Carl Jung on "Archetypes" - Anthology

Archetypes are like riverbeds which dry up when the water deserts them, but which it can find again at any time.

Just as conscious contents can vanish into the unconscious, other contents can also arise from it. Besides a majority of mere recollections, really new thoughts and creative ideas can appear which have never been conscious before. They grow up from the dark depths like a lotus. ~"Approaching the Unconscious" In Man and His Symbols (1964), In CW 18: P.37

In the centre there is a lotus with the Buddha sitting in it, and the decisive experience is the final knowledge that the meditator himself is the Buddha, whereby the fateful knots woven in the opening story are apparently resolved. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Page 572.

The western rose is wholly parallel to the eastern lotus. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Page 21.

The lotus has always had an important mystical meaning. Its roots are down in the slime and mud at the bottom of the lake and the flower unfolds on the surface of the water. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 113.

Mary is represented as a sea flower in one hymn and Christ as the sea bird that rests in her. This is exactly the eastern motif of the lotus. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 118.

Later the single lotus is imagined on the firm ground of seven jewels, which is reality; so it is on the foundation of reality that the lotus is induced through imagination. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture, Pages 103.

Mani means pearl or great treasure, padme is the lotus and hum, like om, has no definite meaning, it is a sound like the humming of bees. So we find the pearl and the lotus sandwiched between a singing sound and a humming sound. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 2Dec1938, Page 36.

Christ is spoken of as being born or hidden in a rose, or as a sea bird resting in a flower of the sea. This is a direct analogy to Buddha appearing in the Lotus in the Amitabha Land with geese and swans about him. Pages 100-101.

Komarius teaches Cleopatra that the dead who stay in Hades [that is in chaos) are transformed into Spring flowers by the miraculous dew. This is the idea of the living elements in chaos or Shunyata waking and uniting through being contained in the lotus. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 3Mar1939, Page 101.

The mystical rose, like the lotus in India, grows for the salvation of man. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 3Mar1939, Page 101.

Just as conscious contents can vanish into the unconscious, other contents can also arise from it. Besides a majority of mere recollections, really new thoughts and creative ideas can appear which have never been conscious before. They grow up from the dark depths like a lotus. ~Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols, Page 37.

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

But we find the chief parallel to the lotus in the hymnology of Mary, where she is called the flower of Heaven, the noble rose of Heaven, the rose without thorn; she is also greeted as the sweet rose, etc. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 3rd March 1939

An archetype is like an old watercourse along which the water of life has flowed for centuries, digging a deep channel for itself.

The longer it has flowed in this channel the more likely it is that sooner or later the water will return to its old bed. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para -395

Archetypes were, and still are, living psychic forces that demand to be taken seriously, and they have a strange way of making sure of their effect.

Always they were the bringers of protection and salvation, and their violation has as its consequence the "perils of the soul" known to us from the psychology of primitives.

Moreover, they are the infallible causes of neurotic and even psychotic disorders, behaving exactly like neglected or maltreated physical organs or organic functional systems. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 266

Our personal psychology is just a thin skin, a ripple on the ocean of collective psychology.

The powerful factor, the factor which changes our whole life, which changes the surface of our known world, which makes history, is collective psychology, and collective psychology moves according
to laws entirely different from those of our consciousness.

The archetypes are the great decisive forces, they bring about the real events, and not our personal reasoning and practical intellect . . . The archetypal images decide the fate of man. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 183

All the most powerful ideas in history go back to archetypes. This is particularly true of religious ideas, but the central concepts of science, philosophy, and ethics are no exception to this rule. In their present form they are variants of archetypal ideas, created by consciously applying and adapting these ideas to reality. For it is the function of consciousness not only to recognize and assimilate the external world through the gateway of the senses, but to translate into visible reality the world within us. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 342

I have often been asked where the archetype comes from and whether it is acquired or not. This question cannot be answered directly. Archetypes are, by definition, factors and motifs that arrange the psychic elements into certain images, characterized as archetypal, but in such a way that they can be recognized only from the effects they produce. They exist preconsciously, and presumably they form the structural dominants of the psyche in general. They may be compared to the invisible presence of the crystal lattice in a saturated solution. As a priori conditioning factors they represent a special, psychological instance of the biological "pattern of behaviour," which gives all living organisms their specific qualities. Just as the manifestations of this biological ground plan may change in the course of development, so also can those of the archetype. Empirically considered, however, the archetype did not ever come into existence as a phenomenon of organic life, but entered into the picture with life itself. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 222

To the extent that the archetypes intervene in the shaping of conscious contents by regulating, modifying, and motivating them, they act like instincts.

It is therefore very natural to suppose that these factors are connected with the instincts and to enquire whether the typical situational patterns which these collective form-principles apparently represent are not in the end identical with the instinctual patterns, namely, with the patterns of behaviour. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 104

The archetype or primordial image might suitably be described as the instinct's perception of itself, or as the self portrait of the instinct, in exactly the same way as consciousness is an inward perception of the objective life process. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 277

We must constantly bear in mind that what we mean by "archetype" is in itself irrepresentable, but has effects which make visualizations of it possible, namely, the archetypal images and ideas.

We meet with a similar situation in physics: there the smallest particles are themselves irrepresentable but have effects from the nature of which we can build up a model.

The archetypal image, the motif or mythologem, is a construction of this kind. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 417

Sooner or later nuclear physics and the psychology of the unconscious will draw closer together as both of them, independently of one another and from opposite directions, push forward into transcendental territory, the one with the concept of the atom, the other with that of the archetype. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 412


Just as the "psychic infra-red," the biological instinctual psyche, gradually passes over into the physiology of the organism and thus merges with its chemical and physical conditions, so the "psychic ultra-violet," the archetype, describes a field which exhibits none of the peculiarities of the physiological and yet, in the last analysis, can no longer be regarded as psychic. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 420

The archetypal representations (images and ideas) mediated to us by the unconscious should not be confused with the archetype as such. They are very varied structures which all point back to one essentially "irrepresentable" basic form. The latter is characterized by certain formal elements and by certain fundamental meanings, although these can be grasped only approximately. The archetype as such is a psychoid factor that belongs, as it were, to the invisible, ultra-violet end of the psychic spectrum ... It seems to me probable that the real nature of the archetype is not
capable of being made conscious, that it is transcendent, on which account I call it psychoid [quasi-psychic]. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 417

transcendental background is as certain as our own existence, but it is equally certain that the direct perception of the archetypal world inside us is just as doubtfully correct as that of the physical world outside us. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 787

In spite or perhaps because of its affinity with instinct, the archetype represents the authentic element of spirit, but a spirit which is not to be identified with the human intellect, since it is the latter's spiritus rector. The essential content of all mythologies and all religions and all isms is archetypal. The archetype is spirit or anti-spirit: what it ultimately proves to be depends on the attitude of the human mind. Archetype and instinct are the most polar opposites imaginable, as can easily be seen when one compares a man who is ruled by his instinctual drives with a man who is seized by the spirit. But, just as between all opposites there obtains so close a bond that no position can be established or even thought of without its corresponding negation, so in this case also "les extremes se touchent." ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 406

The archetype as an image of instinct is a spiritual goal toward which the whole nature of man strives; it is the sea to which all rivers wend their way, the prize which the hero wrests from the fight with the dragon. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 415

I can only gaze with wonder and awe at the depths and heights of our psychic nature. Its non-spatial universe conceals an untold abundance of images which have accumulated over millions of years of living development and become fixed in the organism. My consciousness is like an eye that penetrates to the most distant spaces, yet it is the psychic non-ego that fills them with non-spatial images. And these images are not pale shadows, but tremendously powerful psychic factors. The most we may be able to do is misunderstand them, but we can never rob them of their power by denying them. Beside this picture I would like to place the spectacle of the starry heavens at night, for the only equivalent of the universe within is the universe without; and just as I reach this world through the medium of the body, so I reach that world through the medium of the psyche. ~Carl Jung, CW 4, Para 784

The organism confronts light with a new structure, the eye, and the psyche confronts the natural process with a symbolic image, which apprehends it in the same way as the eye catches the light. And just as the eye bears witness to the peculiar and spontaneous creative activity of living matter, the primordial image expresses the intrinsic and unconditioned creative power of the psyche. The primordial image is thus a condensation of the living process. ~Carl Jung CW CW6, Para 748

It is a great mistake in practice to treat an archetype as if it were a mere name, word, or concept.
It is far more than that: it is a piece of life, an image connected with the living individual by the bridge of emotion. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 96

The so-called "forces of the unconscious" are not intellectual concepts that can be arbitrarily manipulated, but dangerous antagonists which can, among other things, work frightful devastation in the economy of the personality. They are everything one could wish for or fear in a psychic "Thou." The layman naturally thinks he is the victim of some obscure organic disease; but the theologian, who suspects it is the devil's work, is appreciably nearer to the psychological truth. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 659

In psychic matters we are dealing with processes of experience, that is, with transformations which should never be given hard and fast names if their having movement is not to petrify into something static. The protean mythologeme and the shimmering symbol express the processes of the psyche far more trenchantly and, in the end, far more clearly than the clearest concept; for the symbol not only conveys a visualization of the process but—and this is perhaps just as important—it also brings a re-experiencing of it, of that twilight which we can learn to understand only through inoffensive empathy, but which too much clarity only dispels. ~Carl Jung, CW 13, Para 199

