Carl Jung Quotations 21

I cannot tell you how glad I am that I know a man, a theologian, who is conscientious enough to weigh my opinions on the basis of a careful study of my writings! ~Carl Jung to Victor White, 5Oct1945

Thus, when I said that God is a complex, I meant to say: whatever He is, he is at least a very tangible complex. You can say, He is an illusion, but He is at least a psychological fact. I surely never intended to say: He is nothing else but a complex. . . . ~Carl Jung to Victor White, 5Oct1945

I never allow myself to make statements about the divine entity, since such would be a transgression beyond the limit of science.. ~Carl Jung to Victor White, 5Oct1945

My personal view in this matter is that man’s vital energy or libido is the divine pneuma alright. . . . ~Carl Jung to Victor White, 5Oct1945

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

What Buber misunderstands as Gnosticism is psychiatric observation, of which he obviously knows nothing. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 570-573

Buber has been led astray by a poem in Gnostic style I made 44 years ago for a friend's birthday celebration (a private print!), a poetic paraphrase of the psychology of the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 571.

My ambitions are not soaring to theological heights. I am merely concerned with the practical and theoretical problem of how-do-complexes-behave? ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 570-573

Mental possessions are just as good as ghosts, demons, and gods. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 570-573

I am afraid it is sheer prejudice against science which hinders theologians from understanding my empirical standpoint. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 570-573

I am concerned with phenomenal religion, with its observable facts, to which I try to add a few psychological observations about basic events in the collective unconscious, the existence of which I can prove. Beyond this I know nothing and I have never made any assertions about it. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 570-573

I have spent a lifetime of work on psychological and psychopathological investigations. Buber criticizes me in a field in which he is incompetent and which he does not even understand. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 570-573

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.

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.