came true: Jung fell into a neurotic conflict between creativity and inertia. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 141.

When Jung was twelve years old, the "fatal resistance to life in this world" obtruded once more and led to a neurosis. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 142.

He [Jung] suffered from more or less genuine fainting spells and stayed out of school for a half year or more. ''I frittered away my time with loafing, collecting, reading, and playing. But I did not feel any happier for it; I had the obscure feeling that I was fleeing from myself.'' ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 143.

The dissertation, ''On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena" (1902), dedicated to his fianc6e and written at the suggestion of Eugen Bleuler, his chief, formed the prelude to the first creative period. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 144.

The real divergence between Jung's standpoint and Freud's first came to light in the theme of the mother-son incest. Jung dealt with it in the last chapter of Symbols of Transformation, entitled "The Sacrifice." ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 148.

“A true assessment of Freud's achievement would take us into areas of the mind that concern not only Jews but Europeans in general, areas that I have sought to illuminate in my works. Without Freud's 'psychoanalysis' I wouldn't have had a clue.” ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 152.

Jung expressly emphasized, however, that the principle of synchronicity should be applied only when a causal explanation is unthinkable. "For, whenever a cause is even remotely thinkable, synchronicity becomes an exceedingly doubtful proposition .. " ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 20.

In the last essay he wrote before he died, Jung recapitulated the salient points in a dream series of an eight-year-old girl. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 20.

it was a momentous event when he became acquainted with Wilhelm in 1928. Their first meeting, which soon developed into a friendship, took place when Wilhelm, with the help of his learned friend Lau Nai Suan in China, had after ten years of work just completed a new translation of the I Ching, along with a commentary on the oracles. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 26.

The astronomical positions of the stars are merely quantities named by man for measuring and determining time but do not tell us anything about its qualities. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 31.

He [Jung] pointed out that the proton radiation from the sun is influenced to such a degree by the conjunctions, oppositions, and quartile aspects of the planets that the occurrence of electromagnetic storms ( sunspot periods) can be predicted with a fair amount of probability. The astronomical positions of the stars are merely quantities named by man for measuring and determining time but do not tell us anything about its qualities. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 32.

"Astrology seems to require differing hypotheses, and I am unable to opt for an either-or. We shall probably have to resort to a mixed explanation, for nature does not give a fig for the sanitary neatness of our intellectual categories of thought." ~Carl Jung, Jung’s Last Years, Page 32.

"I incline. in fact to the view that synchronicity in the narrower sense is only a special instance of general acausal orderedness that, namely, of the equivalence of psychic and physical processes." ~Carl Jung, Jung’s Last Years, Page 42.

Although the year 1000 did not mark the expected end of the world, it secretly initiated the "kingdom of the second Fish" -traditionally interpreted as the age of Antichrist-whose culmination, no one will deny, we are experiencing in the present century. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 33

In reality the archetype must be regarded as the "arranger" of synchronistic phenomena. It is their condition, not their cause. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 37.

Even in apparently banal synchronistic events it is possible in most cases to uncover the organizing archetype. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 38.

Jung's method of research was pre-eminently historical. It consisted essentially in comparing his ideas and intuitions, and the insights he had gained from the empirical material provided by his patients, with the historical evidence. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 46.

He would let the contents rise up from the unknown psychic depths, not only carefully observing them but treating. them as realities to be lived with, felt, and experienced through active participation. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 47.

This experimental phase began at the end of 1912 and lasted till about 1919. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 47.

The study of Gnostic traditions nevertheless left him unsatisfied. For one thing, they were not less than seventeen or eighteen hundred years old and too remote historically for him to establish a living link with them. For another, the tradition that might have connected the Gnostics with the present seemed to him to have been broken. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 47.

Soon afterwards he acquired the first alchemical work for his library from a bookseller in Munich. It was the two volumes of Artis Auriferae, a compilation of some thirty Latin treatises, published in Basel in 1593. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 53.

In the course of his psychological interpretation of alchemical texts, which were then not understood at all, Jung came to realize the truth of the alchemical saying "liber librum aperit" (one book opens another). ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 54.

In his old age Gerhard Dorn, a learned natural philosopher, doctor, and Paracelcist from Frankfurt-am-Main, who lived in the sixteenth century, came to mean more to Jung than most other alchemists. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 55.

The Book of Krates (ninth century) presents the whole alchemical doctrine in the form of a dream. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 58.

From the numerical standpoint they differ in that the alchemical conception is characterized by the quaternity-in keeping with the Gnostic saying "In the Four is God" whereas the Christian conception found its most differentiated expression in the Holy Trinity. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 63.

Elsewhere Jung contrasted the transformation in the Mass with an analogous transformation process described in the visions of Zosimos of Panopolis, an alchemist of the third century, and compared the Christian ideas of redemption with those of the alchemists. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 66.

His [Jung’s] observations on the religious aspect of evil start from the ancient numerical dilemma that runs through alchemy-the opposition and interplay of the trinity and the quaternity, where the "fourth" takes over the role of evil. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 66.