The great problems of life, including of course sex, are always related to the primordial images of the collective unconscious. These images are balancing and compensating factors that correspond to the problems which life confronts us with in reality. This is no matter for astonishment, since these images are deposits of thousands of years of experience of the struggle for existence and for adaptation. Every great experience in life, every profound conflict, evokes the accumulated treasure of these images and brings about their inner constellation. But they become accessible to consciousness only when the individual possesses so much self-awareness and power of understanding that he also reflects on what he experiences instead of just living it
blindly. In the latter event he actually lives the myth and the symbol without knowing it. ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 373

The soul gives birth to images that from the rational standpoint of consciousness are assumed to be worthless. And so they are, in the sense that they cannot immediately be turned to account in the objective world. The first possibility of making use of them is artistic, if one is in any way gifted in that direction; a second is philosophical speculation; a third is quasi-religious, leading to heresy and the founding of sects; and a fourth way of employing the dynatnis of these images is to squander it in every form of licentiousness. ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 426

The symbol is a living body, corpus et anima; hence the "child" is such an apt formula for the symbol. The uniqueness of the psyche can never enter wholly into reality, it can only be realized approximately, though it still remains the absolute basis of all consciousness. The deeper "layers" of the psyche lose their individual uniqueness as they retreat farther and farther into darkness. "Lower down," that is to say as they approach the autonomous functional
systems, they become increasingly collective until they are universalized and extinguished in the body's materiality, i.e., in chemical substances. The body's carbon is simply carbon. Hence "at bottom" the psyche is simply "world." In this sense I hold Kerenyi to be absolutely right when he says that in the symbol the world itself is speaking. The more archaic and "deeper," that is the more physiological, the symbol is, the more collective and universal, the more "material" it is.
The more abstract, differentiated, and specific it is, and the more its nature approximates to conscious uniqueness and individuality, the more it sloughs off its universal character.
Having finally attained full consciousness, it runs the risk of becoming a mere allegory which nowhere oversteps the bounds of conscious comprehension, and is then exposed to all sorts of attempts at rationalistic and therefore inadequate explanation. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 291

Not for a moment dare we succumb to the illusion that an archetype can be finally explained and disposed of. Even the best attempts at explanation are only more or less successful translations into another metaphorical language. (Indeed, language itself is only an image.) The most we can do is to dream the myth onwards and give it a modern dress. And whatever explanation or interpretation does to it, we do to our own souls as well, with corresponding results for our own well-being. The archetype—let us never forget this—is a psychic organ present in all of us. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 271

In reality we can never legitimately cut loose from our archetypal foundations unless we are prepared to pay the price of a neurosis, any more than we can rid ourselves of our body and its organs without committing suicide. If we cannot deny the archetypes or otherwise neutralize them, we are confronted, at every new stage in the differentiation of consciousness to which civilization attains, with the task of finding a new interpretation appropriate to this stage, in order to connect the life of the past that still exists in us with the life of the present, which threatens to slip away from it. If this link-up does not take place, a kind of rootless consciousness comes into being no longer oriented to the past, a consciousness which succumbs helplessly to all manner of suggestions and, in practice, is susceptible to psychic epidemics. With the loss of the past, now become "insignificant," devalued, and incapable of revaluation, the saviour is lost too, for the saviour either is the insignificant thing itself or else arises out of it. Over and over again in the "metamorphosis of the gods," he rises up as the prophet or first-born of a new generation and appears unexpectedly in the unlikeliest places (sprung from a stone, tree, furrow, water, etc.) and in ambiguous form (Tom Thumb, dwarf, child, animal, and so on). ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 267

All psychic events are so deeply grounded in the archetype and are so much interwoven with it that in every case considerable critical effort is needed to separate the unique from the typical with any certainty. Ultimately, every individual life is at the same time the eternal life of the species. The individual is continuously "historical" because strictly time-bound; the relation of the type to time, on the other hand, is irrelevant. Since the life of Christ is archetypal to a high degree, it represents to just that degree the life of the archetype. But since the archetype is the unconscious precondition of every human life, its life, when revealed, also reveals the hidden, unconscious ground-life of every individual. That is to say, what happens in the life of Christ happens always and everywhere. In the Christian archetype all lives of this kind are prefigured and are expressed over and over again or once and for all. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 146

A symbol loses its magical or, if you prefer, its redeeming power as soon as its liability to dissolve is recognized. To be effective, a symbol must be by its very nature unassailable.
It must be the best possible expression of the prevailing worldview, an unsurpassed container of meaning; it must also be sufficiently remote from comprehension to resist all attempts of the critical intellect to break it down; and finally, its aesthetic form must appeal so convincingly to our feelings that no arguments can be raised against it on that score. ~Carl Jung CW 6, Para 401

Do we ever understand what we think? We only understand that kind of thinking which is a mere equation, from which nothing comes out but what we have put in. That is the working of the intellect. But besides that there is a thinking in primordial images, in symbols which are older than the historical man, which are inborn in him from the earliest times, and, eternally living, outlasting all generations, still make up the groundwork of the human psyche. It is only possible to live the fullest life when we are in harmony with these symbols; wisdom is a return to them. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 794

As we can see from the example of Faust, the vision of the symbol is a pointer to the onward course of life, beckoning the libido towards a still distant goal—but a goal that henceforth will burn unquenchably within him, so that his life, kindled as by a flame, moves steadily towards the far off beacon. This is the specific life-promoting significance of the symbol, and such, too, is the meaning and value of religious symbols. I am speaking, of course, not of symbols that are dead and stiffened by dogma, but of living symbols that rise up from the creative unconscious of the living man. The immense significance of such symbols can be denied only by those for whom the history of the world begins with the present day. ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 202

Why is psychology the youngest of the empirical sciences? Why have we not long since discovered the unconscious and raised up its treasure-house of eternal images? Simply because we had a religious formula for everything psychic — and one that is far more beautiful and comprehensive than immediate experience. Though the Christian view of the world has paled for many people, the symbolic treasure rooms of the East are still full of marvels that can nourish for a long time to come the passion for show and new clothes. What is more, these images—be they Christian or Buddhist or what you will—are lovely, mysterious, richly intuitive. Naturally, the more familiar we are with them the more does constant usage polish them smooth, so that what remains is only banal superficiality and meaningless paradox. ~Carl Jung, Basel Seminar, Para 11

The Catholic way of life is completely unaware of psychological problems in this sense.
Almost the entire life of the collective unconscious has been channeled into the dogmatic archetypal ideas and flows along like a well-controlled stream in the symbolism of creed and ritual. It manifests itself in the inwardness of the Catholic psyche. The collective unconscious, as we understand it today, was never a matter of "psychology," for before the Christian Church existed there were the antique mysteries, and these reach back into the grey mists of Neolithic prehistory. Mankind has never lacked powerful images to lend magical aid against all the uncanny things that live in the depths of the psyche. Always the figures of the unconscious were expressed in protecting and healing images and in this way were expelled from the psyche into cosmic space. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 2121

The gods of Greece and Rome perished from the same disease as did our Christian symbols: people discovered then, as today, that they had no thoughts whatever on the subject. On the other and, the gods of the strangers still had unexhausted mana. Their names were weird and incomprehensible and their deeds portentously dark—something altogether different from the hackneyed chronique scandaleuse of Olympus. At least one couldn't understand the Asiatic symbols, and for this reason they were not banal like the conventional gods. The fact that people accepted the new as unthinkingly as they had rejected the old did not become a problem at that time. Is it becoming a problem today? Shall we be able to put on, like a new suit of clothes, ready-made symbols grown on foreign soil, saturated with foreign blood, spoken in a foreign tongue, nourished by a foreign culture, interwoven with foreign history, and so resemble a beggar who wraps himself in kingly raiment, a king who disguises himself as a beggar? No doubt this is possible. Or is there something in ourselves that commands us to go in for no mummeries, but perhaps even to sew our garment ourselves? ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 26.

