Friday, April 13, 2018

Carl Jung Quotations 5




The psychological trouble in neurosis, and the neurosis itself, can be formulated as an act of adaptation that has failed. ~Carl Jung; CW 4; par. 574.


Man is not a machine in the sense that he can consistently maintain the same output of work. He can meet the demands of outer necessity in an ideal way only if he is also adapted to his own inner world, that is, if he is in harmony with himself. Conversely, he can only adapt to his inner world and achieve harmony with himself when he is adapted to the environmental conditions. ~Carl Jung; CW 8; par. 75.


The constant flow of life again and again demands fresh adaptation. Adaptation is never achieved once and for all. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, par. 143.


Before [individuation] can be taken as a goal, the educational aim of adaptation to the necessary minimum of collective norms must first be attained. If a plant is to unfold its specific nature to the full, it must first be able to grow in the soil in which it is planted. ~Carl Jung; CW 6, par. 761.


I visualize the process of abstraction as a withdrawal of libido from the object, as a backflow of value from the object into a subjective, abstract content. For me, therefore, abstraction amounts to an energic devaluation of the object. In other words, abstraction is an introverting movement of libido. ~Carl Jung; CW 4; par. 679.


The belief, the self-confidence, perhaps also the devotion with which the analyst does his work, are far more important to the patient (imponderabilia though they may be), than the rehearsing of old traumata. ~Carl Jung; CW 4; par. 584.


The most intense conflicts, if overcome, leave behind a sense of security and calm which is not easily disturbed, or else a brokenness that can hardly be healed. Conversely, it is just these intense conflicts and their conflagration which are needed in order to produce valuable and lasting results. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 50


Common is the view that spirit and psyche are essentially the same and can be separated only arbitrarily. Wundt takes spirit as “the inner being, regardless of any connection with an outer being. ~ Carl Jung, CW 9i, para. 386


Although we human beings have our own personal life, we are in large measure the representatives, the victims and promoters of a collective spirit whose years are counted in centuries. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 91.


I have always advised analysts: "Have a father confessor, or a mother confessor!" Women are particularly gifted for playing such a part. They often have excellent intuition and critical insight, and can see what men have up their sleeves, at times see also into men's anima intrigues. They see aspects that the man does not see. That is why no woman has ever been convinced that her husband is a superman! ~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 134.


Then, to my intense confusion, it occurred to me that I was actually two different persons. One of them was the schoolboy who could not grasp algebra and was far from sure of himself; the other was important, a high authority, a man not to be trifled with, as powerful and influential as a manufacturer. The 'other' was an old man who lived in the eighteenth century, wore buckled shoes and a white wig and went driving in a fly with high, concave rear wheels between which the box was suspended on springs and leather straps. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Pages 33-34.


Leaving aside the rational arguments against any certainty in these matters, we must not forget that for most people it means a great deal to assume that their lives will have an indefinite continuity beyond their present existence. They live more sensibly, feel better, and are more at peace. One has centuries, one has an inconceivable period of time at one's disposal. What then is the point of this senseless mad rush? ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 301.


A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them. They then dwell in the house next door, and at any moment a flame may dart out and set fire to his own house. Whenever we give up, leave behind, and forget too much, there is always the danger that the things we have neglected will return with added force. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 277.


Spirit has the further connotation of sprightliness, when we say that a person is “spirited,” meaning that he is versatile and full of ideas, with a brilliant, witty, and surprising turn of mind.~ Carl Jung, CW 9i, para. 386.


A very widespread view conceives spirit as a higher and psyche as a lower principle of activity, and conversely the alchemists thought of spirit as the ligamentum animae et corporis, regarding it as a spiritus vegetativus (the later life-spirit or nerve-spirit). ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, para. 386.


The collective unconscious is common to all; it is the foundation of what the ancients called the 'sympathy of all things'. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 138.


Myths are original revelations of the preconscious psyche, involuntary statements about unconscious psychic happenings… But religion is a vital link with psychic processes independent of and beyond consciousness, in the dark hinterland of the psyche. ~Carl Jung CW 9i, para. 261.


I do not know for what reason the universe has come into being, and shall never know. Therefore I must drop this question as a scientific or intellectual problem. But if an idea about it is offered to me - in dreams or in mythic traditions - I ought to take note of it. I even ought to build up a conception on the basis of such hints, even though it will forever remain a hypothesis that I know cannot be proved. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Pages 301-302.


Others restrict spirit to certain psychic capacities or functions or qualities, such as the capacity to think and reason in contradistinction to the more “soulful” sentiments. Here spirit means the sum-total of all the phenomena of rational thought, or of the intellect, including the will, memory, imagination, creative power, and aspirations motivated by ideals. ~ Carl Jung, CW 9i, para. 386.