Behind the bond between the sexes stands the self, the archetype of wholeness, which contains and at the same time unites the opposites in human nature. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 67.

The dogma of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, promulgated by Pope Pius XII in 1950, contains several allusions to the "heavenly marriage," thus proving how the unconscious world of images reasserts its timeless significance as a dark counterpart to the spiritual world of Christianity. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 68.

He described it as "psychoid," that is, not purely psychic but to a certain extent physical and organic. One might say that it too is utriusque capax. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 69.

Reverting to this idea of a transcendental unitary reality. In his memoirs, Jung admitted that he had reached the bounds of scientific understanding, for which reason he called Mysterium Coniunctionis the culmination of his work. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 70.

The "subtle body," or "breath body" as it is sometimes called, is an archetypal idea that can be traced back to classical antiquity. It occurs in Poseidonius and Plotinus, in Proclus and Synesius, and later in Paracelsus. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 72.

For the Paracelsists, matter acquired the ineffable quality of an "increatum," and hence was coexistent and co eternal with God. ~Carl Jung, Jung’s Last Years, Page 59.

I devoured the manuscript at once, for the text gave me undreamed-of confirmation of my ideas about the mandala and the circumambulation of the centre. That was the first event that broke through my isolation. I became aware of an affinity; I could establish ties with something and someone. ~Carl Jung, Jung’s Last Years, Page 50.

One of the books most frequently quoted by Jung is the anonymous Rosarium philosophorum; it was first published in Frankfurt in 1550, and is also contained in the second volume of Artis Auriferae. Jung's monograph "The Psychology of the Transference" ~Carl Jung, Jung’s Last Years, Page 50.

"Consequently alchemy gains the quite new and interesting aspect of a projected psychology of the collective unconscious, and thus ranks with mythology and folklore. Its symbolism is in the closest relation to dream symbolism on the one hand, and to the symbolism of religion on the other." ~Carl Jung, Jung’s Last Years, Page 57.

"Novum lumen": "To cause things hidden in the shadow to appear, and to take away the shadow from them, this is permitted to the intelligent philosopher by God; through nature….All these things happen, and the eyes of the common men do not see them, but the eyes of the understanding and of the imagination perceive them with true and truest vision." ~Michael Sendivogius, Jung’s Last Years, Page 58.

"The conventional guises are dropped and the true man comes to light. He is in very truth reborn from this psychological relationship. [Transference]" ~Carl Jung, Jung’s Last Years, Page 67.

The organizing factor would then be the archetype of wholeness, which is as much physical as psychic and may thus be thought of as a "subtle body." ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 75.

Synchronicity, Meier says, "presupposes a tertium, higher than soma or psyche, and responsible for symptom formation in both-approximating to the theory of the 'subtle body.' ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 75.

The phenomenon is in accord with the alchemical conception of imaginatio as a half corporeal, half spiritual being, whereby the soul is enabled to bring about "many things of the utmost profundity outside the body" by imagining them. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 76.

Michael Sendivogius says: "Moreover the soul by which man differs from other animals operates inside his body, but it has greater efficacy outside the body, for outside the body it rules with absolute power." ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 76.

£or Jung the stone "contained and. at the same time was the bottomless mystery of being, the embodiment of spirit," and his kinship with it was "the divine nature in both, in the dead and the living matter." ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 76.

"The experiences of the alchemists were, in a sense, my experiences, and their world was my world. " ~Carl Jung, Jung’s Last Years, Page 76.

Yet, unlike the alchemists, what fascinated Jung his life long was not Matter, but Psyche. For the scientist in him she was the object of rigorous empirical research; as a physician he succored her with deepest understanding; as a man he was the master and servant of her transformations. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 77.

At the Congress of the International Society at Bad Nauheim in May 1934, Jung stipulated that the German-Jewish doctors who had been ejected or excluded from the German section could individually become members of the International Society with equal rights, thus preserving their professional and social status. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 81.

Jung, to put it briefly, saw the Jews as a “race with a three thousand year-old civilization," whereas he attributed to the "Aryans" a "youthfulness not yet fully weaned from barbarism.” ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 81.

Yet he himself, long before the advent of Hitler, had warned in 1918 about "the blond beast menacingly prowling about in its underground prison, ready at any moment to burst out with devastating consequences. " But who took the warning seriously then? ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 91.

"The doctor who, in wartime, gives his help to the wounded of the other side will surely not be held a traitor to his country." ~Carl Jung, Jung’s Last Years, Page 81.

In psychology the object of knowledge is at the same time the organ of knowledge, which is true of no other science. . . . If the organ of knowledge is its own object, we have every reason to examine that organ very closely indeed, since the subjective premise is at once the object of knowledge
which is therefore limited from the start. ~Carl Jung, Jung’s Last Years, Page 87.

"Are we really to believe that a tribe which has wandered through history for several thousand years as 'God's chosen people' was not put up to such an idea by some quite special psychological peculiarity? " ~Carl Jung, Jung’s Last Years, Page 89.