Anyone who has lost the historical symbols and cannot be satisfied with substitutes is certainly in a very difficult position today: before him there yawns the void, and he turns away from it in horror. What is worse, the vacuum gets filled with absurd political and social ideas, which one and all are distinguished by their spiritual bleakness. But if he cannot get along with these pedantic dogmatisms, he sees himself forced to be serious for once with his alleged trust in God, though it usually turns out that his fear of things going wrong if he did so is even more persuasive. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 28

To gain an understanding of religious matters, probably all that is left us today is the psychological approach. That is why I take these thought-forms that have become historically fixed, try to melt them down again and pour them into moulds of immediate experience.
It is certainly a difficult undertaking to discover connecting links between dogma and immediate experience of psychological archetypes, but a study of the natural symbols of the unconscious gives us the necessary raw material. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 148

Reverence for the great mysteries of nature, which the language of religion seeks to express in symbols hallowed by their antiquity, profound significance, and beauty, will not suffer from the extension of psychology to this domain, to which science has hitherto found no access.
We only shift the symbols back a little, shedding a little light on their darker reaches, but without succumbing to the erroneous notion that we have created more than merely a new symbol for the same enigma that perplexed all ages before us. ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 428

Eternal truth needs a human language that alters with the spirit of the times. The primordial images undergo ceaseless transformation and yet remain ever the same, but only in a new form can they be understood anew. Always they require a new interpretation if, as each formulation becomes obsolete, they are not to lose their spellbinding power over that jugax Mercurius and allow that useful though dangerous enemy to escape. What is that about "new wine in old bottles"? Where are the answers to the spiritual needs and troubles of a new epoch? And where the knowledge to deal with the psychological problems raised by the development of modern consciousness? Never before has "eternal" truth been faced with such a hybris of will and power. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 396

All the true things must change and only that which changes remains true. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 503

All ages before us have believed in gods in some form or other. Only an unparalleled impoverishment of symbolism could enable us to rediscover the gods as psychic factors, that is, as archetypes of the unconscious. No doubt this discovery is hardly credible at present. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 50

It is only through the psyche that we can establish that God acts upon us, but we are unable to distinguish whether these actions emanate from God or from the unconscious. Strictly speaking, the God-image does not coincide with the unconscious as such, but with a special content of it, namely the archetype of the self. It is this archetype from which we can no longer distinguish the God-image empirically. We can arbitrarily postulate a difference between these two entities, but that does not help us at all. On the contrary, it only helps us to separate man from God, and prevents God from becoming man. Faith is certainly right when it impresses on man's mind and heart how infinitely far away and inaccessible God is; but it also teaches his nearness, his immediate presence, and it is just this nearness which has to be empirically real if it is not to lose all significance. Only that which acts upon me do I recognize as real and actual. But that which does not act upon me might as well not exist. The religious need longs for wholeness, and therefore lays hold of the images of wholeness offered by the unconscious, which, independently of our conscious mind, rise up from the depths of our psychic nature. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 757

God has indeed made an inconceivably sublime and mysteriously contradictory image of himself, without the help of man, and implanted it in man's unconscious as an archetype, the archetypal light: not in order that theologians of all times and places should be at one another's throats, but in order that the unpresumptuous man might glimpse an image, in the stillness of his soul, that is akin to him and is wrought of his own psychic substance. This image contains everything which he will ever imagine concerning his gods or concerning the ground of his psyche. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 661

Carl Jung on "Sleep" - Anthology

At the same time it is an event that was repeated many times in history, for instance in the case of Caesar and Brutus. Through the myth is extremely old it is still a subject for repetition, as it expresses the simple fact that envy does not let mankind sleep in peace ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 42

to the realm of the Mothers. His life is a constant struggle against extinction, a violent yet fleeting deliverance from ever-lurking night. This death is no external enemy, it is his own inner longing for the stillness and profound peace of all-knowing non-existence, for all-seeing sleep in the ocean of coming-to-be and passing away. Even in his highest strivings for harmony and balance, for the profundities of philosophy and the raptures of the artist, he seeks death, immobility, satiety, rest. If, like Peirithous, he tarries too long in this abode of rest and peace, he is overcome by apathy, and the poison of the serpent paralyses him for all time. If he is to live, he must fight and sacrifice his longing for the past in order to rise to his own heights. And having reached the noonday heights, he must sacrifice his love for his own achievement, for he may not loiter. The sun, too, sacrifices its greatest strength in order to hasten onward to the fruits of autumn, which are the seeds of rebirth. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 553

Nothing is so apt to challenge our self-awareness and alertness as being at war with oneself. One can hardly think of any other or more effective means of waking humanity out of the irresponsible and innocent half-sleep of the primitive mentality and bringing it to a state of conscious responsibility. ~Carl Jung; CW 6; Page 964.

The unconscious is the unknown at any given moment, so it is not surprising that dreams add to the conscious psychological situation of the moment all those aspects which are essential for a totally different point of view. It is evident that this function of dreams amounts to a psychological adjustment, a compensation absolutely necessary for properly balanced action. In a conscious process of reflection it is essential that, so far as possible, we should realize all the aspects and consequences of a problem in order to find the right solution. This process is continued automatically in the more or less unconscious state of sleep, where, as experience seems to show, all those aspects occur to the dreamer (at least by way of allusion) that during the day were insufficiently appreciated or even totally ignored in other words, were comparatively unconscious. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 469

It would all be so much simpler if only we could deny the existence of the psyche. But here we are with our immediate experiences of something that is—something that has taken root in the midst of our measurable, ponderable, three dimensional reality, that differs mysteriously from this in every respect and in all its parts, and yet reflects it. The psyche could be regarded as a mathematical point and at the same time as a universe of fixed stars. It is small wonder, then, if, to the unsophisticated mind, such a paradoxical being borders on the divine. If it occupies no space, it has no body. Bodies die, but can something invisible and incorporeal disappear? What is more, life and psyche existed for me before I could say "I," and when this "I" disappears, as in sleep or unconsciousness, life and psyche still go on, as our observation of other people and our own dreams inform us. Why should the simple mind deny, in the face of such experiences, that the "soul" lives in a realm beyond the body? ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 671

Indeed, it seems a very natural state of affairs for men to have irrational moods and women irrational opinions. Presumably this situation is grounded on instinct and must remain as it is to ensure that the Empedoclean game of the hate and love of the elements shall continue for all eternity. Nature is conservative and does not easily allow her courses to be altered; she defends in the most stubborn way the inviolability of the preserves where anima and animus roam. . . . And on top of this there arises a profound doubt as to whether one is not meddling too much with nature's business by prodding into consciousness things which it would have been better to leave asleep. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 35

For indeed our consciousness does not create itself it wells up from unknown depths. In childhood it awakens gradually, and all through life it wakes each morning out of the depths of sleep from an unconscious condition. It is like a child that is born daily out of the primordial womb of the unconscious." ~Carl Jung, CW 11, pp. 569 f.

Consciousness does not create itself-it wells up from unknown depths. In childhood it awakens gradually, and all through life it wakes each morning out of the depths of sleep from an unconscious condition. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, par. 935.

For the alchemist, the one primarily in need of redemption is not man, but the deity who is lost and sleeping in matter. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Page 312.

The analogy with the extraction of the pneuma from the stone in the saying of Ostanes forces itself upon us. We are already familiar with the idea of pneuma as fire, and with Christ as fire and fire as the earth's inner counter-element; but the stone from which the spark is struck is also analogous to the rocky sepulchre, or the stone before it. Here Christ lay as one asleep or in the fetters of death during the three days of his descent into hell, when he went down to the ignis gehennalis, from which he rises again as the New Fire. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 451

Since alchemy is concerned with a mystery both physical and spiritual, it need come as no surprise that the “composition of the waters” was revealed to Zosimos in a dream. His sleep was the sleep of incubation, his dream “a dream sent by God.” The divine water was the alpha and omega of the process, desperately sought for by the alchemists as the goal of their desire. The dream therefore came as a dramatic explanation of the nature of this water. The dramatization sets forth in powerful imagery the violent and agonizing process of transformation which is itself both the producer and the product of the water, and indeed constitutes its very essence ~Carl Jung, CW 13, Para 139

What we call fantasy is simply spontaneous psychic activity, and it wells up wherever the inhibitive action of the conscious mind abates or, as in sleep, ceases altogether. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 125

In sleep, fantasy takes the form of dreams. But in waking life, too, we continue to dream beneath the threshold of consciousness, especially when under the influence of repressed or other unconscious complexes. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 125

What we call fantasy is simply spontaneous psychic activity, and it wells up wherever the inhibitive action of the conscious mind abates or, as in sleep, ceases altogether. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 125

In sleep, fantasy takes the form of dreams. But in waking life, too, we continue to dream beneath the threshold of consciousness, especially when under the influence of repressed or other unconscious complexes. ~Carl Jung; CW 16, Page 125.

He who sleeps in the grave of the millennia dreams a wonderful dream. He dreams a primordially ancient dream. He dreams of the rising sun. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 272

Through comprehending the dark, the nocturnal, the abyssal in you, you become utterly simple. And you prepare to sleep through the millennia like everyone else, and you sleep down into the womb of the millennia, and your walls resound with ancient temple chants. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 267.

I should not worry about all this localization talk. It's practically all foolishness, and a remnant of the old brain mythology like the explanation of sleep through the contraction of the ganglia, which is by no means more intelligent than the localization of the psyche in the pituitary gland. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 161.

Now the weather is beastlier than ever, so that one can only huddle behind the stove. I busy myself chiefly with cooking, eating and sleeping. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 163.

An interesting conversation never disturbs my sleep. Only an arduous talk to no purpose disturbs it. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 197.

The apostles and the early Fathers of the Church had no easy life and moreover no Christian is meant to go to sleep in a safe pew. ~Carl Jung, Letters, Vol. II, Page 239.

A light sleep is certainly a favourable condition for the remembrance of dreams. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 514

The same is the case in the West, where one makes futile attempts to give life to our Christian tenets; but they have gone to sleep. Yet in Buddhism as well as in Christianity there is at the basis of both a valid truth, but its modern application has not been understood yet. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 385-386.

