Carl Jung on the creation and future of Freudian, Adlerian and Jungian philosophies.

Stephen Black: Professor Jung, could you tell me how it came about that psychological medicine came to be divided so sharply in the first half of this century into Freudian and Adlerian and Jungian philosophies?

Dr. Jung: Well, that is so.

Always in the beginning of a new science, or when a new problem is tackled in science, there are necessarily many different aspects, particularly in a science like psychology, and particularly so when an absolutely new factor

has been brought into the discussion. Stephen Black: Which was that?

Dr. Jung: In this case, it was the unconscious—the concept of the unconscious.

It has been a philosophical concept before—in the philosophy of Carl Gustav Carus and then his follower Ed- uard von Hartmann.

But it was a mere speculative concept.

The unconscious was a kind of philosophical concept at first, but through the discoveries by Freud it became a practical medical concept, because he discovered these mechanisms

or connections. . . . He made of it a medical science. This is empirical.

An empirical medical science.

That was an entirely new proposition.

And naturally quite a number of opinions are possible in the beginning, where one is insufficiently acquainted with the phenomena.

It needed many experiments and experiences until one could establish a general terminology, for instance, or even a doctrine.

Now, I never got as far as to produce a general doctrine, because I always felt we don’t know enough.

But Freud started the theory very early and so did Adler, because that can be explained by the human need for certainty.

You feel completely lost in such an enormous field as psychology represents.

And there you must have something to cling to, some guidance as it were, and that is probably the reason why this kind of psychology set out with almost ready-made theories.

At least, the theories were conceived in a moment when one didn’t know enough about the role of the psychology of the unconscious.

That is my private view, and so I’ve refrained from forming theories. Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Inter- views and Encounters, Pages 252-267.

Stephen Black: What in your view will be the final outcome of this kind of scientific quarrel between the various schools of medical psychology?

Dr. Jung: For the time being it is certainly a sort of quarrel, but in the course of time it will be as it always has been in the history of science.

You will see that certain points will be taken from Freud’s ideas, others from Adler’s ideas, and something of my ideas.

There is no question of victory of one idea, of one way of looking at things.

Such victories are only obtained where it is a matter of pretension, of convictions, for instance, philosophical or religious convictions.

In science there is nothing of the kind, there is merely the truth as one can see it. Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 252-267.

Carl Jung: “Called or uncalled, God is present!”

“Called or uncalled, God is present!”

It is a Delphic oracle.

The translation is by Erasmus.

You ask whether the oracle is my motto.

In a way, you see, it contains the entire reality of the psyche.

“Oh God!” is what we say, irrespective of whether we say it by way of a curse or by way of love. ~Carl Jung,
C.G. Jung Speaking, Page 64.

All that I have learned has led me step by step to an unshakeable conviction of the existence of
God.

I only believe in what I know.

And that eliminates believing.

Therefore I do not take His existence on belief—I know that He exists. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, Page 251.

John Freeman: “Do you now believe in God?”

Jung: “Now? [Pause] Difficult to answer.

I know.

I don’t need to believe.

I know.” ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, Page 383.

I did not say in the broadcast, “There is a God.” I said, “I do not need to believe in a God; I know.”

Which does not mean: I do know a certain God (Zeus, Jahweh, Allah, the Trinitarian God, etc.) but rather I do know that I am obviously confronted with a factor unknown in itself, which I call “God” in consensium omnium [by common consensus] (“quod semper, quod ubique, quod omnibus
creditor” [what is always believed everywhere and by everyone]).

I remember Him, I evoke Him, whenever I use His name overcome by anger, or by fear, whenever I involuntarily say: “Oh God.”

That happens when I meet somebody or something stronger than myself.

It is an apt name given to all overpowering emotions in my own psychical system subduing my conscious
will and usurping control over myself.

This is the name by which I designate all things which cross my willful path violently and recklessly, all things which upset
my subjective views, plans, and intentions and change the course of my life for better or for worse.

In accordance with tradition I call the power of fate in this a positive as well as negative aspect, and inasmuch as its origin
is out of my control, “God,” a “personal god,” since my fate means very much myself, particularly when it approaches
me in the form of conscience as vox dei [the voice of God], with which I can even converse and argue.

(We do and, at the same time, we know that we do. One is subject as well as object.) ~Carl Jung, The Listener, 21 Jan. 1960

Carl Jung on "Diagnosing the Dictators"

Diagnosing the Dictators ~C.G. Jung [1938] [Hitler, Stalin, Mussalini]

Hitler and Stalin


What would happen if you were to lock Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin in a room together and give them one loaf of bread and one pitcher of water to last them a week? Who would get all the food and water, or would they divide it? I doubt if they would divide it. Hitler, being a medicine man, would probably hold himself aloof and have nothing to do with the quarrel. He would be helpless because he would be without his German people. Mussolini and Stalin, being both chiefs or strong men in their own right-,- would probably dispute possession of the food and drink, and being the rougher and tougher, would probably get all of it. There were two types of strong men in, primitive society. One was the chief who was physically powerful, stronger than all his , competitors, and the other was the medicine man who was not strong in himself but was strong by reason of the power which the people _projected into him. Thus we had the emperor and the head of the religious community. The emperor was the chief, physic-day strong through his possession of soldiers; the seer was the medicine man, possessing little or no physical power but an actual power sometimes surpassing that of the emperor, because the people agreed that he possessed magic—that is, supernatural ability. He could, for example, assist or obstruct the way to a happy life after death, put a ban upon an individual, a community or a whole nation, and by excommunication cause people great discomfort or pain. Now, Mussolini is the man of physical strength When you see him you are aware of it at once. His body suggests good muscles. He is the chief by reason of the fact that he is individually stronger than any of his competitors. And it is a fact that Mussolini's mentality corresponds to his classification:he has the mind of a chief.

Stalin belongs in the same category. He is, however, not a creator. Lenin, created; Stalin is devouring the brood. He is a conquistador; he simply took what Lenin made and put his teeth into it and devoured it. He is not even creatively destructive. Lenin was that. He tore down the whole structure of feudal and bourgeois society in Russia and replaced - it wit is own creation. Stalin is destroying that. Mentally, Staliin is not so interesting as Mussolini, who resembles him in the fundamental pattern of his personality, and he is not anything like so interesting as the medicine man, the myth—Hitler. Anybody who takes command of one hundred and seventy million people as Stalin has done, is bound to be interesting, whether you like him or not. No, Stalin is just a brute—a shrewd peasant, an instinctive powerful, beast—no doubt in that way far the most powerful of all the dictators. He reminds one of a) Siberian saber-toothed tiger with that powerful neck, those sweeping mustaches, and that smile like a cat which has been eating cream. I should imagine that Genghis Khan might have been an early Stalin. I shouldn't wonder if he makes himself Czar. Hitler is entirely different. His body does not suggest strength. The outstanding characteristic of his physiognomy is its dreamy look. I was especially struck by that when I saw pictures taken of him during the Czechoslovakian crisis; there was in his eyes the look of a seer. There is no question but that Hitler belongs in the category of the truly mystic medicine man) As somebody commented about him at the last Nurnberg party congress, since the time of Mohammed nothing like it has been seen in this world. This markedly mystic characteristic of Hitler's is what makes him do things which seem to us illogical, inexplicable, curious and unreasonable. But consider—even the nomenclature of the Nazis is plainly mystic. Take the very name of the Nazi State. They call it the Third Reich. Why? Because the First Reich was the Holy Roman Empire and the second was the one founded by Bismarck and the third is Hitler's. Of course. But there is a deeper significance. Nobody called Charlemagne's kingdom the First Reich nor Wilhelm's the Second Reich.

Only the Nazis call theirs the Third Reich. Because it has a profound mystical meaning: to every German the expression "Third Reich" brings echoes who more than once has indicated he is aware of his mystic calling, appears to the devotees of the Third Reich as something more than mere man. Again, you take the widespread revival in the Third Reich of the cult of Wotan. Who was Wotan? God of wind. Take the name 'Sturmabteilung"—Storm Troops.Storm, you see—the wind. Just as the swastika is a revolving form making a vortex moving ever toward the left—which means in Buddhist symbolism sinister, unfavorable, directed toward the unconscious. And all these symbols together of a Third Reich led by its prophet under the banners of wind and storm and whirling vortices point to a mass movement which is to sweep the German people in a hurricane of unreasoning emotion on and on to a destiny which perhaps none but the seer, the prophet, the Fuehrer himself can foretell—and perhaps, not even he. But why is it that Hitler, who makes nearly every German fall down and worship him, produces next to no impression on any foreigner? Exactly. Few foreigners respond at all, yet apparently every German in Germany does. It is because Hitler is the mirror of every German's unconscious, but of course he mirrors nothing from a non-German. He is the loudspeaker which magnifies the inaudible whispers of the German soul until they can be heard by the German's unconscious ear. He is the first man to tell every German what he has been thinking and feeling all along in his unconscious about German fate, especially since the defeat in the World War, and the one characteristic which colors every r=eri -nan soul is the typically German inferiority complex—the complex of the younger brother, of the one who is always a bit late to the feast. Hitler's power is not political; it is magic. What do you mean by magic? To understand this you must understand what the unconscious is. It is that part of our mental constitution over which we have little control and which is stored with all sorts of impressions and sensations; which contains thoughts and even conclusions of which we are not aware. Besides the conscious impressions which we receive, there are all sorts of impressions constantly impinging upon our sense organs of which we don't become aware because they are too slight to attract our conscious attention. They lie beneath the threshold of consciousness. But all these subliminal impressions are recorded; nothing is lost. Someone may be speaking in a faintly audible voice in the next room while we are talking here. You pay no attention to it, but the conversation next door is being recorded in your unconscious as surely as though the latter were a dicta-phone record. While you sit here my unconscious is taking in quantities of impressions of you, although I am not aware of them and you would be surprised if I should tell you all that I have already learned unconsciously about you in this short space of time.