When Hitler seized power it became quite evident to me that a mass psychosis was boiling up in Germany. But I could not help telling myself that this was after all Germany, a civilized European nation with a sense of morality and discipline. Hence the ultimate outcome of this unmistakable
mass movement still seemed to me uncertain, just as the figure of the Fuhrer at first struck me as being merely ambivalent.
. . . Like many of my contemporaries, I had my doubts. ~Carl Jung, Jung’s Last Years, Page 89-90.

The driving forces of a psychological mass movement are essentially archetypal. Every archetype contains the lowest and the highest, evil and good, and is therefore capable of producing diametrically opposite results. Hence it is impossible to make out at the start whether it will prove to be positive or negative. ~Carl Jung, Jung’s Last Years, Page 90.

"One can love God, and must fear him. " ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 733.

"a change in the attitude of the individual can bring about a renewal in the spirit of the nations.” ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 459.

So in the Upanishads, in contrast to the Chinese viewpoint, the emphasis is not on the opposites as such, but on the peculiar creative process between them. One could say therefore that the general point of view of the Upanishads is monistic. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 81

Atman is the central thing between the opposites; they themselves are almost taken for granted. Lao-tse on the other hand, as we have seen, stresses the opposites, although he knows the way between the two, Tao, and accepts it as the essence of life. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 81

The Upanishads appeal to people who are beyond the pairs of opposites. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 82

Today we have lost to a great extent this sense of the immanence of thought, as one might put it, and have instead the illusion of making our thoughts ourselves. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 82

We are not convinced that our thoughts are original beings that walk about in our brains, and we invent the idea that they are powerless without our gracious creative act; we invent this in order not to be too much influenced by our thoughts. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 82

Of course it is quite useful to us to have the idea that our thoughts are free expressions of our intentional thinking, otherwise we would never be free from the magic circle of nature. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 82

After all, we really can think, even if not with an absolute independence from nature; but it is the duty of the psychologist to make the double statement, and while admitting man’s power of thought, to insist also on the fact that he is trapped in his own skin, and therefore always has his thinking influenced by nature in a way he cannot wholly control. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 83

The legend says of the I Ching that a horse came up out of the Yellow River bearing on his back the trigrams out of which the symbols are built up. The sages copied it and it was known as the River Map. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 83

We do not think thus, and so we no longer take our thoughts as nature; the very way thought processes work in us keeps us from the notion that nature has spoken to us when we have thought. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 83

Obviously there is no law to prove that this is so, but we cannot assume that the products of our brains do not derive from nature; therefore I see no reason why we would not find astonishingly true things in the thought of the ancient sages, such as the I Ching represents. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 84

He [Heraclitus] is singularly Chinese in his philosophy and is the only Western man who has ever really compassed the East. If the Western world had followed his lead, we would all be Chinese in our viewpoint instead of Christian. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 84

Extreme fanaticism I found to rest on a concealed doubt. Torquemado, as the father of the Inquisition, was as he was because of the insecurity of his faith; that is, he was unconsciously as full of doubt as he was consciously full of faith. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 85

I started with the primitive idea of the flowing out and the flowing in of energy, and from this I constructed the theory of the introverted and extraverted types. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 86

The libido is not split in itself; it is a case of a balancing movement between opposites, and you could say that libido is one or that libido is two according as you concentrate now on the flow, now on the opposing poles between which the flow takes place. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 86

The opposition is a necessary condition of libido flow, and so you may say that by virtue of that fact one is committed to a dualistic conception of the world; but you can also say that the “flow”—that is, the energy—is one, and that is monism. If there is no high and low, no water flows; if there is high and low and no water, nothing happens; thus there is at the same time duality and oneness in the world, and it is a matter of temperament which viewpoint you choose to assume. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 86

If you are a dualist like Lao-tse, and concerned chiefly with the opposites, all you will find to say about what is between might go into his words, “Tao is so still.” But if, on the other hand, you are monistic like the Brahmans, you can write whole volumes about Atman, the thing between the opposites. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 86

But when we become aware of the opposites we are driven to seek the way that will resolve them for us, for we cannot live in a world that is and is not, we must go forward to a creation that enables us to attain a third point superior to the pairs of opposites. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Pages 86-87

We have to learn with effort the negations of our positions, and to grasp the fact that life is a process that takes place between two poles, being only complete when surrounded by death. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 86

We could adopt Tao and Atman as our solutions, possibly, but only on the assumption that these terms have meant to their originators what our philosophical ideas mean to us. But that is not so; Tao and Atman grew, Atman out of the lotus, while Tao is the still water. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 87

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

Analysis should release an experience that grips us or falls upon us as from above, an experience that has substance and body, such as those things occurred to the ancients. ~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

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

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

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

The ringing of the bells in the celebration of the Mass probably comes from the Mithraic cult, where bells were rung at a certain point in the mysteries. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 112