Thus we remain ignorant of whether our ancestral components find an elementary gratification in our lives, or whether they are repelled. Inner peace and contentment depend in large measure upon whether or not the historical family which is inherent in the individual can be harmonized with the ephemeral conditions of the present. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 237.


The word “spirit” possesses such a wide range of application that it requires considerable effort to make clear to oneself all the things it can mean. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, para. 385.



In the dream, … there are numberless inter-connections to which one can find parallels only in mythological associations of ideas (or perhaps in certain poetic creations which are often characterized by a borrowing, not always conscious, from myths. ~Carl Jung; CW 9I; para. 259.


It was then that I dedicated myself to service of the psyche. I loved it and hated it, but it was my greatest wealth. My delivering myself over to it, as it were, was the only way by which I could endure my existence and live it as fully as possible. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 192.


First, fantasies (including dreams) of a personal character, which go back unquestionably to personal experiences, things forgotten or repressed, and can thus be completely explained by individual anamnesis. Second, fantasies (including dreams) of an impersonal character, which cannot be reduced to experiences in the individual’s past, and thus cannot be explained as something individually acquired. ~Carl Jung; CW 9i


The indefinite extent of the unconscious component makes a comprehensive description of the human personality impossible. Accordingly, the unconscious supplements the picture with living figures ranging from the animal to the divine, as the two extremes outside man, and rounds out the animal extreme, through the addition of and inorganic abstractions, into a microcosm. These addenda have a high frequency in anthropomorphic divinities, where they appear as “attributes.” ~Carl Jung; Carl Jung, CW 9i, para. 314-315


The Catholic Church is liberal enough to look upon the Osiris-Horus-Isis myth, or at any rate suitable portions of it, as a prefiguration of the Christian legend of salvation. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Paragraph 178.

Any theological treatment of the devil that is not related to God's trinitarian consciousness is a falsification of the actual position. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Paragraph 103.


Any theological treatment of the devil that is not related to God's trinitarian consciousness is a falsification of the actual position. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Paragraph 103.


What youth found and must find outside, the man of life's afternoon must find within himself. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Pages 74-75.


As a rule, whenever such a falsification of type takes place . . . the individual becomes neurotic later, and can be cured only by developing the attitude consonant with his nature. ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 560.


[Visions] are like dreams, only they occur in the waking state. ~Carl Jung,


We do not work with the "transference to the analyst," but against it and in spite of it. ~Carl Jung, CW 4, par. 601.


Conscious and unconscious are not necessarily in opposition to one another, but complement one another to from a totality, which is the self. ~Carl Jung, The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious, 1925


The unconscious [at times] produces contents which are valid not only for the person concerned, but for others as well, in fact for a great many people and possible for all. ~Carl Jung, The Relations between the Ego and the unconscious, 1928


Since the relation of the ego to the self is like that of the son to the father, we can say that when the Self calls on us to sacrifice ourselves, it is really carrying out the sacrificial act on itself. ~Carl Jung, CW 11; Par 398.


The more a man’s life is shaped by the collective norm, the greater is his individual immorality. ~Carl Jung, “Psychological Types,” 1921


The more intelligent and cultured a man is, the more subtly he can humbug himself. ~Carl Jung, “Analytical Psychology and Education”, 1924


"Archetypes are complexes of experience that come upon us like fate, and their effects are felt in our most personal life. The anima no longer crosses our path as a goddess, but, it may be, as an intimately personal misadventure, or perhaps as our best venture. When, for instance, a highly esteemed professor in his seventies abandons his family and runs off with a young red-headed actress, we know that the gods have claimed another victim. ~Carl Jung, CW 9, Page 62.


One can easily throw dust into one's own eyes with theories. ~Carl Jung;


He [the teacher] has already learnt that the emptiest head parroting a method which can well be the best student. His whole environment speaks and lives there in front of him, all that success and happiness is outside and that one needed only the right method to achieve what you want. ~Carl Jung, Carl Jung, CW 6


The people would never have been Deutsch taken in and carried away so completely if this figure had not been a reflected image of the collective hysteria Deutsch. Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1400 .


The primitives I observed in East Africa took it for granted that "big" dreams are dreamed only by "big" men - medicine-men, magicians, chiefs, etc. This may be true on a primitive level. But with us these dreams are dreamed also by simple people, more particularly when they have got themselves, mentally or spiritually, in a fix. ~Carl Jung. CW 10, Page 324.


The Catholic who has turned his back on the Church usually develops a secret or manifest leaning towards atheism, whereas the Protestant follow, if possible, a sectarian movement. The absolutism of the Catholic Church seems to demand an equally absolute negation, whereas Protestant Relativism permits of variations. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 34.


Be prepared to accept the view that spirit is not absolute, but something relative that needs completing and perfecting through life. –Carl Jung, CW 8, Page 645.