Now, the secret of Hitler's power is not that Hitler has an unconscious more plentifully stored than yours or mine. Hitler's secret is twofold: first, that his unconscious has exceptional access to his consciousness, and second, that he allows himself to be , moved by it. He is like a man who listens intently to a stream of suggestions in a whispered voice from a mysterious source and then acts upon them. In our case, even if occasionally our unconscious does reach us as through dreams, we have too much rationality, too much cerebrum to obey it. This is doubtless the case with Chamberlain, but Hitler listens and obeys. The true leader is always led. We can see it work in him. He himself has referred to his Voice. His Voice is nothing other than his own unconscious, into which the German people have projected their own selves; that is, the unconscious of seventy-eight million Germans. That is what makes him powerful. Without the German people, he would not be what he seems to be now It is literally true when he says that whatever he is able to do is only because he has the German people behind him or, as he sometimes says, because he is Germany. So, with his unconscious being the receptacle of the souls of seventy-eight million Germans, he is powerful, and with his unconscious perception of the true balance of political forces at home and in the world, he has so far been infallible. That is why he makes political judgments which turn out to be right against the opinions of all his advisers and against the opinions of all foreign observers. When this happens, it means only that the information gathered by his unconscious, and reaching his consciousness by means of his exceptional talent, has been more nearly correct than that of all the others, German or foreign, who attempted to judge the situation and who reached conclusions different from his. And of course, it also means that, having this information at hand, he is willing to act upon it. I suppose that would apply to the three really critical decisions he made, each of which involved the acute danger of war: when he marched into the Rhineland in March, 1936, and into Austria in March, 1938, and when he mobilized and forced the Allies to abandon Czechoslovakia. Because in each one of these cases we know that many of Hitler's highest military advisers warned him against doing it, since they believed the Allies would resist, and also that if war came Germany would be bound to lose. Precisely! The fact is that Hitler was able to judge his opponents better than anyone else, and although it appeared inevitable that he would be met by force, he knew his opponents would give in without fighting. That must have been the case especially when Chamberlain came to Berchtesgaden. There for the first time Hitler met the elder British statesman. As Chamberlain proved later at Godesberg, he had come to tell him, among other things, not to go too far or Britain would fight. But Hitler's unconscious eye which so far has not failed him, read so deeply the character of the British Prime Minister that all the later ultimatums and warnings from London made no impression whatever on his unconscious: Hitler's unconscious knew—it didn't guess or feel, it knew—that Britain would not risk war. Yet Hitler's speech in the Sports Palace when he announced to the world a holy oath that he would march into Czechoslovakia October first, with or without the permission of Britain and France, indicated for the first and only time that Hitler the man, in his supremely critical moment, had fear of following Hitler the prophet.

His Voice told him to go ahead, that everything would be all right. But his human reason told him the dangers were vast and perhaps overwhelming. Hence for the first time Hitler's voice trembled; his breath failed. His speech lacked form and trailed off at the end. What human being would not be afraid in such a moment? In making that speech which fixed the destiny of perhaps hundreds ofmillions of people, he was a man doing something of which he was deathly afraid but forcing himself to do it because it was ordered by his Voice. His Voice was correct. Now who knows but that his Voice may continue to be correct? If it does, it will be very interesting to observe the history of the next few years because, as he said just after his Czech victory, Germany stands today on the threshold of her future. That means he has just begun and if his Voice tells him that the German people are destined to become the lords of Europe and perhaps of the world, and if his Voice continues always to be right, then we are in for an extremely interesting period, aren't we? Yes, it seems, that the German people are now convinced they-have found their Messiah. In a way, the position of the Germans is remarkably like that of the Jews of old. Since their defeat in the World War they have awaited a Messiah, a Savior. That is characteristic of people with an inferiority complex. The Jews got their inferiority complex from geographical and ,political factors. They lived in a part of the world which was a parade ground for conquerors from both sides, and after their return from their first exile to Babylon, when they were threatened with extinction by the Romans, they invented the solacing idea of a Messiah who was going to bring all the Jews together into a nation once more and save them. And the ,Germans got their inferiority complex from comparable causes. They came up out of the Danube valley too late, and founded the beginnings of their nation long after the French and the English were well on their way to nationhood. They got too late to the scramble-rafEblonies and for the foundation of empire. Then, when they did get together and made a. united nation, they looked around them and saw the British, the French, and others with rich colonies and all the equipment of grown-up nations, and they became jealous, resentful, like a younger brother whose older brothers have taken the lion's share of the inheritance. This was the original source of the German inferiority complex which has determined so much of their political thought and action and which is certainly decisive of their wEdle policy today. It is impossible, you see, to talk about Hitler without talking about his people, because Hitler is only the German people. It occurred to me that the last time I was in America that one could make an interesting geographical analogy about Germany. In America I noticed that somewhere on the East Coast there exists a certain class of people called "poor white trash" and I learned that they are largely descendents of early settlers, some of them bearers of fine old English names. The poor white trash were left behind when some of the people with energy and initiative climbed into their covered wagons and drove West.

Then, in the Middle West you meet the people I consider the most stable in America; I mean psychologically the best balanced. Yet in some places farther west you meet some of the least-balanced people. Now, it seems to me that, taking Europe as a whole, and including the British Isles, you have in Ireland and Wales the equivalent of your West Coast. The Celts possess colorful imaginative faculties. Then, to correspond to your sober Middle West, you have in Europe the English and the French, both of them psychologically stable peoples. But then you come to Germany, and just beyond Germany are the Slav mujiks, the poor white trash of Europe. Now, the mujiks are people who can't get up in the morning, but sleep all day. And the Germans, their next door neighbors, are people who could get up, but got up too late. Don't you remember how the Germans even today represent Germany in all their cartoons? Yes, "Sleepy Michael," a tall, lean fellow in a nightgown and nightcap. That's right, and Sleepy Michael slept through the division of the world into colonial empires, and so the Germans got their inferiority complex, which made them want to fight the World War, and of course when they lost it their feeling of inferiority grew, even worse, and developed a desire for a Messiah, and so they have their Hitler. If he is not their true Messiah, he is like one of the Old Testament prophets: his mission is to unite his people and lead them to the Promised Land. This explains why the Nazis have to combat every form of religion besides their own idolatrous brand. I have no doubt but that the campaign against the Catholic and Protestant churches will be pursued with relentless and unremitting vigor, for the very sound reason, from the Nazi point of view, that they wish to substitute the new faith of Hitlerism. Do you consider it possible that Hitlerism might become for Germany a permanent religion for the future like Mohammedanism for the Moslems? I think it highly possible. Hitler's "religion" is the nearest to Mohammedanism, realistic, earthy, promising the maximum of rewards in this life, but with a Moslem-like Valhalla into which worthy Germans may enter and continue to enjoy themselves. Like Mohammedanism, it teaches the virtue of the sword. Hitler's first idea is to make his people powerful because the spirit of the Aryan German deserves to be supported by might, by muscle and steel. Of course, it is not a spiritual religion in the sense in which we ordinarily use the term. But remember that in the early days of Christianity it was the church which made the claim to total power, both spiritual and temporal! Today the church no longer makes this claim, but the claim has been taken over by the totalitarian states which demand not only temporal but spiritual power. Incidentally, it occurs to me that the "religious" character of Hitlerism is also emphasized by the fact that German communities throughout the world, far from the political power of Berlin, have adopted Hitlerism. Look at the South American German communities, notably in Chile. (It surprised me that in this analysis of the dictators nothing had been said of the influence of the fathers and mothers of the strong men. Doctor Jung assigned them no major role.) It is a great mistake to think that a dictator becomes so on account of personal reasons, such as that he had a strong resistance to his father. There are millions of men who resisted their fathers just as strongly as, say, Mussolini or Hitler or Stalin, but who never became dictators or anything like dictators. The law to remember about dictators is: "It is the persecuted one who, persecutes." The dictators must have suffered from circumstances calculated to bring about dictatorship. Mussolini came at the moment when the country was in chaos, the workmen out of hand and a threat of Bolshevism was terrifying the people. Hitler came when the economic crisis had reduced the standard of living in Germany and increased unemployment to an intolerable level, and after the great inflation of the currency which, although stabilization had come, had impoverished the whole middle class. Both Hitler and Mussolini received their power from the people and their power cannot be withdrawn.