No Christian is meant to sleep in a safe pew. . . . I have discovered in my private life that a true Christian is not bedded upon roses and he is not meant for peace and tranquility of mind but for war. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 242.

But the detective stories were a rest, chiefly because they had no bearing on his [Jung’s]professional work; and he could sleep after reading them because they were not true. ~E.A. Bennet, Meetings with Jung, Page 187

In Sahasrara there is no difference. The next conclusion could be that there is no object, no God, there is nothing but Brahman. There is no experience because it is One, without a second. It is asleep, it is not, and that is why it is nirvana. ~Carl Jung, Kundalini Seminars, Page 59.

Carl Jung on “Race” “Racial” - Anthology

Carl Jung on “Race” “Racial” - Anthology

Sometimes, when we look back at history, it seems as though the present time had analogies with certain periods in the past, when great empires and civilizations had passed their zenith and were hastening irresistibly towards decay. But these analogies are deceptive, for there are always renaissances. What does move more clearly into the foreground is Europe's position midway between the Asiatic East and the Anglo-Saxon—or shall we say American?—West. Europe now stands between two colossi, both uncouth in their form but implacably opposed to one another in their nature. They are profoundly different not only racially but in their ideals. In the West there is the maximum political freedom with the minimum personal freedom; in the East it is just the opposite. We see in the West a tremendous development of Europe's technological and scientific tendencies, and in the Far East an awakening of all those spiritual forces which, in Europe, these tendencies hold in check. The power of the West is material, that of the East ideal. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 237

…it must be pointed out that just as the human body shows a common anatomy over and above all racial differences, so, too, the psyche possesses a common substratum transcending all differences in culture and consciousness. ~Carl Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 84.

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

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

I myself have personally treated very many Jews and know their psychology in its deepest recesses, so I can recognize the relation of their racial psychology to their religion, but it would be quite beyond me to relate Islam or the ancient Egyptian religion to its devotees as I lack any intimate knowledge of Arab and Egyptian psychology. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 233

The repressed libido for animal relationship is living in the unconscious. It appears in dreams either as animals; or we appear as having animal reactions, for example, the panic fear of animals; or we have inhibited movements due to being in water, a racial memory; also many flying dreams are really swimming. ~Carl Jung; Cornwall Seminar; Page 23.

Life's cessation, that is, death, can only be accepted as a reasonable goal either when existence is so wretched that we are only too glad for it to end, or when we are convinced that the sun strives to its setting "to illuminate distant races" with the same logical consistency it showed in rising to the zenith. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Pages 400

Especially among southern races one can observe that older women develop deep, rough voices, incipient moustaches, rather hard features and other masculine traits. On the other hand the masculine physique is toned down by feminine features, such as adiposity and softer facial expressions ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 780

If, in addition to this, we bear in mind that the unconscious contains everything that is lacking to consciousness, that the unconscious therefore has a compensatory tendency, then we can begin to draw conclusions—provided, of course, that the dream does not come from too deep a psychic level. If it is a dream of this kind, it will as a rule contain mythological motifs, combinations of ideas or images which can be found in the myths of one's own folk or in those of other races. The dream will then have a collective meaning, a meaning which is the common property of mankind. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 322

The horror which the dictator States have of late brought upon mankind is nothing less than the culmination of all those atrocities of which our ancestors made themselves guilty in the not so distant past. Quite apart from the barbarities and blood baths perpetrated by the Christian nations among themselves throughout European history, the European has also to answer for all the crimes he has committed against the coloured races during the process of colonization. In this respect the white man carries a very heavy burden indeed. It shows us a picture of the common human shadow that could hardly be painted in blacker colours. The evil that comes to light in man and that undoubtedly dwells within him is of gigantic proportions. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 571

The mystery of the earth is no joke and no paradox. One only needs to see how, in America, the skull and pelvis measurements of all the European races begin to indianize themselves in the second generation of immigrants. That is the mystery of the American earth. The soil of every country holds some such mystery. We have an unconscious of this in the psyche: just as there is a relationship of mind to body, so there is a relationship of body to earth. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 18

Through his identification with the collective psyche a patient will infallibly try to force the demands of his unconscious upon others, for identity with the collective psyche always brings with it a feeling of universal validity—"godlikeness"—which completely ignores all differences in the personal psyche of his fellows. (The feeling of universal validity comes, of course, from the universality of the collective psyche.) A collective attitude naturally presupposes this same collective psyche in others. But that means a ruthless disregard not only of individual differences but also of differences of a more general kind within the collective psyche itself, as for example differences of race. This disregard for individuality obviously means the suffocation of the single individual, as a consequence of which the element of differentiation is obliterated from the community, ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 240

At such moments ["when an archetypal situation occurs"] we are no longer individuals, but the race. . . . ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Page 128.

The inner voice makes us conscious of the evil from which the whole community is suffering, whether it be the nation or the whole human race. But it presents this evil in an individual form, so that one might at first suppose it to be only an individual characteristic. ~Carl Jung, CW 17, Para 319

Your heights are your own mountain, which belongs to you and you alone. There you are individual and live your very own life. If you live your own life, you do not live the common life, which is always continuing and never-ending, the life of history and the inalienable and ever-present burdens and products of the human race. There you live the endlessness of being, but not the becoming. Becoming belongs to the heights and is full of torment. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 267.

There are things which are simply incomprehensible to the tough brains of our race and time. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 190

There are historical reasons for the qualities of the psyche and there is such a thing as the history of man's evolution in past eons, which as a combination show that real understanding of the psyche must consist in the elucidation of the history of the human race—history of the mind, for instance, as in the biological data. ~Carl Jung, Evans Conversations, Page 36.

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.

Carl Jung on "Primitive" "Primitives" - Anthology

The will is a psychological phenomenon that owes its existence to culture and moral education, but is largely lacking in the primitive mentality. ~Carl Jung, CW 6, para 844.

The sun is the only truly “rational” image of God, whether we adopt the standpoint of the primitive savage or of modern science ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 176

The dammed-up instinctual forces in civilized man are immensely destructive and far more dangerous than the instincts of the primitive, who in a modest degree is constantly living out his negative instincts. Consequently no war of the historical past can rival in grandiose horror the wars of civilized nations. ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 230

Nothing is so apt to challenge our self-awareness and alertness as being at war with oneself. One can hardly think of any other or more effective means of waking humanity out of the irresponsible and innocent half-sleep of the primitive mentality and bringing it to a state of conscious responsibility. ~Carl Jung; CW 6; Page 964.

The picture thus presented is an altogether primitive idea which we find in similar forms elsewhere, as for instance in the West African myth where Obatala and Odudua, the first parents (heaven and earth), lie together in a calabash until a son, man, arises between them.

For the primitive anything strange is hostile and evil. This line of division serves a purpose, which is why the normal person feels under no obligation to make these projections conscious, although they are dangerously illusory. War psychology has made this abundantly clear: everything my country does is good, everything the others do is bad. The centre of all iniquity is invariably found to lie a few miles behind the enemy lines. Because the individual has this same primitive psychology, every attempt to bring these age-old projections to consciousness is felt as irritating. Naturally one would like to have better relations with one's fellows, but only on the condition that they live up to our expectations—in other words, that they become willing carriers of our projections. Yet if we make ourselves conscious of these projections, it may easily act as an impediment to our relations with others, for there is then no bridge of illusion across which love and hate can stream off so relievingly, and no way of disposing so simply and satisfactorily of all those alleged virtues that are intended to edify and improve others. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 517

Our admiration for great organizations dwindles when once we become aware of the other side of the wonder: the tremendous piling up and accentuation of all that is primitive in man, and the unavoidable destruction of his individuality in the interests of the monstrosity that every great organization in fact is. The man of today, who resembles more or less the collective ideal, has made his heart into a den of murderers. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 240

A man is a philosopher of genius only when he succeeds in transforming the primitive and wholly natural vision into an abstract idea belonging to the common stock of consciousness. This achievement, and this alone, constitutes his personal value, for which he may take credit without necessarily succumbing to inflation. . . . The personal value lies entirely in the philosophical achievement, not in the primary vision. To the philosopher this vision comes as so much increment, and is simply a part of the common property of mankind, in which, in principle, everyone has a share. The golden apples drop from the same tree, whether they be gathered by an imbecile locksmith's apprentice or by a Schopenhauer. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 229

Primitive superstition lies just below the surface of even the most tough-minded individuals, and it is precisely those who most fight against it who are the first to succumb to its suggestive effects. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Page 25.

