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's Dream Analysis Seminar Lecture IX 19 March 1930

LECTURE IX 19 March 1930

Here is a question concerning the archetypes.

We were discussing the possibility of representing dreams by the method of crystallizing the archetypes, and Dr. Schlegel's question is whether one could enumerate them.

He is of the opinion that it would be o so.

That is one question. There is another to which we shall come presently.

The question as to whether archetypes are limited in number is almost impossible to answer, for it depends upon a more or less arbitrary decision. In trying to extract archetypes from a dream, one sees that there are a number of indubitable archetypes which are more or less analogous to each other.

Take for instance the cauldron.

It is analogous to the baptismal font, the underworld, the volcano, the depths of the sea, and many other things.

Now shall we call them independent or are they describing one and the same thing.

If we assume that all archetypes ascribe on and the same thing we renounce their discrimination and the whole thing becomes perfectly unmanageable; in that case we practically wind up with the fact that there is only one and that is the collective unconscious.

If we do discriminate between them, we find no limitation to their number.

One's imagination simply would not yield representations and images enough to characterize them or to name all their possible variations.

Theoretically, then, we arrive at the conclusion that every archetype is absolutely unlimited in characterization, but only theoretically, because our language is definitely limited.

There are instances where we can make innumerable variations, yet they refer to practically the same thing. So the question cannot be answered.

We can only say that they are theoretically unlimited, as the numbers that one can count are interminable, but practically they soon come to an end, or are quite unmanageable.

But we can say that there are a reasonable number of archetypes which can be clearly discerned and which are not mere analogies of each other.

For instance, the archetypes of the hero and the cauldron are certainly not identical, in spite of the fact that the hero is in closest connection with the idea of the cauldron.

In primitive myths, the hero always enters a cave, or the underground world, or the belly of a whale, where he makes a fire, etc.

In other words he enters the cauldron, thus bringing about the miracle of renewal or rebirth, which is the most characteristic quality of the cauldron motif.

So despite the close relation between the image of the hero and the image of the cauldron, we can discriminate these two things-even though the cauldron and the hero are really
identical in the fact that it is one and the same process.

Entering the cauldron, or a condition expressed by the cauldron, is an involution of energy, and rising again from the cauldron is an evolution of energy.

Therefore one could call it simply a certain movement, a transformation of energy, represented by these archetypal figures; it is always the same energy-two different states of the
same energy.

But you see that, as soon as the thing is made into a scientific or philosophical reduction, it becomes absolutely abstract and unimaginable and therefore impracticable.

To call a rebirth dream a transformation of energy is so abstract that it means absolutely nothing.

So we need archetypes, we need that picturesque language to express this peculiar kind of transformation.

It is the same with the idea of the anima.

When we speak of her as a function it conveys nothing, but by making it personal, she becomes a personal reality.

If we make an abstraction of it, it is simply a figure in our head, an artificial abbreviation, and not the thing itself.

Even in science, when we make abstractions from facts, we are left with nothing to deal with; we are not dealing with the real animals, only with stuffed animals, or perhaps an ideal construction of an animal, conveying more and more nothing.

And so it is with the archetypes: the more we treat them scientifically, the more they evaporate.

If we restrict them to what we think to be their essence, we arrive at one principle expressed in terms of transformation of energy, which means nothing and which is absolutely lifeless.

Therefore we have to talk of archetypes, and when one begins to discern them, there is no limitation apparently.

How many did you extract from the dreams, Dr. Howells?

Dr. Howells: I got 38 out of 20 dreams, and I did not get half of them.

Dr. Jung: I think you abstracted a number from your own dreams, didn't you, Miss Flenniken?

Miss Flenniken: I got 62 out of go dreams.

Dr. Jung: I remember that in your case I made the observation that you could have restricted the number because you had several archetypes, the prophet and the magician, for instance, which were
obviously one.

In another case, however, one might be forced to separate them.

The prophet, the magician, the old king, and the priest are all independent figures, yet they are all together.

In a particular problem there might be an important difference between them, and then one would naturally differentiate them, but in most cases it is better to draw them together, to let one contaminate the
other.

There are so many to deal with that one has to restrict their number by applying a sort of contraction, summing them up in one figure.

That arbitrary decrease cannot be considered theoretically but is dependent upon one's particular purpose; for instance, in making a statistical statement of the frequency of the flow of the archetypes, only a limited number can be chosen.

Otherwise one simply cannot represent them, one's colours wouldn't last out, and the whole picture would become too confused.

It would be possible to differentiate them into such an infinite number that practically every word would become an archetype, because every word has its history.

Every work goes back to something which has been repeated millions of times before and therefore acquires an archetypal quality.

So in how far one has to limit the limitless archetypes is entirely a matter of the particular end in view.

The other question that Dr. Schlegel asks is whether archetypes would be created in our day.

For instance, what formerly was expressed by fiery chariots rising up to heaven would nowadays be aeroplanes.

When railways were new in France, Victor Hugo said: why not make engines and trains that look like something?-and he suggested the form of a huge snake and the engine was a dragon's head with fire glowing out of its nostrils and spitting smoke.

He was assimilating a new collective phenomenon to an archetypal idea. Dragons are in our day great machines, cars, big guns, these are archetypes now, simply new terms for old things.