Every advance, every conceptual achievement of mankind, has been connected with an advance in self-awareness: man differentiated himself from the object and faced Nature as something distinct from her. Any reorientation of psychological attitude will have to follow the same road. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Page 523.


An exclusively sexual interpretation of dreams and fantasies is a shocking violation of the patient's psychological material: infantile-sexual fantasy is by no means the whole story, since the material also contains a creative element, the purpose of which is to shape a way out of the neurosis. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 277.


Medical treatment of the transference gives the patient a priceless opportunity to withdraw his projections, to make good his losses, and to integrate his personality. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 420.


There is no recrossing the Rubicon. ~Carl Jung, “Individual Dream Symbolism in Relation to Alchemy”, 1935


To ask the right question is already half the solution of a problem. ~Carl Jung CW 9i, Para 49


The capacity for directed thinking I call intellect, the capacity for passive or undirected thinking I call intellectual intuition. ~Carl Jung, “definitions”, para 832.


The tendencies of the conscious and the unconscious are the two factors that together make up the transcendent function. It is called "transcendent" because it makes the transition from one attitude to another organically possible. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, par. 145.


The dreams of redemption, whereby God descends into the human realm and man mounts up to the realm of divinity.~ Carl Jung, “A Psychological Approach to the Trinity,” 1942


. Sentimentality is the superstructure erected upon brutality. ~Carl Jung; CW 15, Para 284


In the Middle Ages they spoke of the devil, today we call it a neurosis. Carl Jung,



The descent into the depths always seems to precede the ascent. ~Carl Jung, “The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious”, 1939



We also live in our dreams, we do not live only by day. Sometimes we accomplish our greatest deeds in dreams. ~Carl Jung; The Red Book. Page 242.


Nature, the psyche, and life appear to me like divinity unfolded - and what more could I wish for? To me the supreme meaning of Being can consist only in the fact that it is, not that it is not or is no longer. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections, Page 276.



Just as man was once revealed out of God, so, when the circle closes, God may be revealed out of man. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 267


The longing for light is the longing for Consciousness. ~Carl Jung, MDR, Chapter 9


There is no consciousness without discrimination of opposites. ~Carl Jung; CW 9i: 178.


What is stirred in us is that faraway background, those immemorial patterns of the human mind, which we have not acquired but have inherited from the dim ages of the past. ~Carl Jung, CW, Page 315.


Whoever speaks in primordial images speaks with a thousand voices. ~Carl Jung. CW Page 129.


. . . man brings with him at birth the ground-plan of his nature. . . . ~Carl Jung; CW 4, Page 728.


The woman is increasingly aware that love alone can give her full stature, just as the man begins to discern that spirit alone can endow his life with its highest meaning. Fundamentally, therefore, both seek a psychic relation to the other, because love needs the spirit, and the spirit love, for their fulfillment. ~Carl Jung; Contributions to Analytical Psychology; Page 185.


We are living in what the Greeks called the right time for a "metamorphosis of the gods," i.e. of the fundamental principles and symbols. This peculiarity of our time, which is certainly not of our conscious choosing, is the expression of the unconscious man within us who is changing. Coming generations will have to take account of this momentous transformation if humanity is not to destroy itself through the might of its own technology and science. ~Carl Jung; The Undiscovered Self; Page 110.


It is astounding that man, the instigator, inventor and vehicle of all these developments, the originator of all judgments and decisions and the planner of the future must make himself such a quantité negligeable. ~Carl Jung; The Undiscovered Self; Page 45.


Reason alone does not suffice. ~Carl Jung; The Undiscovered Self; Page 98.


Even if the whole world were to fall to pieces, the unity of the psyche would never be shattered. And the wider and more numerous the fissures on the surface, the more the unity is strengthened in the depths. ~Carl Jung; CW 10, Para 310.


Yahweh [God] must become man precisely because he has done man a wrong. He, the guardian of justice, knows that every wrong must be expiated, and Wisdom knows that moral law is above even him. Because his creature has surpassed him he must regenerate himself. ~Carl Jung; CW 11Para. 640.


The invasion of evil signifies that something previously good has turned into something harmful…the ruling moral principle, although excellent to begin with, in time loses its essential connection with life, since it no longer embraces life’s variety and abundance. What is rationally correct is too narrow a concept to grasp life in its totality and give it permanent expression. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Answer to Job.


These images are naturally only anticipations of a wholeness which is, in principle, always just beyond our reach. Also, they do not invariably indicate a subliminal readiness on the part of the patient to realize that wholeness consciously, at a later stage; often they mean no more than a temporary compensation of chaotic confusion.[The Psychology of the Transference," ~Carl Jung, CW 16, para 536.