It is interesting that both Hitler and Mussolini base their power chiefly upon the lower middle class, workers and farmers. But to go on with the circumstances under which dictators come to power: Stalin came when the death of Lenin, unique creator of Bolshevism, had left the party and the people leaderless and the country uncertain of its future. Thus the dictators are made from human material which suffers from overwhelming needs. The three dictators in Europe differ from one another tremendously, but it is not so much they who differ as it is their peoples. Compare the way the German people think and feel about Hitler with the way the Italians think and feel about Mussolini. The Germans are highly impressionable. They go to extremes; are always a bit unbalanced. They are cosmopolitan, world citizens; easily lose their national identity; like to imitate other nations. Every German man would like to dress like an English gentleman. Not Hitler. He always has dressed in his own way, and nobody could ever accuse him of trying to look as if he got his clothes on Savile Row. Precisely. Because Hitler is saying to his Germans, "Now, bei Gott, you have got to start being Germans!" The Germans are extraordinarily sensitive to new ideas, and when they hear one which appeals to them they are likely to swallow it uncritically, and for a time to be completely dominated by it; but after a while they are equally likely to throw it violently away and adopt a newer idea, quite probably contradicting the first one entirely. This is the way they have run their political life. Italians are more stable. Their minds do not roll and wallow and leap and plunge through all the extravagant ecstasies which are the daily exercise of the German mind. So you find in Italy a spirit of balance lacking in Germany. When the Fascists took power in Italy, Mussolini did not even remove the king. Mussolini worked not with ecstasy of spirit, but with a hammer in his hand, beating Italy into the shape he wanted it, much as his blacksmith father used to make horseshoes. This Mussolini-Italian balance of temperament is borne out by the Fascist treatment of the Jews. At first they did not persecute the Jews at all, and even now, when for various reasons they have begun an anti-Semitic campaign, it has kept a certain proportion. I suppose the chief reason why Mussolini went in for anti-Semitism at all was that he became convinced that world Jewry was probably an incorrigible and effective force against Fascism—Leon Blum in France, especially, I think—and also, he wished to make his ties with Hitler more solid. So you see, while Hitler is a medicine man, a form of spiritual vessel, a demi-deity or even better, a myth, Mussolini is a man, and therefore everything in Fascist Italy has a more human shape than it has in Nazi Germany, where things are run by revelation. Hitler as a man scarcely exists. At any rate, he disappears behind his role Mussolini, on the contrary, never disappears behind his role. His role disappears behind Mussolini. I saw the Duce and the Parer together in Berlin the time Mussolini paid his formal visit; I had the good luck to beplaced only a few yards away from them, and could study them well. It was entertaining to see Mussolini's expression when they put on the goose step. If I had not seen it should have fallen into the popular delusion that his adoption of the German goose step for the Italian army was in imitation of Hitler. And that would have disappointed me, because I had discerned in Mussolini's conduct a certain style, a certain format of an original man with good taste in certain matters. I mean, for example, that it was good taste of the Duce to keep the King. And his choice of title, "Duce"—not Doge as in old Venice, nor Duca, but Duce, the plain Italian word for leader—was original and in my opinion showed good taste.

Now, as I observed Mussolini watching the first goose step he had ever seen, I could see him enjoying it with the zest of a small boy at a circus. But he enjoyed even more the stunt when the cavalry comes and the mounted drummer gallops ahead and takes his place on one side of the street while the band takes its place on the other. The drummer must gallop around the band and up to the front to take his station there, and this he does without touching the reins, guiding his horse only by pressure of the knees, since both hands are busy with the drums. On this occasion it was done magnificently and it pleased Mussolini so much he broke out laughing and clapped his hands. When he got back to Rome afterwards, he introduced the goose step and I am convinced he did it solely for his own aesthetic enjoyment. It really is a most impressive step. In comparison with Mussolini, Hitler made upon me the impression of a sort of , scaffolding, of wood covered with cloth, an automaton with a mask, like a, robot, or a mask of a robot. During the whole performance he never laughed; it was as though he were in a bad humor, sulking. He showed no human sign, His expression was that of an inhumanly single-minded purposiveness, with no sense of humor. He seemed as if he might be the double of a real person, and that Hitler the man might perhaps be hiding inside like an appendix, and deliberately so hiding in order not to disturb the mechanism. What an amazing difference there is between Hitler and Mussolini! couldn't help liking-- Mussolini. His bodily energy and elasticity are warm, human, and contagious. You have the –homey feeling with Mussolini of being with a human being. With Hitler, you are scared. You know you would never be able to talk to that man; because there is nobody there. He is not a man, but a collective. He is not an individual; he is a whole nation. I take it to be literally true that he has no personal friend. How can you talk intimately with a nation? You can no more explain Hitler by the personal approach than you can explain a great work of art by examining the personality of the artist. The great work of art is a product of the time, of the whole world in which the artist is living, and of the millions of people who surround him, and of the thousands of currents of thought and the myriad streams of activity which flow around him. Thus it would be easier for Mussolini, who is only a man, to find a successor, than for Hitler. With good luck, I should think Mussolini might find someone to take his place, but I don't see how Hitler can. What if Hitler were to marry? He cannot marry. If he married, it would not be Hitler marrying. He would cease to be Hitler. But it is incredible that he should ever do so. I shouldn't wonder if it may be shown that he has sacrificed his sex life entirely to the Cause. This is not an unusual thing, especially for the type of medicine-man leader, although it is much less usual in the type of the chief. Mussolini and Stalin seem to lead entirely normal sex lives. Hitler's real passion, of course is. Germany. You could say that he has a tremendous mother complex, which means that he will be under the domination either of a woman or of an idea.

Idea is always female. Mind is female, because the head, the brain, is creative; hence like a womb, female. The unconscious of a man is always represented by a woman; that of a woman always by a man. How important a role does what we call personal ambition play in the makeup of the three dictators? I should say that it plays a very minor role in Hitler. I don't think Hitler has personal ambition beyond that of the average man. Mussolini has more than average personal ambition, but it is not sufficient to explain his force. He also feels that he coincides with the national need. Hitler does not rule Germany. He is simply the exponent of the trend of things. This makes him uncanny and psychologically fascinating. Mussolini rules Italy to a certain extent, but for the rest he is an instrument of the Italian people. With Stalin it is different. His dominant characteristic is overwhelming personal ambition. He does not identify himself with Russia. He rules Russia like any Czar. Remember, he is a Georgian anyway. But how do you explain Stalin's having taken the course he has? It seems to me that Stalin, far from being uninteresting, is also enigmatic. Here you have a person who spent the greater part of his life as a revolutionist Bolshevik. His cobbler father and pious mother sent him to a theological school. In his early years he became a revolutionary and from then on for the next twenty-five years he did nothing but fight the Czar and the Czar's police. He was put into a dozen jails and broke out of all of them. Now, how do you explain that a man who had fought the Czar's tyranny all his life should suddenly become a kind of Czar himself?

Hitler and Mussalini

That is not remarkable. It is because you always become the thing you fight the most. What undermined the armed force of Rome? Christianity did. Because when the Romans conquered the Near East, they were conquered by its religion. When you fight a thing you have to get very close to it, and it is likely to infect you. You must know Czarism very well in order to defeat it. Then, when you have driven out the Czar, you become a Czar yourself, just as a wild-animal hunter may become bestial. I know of one fellow who, after many years of big-game hunting in a proper sporting manner, had to be arrested because he took a machine gun to the animals. The man had become as blood-lustful as the panthers and lions he killed. Stalin fought so much against the Czar's bloody oppression that he is now doing exactly the same as the Czar. In my opinion, there is no difference at all now between Stalin and Ivan the Terrible. But what about the fact reported by many, and observed by myself, that the standard of living in the Soviet Union has risen considerably and is still rising from the low point of the famine of 1933? Of course. Stalin can be a good administrator at the same time that he is a Czar. It would be a miracle if anybody could keep so naturally rich a country as Russia from being prosperous. But Stalin is not very original, and it is such bad taste for him to go about turning himself into a Czar so crudely, in front of everybody, without any concealment at all! It is really proletarian! But you still have not explained to me how Stalin, the loyal Communist party man, the underground worker for what was then a highly altruistic ideal, should have changed into a power-grabber. In my opinion the change came about in Stalin during the 1918 revolution. Up to that time he had labored, unselfishly perhaps, for the good of the Cause, and probably had never thought of personal power for himself, for the very good reason that there never appeared to be the shadow of a chance that he could even aspire to anything like personal power.

The question didn't exist for him. But during the revolution Stalin saw for the first time how you acquire power. I am sure he said to himself with astonishment, "But it is so easy!" He must have watched Lenin and the others reach the full rank of complete power, and have said to himself, "So that is how it is done! Well, I can go them one better. All you have to do is to do away with the fellow in front of you." He would certainly have done away with Lenin if Lenin had lived. Nothing could have stopped him, as nothing has stopped him now. Naturally, he wants his country to prosper. The more prosperous and greater his country is, the greater he is. But he cannot devote his full energies to promoting the welfare of his country so long as his personal drive for power is not satisfied. But surely he's got fullest power now. Yes, but he's got to keep it. He is surrounded by a pack of wolves. He must keep forever on the alert. I must say that I think we owe him a debt of gratitude! Why? For the wonderful example he has given the whole world of the axiomatic truth that Communism always leads to dictatorship. But now let us leave this aside and let me tell you what my therapy is. As a physician, I have not only to analyze and diagnose, but to recommend treatment. We have been talking nearly all the while about Hitler and the Germans, because they are so incomparably the most important of the dictator phenomena at the moment. It is for this, then, that I must propose a therapy. It is extremely difficult to deal with this type of phenomenon. It is excessively dangerous. I mean the type of case of a man acting under compulsion.

Now, when I have a patient acting under the command of a higher power, a power within him, such as Hitler's Voice, I dare not tell him to disobey his Voice. He won't do it if I do tell him. He will even act more determinedly than if I did not tell him. All I can do is attempt, by interpreting the Voice, to induce the patient to behave in a way which will be less harmful to himself and to society than if he obeyed the Voice immediately without interpretation. So I say, in this situation, the only way to save Democracy in the West—and by the West I mean America too—is not to try to stop Hitler. You may try to divert him, but to stop him will be impossible without the Great Catastrophe for all. His 'Voice tells him to unite the German people and to lead them toward a better future, a bigger place on the earth, a position of glory and richness. You cannot stop him from trying to do that. You can only hope to influence the direction of his expansion. I say let him go East. Turn his attention away from the West, or rather, encourage him to keep it turned away. –Let him go to Russia. That is the logical cure for Hitler. I don't think Germany will be satisfied with a bit of Africa, big or small. Germany looks at Britain and at France with their magnificent colonial empires, and even at Italy with her Libya and Ethiopia, and thinks of her own size, seventy-eight million Germans as against forty-five million British in the British Isles and forty-two million French and forty-two million Italians and she is bound to think that she ought to have a place in the world not merely as large as that occupied by any one of the other three Western Great Powers, but much larger. How is she going to get that in the West without destroying one or more of the nations which now occupy the West? There is only one field for her to operate in, and that is Russia. And what will happen to Germany when she tries accounts with Russia?