These new things are just as valid as the old ones; as the new things are merely words for images, so the old things were words for images.

The mythological idea of the dragon is probably derived from the idea of huge saurians; it is really quite possible that the dragon myths are the last vestiges of ancestral memories of the saurians-the
terrifying thing of which man in the dim past was afraid.

Of course, to be afraid of dragons, even in historical times, was futile because there were no dragons.

They have become a psychological fear because those beasts don't exist in reality; as a father or mother complex can keep on being operative in psychology even if the father or mother are long since dead.

They can be still alive in the form of symbolic images, as the dragon is still alive in the form of an image, although it is in reality nothing but a name.

So when we express an archetypal idea by a machine it is as though we were talking of a time when machines did not exist, as though there were still saurians.

There may be a time when we no longer talk of machines, but the ideas and fears will persist long after the actual machines are obsolete, and so it becomes obvious that these images are simply names for the things we are afraid of, names for fears quite simply.

Even in the days when there really were saurians, they were a name for that fear.

So the operation of archetypes is naturally going on, only today we don't talk about dragons but about cars and machinery and big organizations.

Sure enough, all the little merchants in America and Europe who have been crushed by the Standard Oil Trust must feel that to be a great crushing monster.

Mr. Holdsworth: Were there any men in the world in the time of the great saurians?

Dr. Jung: The mammoth was hunted by man, and those huge lizards on the island of Cocos1 are saurians, so they are still alive in the tropics.

And one reads in Caesar, in the Bellum Gallicum, about a unicorn in the Black Forest that could not lie down because its joints were stiff, so it slept while standing, leaning against trees; and the people cut the trees down so that it would fall and they could kill it!

That unicorn was undoubtedly a rhinoceros.

There have been no rhinoceroses in Europe for a long time, but just recently they discovered the remains of one again somewhere in the petroleum fields of Silesia, where the whole body was preserved.

Dr. Schlegel: Do you identify the idea of archetypes with the idea of symbols, so that everything which has a symbolical value can be considered as an archetype?

Dr. Jung: No, the symbol is an entirely different conception.

I would call an archetype a symbol when it was functioning as a symbol, but it doesn't necessarily function in that way.

The word symbol has been very much misused.

Freud calls things symbolical when they are only semiotic.

If he had had a philosophical education, he could not mix up those terms.

For instance, railroad employees have a design of a little winged wheel on their caps, and Freud would call that a symbol of the railway, but it is a sign of the railway.

If it were a symbol, it would mean that the men who wear it had been initiated into a secret cult symbolized by a winged wheel, and the devil knows what that might mean, perhaps something divine.

One uses the word symbol for something which one can only vaguely characterize.

A symbol expresses something which one cannot designate otherwise; one can only approach the meaning a little by using certain designs.

For instance, the Christian faith is symbolized by the cross, which means that the cross expresses something which cannot be expressed in any other terms.

The Greek word symbolum meand creed and the word symbol in its original use also meant the creed.

The original idea of the creed was not that now God is caught and we know exactly what he means.

The actual creed is the nearest approach in a human way to certain intuitions and beliefs-the belief that God is the Father and in the same person the Son and the Holy Ghost, for instance.

The great mysteries of life and eternity could be expressed only by symbols, and therefore they were always sacred.

The archetype when functioning can be expressive of a situation, and one can call it symbolic inasmuch as the situation is more or less unknown, but the archetype can also function in a situation which is entirely known to you.

For instance, we say a woman suffering from bad temper is like a fire-dragon.

That is an archetype, but one wouldn't call it a symbol; it is simply an exaggerated metaphor.

But when someone makes a peculiar design in order to express something which he cannot express otherwise, and in so, doing uses an archetype, you would then call it a symbol.

If a person makes a drawing of a snake, and above that a cross, and above that a moon, and you ask what that may be, you will probably see him begin to stammer, ajumble of words and vague conceptions; there is nothing to do but guess, and then he informs you that it is the only way in which he could characterize his thoughts and visions.

Now that is a symbol, and he has used the archetypes of the cross, of the snake, and of the moon, but in this case it is not semiotic, it is symbolic.

That difference was always known in philosophy but Freud mixes up the two, his use of the word symbol is really meaningless.

Dr. Baynes: This question of making new archetypes seems to me problematical because, in relation to the dragon, no one could believe that he had any part in making a dragon nowadays, whereas the modern man knows that, with engines, we are on top. We can make them.

Dr. Jung: Yes, but suppose an age when the machine gets on top of us.

Then it would become a dragon, the equivalent of the old saurians, and really, when you look at New York, it really is on top of man; he knows that he has done all that and yet it pulls him down.

Dr. Baynes: Hasn't it something to do with the attitude of a man towards it? Wouldn't it be like the churinga, which he knows he makes, yet it has a kind of power over him? It is both above and below him.

Dr. Jung: Yes, but that would prove that he could make archetypes because we have that ability to make something into a dragon.

I should say that we could transform that power which is embodied in the image of the dragon into something else, yet that something else is equipped with the power of creation too.

The old rabbi was capable of making a living thing, the Golem, from a clod of earth by black magic, but that thing had a tendency to grow and grow and finally it fell on him and killed him. So the churinga is made by man, yet because it is a symbol, it is also the abode of divine power.