The Bataks and many other primitives therefore say that when a man dies his character deteriorates, so that he is always trying to harm the living in some way ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 598

The primitive atmosphere in which the word “spirit” came to birth exists in us still, though of course on a psychic level somewhere below consciousness. But as modern spiritualism shows, it needs very little to bring that bit of primitive mentality to the surface ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 628

No wonder, then, that the primitive mind sees in this the activity of a strange invisible being, a spirit. Spirit in this case is the reflection of an autonomous affect, which is why the ancients, very appropriately, called the spirits imagines, `images' ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 628

According to a primitive view the soul is a fire or flame, because warmth is likewise a sign of life. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 665

The fact that all immediate experience is psychic and that immediate reality can only be psychic explains why it is that primitive man puts spirits and magical influences on the same plane as physical events. He has not yet torn his original experience into antithetical parts. In his world, spirit and matter still interpenetrate each other, and his gods still wander through forest and field. He is like a child, only half born, still enclosed in his own psyche as in a dream, in a world not yet distorted by the difficulties of understanding that beset a dawning intelligence. When this aboriginal world fell apart into spirit and nature, the West rescued nature for itself. It was prone by temperament to a belief in nature, and only became the more entangled in it with every painful effort to make itself spiritual. The East, on the other hand, took spirit for its own, and by explaining away matter as mere illusion—Maya—continued to dream in Asiatic filth and misery. But since there is only one earth and one mankind. East and West cannot rend humanity into two different halves. Psychic reality still exists in its original oneness, and awaits man's advance to a level of consciousness where he no longer believes in the one part and denies the other, but recognizes both as constituent elements of one psyche. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 682

It is characteristic that dreams never express themselves in a logical, abstract way but always in the language of parable or simile. This is also a characteristic of primitive languages, whose flowery turns of phrase are very striking. If we remember the monuments of ancient literature, we find that what nowadays is expressed by means of abstractions was then expressed mostly by similes. Even a philosopher like Plato did not disdain to express certain fundamental ideas in this way. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 474

Even the well-nigh unconscious primitive can adapt and assert himself, but only in his primitive world, and that is why under other conditions he falls victim to countless dangers which we on a higher level of consciousness can avoid without effort. True, a higher consciousness is exposed to dangers undreamt of by the primitive, but the fact remains that the conscious man has conquered the earth and not the unconscious one. Whether in the last analysis, and from a superhuman point of view, this is an advantage or a calamity we are not in a position to decide. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 695

If psychic life consisted only of self-evident matters of fact—which on a primitive level is still the case—we could content ourselves with a sturdy empiricism. The psychic life of civilized man, however, is full of problems; we cannot even think of it except in terms of problems. Our psychic processes are made up to a large extent of reflections, doubts, experiments, all of which are almost completely foreign to the unconscious, instinctive mind of primitive man. It is the growth of consciousness which we must thank for the existence of problems; they are the Danaan gift of civilization, ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 750

While we are all agreed that murder, stealing, and ruthlessness of any kind are obviously inadmissible, there is nevertheless what we call a "sexual question." We hear nothing of a murder question or a rage question; social reform is never invoked against those who wreak their bad tempers on their fellow men. Yet these things are all examples of instinctual behaviour, and the necessity for their suppression seems to us self-evident. Only in regard to sex do we feel the need of a question mark. This points to a doubt —the doubt whether our existing moral concepts and the legal institutions founded on them are really adequate and suited to their purpose. No intelligent person will deny that in this field opinion is sharply divided. Indeed, there would be no problem at all if public opinion were united about it. It is obviously a reaction against a too rigorous morality. It is not simply an outbreak of primitive instinctually; such outbreaks, as we know, have never yet bothered themselves with moral laws and moral problems. There are, rather, serious misgivings as to whether our existing moral views have dealt fairly with the nature of sex. From this doubt there naturally arises a legitimate interest in any attempt to understand the nature of sex more truly and deeply. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 105

The name’s people give to their experiences are often very revealing. What is the origin of the word Seele? Like the English word soul, it comes from the Gothic saiwalu and the old German saiwalô, and these can be connected etymologically with the Greek aiolos, ‘quick-moving, twinkling, iridescent’. The Greek word psyche also means ‘butterfly’. Saiwalô is related on the other side in the Old Slavonic sila, ‘strength’. These connections throw light on the original meaning of the word soul; it is moving force, that is, life-force. The- Latin words animus, ‘spirit’, and anima, ‘soul’, arc the same as the Greek anemos, ‘wind’. The other Greek word for ‘wind’, pneuma , also means ‘spirit’. In Gothic we find the same word in us-anan, ‘to breathe out’, and in Latin it is anhelare, ‘to pant’. In Old High German, spiritus sanctus was rendered by atum,‘breath’. In Arabic, ‘wind’ is rih, and rüh is ‘soul, spirit’. The Greek word psyche has similar connections; it is related to psychein, ‘to breathe’, psychos, ‘cool’, psychros, ‘cold, chill’, and physa, ‘bellows’. These connections show clearly how in Latin, Greek, and Arabic the names given to the soul are related to the notion of moving air, the “cold breath of the spirits.” And this is probably the reason why the primitive view also endows the soul with an invisible breath-body. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Paras 663-664)

Reduction to the natural condition is neither an ideal state nor a panacea. I£ the natural state were really the ideal one, then the primitive would be leading an enviable existence.But that is by no means so, for aside from all the other sorrows and hardships of human life the primitive is tormented by superstitions, fears, and compulsions to such a degree that, if he lived in our civilization, he could not be described as other than profoundly neurotic, if not mad. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 94

In his classic study of mana Lehmann defines it as something “extraordinarily effective. We cannot escape the impression that the primitive view of mana is a forerunner of our concept of psychic energy and, most probably, of energy in general ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 128

The primitive mentality does not invent myths, it experiences them. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 261.

One could say, with a little exaggeration, that the persona is that which in reality one is not, but which oneself as well as others think one is. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, para 221.

The primitive mentality does not invent myths, it experiences them. Myths are original revelations of the preconscious psyche, involuntary statements about unconscious psychic happenings, and anything but allegories of physical processes. Such allegories would be an idle amusement for an unscientific intellect. Myths, on the contrary, have a vital meaning. Not merely do they represent, they are the mental life of the primitive tribe, which immediately falls to pieces and decays when it loses its mythological heritage, like a man who has lost his soul. A tribe's mythology is its living religion, whose loss is always and everywhere, even among the civilized, a moral catastrophe. 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

The mass is swayed by participation mystique, which is nothing other than an unconscious identity. Supposing, for example, you go to the theatreglance meets glance, everybody observes everybody else, so that all those who are present are caught up in an invisible web of mutual unconscious relationship. If this condition increases, one literally feels borne along by the universal wave of identity with others. It may be a pleasant feeling—one sheep among ten thousand! Again, if I feel that this crowd is a great and wonderful unity, I am a hero, exalted along with the group. When I am myself again, I discover that I am Mr. So-and-So, and that I live in such and such a street, on the third floor. I also find that the whole affair was really most delightful, and I hope it will take place again tomorrow so that I may once more feel myself to be a whole nation, which is much better than being just plain Mr. X. Since this is such an easy and convenient way of raising one's personality to a more exalted rank, mankind has always formed groups which made collective experiences of transformation—often of an ecstatic nature—possible. The regressive identification with lower and more primitive states of consciousness is invariably accompanied by a heightened sense of life. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 226

Archetypes were, and still are, living psychic forces that demand to be taken seriously, and they have a strange way of making sure of their effect. Always they were the bringers of protection and salvation, and their violation has as its consequence the "perils of the soul" known to us from the psychology of primitives. Moreover, they are the infallible causes of neurotic and even psychotic disorders, behaving exactly like neglected or maltreated physical organs or organic functional systems. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 266

How else could it have occurred to man to divide the cosmos, on the analogy of day and night, summer and winter, into a bright day-world and a dark night-world peopled with fabulous monsters, unless he had the prototype of such a division in himself, in the polarity between the conscious and the invisible and unknowable unconscious? Primitive man's perception of objects is conditioned only partly by the objective behaviour of the things themselves, whereas a much greater part is often played by intrapsychic facts which are not related to the external objects except by way of projection. This is due to the simple fact that the primitive has not yet experienced that ascetic discipline of mind known to us as the critique of knowledge. To him the world is a more or less fluid phenomenon within the stream of his own fantasy, where subject and object are undifferentiated and in a state of mutual interpenetration. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 187

The primitive cannot assert that he thinks; it is rather that "something thinks in him." The spontaneity of the act of thinking does not lie, causally, in his conscious mind, but in his unconscious. Moreover, he is incapable of any conscious effort of will; he must put himself beforehand into the "mood of willing," or let himself be put—hence his rites d'entree et de sortie. His consciousness is menaced by an almighty unconscious hence his fear of magical influences which may cross his path at any moment; and for this reason, too, he is surrounded by unknown forces and must adjust himself to them as best he can. Owing to the chronic twilight state of his consciousness, it is often next to impossible to find out whether he merely dreamed something or whether he really experienced it. The spontaneous manifestation of the unconscious and its archetypes intrudes everywhere into his conscious mind, and the mythical world of his ancestors—for instance, the aljira or bugari of the Australian aborigines—is a reality equal if not superior to the material world. It is not the world as we know it that speaks out of his unconscious, but the unknown world of the psyche, of which we know that it mirrors out empirical world only in part, and that, for theother part, it moulds this empirical world in accordance with its own psychic assumptions. The archetype does not proceed from physical facts but describes how the psyche experiences the physical fact, and in so doing the psyche often behaves so autocratically that it denies tangible reality or makes statements that fly in the face of it. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 260