Ah, that's her own business. Our interest in it is simply that it will save the West. Nobody has ever bitten into Russia without regretting it. It's not very palatable food. It might-take -the Germans a hundred years to finish that meal. Meanwhile we .should be safe, and by we, I mean all of Western civilization. Instinct should tell the Western statesmen not to touch Germany in her present mood. She is much too dangerous. Stalin's instinct was correct when it told him to let the Western nations have a war and destroy one another, while he waited to pick the bones. That would have saved the Soviet Union. I don't believe he ever would have entered the war on the side of Czechoslovakia and France, unless it were at the very end, to profit from the exhaustion of both sides. So I say, studying Germany as I would a patient, and Europe as I would a patient's family and neighbors, let her go into Russia. There is plenty of land there—one sixth of the surface of the earth. It wouldn't matter to Russia if somebody took a bite, and as I said, nobody has ever prospered who did. How to save your democratic U.S.A.? It must, of course, be saved, else we all go under. You must keep away from the craze, avoid the infection. Keep your army and navy large, but save them. If war comes, wait. America must keep big armed forces to help keep the world at peace, or to decide the war if it comes. You are the last resort of Western democracy. But how is the peace of Western Europe going to be preserved by letting Germany "go East," as you put it, since England and France have now formally guaranteed the frontiers of the new rump state of Czechoslovakia? Won't there then be war anyway if Germany attempts to incorporate the rump state in her administrative system? England and France will not honor their new guarantee to Czechoslovakia any more than France honored her previous pledge to Czechoslovakia. No nation - keeps its word.

A nation is a big, blind worm, following what? Fate, perhaps. A nation has no honor; it has no word to keep. That is the reason why, in the old days, they tried to have kings who did possess personal honor and a word. Don't you know that if you choose one hundred of the most intelligent people in the world and get them all together, they are a stupid mob? Ten thousand of them together would have the collective intelligence of an alligator. Haven't you noticed that at a dinner party the more people you invite the more stupid the conversation? In a crowd, the qualities which everybody possesses multiply, pile up, and become the dominant characteristics of the whole crowd. Not everybody has virtues, but everybody has the low animal instincts, the basic primitive caveman suggestibility, the suspicions and vicious traits of the savage. The result is that when you get a nation of many millions of people, it is not even human. It is a lizard or a crocodile or a wolf. Its statesmen cannot have a higher morality than the animal like mass morality of the nation, although individual statesmen of the democratic states may attempt to behave a little better. For Hitler, however, more than for any other statesman in the modern world, it would be impossible to expect that he should keep the word of Germany against her interest, in any international bargain, agreement or treaty. Because Hitler is himself the nation. That, incidentally, is why Hitler always has to talk so loud, even in private onversation—because he is speaking with seventy-eight million voices. That's what a nation is: a monster. Everybody ought to fear a nation. It is a horrible thing. How can such a thing have honor or a word? That's why I am for small nations. Small nations mean small catastrophes. Big nations mean big catastrophes. The telephone rang. In the stillness of the study and a windless day without, I could hear a patient cry that a hurricane in his bedroom was about to sweep him of his feet. "Lie down on the floor and you will be safe," advised the doctor. It is the same advice the sage physician now gives to Europe and America, as the high wind of Dictatorship rages at the foundations of Democracy. ~Carl Jung interview with H.R. Knickerbocker in Cosmopolitan [1938] See: C.G. Jung Speaks; Pages 115-135

"C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters" - Quotations

In everyone some kind of artist is hiding. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 38-46

Biographies should show people in their undershirts. Goethe had his weaknesses, and Calvin was often cruel. Considerations of this kind reveal the true greatness of a man. This way of looking at things is better than false hero worship! ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, Page 165.

The intuitive is a type that doesn't see, doesn't see the stumbling block before his feet, but he smells a rat for ten miles. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, Page 309.

We all must do just what Christ did. We must make our experiment. We must make mistakes. We must live out our own vision of life. And there will be error. If you avoid error you do not live. ~Carl Jung, Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, p. 98.

He said "My kingdom is not of this world." But "kingdom" it was, all the same. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, p. 97.

Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word "happy" would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, Pages 451-452.

The more successful we become in science and technology, the more diabolical are the uses to which we put our inventions and discoveries. ~C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews & Encounters, page 397.

Religious experience is numinous, as Rudolf Otto calls it, and for me, as a psychologist, this experience differs from all others in the way it transcends the ordinary categories of time, space and causality. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, Page 230.

You know, man doesn’t stand forever, his nullification. Once, there will be a reaction, and I see it setting in, you know, when I think of my patients, they all seek their own existence and to assure their existence against that complete atomization into nothingness or into meaninglessness. Man cannot stand a meaningless life. ~C.G. Jung Speaking, Pages 438-439.

Jazz and all that sort of stuff is silly and stultifying. But it is even worse when they play classics in such a place. Bach, for instance. Bach talks to God. I am gripped by Bach. But I could slay a man who plays Bach in banal surroundings. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, Page 249.

Cocktails and all they stand for are just as bad. They simply kill all sensible conversation. Why, most of the people who go in for cocktail drinking are only able to keep up a decent conversation after the third. Worst of all is television. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, Page 249.

Without knowing it man is always concerned with God. What some people call instinct or intuition is nothing other than God. God is that voice inside us which tells us what to do and what not to do. In other words, our conscience. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, Page 249.

Man has come to be man's worst enemy. It is a clash between man and God, in which man's Luciferan genius has produced in the H-bomb the power to destroy more effectively than any ancient god could. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, Page 248.

God is nothing more than that superior force in our life. You can experience God every day. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, Page 249.

The archetypes. . . are not intellectually invented. They are always there and they produce certain processes in the unconscious one could best compare with myths. That's the origin of mythology. Mythology is a dramatization of a series of images that formulate the life of the archetypes. ~C.G. Jung Speaking, Page 348.


Even though differences of scientific opinion have brought about a certain estrangement between Professor Freud and myself, a debt of gratitude nevertheless impels me to honor Freud and Janet' as the men who have guided me in my scientific career. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 38-46

Even so, as a Protestant, it is quite clear to me that, in its healing effects, no creed is as closely akin to psychoanalysis as Catholicism. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 38-46

The symbols of the Catholic liturgy offer the unconscious such a wealth of possibilities for expression that they act as an incomparable diet for the psyche. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 38-46

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

A schooling that is not too strict, and is actually what many people would call a bad one, is in my experience the best. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 38-46

How great the importance of psychic hygiene, how great the danger of psychic sickness, is evident from the fact that just as all sickness is a watered-down death, neurosis is nothing less than a watered-down suicide, which left to run its malignant course all too often leads to a lethal end. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 38-46

All the Nazi leaders were possessed in the truest sense of the word, and it is assuredly no accident that their propaganda minister was branded with the ancient mark of the demonized man—a clubfoot. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 149-155

There are demons all right, as sure as there is a Buchenwald. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 149-155

The symbol has a future. The past does not suffice to interpret it, because germs of the future are included in every actual situation. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 141-145

In explaining dreams from a causal point of view, Freud got to their primary causes. But what interests me is why a person dreams of one thing rather than another. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 141-145

One must never give way to fear, but one must admit to oneself that one is afraid. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 141-145

But as I grasped Jung's powerful hand in mine, I felt passing into me the vibrant, tenacious, communicative warmth of an immense hope. ~Pierre Courthion, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 141-145

Even now I am receiving many applications from Germans who want to be treated by me. If they come from those "decent Germans" who want to foist the guilt onto a couple of men in the Gestapo, I regard the case as hopeless. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 149-155

Man is slowly transformed into a uroboros, the "tail-eater" who devours himself, from ancient times a symbol of the demon-ridden man. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 149-155

Indeed all during his illness, he told us, ideas were flooding up, even in his delirium, which he is still trying to evaluate and record. ~Esther Harding, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters and Pages 171-179

Women are much tougher than men underneath. To call women the weaker sex is sheer nonsense. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, Pages 244-251

…the line of the ecliptic, at present traversing the second fish of the sign of Pisces, the fish of the Anti-Christ, does not pass through its head but below. This would mean that, according to the stars, the sinister forces do not reach their maximum, do not quite "come to a head." ~ Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters and Pages 171-179

I always hold that psychology is such a complicated chapter of human knowledge that those who deal with it should really have some philosophical preparation. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 99-113

You know that the terminology in the field of medical psychology is still in the state of the old Babylonian confusion of tongues. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 99-113

You see, I am not a philosopher. I am not a sociologist—I am a medical man. I deal with facts. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking; Interviews and Encounters, Pages 205-218

I am not particularly well read in philosophy. I simply have had to make use of philosophical concepts to formulate my findings. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking; Interviews and Encounters, Pages 205-218

My conceptions are much more like Carus than like Freud. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking; Interviews and Encounters, Pages 205-218

The great question was, is there a non-ego, is there something that can pull me out of the isolation-in-the-ego of the Kantian world picture. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking; Interviews and Encounters, Pages 205-218

We were living at a time when there had been no wars within men's memory, but here was a man [Nietzche] who saw war coming, who wrote that the next century would be the most warlike of all. I felt that he was right. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking; Interviews and Encounters, Pages 205-218

In his thirty-seventh year, Zarathustra happened to Nietzsche . . . 'cla ward die eins zu zwei, Zarathustra ging an mir vorbei.' In 1888 he went mad. That was a tremendous event; it made a deep impression on me. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking; Interviews and Encounters, Pages 205-218

I was especially interested in palaeontology; you see, my life work in historical comparative psychology is like palaeontology. That is the study of the archetypes of the animals, and this is the study of the archetypes in the soul. The Eohippus is the archetype of the modern horse, the archetypes are like the fossil animals. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking; Interviews and Encounters, Pages 205-218

It [Individuation] is not a therapy. Is it therapy when a cat becomes a cat? It is a natural process. Individuation is a natural process. It is what makes a tree turn into a tree; if it is interfered with, then it becomes sick and cannot function as a tree, but left to itself it develops into a tree. That is individuation. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking; Interviews and Encounters, Pages 205-218

You know, it is possible to have 'consciousness' in globo, so to speak, without its being differentiated. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking; Interviews and Encounters, Pages 205-218

The East is just as one-sided in its way as the West is in its way. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, Pages 252-267.