Also, Christmas day is a Mithraic feast. In early days, Christmas came on the 8th of January, and was a day taken over from the Egyptians, being the day celebrating the finding of the body of Osiris. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 113

To the early Christians, Christmas was the resurrection of the sun, and as late as Augustine, Christ was identified with the sun. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 113

There is no man who could not exist without a woman—that is, he carries the necessary balance within himself if he be obliged to live his life that way, and the same thing applies to a woman with respect to a man, but if either sex is to have a complete life, it requires the other as a compensatory side. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 114

Primitives show a much more balanced psychology than we do for the reason that they have no objection to letting the irrational come through, while we resent it. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 114

For example, you can run across people who think themselves born without a religious sense, and this is just as absurd as if they said they were born without eyes. It simply means they have left all that side of themselves in the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 114

As another example, one is always hearing persons who have had some experience of analysis saying, “I won’t make up my mind about that, I’ll see what my dreams say.” But there are hosts of things which call for decisions from the conscious, and about which it is idiotic to “put it up” to the unconscious for a decision. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 114

One can even come to clairvoyance; but when such a gift as the latter is developed, it makes the person permeable to all sorts of atmospheric conditions that may result in his misery. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 115

So when you relieve the unconscious of non-realized contents, you release it for its own special functioning, and it will go ahead like an animal. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 115

We look at an animal and say it is such and such a species, but if we knew that animal to be our ghost brother, it would be a different situation for us. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 115

After all, an animal is not just a thing with fur on it; it is a complete being. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 115

That is, Americans, being so split, turn to the East for the expression of the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 116

But if I ask myself how I establish an absolute or unconditioned connection with the world, my answer is that I can only do that when I am both passive and active at the same time, as much victim as actor. This only occurs for a man through woman. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 117

If you give up the woman in reality, you fall a victim to the anima. It is this feeling of inevitability about his connection with woman that man dislikes the most. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 117

Let us take as a sample the Catholic Mass. If we study this we must recognize it to be one of the most perfect things we possess. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 119


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

Take the goodness expressed in Christianity, for instance. That is apparent to us, but get outside of your own skin and into that of a Polynesian native, and Christianity looks very black indeed. Or ask the Spanish heretics who have been burned for the glory of God what they think of Christianity. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 119

When a man knows his anima, she is both night and day to him. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 120

A man may, as I have said, know the real woman also as lightness and darkness, but when he sees in a woman the magical quality that is the essence of She, he at once begins tremendous projections of the unconscious upon her. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 120

A woman too has a peculiar attitude toward nature, much more trusting than that of a man. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 123

I have been tremendously impressed with the animal character of the unconscious of woman, and I have reason to think that her relation to the Dionysian element is a very strong one. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 124

It looks to me as if man were really further away from the animal than the woman—not that he has not a strong animal likeness in him, but it is not so psychological as in women. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 124

It is as though in men the animal likeness stopped at the spinal cord while in women it extends into the lower strata of the brain, or that man keeps the animal kingdom in him below the diaphragm, while in women it extends throughout her being. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 124

But that is altogether a mistake, for their [women] animalness contains spirituality, while in the man it is only brute. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 124

There are always parts of your functions that are within your conscious, and parts that are without your conscious but still within the sphere of psychical activity. Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 131

It is of reality as it is that sensation speaks, not reality as it might have been nor as it might be, but as it is now. Therefore sensation gives only a static image of reality, and this is the basic principle of the sensation type. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 132

I would like to speak now of the four functions in relation to reality, for it is my idea that each of them brings to the subject a special aspect of reality. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 131

Inasmuch as we can test the validity of intuition by seeing whether or not the possibilities do occur actually, and since millions of these possibilities arrived at by intuition have been realized, it is legitimate for the intuitive type to value his function as a means of understanding one phase of reality, that is, dynamic reality. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 132

Insofar as you live in a world, you cannot escape forming a persona. You can say, “I won’t have such and such a persona,” but as you discard one you get another—unless, of course, you live on Everest. You can only learn who you are through your effects on other people. By this means you create your personality. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 117

It was only in later days, when the Mithraic cult was being overcome, that the Christians took the 25th of December, the day celebrated by the followers of Mithras as the day of Sol invictus, for their Christmas. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 113

Thinking is based on reality only indirectly, but nonetheless it can carry just as much conviction. Nothing is more real than an idea to a person who thinks. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 132

Thinking, then, derives from the reality of the image, but has the image reality? To answer that question, let us turn to the field of natural science, where we can find abundant evidence of the potency of an image. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 132

The great philosophers have spoken of them always as being eternal. It is these static images that underlie thinking. We could call them, if we chose, Logos. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 133

I assume that the fact of the discovery of the four functions is equivalent to a statement about the world, that is, that the world has these four aspects of reality. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 134

We have no way of knowing whether the world is Cosmos or Chaos, for, as we know the world, all the order is put into it by ourselves. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 134