Affects usually occur where adaptation is weakest, and at the same time they reveal the reason for its weakness, namely a certain degree of inferiority and the existence of a lower level of personality. On this lower level with its uncontrolled or scarcely controlled emotions one behaves more or less like a primitive, who is not only the passive victim of his affects but also singularly incapable of moral judgment. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 15

Primitive man, being closer to his instincts, like the animal, is characterized by fear of novelty and adherence to tradition. To our way of thinking he is painfully backward, whereas we exalt progress. But our progressiveness, though it may result in a great many delightful wish-fulfillments, piles up an equally gigantic Promethean debt, which has to be paid off from time to time in the form of hideous catastrophes. For ages man has dreamed of flying, and all we have got for it is saturation bombing! We smile today at the Christian hope of a life beyond the grave, and yet we often fall into chiliasms a hundred times more ridiculous than the notion of a happy Hereafter. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 276

But if we step through the door of the shadow we discover with terror that we are the objects of unseen factors. To know this is decidedly unpleasant, for nothing is more disillusioning than the discovery of our own inadequacy. It can even give rise to primitive panic, because, instead of being believed in, the anxiously guarded supremacy of consciousness which is in truth one of the secrets of human success-is questioned in the most dangerous way. But since ignorance is no guarantee of security, and in fact only makes our insecurity still worse, it is probably better despite our fear to know where the danger lies. To ask the right question is already half the solution of a problem. At any rate we then know that the greatest danger threatening us comes from the unpredictability of the psyche’s reactions. Discerning persons have realized for some time that external historical conditions, of whatever kind, are only occasions, jumping-off grounds, for the real dangers that threaten our lives. These are the present politico-social delusional systems. We should not regard them causally, as necessary consequences of external conditions, but as decisions precipitated by the collective unconscious. ~Carl Jung CW 9i, Para 49

The dream has for the primitive an incomparably higher value than it has for civilized man. Not only does he talk a great deal about his dreams, he also attributes an extraordinary importance to them, so that it often seems as though he were unable to distinguish between them and reality. To the civilized man dreams as a rule appear valueless, though there are some people who attach great significance to certain dreams on account of their weird and impressive character. As against Freud's view that the dream is essentially a wish-fulfillment, I hold . . . that the dream is a spontaneous self-portrayal, in symbolic form, of the actual situation in the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, CW 9 Para 505

[In America] the men and women are giving their vital energy to everything except the relation between themselves. In that relation all is confusion. The women are the mothers of their husbands as well as of their children, yet at the same time there is in them the old primitive desire to be possessed, to yield, to surrender. And there is nothing in the man for her to surrender to except his kindness, his courtesy, his generosity, his chivalry. His competitor, his rival in business must yield, but she need not. ~Carl Jung, NY Times, 30 Sept 1912

So far mythologists have always helped themselves out with solar, lunar, meteorological, vegetal, and other ideas of the kind. The fact that myths are first and foremost psychic phenomena that reveal the nature of the soul is something they have absolutely refused to see until now. Primitive man is not much interested in objective explanations of the obvious, but he has an imperative need—or rather, his unconscious psyche has an irresistible urge—to assimilate all outer sense experiences to inner, psychic events. It is not enough for the primitive to see the sun rise and set; this external observation must at the same time be a psychic happening the sun in its course must represent the fate of a god or hero who, in the last analysis, dwells nowhere except in the soul of man. All the mythologized processes of nature, such as summer and winter, the phases of the moon, the rainy seasons, and so forth, are in no sense allegories of these objective occurrences; rather they are symbolic expressions of the inner, unconscious drama of the psyche which becomes accessible to man's consciousness by way of projection—that is, mirrored in the events of nature. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 7

All kinds of objects and signs mark these places, and pious awe surrounds the marked spot. Thus does primitive man dwell in his land and at the same time in the land of his unconscious. Everywhere his unconscious jumps out at him, alive and real. How different is our relationship to the land we dwell in! ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 44

Feelings totally strange to us accompany the primitive at every step. Who knows what the cry of a bird means to him, or the sight of that old tree! A whole world of feeling is closed to us and is replaced by a pale aestheticism ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 44

Nevertheless, the world of primitive feeling is not entirely lost to us; it lives on in the unconscious. The further we remove ourselves from it with our enlightenment and our rational superiority, the more it fades into the distance, but is made all the more potent by everything that falls into it, thrust out by our one-sided rationalism ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 44

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.

It is impossible to derive any philosophical system from the fundamental thoughts of primitive man. They provide only antinomies, but it is just these that are the inexhaustible source of all spiritual problems in all times and in all civilizations. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 144

Whether primitive or not, mankind always stands on the brink of actions it performs itself but does not control. The whole world wants peace and the whole world prepares for war, to take but one example. Mankind is powerless against mankind, and the gods, as ever, show it the ways of fate. Today we call the gods "factors," which comes from facere, 'to make.' The makers stand behind the wings of the world-theatre. It is so in great things as in small. In the realm of consciousness we are our own masters; we seem to be the "factors" themselves. But if we step through the door of the shadow we discover with terror that we are the objects of unseen factors. ~Carl Jung CW 10 Para 49

One would do well to treat every dream as though it were a totally unknown object. Look at it from all sides, take it in your hand, carry it about with you, let your imagination play round it, and talk about it with other people. Primitives tell each other impressive dreams, in a public palaver if possible, and this custom is also attested in late antiquity, for all the ancient peoples attributed great significance to dreams. Treated in this way, the dream suggests all manner of ideas and associations which lead us closer to its meaning. The ascertainment of the meaning is, I need hardly point out, an entirely arbitrary affair, and this is where the hazards begin. Narrower or wider limits will be set to the meaning, according to one's experience, temperament, and taste. Some people will be satisfied with little, for others much is still not enough. Also the meaning of the dream, or our interpretation of it, is largely dependent on the intentions of the interpreter, on what he expects the meaning to be or requires it to do. In eliciting the meaning he will involuntarily be guided by certain presuppositions, and it depends very much on the scrupulousness and honesty of the investigator whether he gains something by his interpretation or perhaps only becomes still more deeply entangled in his mistakes. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 320

It is not only primitive man whose psychology is archaic. It is the psychology also of modern, civilized man, and not merely of individual "throw-backs" in modern society. On the contrary, every civilized human being, however high his conscious development, is still an archaic man at the deeper levels of his psyche. Just as the human body connects us with the mammals and displays numerous vestiges of earlier evolutionary stages going back even to the reptilian age, so the human psyche is a product of evolution which, when followed back to its origins, shows countless archaic traits. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 105

The primitive form of conscience is paradoxical to burn a heretic is on the one hand a pious and meritorious act as John Hus himself ironically recognized when, bound to the stake, he espied an old woman hobbling towards him with a bundle of faggots, and exclaimed, "O sancta simplicitas!"— and on the other hand a brutal manifestation of ruthless and savage lust for revenge, ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 845

All kinds of objects and signs mark these places, and pious awe surrounds the marked spot. Thus does primitive man dwell in his land and at the same time in the land of his unconscious. Everywhere his unconscious jumps out at him, alive and real. How different is our relationship to the land we dwell in! ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 44

Feelings totally strange to us accompany the primitive at every step. Who knows what the cry of a bird means to him, or the sight of that old tree! A whole world of feeling is closed to us and is replaced by a pale aestheticism ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 44

Nevertheless, the world of primitive feeling is not entirely lost to us; it lives on in the unconscious. The further we remove ourselves from it with our enlightenment and our rational superiority, the more it fades into the distance, but is made all the more potent by everything that falls into it, thrust out by our one-sided rationalism ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 44

There are just as many neurotics among primitives as among civilized Europeans. Hysterical Africans are by no means rare in Africa. These disagreeable manifestations of the unconscious account in large measure for the primitive fear of demons and the resultant rites of propitiation ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 26

We carry our past with us, to wit, the primitive and inferior man with his desires and emotions, and it is only with an enormous effort that we can detach ourselves from this burden. If it comes to a neurosis, we invariably have to deal with a considerably intensified shadow. And if such a person wants to be cured it is necessary to find a way in which his conscious personality and his shadow can live together. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 132

If the repressed tendencies, the shadow as I call them, were obviously evil, there would be no problem whatever. But the shadow is merely somewhat inferior, primitive, unadapted, and awkward; not wholly bad. It even contains childish or primitive qualities which would in a way vitalize and embellish human existence, but—convention forbids. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 134

Our modern attitude looks back arrogantly upon the mists of superstition and of medieval or primitive credulity, entirely forgetting that we carry the whole living past in the lower storeys of the skyscraper of rational consciousness. Without the lower storeys our mind is suspended in mid air. No wonder it gets nervous. The true history of the psychic organism of every individual. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 56

Side by side with the biological, the spiritual, too, has its inviolable rights. It is assuredly no accident that primitive peoples, even in adult life, make the most fantastic assertions about well-known sexual processes, as for instance that coitus has nothing to do with pregnancy. From this it has been concluded that these people do not even know there is such a connection. But more accurate investigation has shown that they know very well that with animals copulation is followed by pregnancy. Only for human beings is it denied—not known, but flatly denied—that this is so, for the simple reason that they prefer a mythological explanation which has freed itself from the trammels of concretism. It is not hard to see that in these facts, so frequently observed among primitives, there lie the beginnings of abstraction, which is so very important for culture. We have every reason to suppose that this is also true of the psychology of the child. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 79