As to the spelling of extravert, he [Jung] says extrovert is bad Latin and should not be used. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking; Interviews and Encounters, Pages 205-218

The thought of this principium individuationis at work through all nature and through all mankind, East and West, has something awe inspiring and majestic about it. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking; Interviews and Encounters, Pages 205-218

The participation mystique by which society contains the individual may be understood as a statement of the fact that individuals are still undifferentiated from each other, that is to say, they have not yet been self-consciously broken up into individual personalities. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking; Interviews and Encounters, Pages 205-218

The archetype of the individual is the Self. The Self is all embracing. God is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking; Interviews and Encounters, Pages 205-218

. . the individual in society may be understood as a piece of the archetype, a piece that has been differentiated out of the collective representation. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking; Interviews and Encounters, Pages 205-218

. . when a culture becomes too highly rationalized .. .individuals are not able to experience the natural flow of unconscious materials. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking; Interviews and Encounters, Pages 205-218

The mechanisms of convention . . . keep people unconscious. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking; Interviews and Encounters, Pages 205-218

The son became a thief, and the daughter a prostitute. Because the father would not take on his shadow, his share in the imperfection of human nature, his children were compelled to live out the dark side which he had ignored. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 156-163

This is how you must live—without reservation, whether in giving or withholding, according to what the circumstances require. Then you will get through. After all, if you should still get stuck, there is always the enantiodromia from the unconscious, which opens new avenues when conscious will and vision are failing. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 156-163

Always I have a feeling of compassion for the clergyman. He has a devil of a problem. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 156-163

Jung stated that, at the birth of Christ, Saturn the maleficent god and Jupiter the beneficent god were so near to each other that they were almost one star, that is, the star of Bethlehem, when the new self, Christ, good and evil, was born. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 156-163

The vanity of men is in most cases a result of their professional activities. The extent it reaches is sometimes almost grotesque. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 244-251

Most men are afraid of something and are full of prejudices—which are not there in the case of most women. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 244-251

Men almost invariably are not honest, either with themselves or with me. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 244-251

So many women are just crying out for a better understanding with their husbands. Their men are incapable of grasping this—which is not strange since men do not understand women anyway. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 244-251

I do not particularly enjoy a discussion in which everybody agrees with me—there is no obstacle to overcome, no tension, no productive flow. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 244-251

If man and woman were the same, that would be stalemate. The earth would be sterile. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 244-251

Where the land is flat there is no flow of water; it has nowhere to go; it stagnates. In order to produce energy you must have opposites—an above and a below. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 244-251

It is a clash between man and God, in which man's Luciferan genius has produced in the H-bomb the power to destroy more effectively than any ancient god could. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 244-251

We must begin to learn about man until every Jekyll can see his Hyde. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 244-251

He [Jung] said, write the truth, and expect to be misunderstood, and take the consequences. That was what he had been doing all his life. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 237-238

If you are not interested in your own fate, the unconscious is. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 359-364

We tend to identify our chthonic nature with evil and our spiritual nature with good. We must accept the dark forces and stop projecting them. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 359-364

Go to bed. Think of your problem. See what you dream. Perhaps the Great Man, the 2,000,000-year-old man, will speak. In a cul-de-sac, then only do you hear his voice. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 359-364

The urge to become what one is is invincibly strong, and you can always count on it, but that does not mean that things will necessarily turn out positively. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 359-364

As if we know nature! Or about the psyche! The 2,000,000-year-old man may know something. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 359-364

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

We go through difficult things; that is fate. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 359-364

Man goes through analysis so that he can die. I have analyzed to the end with the end in sight—to accompany the individual in order that he may die. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 359-364

The analyst must help life as long as he can. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 359-364

One must see what the underlying trend is—what the will of God is. You are damned if you don't follow it. It will ruin your life, your health. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 359-364

It, the Great Man, can at one stroke put an entirely different face on the thing—or anything can happen. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 359-364

Ethics is not convention; ethics is between myself and the Great Man. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 359-364

The way is ineffable. One cannot, one must not, betray it. It is like the way of Zen—like a sharp knife, and also twisting like a serpent. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 359-364

To clarify your mind you draw a mandala, and it is legitimate. Another says, "Oh, that's how to do it!" and draws a mandala. And that is a mistake; that is cheating, because he is copying. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 359-364

Never say no or yes on principle. Say it only when you feel it is really yes. If it is really no, it is no. If you say yes for any outer reason, you are sunk. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 359-364

If you are dishonest, you are nothing for your unconscious. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 359-364

If you follow the unconscious closely, your intelligence will not sink below a certain level, and you will add a good deal of intelligence to what you already possess. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 359-364

If you take the unconscious intellectually, you are lost. It is not a conviction, not an assumption. It is a Presence. It is a fact. It is there. It happens. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 359-364

You have got to accept what the unconscious produces, and you have to understand its language. It is Nature, and it has to be translated into human forms. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 359-364

That is the reason for the dignity of man, that he has the ability to do this. There is no reflection in creation. To reflect is man's task, and he can do it when he is not sterilized. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 359-364

The naivete of the white man—that he identifies the ego with the Great Man! ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 359-364

The patient is permeated by what you are—by your real being—and pays little attention to what you say. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 359-364

The analyst has unsolved problems because he is alive—life is a problem daily. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 359-364

When I dream of a patient, it is usually a sign that one of my complexes has been touched. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 359-364

Each step ahead that the patient makes can be a step for the analyst. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 359-364

One of the greatest hindrances to understanding is the projection of the shaman—the savior. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 359-364

At bottom, the transference is by no means a personal fantasy. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 359-364

“Called or uncalled, God is present!” It is a Delphic oracle. The translation is by Erasmus. You ask whether the oracle is my motto. In a way, you see, it contains the entire reality of the psyche. “Oh God!” is what we say, irrespective of whether we say it by way of a curse or by way of love. “On Creative Achievement” (1946), C. G. Jung Speaking, p. 164.

All that I have learned has led me step by step to an unshakeable conviction of the existence of God. I only believe in what I know. And that eliminates believing. Therefore I do not take His existence on belief— I know that He exists. ~Carl Jung, C. G. Jung Speaking, p. 251.

The farmer is still closer to these layers. In tilling the earth he moves around within a very narrow radius, but he moves on his own land. ~Carl Jung, Man and his Environment; C.G. Jung Speaking; Pages 201-203

I am fully committed to the idea that human existence should be rooted in the earth. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, Page 204

The great astrological periods do exist. Taurus and Gemini were prehistoric periods, we don't know much about them. But Aries the Ram is closer; Alexander the Great was one of its manifestations. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 410-423

It was not I who invented all the fish symbols there are in Christianity: the fisher of men, the pisciculi christianorum. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 410-423

Christianity has marked us deeply because it incarnates the symbols of the era so well. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 410-423

In our era the fish is the content; with the Water-pourer, he becomes the container. It's a very strange symbol. I don't dare interpret it. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 410-423

One finds, besides, a lot of things about this in the Bible itself: there are more things in the Bible than the theologians can admit. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 410-423

Why, when Pope Pius XII in one of his last discourses deplored that the world was no longer conscious enough of the presence of angels, he was saying to his faithful Catholics in Christian terms exactly what I am trying to say in terms of psychology to those who stand more chance of understanding this language than any other. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 410-423

There is a terrible spiritual famine in our world, but there are also people who don't want to be beak-fed or fed with infant's pap. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 410-423

In the first place, I have no system, no doctrine, nothing of that kind. I am an empiricist, with no metaphysical views at all. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 410-423

Our instincts do not express themselves only in our actions and reactions, but also in the way we formulate what we imagine. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 410-423

The development of consciousness is the burden, the suffering, and the blessing of mankind. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, Page 248

I try to funnel the fantasies of the unconscious into the conscious mind, not in order to destroy them but to develop them. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, Pages 39-40.

We are awakening a little to the feeling that something is wrong in the world, that our modern prejudice of overestimating the importance of the intellect and the conscious mind might be false. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, Page 49.

The great work of art is a product of the time, of the whole world in which the artist is living, and of the millions of people who surround him, and of the thousands of currents of thought and the myriad streams of activity which flow around him. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, Page 128

When I see so much refinement and sentiment as I see in America, I look always for an equal amount of brutality. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, Page 64

“Oh God!” is what we say, irrespective of whether we say it by way of a curse or by way of love. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, Page 64.

Religion gives us a rich application for our feelings. It gives meaning to life. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, Page 69.