Each function type has a special way of viewing feeling, and is likely to find things about it which are untrue for the other types. Thus one of the points with respect to the functions that has been most combated is my contention that feeling is rational. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 134

My books have been read largely by intellectuals, who have, of course, not been able to see feeling from this aspect, because feeling in themselves is thoroughly irrational by reason of its contamination by elements from the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 134

Sometimes it is quite impossible to convince a person that he cannot grasp the trans-subjective world with one function alone, no matter how strong that function may be. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 134

I have spoken more than once of the way an intuitive type can neglect reality, and you can, I am sure, supply an equal number of examples of the ways a feeling type can do the same thing. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 135

Up to this time we have spoken of the subject as though it were unchanging in time, but as we know, the body is a four-dimensional entity, the fourth dimension being time. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 136

Time means a past and a future, and so the individual is only complete when we add his actual structure as the result of past events, and at the same time the actual structure taken as the starting point of new tendencies. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 137



We can speak of the conscious ego as the subjective personality, and of the shadow self as the objective personality. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 139

For we do have effects on people which we can neither predict nor adequately explain. Instinct warns us to keep away from this racial side of ourselves. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 139

If we became aware of the ancestral lives in us, we might disintegrate. An ancestor might take possession of us and ride us to death. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 139

When it comes to the rather delicate task of locating the collective unconscious, you must not think of it as being compassed by the brain alone but as including the sympathetic nervous system as well. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 140

The very primitive animal layers are supposed to be inherited through the sympathetic system, and the relatively later animal layers belonging to the vertebrate series are represented by the cerebrospinal system. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 140

On this basis the main body of the collective unconscious cannot be strictly said to be psychological but psychical. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 140

We cannot repeat this distinction too often, for when I have referred to the collective unconscious as “outside” our brains, it has been assumed that I meant hanging somewhere in mid-air. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 141

After this explanation it will become clear to you that the collective unconscious is always working upon you through trans-subjective facts which are probably inside as well as outside yourselves. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 141

It is of reality as it is that sensation speaks, not reality as it might have been nor as it might be, but as it is now. Therefore sensation gives only a static image of reality, and this is the basic principle of the sensation type. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 132

He thinks the sensation type spends his life with corpses, but once he has taken up this inferior function in himself, he begins to enjoy the object as it really is and for its own sake instead of seeing it through an atmosphere of his projections. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 90

In the same way I can see no sense in our blaming the war for things that have happened to us. Each of us carried within himself the elements that brought on the war. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 92

The substance of energy so to speak is a dissipation of energy, that is, one never observes energy save as having movement and in a direction. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 93

Coming back to the original point about the ambitendency, energy is not split in itself, it is the pairs of opposites and also undivided—in other words, it presents a paradox. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 93

Certainly seeing the top and the bottom is an introverted attitude, but that is just the place the introvert fills. He has distance between himself and the object and so is sensitive to types—he can separate and discriminate. He does not want too many facts and ideas about. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 94

The extravert is always calling for facts and more facts. He usually has one great idea, a fat idea you might say, that will stand for a unity back of all these facts, but the introvert wants to split that very fat idea. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 94

Introverts want to see little things grow big and big things grow little. Extraverts like great things—they do not want to see good things going into worse, but always into better. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 94

Moreover, the introvert leans toward accepting enantiodromia easily, because such a concept robs the object of much power, while the extravert, having no desire to minimize the importance of the object, is willing to credit it with power. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 94

In a Platonist’s idea of life, there is always a limited number of primordial images, but still there are many, not just one—so the introvert has the tendency to be polytheistic. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 95

Similarly, the unconscious pits itself against the conscious, and it is the special tragedy of man that in order to win consciousness he is forced into dissociation with nature. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 38

Going back to the question of fantasizing, if once the resistance to free contact with the unconscious can be overcome, and one can develop the power of sticking to the fantasy, then the play of the images can be watched. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 38.

Any artist is doing that quite naturally, but he is getting only the esthetic values out of it while the analyst tries to get at all the values, ideational, esthetic, feeling, and intuitional. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 38

But, aside from dementia praecox cases, so-called normal people are very fragmentary—that is, they produce no full reactions in most cases. That is to say, they are not complete egos. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 38.

There is one ego in the conscious and another made up of unconscious ancestral elements, by the force of which a man who has been fairly himself over a period of years suddenly falls under the sway of an ancestor. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, page 38.

Perhaps certain traits belonging to the ancestors get buried away in the mind as complexes with a life of their own which has never been assimilated into the life of the individual, and then, for some unknown reason, these complexes become activated, step out of their obscurity in the folds of the unconscious, and begin to dominate the whole mind. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 39.

It is possible that a certain historical atmosphere is born with us by means of which we can repeat strange details almost as if they were historical facts. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 39.

As soon as one begins to watch one’s mind, one begins to observe the autonomous phenomena in which one exists as a spectator, or even as a victim. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 40.