There are many people who are only partially conscious. Even among absolutely civilized Europeans there is a disproportionately high number of abnormally unconscious individuals who spend a great part of their lives in an unconscious state. They know what happens to them, but they do not know what they do or say. They cannot judge of the consequences of their actions. These are people who are abnormally unconscious, that is, in a primitive state. What then finally makes them conscious? If they get a slap in the face, then they become conscious; something really happens, and that makes them conscious. They meet with something fatal and then they suddenly realize what they are doing. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 6

The world is as it ever has been, but our consciousness undergoes peculiar changes. First, in remote times (which can still be observed among primitives living today), the main body of psychic life was apparently in human and in nonhuman objects it was projected, as we should say now. Consciousness can hardly exist in a state of complete projection. At most it would be a heap of emotions. Through the withdrawal of projections, conscious knowledge slowly developed. Science, curiously enough, began with the discovery of astronomical laws, and hence with the withdrawal, so to speak, of the most distant projections. This was the first stage in the despiritualization of the world. One step followed another already in antiquity the gods were withdrawn from mountains and rivers, from trees and animals.Modern science has subtilized its projections to an almost unrecognizable degree, but our ordinary life still swarms with them. You can find them spread out in the newspapers, in books, rumours, and ordinary social gossip. All gaps in our actual knowledge are still filled out with projections. We are still so sure we know what other people think or what their true character is. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 140

In this way the archetype of the imperfect demiurge, who had enjoyed official recognition in Gnosticism, reappeared in altered guise. (The corresponding archetype is probably to be found in the cosmogonic jester of primitive peoples.) With the extermination of the heretics that dragged on into the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, an uneasy calm ensued, but the Reformation thrust the figure of Satan once more into the foreground. I would only mention Jakob Böhme, who sketched a picture of evil which leaves the privatio boni pale by comparison. The same can be said of Milton. He inhabits the same mental climate. As for Böhme, although he was not a direct descendant of alchemical philosophy, whose importance is still grossly underrated today, he certainly took over a number of its leading ideas, among them the specific recognition of Satan, who was exalted to a cosmic figure of first rank in Milton, even emancipating himself from his subordinate role as the left hand of God (the role assigned to him by Clement). Milton goes even further than Böhme and apostrophizes the devil as the true principium individuationis, a concept which had been anticipated by the alchemists some time before ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 470

In this way the archetype of the imperfect demiurge, who had enjoyed official recognition in Gnosticism, reappeared in altered guise. (The corresponding archetype is probably to be found in the cosmogonic jester of primitive peoples.) With the extermination of the heretics that dragged on into the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, an uneasy calm ensued, but the Reformation thrust the figure of Satan once more into the foreground. I would only mention Jakob Böhme, who sketched a picture of evil which leaves the privatio boni pale by comparison. The same can be said of Milton. He inhabits the same mental climate. As for Böhme, although he was not a direct descendant of alchemical philosophy, whose importance is still grossly underrated today, he certainly took over a number of its leading ideas, among them the specific recognition of Satan, who was exalted to a cosmic figure of first rank in Milton, even emancipating himself from his subordinate role as the left hand of God (the role assigned to him by Clement). Milton goes even further than Böhme and apostrophizes the devil as the true principium individuationis, a concept which had been anticipated by the alchemists some time before ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 470

The ideology of this mysterium, [the mystical effect of God-man's self-sacrifice], is anticipated in the myths of Osiris, Orpheus, Dionysus, and Hercules and in the conception of the Messiah among the Hebrew prophets. These anticipations go back to the primitive hero-myths where the conquest of death is already an important factor. The projections upon Attis and Mithras, more or less contemporary with the Christian one, are also worth mentioning. The Christian projection differs from all these manifestations of the mystery of redemption and transformation by reason of the historical and personal figure of Jesus. The mythical event incarnates itself in Him and so enters the realm of world history as a unique historical and mystical phenomenon ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 416

For medieval man, however, analogy was not so much a logical figure as a secret identity, a remnant of primitive thinking which is still very much alive. An instructive example of this is the rite of hallowing the fire on the Saturday before Easter (fig. 191) . The fire is “like unto” Christ, an imago Christi. The stone from which the spark is struck is the “cornerstone”another imago; and the spark that leaps from the stone is yet again an imago Christi ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 451

I do not underestimate the psyche in any respect whatsoever, nor do I imagine for a moment that psychic happenings vanish into thin air by being explained. Psychologism represents a still primitive mode of magical thinking, with the help of which one hopes to conjure the reality of the soul out of existence, after the manner of the "Proktophantasmist" in Faust: Are you still there? Nay, it's a thing unheard. Vanish at once! We've said the enlightening word. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 750

Our material is, however, fully in accord with the widespread, primitive shamanistic conceptions of the tree and the heavenly bride, who is a typical anima projection. She is the ayami (familiar, protective spirit) of the shaman ancestors. Her face is half black, half red. Sometimes she appears in the form of a winged tiger. Spitteler also likens the “Lady Soul” to a tiger. The tree represents the life of the shaman's heavenly bride, and has a maternal significance. Among the Yakuts a tree with eight branches is the birthplace of the first man. He is suckled by a woman the top part of whose body grows out of the trunk. ~Carl Jung, CW 13, Para 460

The Latin translation "serpent" for "witch" is connected with the widespread primitive idea that the spirits of the dead are snakes. This fits in with the offering of goat's blood, since the sacrifice of black animals to the chthonic numina was quite customary. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Par 78.

A person must pay dearly for the divine gift of creative fire. It is as though each of us was born with a limited store of energy. In the artist, the strongest force in his make-up, that is, his creativeness, will seize and all but monopolize this energy, leaving so little over that nothing of value can come of it. The creative impulse can drain him of his humanity to such a degree that the personal ego can exist only on a primitive or inferior level and is driven to develop all sorts of defects—ruthlessness, selfishness ("autoeroticism"), vanity, and other infantile traits. These inferiorities are the only means by which it can maintain its vitality and prevent itself from being wholly depleted. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 158

Assimilation of the shadow gives a man body, so to speak; the animal sphere of instinct, as well as the primitive or archaic psyche, emerge into the zone of consciousness and can no longer be repressed by fictions and illusions. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 452

Since dreams provide information about the hidden inner life and reveal to the patient those components of his personality which, in his daily behaviour, appear merely as neurotic symptoms, it follows that we cannot effectively treat him from the side of consciousness alone, but must bring about a change in and through the unconscious. In the light of our present knowledge this can be achieved only by the thorough and conscious assimilation of unconscious contents. “Assimilation” in this sense means mutual penetration of conscious and unconscious, and not-as is commonly thought and practised-a one-sided evaluation, interpretation, and deformation of unconscious contents by the conscious mind. As to the value and significance of unconscious contents in general, very mistaken views are current. It is well known that the Freudian school presents the unconscious in a thoroughly negative light, much as it regards primitive man as little better than a monster. Its nursery-tales about the terrible old man of the tribe and its teachings about the “infantile-perverse-criminal” unconscious have led people to make a dangerous ogre out of something perfectly natural. As if all that is good, reasonable, worth while, and beautiful had taken up its abode in the conscious mind! Have the horrors of the ‘World War done nothing to open our eyes, so that we still cannot see that the conscious mind is even more devilish and perverse than the naturalness of the unconscious? ~Carl Jung CW 16, Paras 326-327

The remarkable potency of unconscious contents always indicates a corresponding weakness in the conscious mind and its functions. It is as though the latter were threatened with impotence. For primitive man this danger is one of the most terrifying instances of "magic." So we can understand why this secret fear is also to be found among civilized people. In serious cases it is the secret fear of going mad; in less serious, the fear of the unconscious—a fear which even the normal person exhibits in his resistance to psychological views and explanations. This resistance borders on the grotesque when it comes to scouting all psychological explanations of art, philosophy, and religion, as though the human psyche had, or should have, absolutely nothing to do with these things. The doctor knows these well-defended zones from his consulting hours they are reminiscent of island fortresses from which the neurotic tries to ward off the octopus. ("Happy neurosis island," as one of my patients called his conscious state!) The doctor is well aware that the patient needs an island and would be lost without it. It serves as a refuge for his consciousness and as the last stronghold against the threatening embrace of the unconscious. The same is true of the normal person's taboo regions which psychology must not touch. But since no war was ever won on the defensive, one must, in order to terminate hostilities, open negotiations with the enemy and see what his terms really are. Such is the intention of the doctor who volunteers to act as a mediator. He is far from wishing to disturb the somewhat precarious island idyll or pull down the fortifications. On the contrary, he is thankful that somewhere a firm foothold exists that does not first have to be fished up out of the chaos, always a desperately difficult task. He knows that the island is a bit cramped and that life on it is pretty meagre and plagued with all sorts of imaginary wants because too much life has been left outside, and that as a result a terrifying monster is created, or rather is roused out of its slumbers. He also knows that this seemingly alarming animal stands in a secret compensatory relationship to the island and could supply everything that the island lacks. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 374