All idol-worshippers know that the image has been made by man, yet it is chosen as an abode of the god because it is his symbol, and inasmuch as it is inhabited by a god, it is sacred, it is taboo.

In building a machine we are so intent upon our purpose that we forget that we are investing that machine with creative power.

It looks as if it were a mechanical thing, but it can overgrow us in an invisible way, as, time and again in the history of the world, institutions and laws have overwhelmed man.

Despite the fact that they were created by man, they are the dwelling-places of divine powers that may destroy us.

Dr. Baynes: The point I tried to make was that in making machines we are transforming irrational into rational power. It therefore seems to me that the shaping of the archetype should be according to this function of rationalizing-like harnessing the Nile, which would be rather different from the dragon.

Dr. Jung: Yes, but when we speak of the transformation of the dragon into a machine, we are in a certain stage of that development only.

We are actually in the stage of inventing the machine, we are just about to transform that primitive energy into the machine.

We have ideas about the godlikeness of man and forget about the gods.

After a while, when we have invested all our energy in rational forms, they will strangle us.

They are the dragons now, they became a sort of nightmare. Slowly and secretly we become their slaves and are devoured. New York has· grown t~overwhelming~proportions and it is due to the machine.

And it is such a devouring monster that Dr. Drapers tells me that the average life expectancy of people in New York is forty years.

In Switzerland it is sixty years.

Why do we have psychology? Because we are already strangled by our rational devices.

One can see that also in enormous machine-like bodies of men, armies or other organizations, which all lead to destruction.

Think of the tremendous power of Napoleon I and how completely his army was wiped out.

And Alexander the Great, whose army was crushed in India.

Think of the history of Babylon and Assyria.

It took two thousand years to reach the climax of their glory, and in the next thirty years the whole thing was destroyed.

It is always so. Great organizations eat themselves up.

Mr. Holdsworth: Would you say that, when the farm labourers started to break up the machinery in the industrial riots, they were working under the fear of the dragon?

Dr. Jung: It is difficult to discuss that question because it is too near to us, but perhaps those riots in England arose from the fear of the dragon in machines.

Well, now we must get back to our dream.

We got as far as the mouse, which we really must tackle seriously.

You have heard the dreamer's associations about it, and we decided that it must be an instinctive thing. In what way would it be characterized?

We must be as specific as possible in dream interpretation; we must bring theory down to reality.

Mrs. Sigg: A mouse comes up unexpectedly very often. It seems to be a symbolic representation of man's sexuality, and this man's sexuality is not so connected with the whole of his being.

Dr. Jung: But why think of sexuality at all?

Mr. Holdsworth: He is a child in his crib. When it breaks he has outgrown it. Then naturally his sexuality appears.

Dr. Jung: It is often the case that when a man comes of age his sexuality does not work.

Mrs. Sigg: Women sometimes say of sexuality that it is only the animal part of their nature.

Dr. Jung: It is the word only that points the way.

That is really an important point because the mouse has always been "only."

You remember perhaps about the mountain being in labour pains and then appears a ridiculously small mouse.

That is the "only." It is tiny and not important, a nuisance but not dangerous in any way.

One has to take care that it doesn't eat the cheese and the bread, soil the food, make holes in things, but it is not very considerable.

We have to take that point of view.

Where have we evidence of that in the dream?

Mrs. Sawyer: Where it runs away and he thinks it is of no importance.

Dr. Jung: Yes, the evidence is in his associations.

But his wife has a different view. She gets very much excited and goes after it with a stick, assuming that it might be dangerous to the boys. Now, what is that mouse?

There seems to be a general suspicion that it means sexuality.

And the mouse is instinctive; instinct, like sexuality, is under a strong taboo. Let us discuss that possibility.

In that marriage the difficulty, as we were saying, is the fundamental difference that exists between the viewpoints of husband and wife concerning the importance of what we call Eros-sex or relatedness.

He is confronted with the sex problem, that is the point in ligitation.

There have been discussions about it, and his wife holds entirely different convictions from the dreamer.

He thinks of sexuality as something very important and indispensable, and she thinks it is futile and can be dispensed with except for the purpose of producing children; she has the puritanical idea that sexuality only serves that purpose and has otherwise no justification whatever.

That is a hint for us.

He would say, "Oh, let that little thing go, it is not so important," and she would say, "No, it is terrible. It should not be."

Well, we guess that the mouse is sex, but there is another consideration.

It is surely an instance of a secret nocturnal instinct, because mice show themselves in the night.

They live in dark holes, parasites, outcasts, outlaws, and we trap them or poison them whenever we can.

So it must be a form of instinct under a strong taboo. What is that instinct? Will only sexuality cover it? There is another conclusion.:

Dr. Draper: To be quite irrational, it might be that the first part of this lecture about archetypes and dragons had the occult purpose of preparing us for the interpretation of the mouse symbol.

Thus the mouse might be a diminutive dragon which in the dreamer's life is actually significant, really a dragon.

We can look at the mouse as an inverted dragon. It may refer not only to the physical but to very much broader concerns in life.

Dr. Jung: That is true.

Sexuality is not only a little mouse, it is a very big thing, a most upsetting problem; but the dream speaks of a mouse, and we assume that it has a purpose in so doing.

We would expect far more powerful symbolism, but instead of a dragon we find only a little mouse.