In a way the collective unconscious is merely a mirage because unconscious, but it can be also just as real as the tangible world. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 40

You can only learn who you are through your effects on other people. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 117

If the superior function is intuition, for example, then the intuitions are directly in the way, since the transcendent function is made, or takes place, between the superior and the inferior functions. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 27

The inferior function can only come up at the expense of the superior, so that in the intuitive type the intuitions have to be overcome, so to speak, in order for the transcendent function to be found. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 27

On the other hand, if the person is a sensation type, then the intuitions are the inferior function, and the transcendent function may be said to be arrived at through intuition. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 27

It is a fact that in analysis it often seems as though intuition were the most important of the functions, but that is only so because analysis is a laboratory experiment and not reality. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 27

In the process of directed thinking, thoughts are handled as tools, they are made to serve the purposes of the thinker; while in passive thinking thoughts are like individuals going about on their own as it were. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 28

Fantastical thinking knows no hierarchy; the thoughts may even be antagonistic to the ego. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 28

I was in my consciousness an active thinker accustomed to subjecting my thoughts to the most rigorous sort of direction, and therefore fantasizing was a mental process that was directly repellent to me. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 28

Or, to put it even more strongly, passive thinking seemed to me such a weak and perverted thing that I could only handle it through a diseased woman. As a matter of fact, Miss Miller did afterwards become entirely deranged. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 28

Sexuality and spirituality are pairs of opposites that need each other. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 30

The hero embodies the transition we are seeking to trace, for it is as though in the sexual stage man feels too much under the power of nature, a power which he is in no way able to manage. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 30

The hero is a very perfect man, he stands out as a human protest against nature, who is seeking to rob man of that possibility of perfection. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 30

We can conquer unconsciousness by regular work but never by a grand gesture. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 31

We would say one got strength from God through prayer, but the primitive gets strength from God by work. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 32

I began to see among my patients some who fit Adler’s theories, and others who fit Freud’s, and thus I came to formulate the theory of extraversion: and introversion. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 33

There followed much discussion here and there among friends and acquaintances, through which I found that I had the tendency to project my inferior extraverted side into my extraverted friends, and they their introverted sides into me. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 33

Little by little I made a discovery that was shocking to me, namely the fact of this extraverted personality, which every introvert carries within him in his unconscious, and which I had been projecting upon my friends to their detriment. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 33

Out of these experiences that were partly personal, I wrote a little pamphlet on the psychological types, and afterwards read it as a paper before a congress. There were contained in this several mistakes which I afterwards could rectify. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 33

What I did then in order to get at this inferior, unconscious side of me was to make at night an exact reversal of the mental machinery I had used in the day. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 35

That is to say, I turned all my libido within in order to observe the dreams that were going on. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 35

By assuming a passive attitude at night, while at the same time pouring the same stream of libido into the unconscious that one has put into work in the day, the dreams can be caught and the performances of the unconscious observed. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 35

I found that the unconscious is working out enormous collective fantasies. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 35

I watched the creation of myths going on, and got an insight into the structure of the unconscious, forming thus the concept that plays such a role in the Types. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 35

I drew all my empirical material from my patients, but the solution of the problem I drew from the inside, from my observations of the unconscious processes. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 35

She [Miss Miller] took over my fantasy and became stage director to it, if one interprets the book subjectively. In other words, she became an anima figure, a carrier of an inferior function of which I was very little conscious. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 2

The analyst can never be sure that in making the patient throw away a wrong form, he is not going to throw away the contained value. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 10

As you know, Plato laid down the principle that it is impossible to look at something ugly without taking something of it into the soul, and it is equally impossible to be in contact with what is beautiful without reacting to it. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 10

One could say that nature working alone works along the lines of the mediatory or transcendent function, but one has to admit that sometimes nature works against us and brings the wrong personality into reality, so to speak. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 10

Our prisons and hospitals are full of people with whom nature has been experimenting to unhappy ends. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 10

In youth the libido fills out a frame of generous proportions, while in old age it contracts to a much smaller amplitude. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 11

Fantasy is the creative function—the living form is a result of fantasy. Fantasy is a pre-stage of the symbol, but it is an essential characteristic of the symbol that it is not mere fantasy. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 11

Life often demands the trying out of new ways that are entirely unacceptable to the time in which we live, but we cannot shrink from undertaking a new way for that reason. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 11

Suppose, for example, we are concerned with a certain historical problem. If I had five hundred years at my disposal I could solve it. Well now, I have within myself a “man” who is millions of years old, and he perhaps can throw light on these metaphysical problems. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 12

One should be willing to make mistakes cheerfully. The most perfect analysis cannot prevent error. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 13

Analysis is fatal to second-rate artists, but that should be a feather in its cap. In analysis, or in an analyzed person, only something big comes through, whereas it is the tendency of our times to make it easy for every little cat or worm to be born into the art world. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 14

The author shows an amazingly sympathetic knowledge of the introvert of the thinking type, and hardly less for the other types. . . . Jung has revealed the inner kingdom of the soul marvelously well and has made the signal discovery of the value of phantasy. His book has a manifold reach and grasp, and many reviews with quite different subject matter could be written about it.” ~Sonu Shamdasani, Introduction 1925 Seminar, Page xi