The evolutionary stratification of the psyche is more clearly discernible in the dream than in the conscious mind. In the dream, the psyche speaks in images, and gives expression to instincts, which derive from the most primitive levels of nature. Therefore, through the assimilation of unconscious contents, the momentary life of consciousness can once more be brought into harmony with the law of nature from which it all too easily departs, and the patient can be led back to the natural law of his own being. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 351

So often among so-called "primitives" one comes across spiritual personalities who immediately inspire respect, as though they were the fully matured products of an undisturbed fate. ~Carl Jung, CW 17, Para 336

The wheel of history cannot be put back; we can only strive towards an attitude that will allow us to live out our fate as undisturbedly as the primitive pagan in us really wants. Only on this condition can we be sure of not perverting spirituality into sensuality, and vice versa; for both must live, each drawing life from the other. ~Carl Jung, CW 17, Para 336

Modern psychology can affirm that for many people this problem arises in the second half of life, when the unconscious often makes itself felt in a very insistent way. The unconscious is the land of dreams, and according to the primitive view the land of dreams is also the land of the dead and of the ancestors. From all we know about it, the unconscious does in fact seem to be relatively independent of space and time, nor is there anything objectionable in the idea that consciousness is surrounded by the sea of the unconscious, just as this world is contained in “Orthos.” The unconscious is of unknown extent and is possibly of greater importance than consciousness. At any rate, the role which consciousness plays in the life of primitives and primates is insignificant compared with that of the unconscious. The events in our modern world, as we see humanity blindly staggering from one catastrophe to the next, are not calculated to strengthen anyone’s belief in the value of consciousness and the freedom of the will. Consciousness should of course be of supreme importance, for it is the only guarantee of freedom and alone makes it possible for us to avoid disaster. But this, it seems, must remain for the present a pious hope. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 754

Although we are still far from having overcome our primitive mentality, which enjoys its most signal triumphs just in the sphere of sex where man is made most vividly aware of his mammalian nature, certain ethical refinements have nevertheless crept in which permit anyone with ten to fifteen centuries of Christian education behind him to progress towards a slightly higher level. On this level the spirit—from the biological an incomprehensible psychic phenomenon—plays a not unimportant role psychologically. It had a weighty word to say on the subject of Christian marriage and it still participates vigorously in the discussion whenever marriage is doubted and depreciated. It appears in a negative capacity as counsel for the instincts, and in a positive one as the defender of human dignity. Small wonder, then, that a wild and confusing conflict breaks out between man as an instinctual creature of nature and man as a spiritual and cultural being. The worst thing about it is that the one is forever trying violently to suppress the other in order to bring about a so-called harmonious solution of the conflict. Unfortunately, too many people still believe in this procedure, which is all-powerful in politics; there are only a few here and there who condemn it as barbaric and would like to set up in its place a just compromise whereby each side of man's nature is given a hearing. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para xii

Surely the times of primitive Christianity were bad too, but not as bad as the world is now. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 346.

It should be noted that music is a primitive means of putting people into a state of frenzy; one has only to think of the drumming at the dances of shamans and medicine-men, or of the flute-playing at the Dionysian orgies. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 331.

There are beautiful examples of this in the Arabian art which went hand in hand with the psychic reorientation of a primitive society under the influence of Islam. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 387.

He still thinks in terms of mass-hygiene and has nightmares about mass killing. Why should he learn about the unconscious, the mother of the future?! Man still hopes, in a primitive way, that not knowing, not naming, not seeing a danger would remove it. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 496.

The archetypality of Communism is on the one hand the common ownership of goods, as in primitive societies, and on the other hand the unlimited power of the tribal chieftain. Ostensibly all goods belong to all. Everybody has his share. But since all are represented by one man, the chieftain, only one man has control of everything. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 513

From what we know of genuine primitives today, the stars play an astonishingly small role in their lives, a fact which may justify the assumption that the projection of the constellations and their interpretation coincided with the beginnings of a reflecting consciousness, i.e., with the first steps in civilization. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 563.

The naïve primitive doesn't believe in God, he knows, because the inner experience rightly means as much to him as the outer. He still has no theology and hasn't yet let himself be befuddled by booby trap concepts. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 4.

Anthropologists have often described what happens to a primitive society when its spiritual values are exposed to the impact of modern civilization. Its people lose the meaning of their lives, their social organization disintegrates, and they themselves morally decay. We are now in the same condition. ~Carl Jung; Man and His symbols; Page 84

Primitive man was much more governed by his instincts than are his "rational" modern descendants, who have learned to "control" themselves. ~Carl Jung; Man and His symbols; Page 36.

Myths go back to the primitive storyteller and his dreams, to men moved by the stirring of their fantasies. These people were not very different from those whom later generations called poets or philosophers. ~Carl Jung; Man and His Symbols; Page 78

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

Such things can happen: a projection is a very tangible thing, a sort of semi-substantial thing which forms a load as if it had real weight. It is exactly as the primitives understand it, a subtle body. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1495.

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

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

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

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

Consequently, the sight of a child or a primitive will arouse certain longings in adult, civilized persons longings which relate to the unfulfilled desires and needs of those parts of the personality which have been blotted out of the total picture in favor of the adapted persona. ~Carl Jung, MDR, Page 244

Again one has only to think of the craze for Negro dances, for the Charleston and jazz—they are all symptoms of the great longing of the mass psyche for this more complete—development of the powers immanent within us which primitives possess to a higher degree than we do. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 38-46

I have no trouble talking to primitives. When I talk of the Great Man, or the equivalent, they understand. The Great Man is something that reacts. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 359-364

I have landed in the Eastern sphere through the waters of the unconscious, for the truths of the unconscious can never be thought up, they can be reached only by following a path which all cultures right down to the most primitive level have called the way of initiation. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 87.

The "duality" of the ruler is based on the primitive belief that the placenta is the brother of the new-born child, which as such often accompanies him throughout life in ghostly fashion, since it dies early and is ceremonially buried. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 259-260

On the primitive level the totemistic rite of renewal is always a reversion to the half animal, half human condition of prehistoric times. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 260

Depending on the peculiar nature of the case the most primitive therapeutic methods can achieve even better results than the most refined. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 324

I can only agree with you when you equate St. Francis with the essence of primitive religiosity, but even so a special illumination is needed for a person living in more highly developed centuries to become as simple again as a primitive. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 118

By removing yourself from the dogma you get into the world which is increasingly chaotic and primitive, in which you must find or create a new orientation. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 905

But such a thing [Individuation] is only possible if the individual in every moment of existence fulfills his complete being, lives the primitive pattern, fulfills all the expectations that he was originally born with. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Pages 760-761

I analysed dreams of Somali Negroes as if they were people of Zurich, with the exception of certain differences of languages and images. Where the primitives dream of crocodiles, pythons, buffaloes, and rhinoceroses, we dream of being run over by trains and automobiles. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 70

The primitives say the real scale of values begins with the elephant, lion, eagle, perhaps cobra, then man and monkey. They recognize the fact that man is one of the animals. To say that man is on top is megalomaniac. ~Carl Jung; Cornwall Seminar; Page 24.

But the real anima of a man is shown by psychological experience to be like the primitive idea of soul; something between earth and heaven, as black as it is white; ghostlike; ill defined. ~Carl Jung, Cornwall Lecture, Page 25.

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

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

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

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

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

In the same way one can withhold the material content of primitive myths from a child but not take from him the need for mythology, and still less his ability to manufacture it for himself. One could almost say that if all the world's traditions were cut off at a single blow, the whole of mythology and the whole history of religion would start all over again with the next generation. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 30

The God-concept is not only an image, but an elemental force. The primitive power which Job's Hymn of Creation vindicates, absolute and inexorable, unjust and superhuman, is a genuine and authentic attribute of the natural power of instinct and fate which “leads us into life,” which makes “all the world become guilty before God” (Romans 3:19), and against which all struggle is in vain. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 89

We can understand at once the fear that the child and the primitive have of the great unknown. We have the same childish fear of our inner side, where we likewise touch upon a great unknown world. All we have is the affect, the fear, without knowing that this is a world-fear—for the world of affects is invisible. We have either purely theoretical prejudices against it, or superstitious ideas. One cannot even talk about the unconscious before many educated people without being accused of mysticism. The fear is legitimate in so far as our rational Weltanschauung with its scientific and moral certitudes—so hotly believed in because so deeply questionable—is shattered by the facts of the other side. ~Carl Jung, CW 4, Para 324

Has mankind ever really got away from myths? Everyone who has his eyes and wits about him can see that the world is dead, cold, and unending. Never yet has he beheld a God, or been compelled to require the existence of such a God from the evidence of his senses. On the contrary, it needed the strongest inner compulsion, which can only be explained by the irrational force of instinct, for man to invent those religious beliefs whose absurdity was long since pointed out by Tertullian. In the same way one can withhold the material content of primitive myths from a child but not take from him the need for mythology, and still less his ability to manufacture it for himself. One could almost say that if all the world's traditions were cut off at a single blow, the whole of mythology and the whole history of religion would start all over again with the next generation. ~Carl Jung, CW 4, Para 30