That would be no argument against the idea that the mouse really means sexuality, but I should say it was definitely the purpose of the unconscious in this case to belittle it, to make it quite small so that it appears as nothing.

It is like a sort of deceit.

The wife makes a fuss about it as if it were a much bigger thing than it is in reality, because she would represent the figure in the dream that knows more about the importance of that
mouse or sexuality than the dreamer himself does.

One might say that he relegates realization into his wife, as if he said, "You would make a fuss about it but to me it is nothing."

The question is, why is it belittled? Why is it not represented at its full value? It is really the fundamental problem in the dream for the time being.

Mrs. Sigg: To encourage him.

Dr. Jung: Yes, that is really the idea.

Often we see that certain things which in reality seem unimportant are tremendously emphasized in dreams; something is given an extraordinary size to impress the dreamer when he undervalues it.

And the reverse occurs where a thing which is enormously important is belittled.

It is like the instances we were recently talking about, where the analyst is decreased, depotentiated, in order to give a chance to the dreamer to assert himself.

Otherwise he is obsessed by the figure of the analyst. In this case, the man is consciously quite aware of the importance of sex, and the purpose of the figure of the tiny mouse might be to encourage him.

Now, to encourage him to what?

Mrs. Sigg: To try to find a way to manage the problem with his wife; he might ask the reason why his wife was afraid, for instance.

Dr. Jung: But he often asked her that and it led nowhere.

All women have that fear of mice, and it is always ridiculous to a man.

So it is even ridiculed, obviously the unconscious wants him to think of it as a small matter which his wife makes a fuss over as if it could injure the children, which is nonsense.

The tendency of the dream, then, is to decrease the importance of the problem in order to encourage him. But encourage him to what?

Dr. Baynes: To follow the libido which he is so scared about.

Dr. Jung: When the bed breaks apart, away runs his libido.

He is not afniid of running after it because he delegates the fear to his wife, but what would he do with it?

He tries to kill the mouse with the wall of his crib and fails to hit it-a case of turning big guns on sparrows.

Now to what is the dream trying to encourage him?

Mr. Holdsworth: To get to it with his wife. He should take a stick according to the old proverb about a woman:-"The more you beat her, the better she'll be."

Dr. Jung: No, he would never do that. There would be no attraction to him in beating her up, he is too refined.

Naturally, if he were deeply in love with her and lived several degrees nearer to the East he would take a stick, but for an educated Western man it is not attractive to beat a woman down and then have intercourse with her.

Mrs. Sigg: But I think it would be an important thing for them both, for the benefit of their children, if they got all right again.

They could discuss the question and what effect it might have on the children.

Dr. Jung: Obviously the wife is of the opinion that the mouse might injure the children somehow, but that is all bunk.

We are concerned now with the fact that the dream encourages him.

But to what? I want you to continue.

Dr. Baynes: He is in a crib, in a kind of corner fighting the bogey in the mouse, and he has to come out in the open.

Mr. Holdsworth: Isn't it that there isn't so much in all this copulation business?-it is only a mouse.

Dr. Jung: I want to force a lady to say what he ought to do.

It is a sweet sadistical question. I want to see how they continue their sentences. Now please betray a secret.

You see that we have to discuss things a fond.

Where are the ladies who can tell us something enlightening about it?

We men are poor judges of human feelings.

It would be a splendid opportunity for the ladies to have a word in this discussion which concerns them.

Mrs. Sigg is perfectly right to assume that he is to be encouraged. Don’t be afraid. Don’t be so fussy. What would that mean?

Mrs. Baynes: Perhaps he is becoming discouraged by his wife's repudiation of him and that is why his libido is on such a small scale.

Dr. Jung: Yes, in his conscious.

The situation between this man and his wife has become terribly uninteresting in a way.

His wife was petering out. He would have wished that she had been more interested, but since she was not, he occasionally stepped aside and had foolish adventures with very ordinary women.

Then he tried theosophical studies, but he could not settle his problem in such a futile way, and so he came to analysis and is making a serious attempt at it.

He now tries to hold himself together and to be superior to this problem; he avoids trips to Poland and tries to be reasonable.

But there is the mouse, that nocturnal nuisance, and naturally in his conscious he thinks this is terribly important and something must be done about it.

Mrs. Deady: Hasn't he built up a tremendous mountain of fears in himself?

Dr. Jung: That is what she has built up, not he.

Mrs. Sigg: I understand quite well Mrs. Deady's meaning, and I think it is true that if there had been such a long separation, there might be an invisible wall in the man too.

Dr. Jung: Sure enough, there is an invisible wall, but we cannot make it visible.

What we see in this dream is only the tendency of the unconscious to decrease the importance of the problem.

We might even say that he kept himself within four walls as if he were a baby, behaving like a baby, fulfilling his functions as a baby, doing what he was told to do, and in the course of his exercises the bed breaks apart and the mouse runs out.

When it held together in infantilism the mouse didn't appear.

But now the problem appears.

He is inefficient and does not succeed in killing it, it escapes, and his wife rages because she thinks, if his sexuality comes out it will injure the children, which of course is always an argument with
wives-they say it injures children.

Miss Hannah: Is it that he should, like the Buddha, try living as a monkey?

Dr. Jung: Try living as a mouse?-imitate the ways of the mouse and escape?

