Carl Jung on the “Creative Impulse.”




You cannot put something on a table which is already laden; you must first clear those things away in order to put new ones in their
place.

And to build a house where an old house stands, you must first destroy the old house. Here the process of thought turns into an enantiodromia.
All that he has said has been true with the sole exception that Nietzsche takes it as the action of conscious- ness, while we know that our conscious valuation means just nothing.

Try it on your children or on other people, and you will see it is all bunk: it simply won’t work.

If you say to a child, "My deepest conviction is that this soup is very good," the child doesn’t think it is very good: he won’t eat it.

When my parents told me that something was very good and wonderful, I thought, "Not a bit of it, it bores me." "

Always doth he destroy who hath to be a creator" is true.

You cannot put something on a table which is already laden; you must first clear those things away in order to put new ones in their place.

And to build a house where an old house stands, you must first destroy the old house.

We must go a bit deeper and realize that with the instinct of creation is always connected a destructive some- thing; the creation in its own essence is also destructive.

You see that quite clearly in the moment when you check the creative impulse; nothing is more poisonous to the nervous system than a disregarded or checked creative impulse.

It even destroys people’s organic health.

It is dangerous because there is that extraordinary destructive quality in the creative thing.

Just because it is the deepest instinct, the deeper power in man, a power which is beyond conscious control, and because it is on the other side the function which creates the greatest value, it is most dangerous to interfere with it. Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 654.

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