Monday, May 8, 2017

Carl Jung on "Parents" - Anthology




But no matter how much parents and grandparents may have sinned against the child, the man who is really adult will accept these sins as his own condition which has to be reckoned with. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Page 117.

Children are educated by what the grown-up is and not by what he says. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 293

Actually it is the parents' lives that educate the child—what they add by word and gesture at best serves only to confuse him. ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 665.

Around the eighth year there is a transition to ego consciousness, as we have already seen in previous children’s dreams. The child breaks away from the extremely close relatedness with the familial milieu; he has already acquired a certain experience of the world, and the libido, which had up to then been tied to the parents, detaches itself from them and often is introverted. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Page 323.

Beyond the human obligation to look after ageing parents and to maintain a friendly relation with them, there should be no other dependencies, for the young generation has to start life anew and can encumber itself with the past only in case of the greatest necessity. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 218.

Parents must realize that they are trees from which the fruit falls in the autumn. Children don't belong to their parents, and they are only apparently produced by them. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 217-218.

The individual experience is woven in to this tissue, so it is of vital importance, where we come from, who our parents are, and what our early surroundings were. We say that a person has such and such a character, but one is born with a form which can only be changed with the greatest difficulty. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture XII, 1Feb1935, Page 179.

Even in rearing a child it is often good for parents to react emotionally and not with cool superiority to the child's bad behaviour. Children often irritate their parents just to make them show emotion. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 14.

If the question of an abortion arises the whole situation with all its implications must be taken into account. If the parents are married and healthy the child must be accepted, and the sacrifice of living a more modest life should be met if it is financially necessary. If the parents are not married the question must be weighed very carefully: would it be favourable or not, damaging or useful? ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 16.

In any case of a child's neurosis, I go back to the parents and see what is going on there, because children have no psychology of their own, literally taken. ~Carl Jung, Evans Conversations, Page 13.

For as the son of his father, he must, as if often the case with children, re-enact under unconscious compulsion the unlived lives of his parents. ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 307

If consciousness had never split off from the unconscious—an eternally repeated event symbolized as the fall of the angels and the disobedience of the first parents—this problem would never have arisen, any more than would the question of environmental adaptation. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 339.

When, towards middle life, the last gleam of childhood illusion fades—this it must be owned is true only of an almost ideal life, for many go as children to their graves—then the archetype of the mature man or woman emerges from the parental imago: an image of man as woman has known him from the beginning of time, and an image of woman that man carries within him eternally. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 74

However remote alchemy may seem to us today, we should not underestimate its cultural importance for the Middle Ages. Today is the child of the Middle Ages and it cannot disown its parents. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 432

Nothing exerts a stronger psychic effect upon the human environment, and especially upon children, than the life which the parents have not lived. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 4

All the life which the parents could have lived, but of which they thwarted themselves for artificial motives, is passed on to the children in substitute form. ~Carl Jung, CW 17, Para 328

It’s no help just to search for causes and then blame the parents. Why not have the parents as the patients? ~Carl Jung, Meetings with Jung, Page 88

A mother-complex is not got rid of by blindly reducing the mother to human proportions. Besides that we run the risk of dissolving the experience "Mother" into atoms, thus destroying something supremely valuable and throwing away the golden key which a good fairy laid in our cradle. That is why mankind has always instinctively added the pre-existent divine pair to the personal parents—the "god"- father and "god"-mother of the newborn child—so that, from sheer unconsciousness or shortsighted rationalism, he should never forget himself so far as to invest his own parents with divinity. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 172

A child certainly allows himself to be impressed by the grand talk of his parents, but do they really imagine he is educated by it? Actually it is the parents' lives that educate the child—what they add by word and gesture at best serves only to confuse him. The same holds good for the teacher. But we have such a belief in method that, if only the method be good, the practice of it seems to sanctify the teacher. ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 665

An individual is infantile because he has freed himself insufficiently, or not at all, from his childish environment and his adaptation to his parents, with the result that he has a false reaction to the world on the one hand he reacts as a child towards his parents, always demanding love and immediate emotional rewards, while on the other hand he is so identified with his parents through his close ties with them that he behaves like his father or his mother. He is incapable of living his own life and finding the character that belongs to him. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 431

Nothing exerts a stronger psychic effect upon the human environment, and especially upon children, than the life which the parents have not lived. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 4

All the life which the parents could have lived, but of which they thwarted themselves for artificial motives, is passed on to the children in substitute form.
That is to say, the children are driven unconsciously in a direction that is intended to compensate for everything that was left unfulfilled in the lives of their parents. Hence it is that excessively moral-minded parents have what are called "unmoral" children, or an irresponsible wastrel of a father has a son with a positively morbid amount of ambition, and so on. ~Carl Jung, CW 17, Para 328

The Church represents a higher spiritual substitute for the purely natural, or "carnal," tie to the parents. Consequently it frees the individual from an unconscious natural relationship which, strictly speaking, is not a relationship at all but simply a condition of inchoate, unconscious identity. This, just because it is unconscious, possesses a tremendous inertia and offers the utmost resistance to any kind of spiritual development.

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