The appearance of animals in dreams often means to imitate the ways of animals. In fairy tales there are helpful animals.

Now what would that mean practically?

I wish particularly that the ladies would use their wits on such a question.

Mrs. Baynes: I think that one ·very important point is that he has got to get out of the crib before he can manage anything.

Dr. Jung: He is out of the crib.

He is behind infantile walls. Something is now en route, just leaving the precincts, but we should know what it is.

Mrs. Deady: He should not think about it so much. He should have the suddenness of the mouse-just one leap.

Dr. Jung: Just one leap-like lightning, silently?

Yes, that would be imitating the mouse, but we are too metaphorical, we should be more specific.

We have the consideration here that this mouse means a separate autonomous factor, something instinctive that has left its hiding-place and appears on the scene.

No use trying to kill that thing, the mouse is quicker; no use trying to kill it even if his wife holds that it might injure the children.

Something in the mechanism is loose now.

We speak of a screw loose when one does things one didn't intend to do, says things one didn't intend to say.

An autonomous factor has appeared on the scene that takes on a very small form but that asserts itself just as a mouse asserts itself.

It will be a nuisance in the night and in the day, and it will make holes b~cause nothing will hold it for ever; it will creep through walls and doors, it cannot be locked in; whether he wants it or not
it will work.

That is the obvious meaning of the dream, but naturally the man will ask me, "What is it?" and I will say that it is his sexual problem, which neither he nor his wife can control, it will find its way through.

"But why just a mouse for a big problem?"-to which I would say that obviously the importance is greatly decreased and that it literally means that the dreamer should not make such a fuss about
his sexuality.

He can leave it alone because that mouse will take care of itself.

He worries all the time about what one should do, not what he should do; he seeks a formula or something that is generally acknowledged to deal with the situation.

But he should completely dismiss it, he should simply say that he can't manage it and doesn't know what the solution is.

If that thing wants to live it will live, and he should let it go.

If left alone takes care of itself, it works out according to its own laws.

The cat is out of the bag, and if the problem is working like that it will keep on working, making ways.

Provided it is real it will produce certain effects and naturally one is more or less at its mercy; it goes on even if one does not know when or where.

It is most important that we assume nothing.

There are many problems with which our rational mind is quite incapable of dealing, apparently impossible situations, and I am very careful not to mix in.

There are people who at thirty five go into a monastery, for instance.

People sometimes choose strange lives which the average opinion would say were wrong, but it may be right for them, how do I know?

If his unconscious should say that this man's sexuality had disappeared completely, that it was absolutely unimportant and did not exist, it would be unexpected, but I would say, well, perhaps this is true.

Here, then, I would say to the dreamer, the mouse has escaped, and now it can do something if it really is alive, if it has strength.

It will take care of itself and something is going to happen.

Do you understand?

I mean that I really believe in autonomous complexes. I really believe that autonomous factors can produce something and help settle an unmanageable problem in a way that is not repressing it nor neglecting it.

It is as if you sent your servant with a letter of credit to cash: you cannot go so you delegate your powers, you send that pr

I cannot tell how to solve it, but if you dismiss a problem it will work out along the lines of general law.

You see, I can talk very definitely about this case because I know by what peripeties he went and how it has developed since, and I know that here things began to move.

You remember that the former dream said that the machine was ready to work, and you know what the difficulty was-that he came up against church prejudices and moral laws.

Then he recoiled and found himself in the crib.

Now the crib breaks apart. The machine becomes the mouse.

He recognizes that it is a living mechanism able to work out its own salvation.

It is the first time he has discovered that it can take care of itself. I don't know how.

It is left to the grace of God, but I can tell you that it was very alive. It worked itself out. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis Seminar, Pages 536-549

Carl Jung on: The Unconscious: Archetypes

Dr. Evans: You mentioned earlier that Freud’s Oedipal situation was an example of an archetype.

At this time would you please elaborate on the concept, archetype?

Dr. Jung: Well, you know what a behavior pattern is, the way in which a weaver bird builds its nest. That is an inherited form in him.

He will apply certain symbiotic phenomena, between insects and plants.

They are inherited patterns of behavior.

And so man has, of course, an inherited scheme of functioning.

You see, his liver, his heart, all his organs, and his brain will always function in a certain way, following its pattern.

You may have a great difficulty seeing it because you cannot compare it.

There are no other similar beings like man, that are articulate, that could give an account of their functioning.

If that were the case, we could—I don’t know what.

But because we have no means of comparison, we are necessarily unconscious about the whole conditions.

It is quite certain, however, that man is born with a certain functioning, a certain way of functioning, a certain pattern of behavior which is expressed in the form of archetypal images, or archetypal forms.

For instance, the way in which a man should behave is expressed by an archetype.

Therefore, you see, the primitives tell such stories. A great deal of education goes through story telling.

For instance, they call together the young men, and two older men act out before the eyes of the younger all the things they should not do.


Then they say, "Now that’s exactly the thing you shall not do."

Another way is they tell them all of the things they should not do, like the Decalogue, "Thou shalt not," and that is always supported by mythological tales.

That, of course, gave me a motive to study the archetypes, because I began to see that the structure of what I then called the collective

unconscious was really a sort of agglomeration of such typical images, each of which had a unique quality.

The archetypes are, at the same time, dynamic.

They are instinctual images that are not intellectually invented.