Without knowing it man is always concerned with God. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, Page 249

When you observe the world you see people, you see houses, you see the sky, you see tangible objects. But when you observe yourself within, you see moving images, a world of images, generally known as fantasies. Yet these fantasies are facts. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, Page 302

If people would only take the trouble to turn up the actual writings of the ancient alchemists, they would find a deep treasure-trove of wisdom, much of which is perfectly applicable to the very events which are happening in the world today. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, Page 444

After all, what can possibly be more important than the study of how men’s minds work, and have worked in the past? ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, Page 444

We want simplicity. We are suffering, in our cities, from a need of simple things. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, Page 49.

Alchemy represents the projection of a drama both cosmic and spiritual in laboratory terms. The opus magnum [the great work] had two aims: the rescue of the human soul and the salvation of the cosmos. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, Page 228

It is for this reason that the alchemists believed in the truth of “matter,” because “matter” was actually their own psychic life. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, Page 228

For the collective unconscious which sends you these dreams already possesses the solution: nothing has been lost from the whole immemorial experience of humanity, every imaginable situation and every solution seem to have been foreseen by the collective unconscious. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, Page 231.

We must do what Christ did. We must make mistakes. We must live out our own vision of life. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, Page 98

If you avoid error you do not live; in a sense even it may be said that every life is a mistake, for no one has found the truth. When we live like this we know Christ as a brother, and God indeed becomes man. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, Page 98

One comes to see that life is great and beautiful, that nonsense and stupidity do not always triumph. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, Page 145.

Nature can help you only if you manage to get time for yourself. You need to be able to relax in the garden, completely at peace, or to walk. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, Page 166

After all, if you should still get stuck, there is always the enantiodromia from the unconscious, which opens new avenues when conscious will and vision are failing. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, Pages 158-159.

Life behaves as if it were going on, and so I think it is better for an old person to live on, to look forward to the next day, as if he had to spend centuries, and then he lives properly. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, Page 438

What is important and meaningful to my life is that I shall live as fully as possible to fulfill the divine will within me. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, Page 75.

Jaffe reports "a penchant for Negro spirituals" along with Bach, Handel Mozart, and early music. A string quartet of Schubert had to be turned off because "it moved him too much," while Beethoven's late quartets "churned him up almost beyond endurance." ~C.G. Jung Speaking, Page 249.

Music is dealing with such deep archetypal material and those who play don't realize this. Yet, used therapeutically from this level music should be an essential part of every analysis. ~C.G. Jung Speaking, Page 89.

Your books are not books, Herr Professor. They are bread. ~A poor uneducated woman, ~C.G. Jung Speaking, Page 402.

Instinct is not only biological, it is also, you might say, spiritual. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 410-423

Synchronicity states that a certain psychic event is paralleled by some external non-psychic event and that there is no causal connection between them. It is a parallelism of meaning. ~C.G. Jung Speaking, Page 387.

And the little travelling salesman of women’s things who stopped me in the street and looked at me with immense eyes, saying "Are you really the man who writes those books? Are you truly the one who writes about these things no one knows? ~C.G. Jung Speaking, Page 402.

Dr. Jung I Presume

“DOCTOR JUNG, I PRESUME” [1925] Despite the increased facilities for travel nowadays, I fancy it must still be unusual for a junior Government officer in an up-country station to find himself entertaining a great European thinker of the calibre of Carl Gustav Jung of Zurich. Nevertheless, I had this memorable experience along time ago, and it occurred because Jung, oddly enough, was wandering about in a safari car, more or less lost. It happened in 1925 when I was the Assistant District Commissioner at Kapsabet, the Government station for Nandi District in Kenya, an out-of-the-way place in those days. One afternoon I was returning to my bungalow, which lay just off the main road behind a screen of trees, when I saw a large safari box-body car pulled into the side.

Now this main road was magnificently broad, bordered and shaded by enormous blue gums, and looking as if it led to some important place. But, alas, just beyond my house it changed abruptly into a neglected earth track. This was, in fact, part of the old Sclater Road to Uganda for foot caravans in the 1890’s. It had become literally side-tracked when the railway reached Kisumu by a more southern route in 1901 and an easier connection with Uganda was made across Lake Victoria. All this explains why the safari car had stopped: the three Europeans in it had seen where the broad road ended at the township boundary. They had got out of the car and were looking at me speculatively as I approached. I said, “Good afternoon.

Can I help you in any way? I’m the A.D.C. here.” The tallest of the three, a reddish-faced man, replied. “We’re trying to get to Mount Elgon and would like to know the best road to take.” I told them there was no direct road to Elgon from Kapsabet and they could not possibly get there in daylight. I went on to explain that Elgon, where I had recently spent several weeks on a boundary job, was a sprawling land mass with extensive foothills, and it would be about seventy miles on earth roads, either by Kakamega or Eldoret, to get to them. Then it would be over twenty miles to the summit. “We aren’t interested in the summit,” said the spokesman.

“We just want to get to the foothills.” From where we were standing we could see the blue-gray shape of Elgon away to the north west receding into the usual mist. As we all gazed at it, thinking, I suppose, how close it might be as the vulture flew, I again stressed that they could not get there in daylight and suggested they had some tea with me, pushed on to the hotel at Eldoret, thirty miles distant, and made a fair start in the morning. The tall man then said, “I am Dr. X.” (the name escaped me and I have never discovered who he was).’

“This is Dr. Jung and this is Mr. Douglas, our secretary, an American.”‘ Douglas was a young man, about twenty-five, athletic looking and darkly handsome. He appeared bored by the proceedings and I do not recollect that he ever uttered a single word—perhaps the perfect secretary. On the other hand I noticed that they had no African servants with them and it occurred to me later that perhaps this explained young Douglas’s gloom.’ I led the way to my bungalow, and over tea Dr. X again took up the batting.

“It may seem odd to you,” he said, “but we are in fact psychologists intending to do some field work.” I started mentally. “Did you say Dr. Jung?” The burly man smiled and said, “Yes, I am Dr. Jung.” “Of Zurich ?” “Yes, of Zurich.” He looked surprised and pleased. “I cannot help wondering,” I said, “what kind of field work you will find to do on Elgon?” Dr. X. explained. “Dr. Jung,” he said, “is interested in dreams and their interpretation, and as a change from studying them among the highly civilized people of Europe, he wants to get further back and see if he can learn anything from a fairly primitive people.

After considering the possibilities everywhere we decided that the tribes on Mount Elgon would suit us best for this purpose. And so,” he concluded, “we are devoting our summer vacation to this work.” They were thinking, it seemed, of contacting the Kara mojong or the Sabei and I told them that these tribes were in Uganda—so far as I knew, in a Closed District, which meant that they would have to get a permit to enter it from the Provincial Commissioner at Mbale. They seemed rather disconcerted, and I hurried on to another obvious weakness in this psychological expedition. “How,” I asked, “do you propose to communicate with these people?” “We have thought of that,” said Dr. X, “and Dr. Jung has learned Swahili for the purpose.” “Yes,” said Dr. Jung.

“I have spent six weeks learning Swahili.” Somewhat diffidently I pointed out that the Karamojongand the Sabei had their own languages and did not speak Swahili. Dr. Jung said he understood Swahili was the lingua franca and everyone spoke it. I explained that though Swahili was indeed the lingua franca of East Africa, this only meant that people could be found everywhere who spoke and understood it, but that in fact the majority of the Africans, including the vast majority of the women, did not speak Swahili. Further, the more primitive the tribe the fewer Swahili speakers would there be.

I said they would have to use interpreters and probably the Administration would be able to help them in this way. I carefully avoided suggesting that it might be necessary for them to have interpreters who could speak English, as this would have been to cast doubts on Dr. Jung’s command of Swahili, and for all I knew a man of his intellectual capacity might have been able to learn more Swahili in six weeks than I could in six years. Like a prophet of doom I went on to say that even with good interpretation, they would run into considerable difficulty, because the more primitive the tribe the more purely materialistic was their language.

Swahili was a poor medium for expressing any abstract ideas or emotions, and I was pretty sure that the Karamojong and Sabei languages would be even worse. At this point Dr. X. observed that thismethods of getting results. That, of course, immediately shut me up, and Dr. Jung took up the running, asking me about camping conditions on Elgon. Eventually he came to the subject of the Elgon caves. “Have you been inside them ?” he asked. “I have been inside one,” I replied.

“What did you find inside ?” “Fleas,” I answered. Dr. Jung gave a great bellow of laughter, and Dr. X. joined in a little more moderately, but young Douglas only gave me a sort of sour smile as if I had taken an undue liberty with the great man. I went on to explain that the people who lived on Elgon had always used the caves as cattle shelters, so far as I knew, and the floors were covered with dung and sheep and goat droppings to a great depth. In these rich layers flourished countless millions of fleas.

Visiting one with gum boots on and an electric torch had been enough for me. “Of course,” I said, “I know what you have in mind—paintings or such-like by primitive or even prehistoric man. In fact, that’s what I was looking for in the cave I visited, but I did not see anything. However, there are many caves. I have never heard of any relics of that kind in any of them, but I don’t know if all the caves have ever been visited, more especially by trained observers.

You might be lucky and find something that has hitherto been missed. The fleas are rather a deterrent.” Shortly afterwards they thanked me warmly and I put them on the road to Eldoret. It was a queer thing that I never heard any more about this psychological expedition, though I was on the look-out for news. Unless they had resources and prepared lines of work about which they did not tell me, I cannot help thinking that their safari could hardly have produced any useful results because either Dr. Jung and his friends stopped longer than I gathered was their intention, or they came back the following year, in which case I can only suppose that they would have been rather better prepared than on their initial effort. And what was the result of Dr. Jung’s “Researches about primitive psychology in North Kenya”? Truth compels me to state that I don’t know. It is not my line of country. C.G. Jung Speaking; Pages 32-37.