Dreams are often anticipatory and would lose their specific meaning on a purely causalistic view. They afford unmistakable information about the analytical situation, the correct understanding of which is of the greatest therapeutic importance. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Page 312.


As a totality, the self is by definition always a complexio oppositorum [union of opposites], and the more consciousness insists on its own luminous nature and lays claim to moral authority, the more the self will appear as something dark and menacing. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, para 716.


The self is defined psychologically as the psychic totality of the individual. Anything that a [person] postulates as being a greater totality than [oneself] can become a symbol of the self. For this reason the symbol of the self is not always as total as the definition would require. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, para 232.


And Gerhard Dorn cries out, "Transform yourselves into living philosophical stones!" There can hardly be any doubt that not a few of those seekers had the dawning knowledge that the secret nature of the stone was man's own self. This "self" was evidently never thought of as an entity identical with the ego, and for this reason it was described as a "hidden nature" dwelling in inanimate matter, as a spirit, daemon, or fiery spark. By means of the philosophical opus, . . . this entity was freed from darkness and imprisonment, and finally it enjoyed a resurrection. . . . It is clear that these ideas can have nothing to do with the empirical ego, but are concerned with a "divine nature" quite distinct from it, and hence, psychologically speaking, with a consciousness-transcending content issuing from the realm of the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, para 154.


[From an early treatise]: "Thus it [the stone] comes from man, and you are its mineral (raw material); in you it is found and from you it is extracted . . . and it remains inseparably in you" ~Carl Jung, CW 11, para 53


The spiritual man says to the worldly man, "Are you capable of knowing your soul in a complete manner? If you knew it, as is fitting, and if you knew what makes it better, you would be able to recognize that the names the philosophers formerly gave it are not its true names. . . . O dubious names that resemble the true names, what errors and agonies you have provoked among men!" The names refer in turn to the philosopher's stone. . . . ~Carl Jung, CW 11, para 153.


It is a figure comparable to Hiranyagarbha, Purusha, Atman, and the mystic Buddha. For this reason I have elected to call it the “self,” by which I understand a psychic totality and at the same time a centre, neither of which coincides with the ego but includes it, just as a larger circle encloses a smaller one. ~Carl Jung, CW 9I, 247.



Because of its unconscious component the self is so far removed from the conscious mind that it can only be partially expressed by human figures; the other part of it has to be expressed by objective, abstract symbols. The human figures are father and son, mother and daughter, king and queen, god and goddess…. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, para. 314-315.


[The alchemist Gerhard] Dorn . . . says, "In the body of man there is hidden a certain substance of heavenly nature known to very few ~Carl Jung, CW 11, page 93, note 47.


The sun… is the only truly ‘rational’ image of God, whether we adopt the standpoint of the primitive savage or of modern science. In either case the sun is the father-god from whom all living things draw life; he is the fructifier and creator, the source of energy for our world. The discord into which the human soul has fallen can be harmoniously resolved through the sun as a natural object which knows no inner conflict. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 176.


The final factors at work in us are nothing other than those talents which "a certain nobleman" entrusted to his "servants," that they might trade with them (Luke 19:12 ff.). It does not require much imagination to see what this involvement in the ways of the world means in the moral sense. Only an infantile person can pretend that evil is not at work everywhere, and the more unconscious s/he is, the more the devil drives her/him. . . . Only ruthless self-knowledge o the widest scale, which sees good and evil in correct perspective and can weigh up the motives of human action, offers some guarantee that the end result will not turn out too badly ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 255.


It is of the greatest importance that the ego should be anchored in the world of consciousness and that consciousness should be reinforced by a very precise adaptation. For this, certain virtues like attention, consciousness, patience, etc., are of the greatest value on the moral side, just as accurate observation of the symptomatology of the unconscious and objective self-criticism are valuable on the intellectual side. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 46.


. Nature must not win the game, but she cannot lose. ~Carl Jung, CW 13, Para 229


Psychological truths are not metaphysical insights; they are habitual modes of thinking, feeling, and behaving that experience has proved appropriate and useful. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, para 50.


This subjective knowledge of the self [is what is meant by]: "No one can know himself unless he knows what, and not who, he is, on what he depends, or whose he is (or to whom or what he belongs) and for what end he was made." This distinction . . . is crucial. . . . Not the subjective ego-consciousness of the psyche is meant, but the psyche itself as the unknown, unprejudiced object that still has to be investigated. . . . "What" refers to the neutral self, the objective fact of totality, since the ego is on the one hand causally "dependent on" or "belongs to" it, and on the other hand is directed toward it as to a goal ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, para 252.


The shadow, the syzygy, and the Self are psychic factors of which an adequate picture can be formed only on the basis of a fairly thorough experience of them. Just as these concepts arose out of an experience of reality, so they can be elucidated only by further experience ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, para 63.

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