They are always there and they produce certain processes in the unconscious that one could best compare with myths.

That’s the origin of mythology.

Mythology is a pronouncing of a series of images that formulate the life of archetypes.

So the statements of every religion, of many poets, etc., are statements about the inner mythological process, which is a necessity because man is not complete if he is not conscious of that aspect of things.

For instance, our ancestors have done so and so, and so shall you do.

Or such and such a hero has done so and so, and that is your model.

For instance, in the teachings of the Catholic church, there are several thousand saints.

They show us how to do— They have their legends— And that is Christian mythology.

In Greece, you know, there was Theseus and there was Heracles, models of fine men, of gentlemen, you know; and they teach us how to behave.

They are archetypes of behavior.

I became more and more respectful of archetypes, and that naturally led me on to a profound study of them.

And now, by Jove, there is an enormous factor, very important for our further development and for our wellbeing, that should be taken into account.

It was, of course, difficult to know where to begin, because it is such an enormously extended field.

And the next ques􀢢on I asked myself was, "Now, where in the world has anybody been busy with that problem?"

I found that nobody had except a peculiar spiritual movement that went together with the beginning of Christianity, namely, the Gnostics; and that was the first thing actually that I saw.

They were concerned with the problem of archetypes, and made a peculiar philosophy of it.

Everybody makes a peculiar philosophy of it when he comes across it naively, and doesn’t know that those are structural elements of the unconscious psyche.

The Gnostics lived in the first, second and third centuries; and I wanted to know what was in between that time and today, when we suddenly are confronted by the problems of the collective unconscious which were the same two thousand years ago, though we are not prepared to admit that problem.

I was always looking for something in between, you know, something that would link that remote past with the present moment.

I found to my amazement that it was alchemy, that which is understood to be a history of chemistry.

It was, one could almost say, nothing less than that. It was a peculiar spiritual movement or a philosophical movement.

They called themselves philosophers, like Narcissism.

And then I read the whole accessible literature, Latin and Greek.

I studied it because it was enormously interesting.

It [Alchemy] is the mental work of 1,700 years, in which there is stored up all they could make out about the nature of the archetypes, in a peculiar way that’s foolish.

It is not simple.

Most of the texts are no more published since the middle ages, the last editions dated in the middle or the end of the sixteenth

century, all in Latin; some texts are in Greek, not a few very important ones.

That has given me no end of work, but the result was most satisfactory, because it showed me the development of our unconscious relation to the collective unconscious and the variations our consciousness has undergone; why the being’s unconscious is concerned with these mythological images.

For instance, such phenomena as in Hitler, you know.

That is a psychical phenomenon, and we’ve got to understand these things.

To me, of course, it has been an enormous problem because it is a factor that has determined the fate of millions of European people, and of Americans.

Nobody can deny that he has been influenced by the war.

That was all Hitler’s doing—and that’s all psychology, our foolish psychology.

But you only come to an understanding of these things when you understand the background from which it springs.

It is just as though, as if a terrific epidemic of typhoid fever were breaking out, and you say, "That is typhoid fever— isn’t that a marvelous disease!"

It can take on enormous dimensions and nobody knows anything about it. Nobody takes care of the water supply, nobody thinks of examining

the meat or anything like that; but everyone simply states, "This is a phenomenon."—Yes, but one doesn’t understand it.

Of course, I cannot tell you in detail about alchemy.

It is the basic of our modern way of conceiving things, and therefore, it is as if it were right under the threshold of consciousness.

This is a wonderful picture of how the development of archetypes, the movement of archetypes, looks when you look upon them with broader perspective.

Maybe from today you look back into the past and you see how the present moment has evolved out of the past.

It is just as if the alchemistic philosophy— That sounds very curious; we should give it an entirely different name.

Actually, it has a different name.

It [Alchemy] is also called Hermetic Philosophy, though, of course, that conveys just as little as the term alchemy.—It was the parallel development, as Narcissism was, to the conscious development of Christianity, of our Christian philosophy, of the whole psychology of the middle ages.

So you see, in our days we have such and such a view of the world, a particular philosophy, but in the unconscious we have a different one.

That we can see through the example of the alchemistic philosophy that behaves to the medieval consciousness
exactly like the unconscious behaves to ourselves.

And we can construct or even predict the unconscious of our days when we know what it has been yester

day.

Or, for instance, to take a more concise archetype, like the archetype of the ford—the ford to a river.

Now that is a whole situation.

You have to cross a ford; you are in the water; and there is an ambush or a water animal, say a crocodile or something like that.

There is danger and something is going to happen.

The problem is how you escape.

Now this is a whole situation and it makes an archetype.

And that archetype has now a suggestive effect upon you.

For instance, you get into a situation; you don’t know what the situation is; you suddenly are seized by an emotion or by a spell; and you behave in a certain way you have not foreseen at all—you do something quite strange to yourself.

Dr. Evans: Could this also be described as spontaneous?

Dr. Jung: Quite spontaneous.

And that is done through the archetype that is concerned.

Of course, we have a famous case in our Swiss history of the King Albrecht, who was murdered in the ford of the Royce not very far from Zurich.

His murderers were hiding behind him for the whole stretch from Zurich to the Royce, quite a long stretch, and after deliberating, still couldn’t come together about whether they wanted to kill the king or not.