From Esther Harding’s Notebooks: 1922, 1925

FROM ESTHER HARDING’S NOTEBOOKS: 1922, 1925 Kiisnacht, 3 July [1922]

Dr. Jung spoke of the inferior function being united to the collective: it is just a bit of nature and, as such, must first be accepted and adapted to. . . . The superior function is in your hands, and you can put it to your uses.

The inferior is your master, and you must adapt yourself to it. Yet it is nature; there is life there.

The thing that wants to be born must first be found. The form it is to grow into shall later be the object of search, and the search may be a long one….

4 July I began by describing how I always had so much to say before I got into the room, so that I had to edit my thoughts allusion.

Extraverts’ language is thin and poor, but profuse, so that although what they want to say may be very slight, atleast when they have finished they have said what they set out to say, He went on to say that when speaking to an extravert he has to cut down his thought; also when he is speaking to an introvert he has to cut down, for the thought of an introvert, even if expanded into a book, would not be fully expressed. . . .

I had been trying to find out the meaning of my [slip of the tongue] and thought it was in protest against the extra difficulty of the feminine position regarding searching for the anima.

This he denied. He said a man must take up a feminine attitude, while a woman must fight her animus, a masculine attitude. I asked, “Is this why I always want to fight you?”

And he replied, “In so far as I am your animus. As far as you are identified to your animus, so far will you project him to me. And then, if you battle me with him who is demonic, I call my demon, my anima, to my aid, and it is two married couples fighting.

Then you have a hell of a row.” He said this is what happens when you get a reciprocal transference.

But that as he is not [word illegible], I need not fear that would happen to him. Then he began talking about how it happens that a professional woman lives her animus. The professional situation is new for woman and needs a new adaptation, and this, as always, is readily supplied by the animus. On the other hand, analysis requires a new adaptation from a man, for to sit still and patiently try to understand a woman’s mind is far from a masculine attitude.

The only time he does it is as lover to his mistress; he will not do so for his wife, for she is only his wife. In love, his anima shows him how.

He then takes on a feminine tenderness and uses the baby talk he learned from his mother; he calls on the eternal image of the feminine in himself. But [in analysis] that won’t do.

[The male analyst] has got to learn the feminineness of a man, which is not the anima. He must not let his masculinity be overwhelmed, or his weakness calls out the animus in the woman patient.

Similarly, the professional woman takes on the animus, the prototype of the father, and develops a god-almightiness, Tan imitation of] the hero, instead of developing the images of the female.

This animus is primitive man, and men want to react to it with their fists.

But, as this is a woman, that way is barred to them; so they shun her—just as a man who lives his anima is shunned by all really womanly women.

Dr. Jung went on to speak of the strength of womanhood, how it is stronger than any [imitation of the] male adaptation, and how a woman who is woman from the crown of her head to the tip of her toe can afford to be masculine, just as a man who is sure of his masculinity can afford to be tender and patient like a woman. . . .

Next he spoke of the Self and how it can be separated off from the demons. He reiterated that words in the realm of the spirit are creative and full of power.

I said, “You mean as Logos?” He replied, “Yes. God spake and created from the chaos—and here we are all gods for ourselves.

But use few words here, words that you are sure of. Do not make along theory or you will entangle yourself in a net, in a trap.”

Next he spoke of fear. He said, “Be afraid of the world, for it is big and strong; and fear the demons within, for they are many and brutal; but do not fear yourself, for that is your Self.”

I said I feared to open the door for fear the demons would come out and destroy.

He said, “If you lock them up they will as surely destroy. The only way of delimiting the Self is by experiment,

Go as far, as your desire goes, and you will presently find that you have gone as far as your own laws allow. If you feel afraid, be brave enough to run away. Find a hole to hide in, for this is the action of a brave man, and by so doing you are exercising courage.

Presently the swing of cowardice will be over, and courage will take its place.” I said, “But how hopelessly unstable and changeable you will appear!”

He replied, “Then be unstable. A new stability will reassert itself.

Does one live for other people or for oneself? Here is the place where one must learn true unselfishness.”

The law was made by man. We made it. It is therefore below us, and we can be above it. As St. Paul said, “I am redeemed and am freed from the law.”

He realized that, as man, he had made it.

So also a contract cannot bind us, for we who made it can break it.

This too, if entered into sincerely as a means of finding and expressing the Self, is not vice, for the fearless honesty cuts that out., But when we are bound by an artificial barrier, or by laws and moralities that have entered into us, then we are prevented from finding, or even from seeing that there is a real barrier of the Self outside this artificial barrier.

We fear that if we break through this artificial barrier we shall find ourselves in limitless space.

But within each of us is the regulating Self.

5 July I began the hour by telling Jung how something wonderful had happened to me yesterday, that his talk on the animus relationship had cleared things up, so that much had clicked into place, and that now I felt quite different.

I said that yesterday we were dealing with the negative relationship to the animus, but there must also be a positive relationship.

He replied that there certainly must—but that the important part of analysis was to get that negative point cleared, for that is the growing point of differentiation from the unconscious.

Until that is clear, the voice of the animus is as the voice of God within us; in any case, we respond to it as if it were.

When we are not aware of the negative aspect of the animus, we are still animal, still connected to nature, therefore unconscious and less than human.

We need to reach a higher degree of consciousness, Which must be sought at that point. Then we discover a new country. And it is our responsibility to cultivate it. (“To him that knoweth to do good and doeth it not, to him it is sin.”)

Also the legend of Christ and the man working on the Sabbath, to whom he said, “If thou knowest what thou doest, blessed art thou! But if thou knowest not what thou doest, cursed art thou !”

If we are conscious, morality no longer exists.

If we are not conscious, we are still slaves, and we are accursed if we obey not the law.

He said that if we belong to the secret church, then we belong, and we need not worry about it, but can go our own way.

No amount of teaching or organization can bring us there.

Then I asked him about a single animus figure, and he said, “Many souls are young; they are promiscuous; they are prostitutes in the unconscious and sell themselves cheaply.

They are like flowers that bloom and die and come again. Other souls are older, like trees or palms.

They find, or must seek, one complete animus, who shall perhaps be many in one. And when they find him, it is like the closing of an electric circuit.

Then they know the meaning of life. “But to have an animus like an archimandrite is as if to say, you are a priest of the Mysteries. And this needs a great humility to counterbalance it.

You need to go down to the level of the mice. And as a tree, so great as the height of its branches, so deep must be the depths of its roots.

And the meaning of the tree is neither in the roots, nor in the uplifted crown, but in the life in between them.”

Then I asked him how to get the mean between the two worlds,! Between the world of the unconscious and that of reality: He replied, “You are the mediator. It is in your immediate life that they meet.

In the pleroma they are always…striving up against its oneness.

The glacier is always there. Our civilization finds an adaptation that will satisfy these things for a while, and they are quiet. Then they begin to .come. up again, and again we find a new adaptation, and they are quiet once more.

Today we are in a period of great transition, and they come up again.

Eventually they will swallow man, but it will not be the same again, for he has attained the union of the opposites through their separation.

Possibly, after man will come a period of the animal and then again the plant—who knows ?—and who or what will carry on the lamp of consciousness? Who knows?”

In December 1924 Jung came to the United States—his first visit since before the War—and journeyed to the Southwest.

With American friends he visited the Grand Canyon on New Year’s Day 1925, and then the party motored across Arizona and New Mexico to Taos, where Jung spent a day or two with the Pueblo Indians

He traveled back to New York through the South, and sailed for Europe on January 34.

New York, 13 January [1925] Dr. Jung gave a talk to a group at Dr. Mann’s apartment on 59th Street.’

He spoke on racial psychology and said many interesting things about the ancestors, how they seem to be in the land. As evidence of this, he spoke about the morphological changes in the skulls of people here in the U.S.A. and in Australia.

He said that in America there is a certain lack of reverence contains certain ruthlessness.

The ancestors are not considered here, their values not respected.

He spoke of the “single-mindedness” of Americans, which would be impossible to Europeans because of all the many considerations to which they must pay due regard. The American disregards these completely, is, indeed, utterly unconscious of them.

In the spring, Dr. Harding again went to Kusnacht to work with Jung.

Kusnacht, 13 May Dr. Jung talked about the various forms of relationship, about sexuality, about friendship (which is mitigated desire, with its obligations to write frequently and so on).

There is a third kind of relationship, the only lasting one, in which it is as though there were an invisible telegraph wire between two human beings. He said, “I call it, to myself, the Golden Thread.”

This may be masked by other forms of a relationship. And other forms may be present without any such thread in them.

It is only when the veil of maya, of illusion, is rent for us that we can begin to recognize the Golden Thread.

He went on to speak of the three realities that make up the individuated state: God; the Self; and Relatedness. Or in Christian terms: God, Father, and Son; the Spirit, or Self; and the Kingdom of Heaven.

And just as it is impossible to individuate without relatedness, so it is impossible to have real relationships without individuation.

For otherwise illusion comes in continually, and you don’t know where you are. ~C.G. Jung Speaking; Pages 25-31.

Carl Jung: Does the World stand of the verge of a Spiritual Rebirth

This is what theologians for several centuries have been crying for; what many of them have professed to see through the fog of doubts, disillusion and despair, like a star glowing in the high heavens. I am not a theologian; I am a doctor, a psychologist. But as a doctor, I have had experience with thousands of persons from all parts of the world—those who came to tell me the stories of their lives, their hopes, their fears, their achievements, their failures.