When the First World War broke out, Jung considered that a number of his fantasies were precognitions of this event. ~Sonu Shamdasani, Introduction 1925 Seminar, Page xii

The work [Liber Novus], though never published during Jung’s lifetime, was intended for publication. ~Sonu Shamdasani, Introduction 1925 Seminar, Page xii

The paintings initially started out as illustrations of the fantasies in the text, and thereafter could be considered active imaginations in their own right, at times referring to contemporaneous fantasies in Jung’s Black Books. ~Sonu Shamdasani, Introduction 1925 Seminar, Page xii

He felt the need to represent his innermost thoughts in stone and to build a completely primitive dwelling: “Bollingen was a great matter for me, because words and paper were not real enough. I had to put down a confession in stone.” ~Sonu Shamdasani, Introduction 1925 Seminar, Page xiii

The tower [Jung’s] was a “representation of individuation.” Over the years, he painted murals and made carvings on the walls. The tower [Jung’s] may be regarded as a three-dimensional continuation of Liber Novus: its “Liber Quartus.” ~Sonu Shamdasani, Introduction 1925 Seminar, Page xiii

In this way we could come to discuss many things which never came up in my analysis and I could understand your ideas from the foundation. Mona Lisa [Emma Jung] should be included too. Perhaps she knows all that is in it so well, and understands it so completely that this would not appeal to her, but I thought it would . . . he [Peter Baynes] asked me . . .why it was such a problem with me about publishing the Red Book. ~Cary Baynes, Introduction 1925 Seminar, Page xiv

On August 22, 1922, Jaime de Angulo wrote to Chauncey Goodrich issuing “a challenge to all brother-neurotics—go, my brethren, go to the Mecca, I mean to Zürich, and drink from the fountain of life, all ye who are dead in your souls, go and seek new life.” ~Sonu Shamdasani, Introduction 1925 Seminar, Page xv

Jung made clear that it was only after having formed his initial conceptions of the unconscious and the libido and having made his mark through his experiment al researches in psychopathology that he came into contact with Freud. ~Sonu Shamdasani, Introduction 1925 Seminar, Page xvi

When Jung published three of his paintings from Liber Novus in his commentary on The Secret of the Golden Flower in 1929 as examples of “European mandalas,” they were presented anonymously. ~Sonu Shamdasani, Introduction 1925 Seminar, Page xxi

In the late 1950s, when Aniela Jaffé was engaged in her biographical project that resulted in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, she raided sections of this seminar to supplement the material from her interviews with Jung. ~Sonu Shamdasani, Introduction 1925 Seminar, Page xxii

It is thought that cancer may be due to the later and anarchical development of embryonic cells folded away in the mature and differentiated tissues. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 39.

In the late 1950s, when Aniela Jaffé was engaged in her biographical project that resulted in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, she raided sections of this seminar to supplement the material from her interviews with Jung. ~Sonu Shamdasani, Introduction 1925 Seminar, Page xxii

Friday, October 27, 2017

Carl Jung’s Foreword to “Apparitions and Precognitions” by Aniela Jaffe.




Carl Jung’s Foreword to “Apparitions and Precognitions” by Aniela Jaffe.

THE AUTHOR OF THIS BOOK has already made a name for herself for her valuable contributions to the literature of analytical psychology.

Here she tells of those strange tales that, because they incur the odium of superstition, are generally exchanged only in secret.

In this instance they were brought to light by a questionnaire sent out by the Schweizerischer Beobachter, which can thereby claim to have rendered no small service to the public.

The mass of material that came in arrived first at my address.

Since my age and my ever-growing preoccupation with other matters did not allow me to burden myself with further work, the task of sorting out such a collection and submitting it to psychological evaluation could not have been placed in worthier hands than those of the author.

She had displayed so much psychological tact, understanding and insight in her approach to a related theme- an interpretation of E. T. A. Hoffmann's story "The Golden Bowl" that I never hesitated in my choice.

Curiously enough, the problem of wonder tales as they are currently told has never been approached from the psychological side.

I naturally don't count mythology, although people are generally of the opinion that mythology is essentially history and no longer happens nowadays.

As psychic phenomena of the present, mythological themes are considered only a hunting ground for eccentrics.

Nevertheless, ghost stories, warning visions, and other strange happenings are constantly being reported, and the number of people to whom something once "happened" is surprisingly large.

Moreover, despite the disapproving silence of the "enlightened," for some time now "parapsychology" has been accepted as a serious science.

This fact may have helped to encourage the popular response to the questionnaire.

One of the most notable things that came to light is the fact that among the Swiss, who are commonly regarded as stolid, unimaginative, rationalistic and materialistic, there are just as many ghost stories and such as, for instance, among the English or Irish.