The moment the king rode into the ford, they thought, "Murder!"

They shouted, "Why do we let him abuse us?"

Then they killed him, because this was the moment they were seized; this was the right moment.

So you see, when you have lived in primitive circumstances, in the primeval forest among primitive populations, then you know that phenomenon.

You are seized with a certain spell and you do a thing that is unexpected.

Several times when I was in Africa, I went into such situations where I was amazed afterwards.

One day I was in the Sudan and it was really a very dangerous situation, which I didn’t recognize at the moment
at all.

But I was seized with a spell.

I did something which I wouldn’t have expected and I couldn’t have intended.

You see, the archetype is a force. It has an autonomy, and it can suddenly seize you. It is like a seizure.

So, for instance, falling in love at first sight, that is such a case.

You have a certain image in yourself, without knowing it, of the woman—of any woman.

You see that girl, or at least a good imitation of your type, and instantly you get the seizure; you are caught.

And afterward you may discover that ￿ it was a hell of a mistake.

You see, a man is quite capable, or is intelligent enough to see that the woman of his choice was no choice; he has been captured!

He sees that she is no good at all, that she is a hell of a business, and he tells me so.

He says, "For God’s sake, doctor, help me to get rid of that woman." He can’t though, and he is like clay in her fingers.

That is the archetype.

It has all happened because of the archetype of the anima, though he thinks it is all his soul, you know.

It is like the girl—any girl.

When a man sings very high, for instance, sings a high C, she thinks he must have a very wonderful spiritual
character, and she is badly disappointed when she marries that particular "letter."

Well, that’s the archetype of the animus.

Dr. Evans: Now Dr. Jung, to be even a bit more specific, you have suggested that in our society, in all societies, there are symbols that in a sense direct or determine what a man does. Then you also suggest that somehow these symbols become "inborn" and, in part, "inbred."

Dr. Jung: They don’t become; they are.

They are to begin with. You see, we are born into a pattern; we are a pattern.

We are a structure that is pre-established through the genes.

Dr. Evans: To recapitulate then, the archetype is just a higher order of an instinctual pattern, such as your earlier example of a bird building a nest. Is that how you intended to describe it?

Dr. Jung: It is a biological order of our mental functioning, as, for instance, our biological-physiological function follows a pattern.

The behavior of any bird or insect follows a pa􀂂ern, and that is the same with us.

Man has a certain pa􀂂ern that makes him specifically human, and no man is born without it.

We are only deeply unconscious of these facts because we live by all our senses and outside of ourselves.

If a man could look into himself, he could discover it.

When a man discovers it in our days, he thinks he is crazy—really crazy.

Dr. Evans: Now would you say the number of such archetypes are limited or predetermined, or can the number be increased?

Dr. Jung: Well, I don’t know what I do know about it; it is so blurred.

You see, we have no means of comparison.

We know and we see that there is a behavior, say like incest; or there is a behavior of violence, a certain kind of violence; or there is a behavior of panic, of power, etc.

Those are areas, as it were, in which there are many variations.

It can be expressed in this way or that way, you know.

And they overlap, and o􀁛en you cannot say where the one form begins or ends.

It is nothing concise, because the archetype in itself is completely unconscious and you only can see the effects of it.

You can see, for instance, when you know a person is possessed by an archetype; then you can divine and even prognosticate possible developments.

This is true because when you see that the man is caught by a certain type of woman in a certain very specific way, you know that he is caught by the anima.

Then the whole thing will have such and such complications and such and such developments because it is typical.

The way the anima is described is exceedingly typical.

I don’t know if you know Rider Haggard’s She, or L’Atlantide by Benoît—c’est la femme fatale.

Dr. Evans: To be more specific, Dr. Jung, you have used the concepts, anima and animus, which you are now identifying in terms of sex, male or female. I wonder if you could elaborate perhaps even more specifically on these terms? Take the term "anima" first. Is this again part of the inherited nature of the individual?

Dr. Jung: Well, this is a bit complicated, you know.

The anima is an archetypal form, expressing the fact that a man has a minority of feminine or female genes.

That is something that doesn’t appear or disappear in him, that is constantly present, and works as a female in a man.

As early as the 16th century, the Humanists had discovered that man had an anima, and that each man carried female within himself.

They said it; it is not a modem invention.

The same is the case with the animus.

It is a masculine image in a woman’s mind which is sometimes quite conscious, sometimes not quite conscious; but it is called into life the moment that woman meets a man who says the right things.

Then because he says it, it is all true and he is the fellow, no matter what he is.

Those are particularly well-founded archetypes, those two.

And you can lay hands on their bases. Carl Jung, Evans Conversations, Pages 16-18.

Carl Jung on "Archetypes,"

Archetypes:

When all the archetypal images are properly placed in a hierarchy, when that which must be below is below, and.
that which must be above is above, our final condition can recapture our original blissful state.

Archetypes are images in the soul that represent the course of one’s life.

One part of the archetypal content is of material and the other of spiritual origin.

The more an archetype is amplified the more understandable it becomes.

It is hard to explain because the spiritual cannot be expressed in a few words.

The archetype signifies that particular spiritual reality which cannot be attained unless life is lived in consciousness.

Archetypes are not ma􀂂ers of faith; we can know that they are there.

An archetype is composed of an instinctual factor and a spiritual image.

The approaches to it from the instinctual or the spiritual side are very different.

The libido cannot be freed, however, unless the archetypal images can be made conscious.

When fantasy pictures are brought into consciousness their intrinsic energy is liberated.

In this way the instincts become integrated and ordered.

When only the instinctual element of the archetypal content is active there is chaos (massa confusa).

Archetypes can change whilst the individual remains quite unconscious of their movements.

Conceivable they change spontaneously.

The archetypal content of dreams disappears and is replaced by a new one, even when the earlier form has not come into consciousness.

From the nature of a particular archetype it is possible to predict which will follow it.

It can be assumed that the flow of archetypes at a particular time characterize that historical period in a particular way.

The typical events of an era are determined by the succession and the quality of the corresponding archetypal images.

The succession of the archetypal motives is a collective development and has nothing to do with the individual.

We may imagine that the archetypes, being only the residual deposits of human experiences, would have represented animalistic life in an earlier period.

The archetypal primordial forms were already present, however, at the dawn of human consciousness; at its centre, everything was already there as an apriori possibility.

Even the first experiences of man were already fixed; we can only translate these patterns, these archetypes, into form we can understand.

Men have to realize the archetypes which are present at an unconscious level in creation.

All potentialities lie in the unconscious like ideas that have not yet been embodied nor experienced yet as reality.

The archetypes are present in the unconscious as potential abilities which, at a given moment, are realized and applied when brought into consciousness by a creative act.

As an analogy we can suppose that every inspiration produced out of the unconscious has a history.

A new situation occurs as a constellation produced by the archetype, a new inspiration emerges, and something else is discovered and becomes a part of reality.

A host of possibilities is still embedded in the archetypes, in the realm of the Mothers.

The abundance of possibilities eludes our comprehension.

The origin of the archetypes is a crucial ques􀢢on.

Where space and time are relative it is not possible to speak of developments in 􀢢me.

Everything is present, altogether and all at once, in the constant presence of the pleroma.

I remember standing on a mountain top in inner Africa, seeing around me an endless expanse of brush and herds of animals grazing, all in a deep silence as it had been for thousands of years without anyone being aware of it.

"They" were present but not consciously seen; they were as nameless as in Paradise before Adam named them.

Name-giving is an act of creation.

Where space and time do not exist there is only oneness (monotes).

There is no differentiation; there is only pleroma.

Pleroma is always with us, under our feet and above our heads.

Man is the point that has become visible, stepping out from the pleroma, knowing what he is doing, and able to name the things about him.

Although the earth existed before there were any human beings, it could not be seen or known by anyone.

In China they say that the ancestor of the family, the one who stood at the beginning, is the Cosmos.

Out of him was everything created: in the time before time.

There is nothing to explain or distinguish in the oneness because sequence and causality do not exist.

The archetypes are the material of the God- Creator.

The cons􀢢tute a primeval ocean charged with potentiality. Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Pages 21-22.

Carl Jung on “Archetypes” - Anthology

The unconscious, as the totality of all archetypes, is the deposit of all human experience right back to its remotest beginnings.

Not, indeed, a dead deposit, a sort of abandoned rubbish-heap, but a living system of reactions and aptitudes that determine the individual’s life in invisible ways —all the more effective because invisible.

It is not just a gigantic historical prejudice, so to speak, an a priori historical condition; it is also the source of the instincts, for the archetypes are simply the forms which the instincts assume.

From the living fountain of instinct flows everything that is creative; hence the unconscious is not merely conditioned by history, but is the very source of the creative impulse.

It is like Nature herself—prodigiously conservative, and yet transcending her own historical conditions in her acts of creation.

No wonder, then, that it has always been a burning question for humanity how best to adapt to these invisible determinants.

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

By means of “active imagination” we are put in a position of advantage, for we can then make the discovery of the archetype without sinking back into the instinctual sphere, which would only lead to blank unconsciousness or, worse still, to some kind of intellectual substitute for instinct. Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 414

Whether this psychic structure and its elements, the archetypes, ever “originated” at all is a metaphysical question and therefore unanswerable. Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 187.

The archetype—let us never forget this—is a psychic organ present in all of us. Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 271

Man must remain conscious of the world of the archetypes, because in it he is still a part of Nature and is connected with his own roots. Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 174

The archetypes are imperishable elements of the unconscious, but they change their shape continually.Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 301

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

All human control comes to an end when the individual is caught in a mass movement.

Then the archetypes begin to function, as happens also in the lives of individuals when they are confronted with situations that cannot be dealt with in any of the familiar ways. Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 395

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 be- haviour,” 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.


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.

We cannot tell whether God and the unconscious are two different entities.

Both are border-line concepts for transcendental contents.

But empirically it can be established, with a sufficient degree of probability, that there is in the unconscious an archetype of wholeness which manifests itself spontaneously in dreams, etc., and a tendency, independent of the conscious will,to relate other archetypes to this centre.

Consequently, it does not seem improbable that the archetype of wholeness occupies as such a central position which approximates it to the God-image. Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 757

I am not, however, addressing myself to the happy possessors of faith, but to those many people for whom the light has gone out, the mystery has faded, and God is dead.

For most of them there is no going back, and one does not know either whether going back is always the better way.

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 natural symbols of the unconscious gives us the necessary raw material.Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 148.

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