Indeed, as I know from my own experience and that of other investigators, magic as practised in the Middle Ages and much remoter times has by no means died out, but still flourishes today as rampantly as it did centuries ago.

One doesn't speak of these things, however.

They simply happen, and the intellectuals know nothing of them- for intellectuals know neither themselves nor people as they really are.

In the world of the latter, the life of the centuries lives on, and things that have accompanied human life from time immemorial continue to happen: premonitions, foreknowledge, second sight, hauntings,
ghosts, return of the dead, bewitchings, sorcery, magic spells, etc.

Naturally enough our scientific age wants to know whether such things are "true," without taking into account what the nature of proof would have to be and how it could be furnished.

The events in question must be looked at squarely and soberly, and then it generally turns out that the most exciting stories vanish into thin air; what remains is "not worth talking about."

Nobody thinks of asking the fundamental question: What is the real reason why the same old stories are experienced and repeated over and over again, without losing any of their prestige?

On the contrary, they return with their youthful vitality constantly renewed, fresh as on the first day.

The author has made it her task to take these tales for what they are, psychic facts, and not to pooh-pooh them because they do not fit into our scheme of things.

She has therefore logically left aside the question of truth, as has long since been done in mythology, and instead has tried to inquire into the psychological questions: Exactly who is it that sees a ghost?

Under what psychic conditions does he see it? What does a ghost signify when examined for its content, i.e., as a symbol?

She understands the art of leaving the story just as it is, with all the trimmings that are so offensive to the rationalist.

In this way the twilight atmosphere that is so essential to the story is preserved.

An integral ingredient of any nocturnal, numinous experience is the dimming of consciousness, the feeling that one is in the grip of something greater than oneself, the impossibility of exercising criticism, and the paralysis of the will.

Under the impact of the experience reason evaporates and another power spontaneously takes control- a most singular feeling which one willy-nilly hoards up as a secret treasure no matter how much
one's reason may protest.

This, indeed, is the uncomprehended purpose of the experience- to make us feel the overpowering presence of a mystery.

The author has succeeded in preserving the total character of such experiences, despite the refractory nature of the reports, and in making it an object of investigation.

Anyone who expects an answer to the question of parapsychological truth will be disappointed.

The psychologist is little concerned here with what kind of facts can be established in the conventional sense; all that matters to him is whether a person will vouch for the authenticity of his experience regardless of all interpretations.

The reports leave no doubt about this; moreover in most cases their authenticity is confirmed not only by the freedom with which they were reported, but also by independent parallel stories.

Since it cannot be doubted that such reports are found at all times and places, there is no sufficient reason for doubting the veracity of individual reports.

Doubt is justified only where it is a question of a deliberate lie.

The number of such cases is increasingly small, for the authors of such falsifications are too ignorant to be able to lie properly.

The psychology of the unconscious has thrown so many beams of light into other dark corners that we would expect it to elucidate also the obscure world of wonder tales eternally young.

From the copious material assembled in this book those conversant with depth psychology will indeed gain new and significant insights which merit the greatest attention.

I can recommend it to all who know how to value things that break through the monotony of daily life with salutary effects, that (sometimes!) shake our certitudes and lend wings to the imagination. ~ Carl Jung’s Foreword to “Apparitions and Precognitions” by Aniela Jaffe.

Tuesday, March 14, 2017

Carl Jung: Doubt is justified only where it is a question of a deliberate lie.




The psychologist is little concerned here with what kind of facts can be established in the conventional sense; all that matters to him is whether a person will vouch for the authenticity of his experience regardless of all interpretations.

The reports leave no doubt about this; moreover in most cases their authenticity is confirmed not only by the freedom with which they were reported, but also by independent parallel stories.

Since it cannot be doubted that such reports are found at all times and places, there is no sufficient reason for doubting the veracity of individual reports.

Doubt is justified only where it is a question of a deliberate lie.

The number of such cases is increasingly small, for the authors of such falsifications are too ignorant to be able to lie properly. Aniela Jaffe, Apparitions and Precognitions, Pages vii – viii.

Prophetic dreams and precognitions were no rarity in Jung’s life. ˜Aneila Jaffe




To Carl Gustave Jung parapsychology was more than a subject for scientific research, experiment, and theory.

His life was rich in personal experiences of spontaneous, acausal, or-to use the common term-paranormal phenomena.

Jung seemed to be endowed with an unusual “permeability” when it came to the background events of the psyche.

Prophetic dreams and precognitions were no rarity in Jung’s life.

But that alone does not explain the scope of his experiences; his sensitivity to manifestations of the unconscious was supplemented by constant observation of nature, of objects and of people.

Given his close attention to the worlds of the psyche and of external reality, it is not surprising that he perceived meaningful connections between the two which would have been overlooked by a less sharp observer.

Prophetic dreams and precognitions were no rarity in Jung’s life, though far from habitual.

Whenever they occurred he noted them with surprise-one is tempted to say, with awe due to the miraculous. Aniela Jaffe, The Life and Work of C.G. Jung, Page 1