I have studied carefully their psychology, which is, and which must be, my guide. Out of my experience with those thousands of patients, I have become convinced that the psychological problem of today is a spiritual problem, a religious problem, Man today hungers and thirsts for a safe relationship to the psychic forces within himself. His consciousness, recoiling from the difficulties of the modern world, lacks a relationship to safe spiritual conditions. This makes him neurotic, ill, frightened. Science has told him that there is no God, and that matter is all there is.

This has deprived humanity of its blossom, its feeling of well-being and of safety in a safe world.

As modern man is driven back upon himself by doubt and fear, he looks inward to his own psychic life to give him something of which his outer life has deprived him. In view of ‘the present widespread interest in all sorts of psychic phenomena—an interest such as the world has not experienced since the last half of the seventeenth century—it does not seem beyond the range of possibility to believe that we stand on the threshold of a new spiritual epoch; and that from the depths of man’s own psychic life new spiritual forms will be born. Look at the world about us, and what do we see? The disintegration of many religions.

It is generally admitted that the churches are not holding the people as they did,particularly educated people, who do not feel any longer that they are redeemed by a system of theology. The same thing is seen in the old established religions of the East— Confucianism and Buddhism. Half the temples in Peking are empty. In our Western world millions of people do not go to church. Protestantism alone is broken up into four hundred denominations. Contrast this state of life and thought with that of the Middle Ages. In those centuries almost everyone went to Mass every morning.

The whole life was lived within the church, which became a tremendous outlet of psychic energy. Instead, we have today an intricate and complicated life full of mechanical devices for living. A life crowded with motor cars and radios and motion pictures. But none of these things is a substitute for what we have lost. Religion gives us a rich application for our feelings. It gives meaning to life. Man in the Middle Ages lived in a meaningful world. He knew that God had made the world for a definite purpose; had made him for a definite purpose—to get to heaven, or to get to hell.

It made sense. Today the world in which all of us live is a madhouse. This is what many people are feeling, Some of those people come to me to tell me so. All that energy which was the origin of the rich blossom of man’s emotional life during the Middle Ages, and which found expression in the painting of great religious pictures, the carving of great religious statues, the building of the great cathedrals, has gone flat,)It is not lost, because it is a law that energy cannot be lost. Then what has become of it? Where has it gone?

The answer is that it is in man’s unconscious. It may be said to have fallen down into a lower storey. Take the example of a business man—successful, rich, not yet old. He is perhaps forty-five. He says, “I have made my fortune; I have sons who are old enough to carry on the business which I founded. I will retire. I will build a fine house in the country and live there without any cares and worries.” So he retires. He builds his house and goes to live in it.

He says to himself, “Now my life will begin.” But nothing happens. One morning he is in his bath. He is conscious of a pain in his side. All day he worries about it; wonders what it can be. When he goes to the table he does not eat. In a few days his digestion is out of order. In a fortnight he is very ill. The doctors he has called in do not know what is the matter with him. Finally one of them says to him: “Your life lacks interest. Go back to your business. Take it up again.” The man is intelligent, and this advice seems to him sound.

He decides to follow it. He goes back to his office and sits down at his old desk and declares that now he will help his sons in the management. But when the first business letter is brought to him, he cannot concentrate on it. He cannot make the decisions it calls for. Now he is terribly frightened about his condition. You see what happened. He couldn’t go back. It was already too late. But his energy is still there, and it must be used. This man comes to me with his problem. I say to him: “You were quite right to retire from business. But not into nothingness.

You must have something you can stand on. In all the years in which you devoted your energy to building up your business you never built up any interests outside of it. You had nothing to retire on.” This is a picture of the condition of man today. This is why we feel that there is something wrong with the world. All the material interests, the automobiles and radios and skyscrapers we have, don’t fill the hungry soul. We try to retire from the world, but to what? Some try to go back to the churches. A few are able to do this. But many are not finding this entirely satisfactory.

They are like the business man who tried to go back to his desk. And these people come to me, asking me to help them to find a meaning in their lives. What shall I tell them? Among them comes a man who is only slightly neurotic. He says to me: “I am not really very sick. Perhaps I should not be here at all taking up your time. But I know you are busy with the human mind. I thought, therefore, that you might be able to tell me on what terms I may live. I have the feeling of being forlorn and lonely in a world that makes no sense.”

I say to him: “My dear man, I don’t know any more than you do the meaning of the world or the meaning of your life. But you—all men—were born with a brain ready made. It took millions of years to build the brain and the body we now have. Your brain embodies all the experience of life. The psyche, which may be called the life of the brain, existed before consciousness existed in the little child. “Now, suppose that I am in need of advice about living, and I know of a man who is already thousands of years old.

I go to him and say, ‘You have seen many changes; you have observed and experienced life under many aspects. My life is short—perhaps seventy years, perhaps less—and you have lived for thousands of years. Tell me the meaning of life for me.’ ” When I say this to my patient, he cocks his ears and looks at me. “No,” I say, “I am not that man. But that man speaks to you every night. How? In your dreams.” I go on: “You are in trouble. You feel that your life has no orientation. I cannot tell you what to do.

But let us ask the Great Old Man. He will tell you. Go away for a few days, and you will have a dream. Come back and tell me about it.” He goes away; he comes back and brings me a dream. It is difficult to work out. But we do work it out together, and it tells us something about him. Certain people lose connection with life because they have made mistakes, or because they are living the wrong way, in a life that is intellectual only. The dreams they bring to a psychologist will take up these things first. All dreams reveal spiritual experiences, provided one does not apply one’s own point of view to the interpretation of them. Freud says that all man’s longings expressed in his dreams relate to sexuality.

It is true that man is a being with sex. But he is also a being with a stomach and a liver. As well say that because he has a liver all his troubles come from that one organ. Primitive man has little difficulty with sex. The fulfillment of his sexual desires is too easy to constitute a problem. What concerns primitive man—and I have lived among primitives, and Freud has not—is his food: where he is to get it, and enough of it. Civilized man in his dreams reveals his spiritual need. When modern science disinfected heaven it did not find God. Some scientists say that the resurrection of Jesus, the virgin birth, the miracles—all those things which fed Christian thought through ages, are pretty stories, but none the less untrue.

But what I say is, Do not overlook the fact that these ideas which millions of men carried with them through generations are great eternal psychological truths. Let us look at this truth as the psychologist sees it. Here is the mind of man, without prejudice, spotless, untainted, symbolized by a virgin. And that virgin mind of man can give birth to God himself. “The kingdom of heaven is within you.” This is a great psychological truth. Christianity is a beautiful system of psychotherapy. It heals the suffering of the soul. This is the truth which man has clung to through the ages. Even after his consciousness has listened too long at the door of modern materialistic science, he clings to it in his unconscious.

The old symbols are good today. They fit our minds as well as they fitted the minds that conceived them. Deep in the unconscious of each one of us are all the attempts of that Great Old Man to express his spiritual experiences. Suppose I ask you to stay in my house. I tell you that it is well built, comfortable; that our life is pleasant; that you will have good food. You can swim in the lake and walk in the garden. With these beliefs in your mind you decide to come, and you enjoy your stay. But suppose, when I ask you, I say to you: “This house is unsafe. The foundations are not secure. We have many earthquakes in this region. Besides all that, we have had illness here. Someone recently died of tuberculosis in this room.”

Under those conditions and with these ideas in your mind, do you enjoy your stay in that house? That medieval man we have talked of had a beautiful relationship with God. He lived in a safe world, or one that he believed to be safe. God looked out for everyone in it; he rewarded the good and punished the bad. There was the church where the man could always get forgiveness and grace. He had only to walk there to receive it. His prayerswere heard. He was spiritually taken care of. But what is modern man told? Science has told him that there is no one taking care of him. And so he is full of fear. For a time, after we gave up that medieval God, we had gold for a deity. But now that, too, has been declared incompetent. We trusted in armies, but the threat of poison gas defeated them. Already people talk about the next war.

In Berlin they have built dugouts under the streets for retreat from poison gas attacks. If they go on talking in this way, thinking this way, the next war will explode of itself. Naturally enough, in a world of this sort, everybody gets neurotic. Even if the house you live in is really safe, if you have the idea that it is not, you will suffer. Your reaction depends entirely on what you think. In making this point to my students, I say: “How do you measure a thing? By its effects. And usually by its terrible effects. An avalanche occurs which wipes away a dozen farms, kills scores of cows, and you say, ‘An elephant of an avalanche!’ Now, tell me, what is the most destructive thing you know of ?” In turn we consider fire, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, floods, diseases.

Then I say, “Can you think of nothing more terrible than any of these things? What about the World War?” Ah, yes! High explosives. “But,” I say, “do high explosives make themselves? Do they declare war. It is the psyche of man that makes wars. Not his consciousness. His consciousness is afraid, but his unconscious, which contains the inherited savagery as we l as the spiritual strivings of the race,) says to. him, “Now it is time to make war. Now is the time to kill and destroy.” And he does it. The most tremendous danger that man has to face is the power of his ideas. No cosmic power on earth ever destroyed ten million men in four years. But man’s psyche did it. And It can do it, vain. I am afraid of one thing only—the thoughts of people. I have means of defense against things.

I live here in my house happily with my family. But suppose they get the illusion that I am a devil. Can I be happy with them then? Can I be safe? All of us are subject to mass infections. I Mass infections) are greater than man. And man is their victim. He shouts and parades and pretends that he is the leader, but really he is their victim. They are the up rush of earthly and spiritual forces from the depth of the psyche. Turn the eye of consciousness within to see what is there.

Let us see what we can do in small ways. If I have planted a cabbage right, then I have served the world in that place. I do not know what more I can do. Examine the spirits that speak in you. Become critical. The modern man must be fully conscious of the terrific dangers that lie in mass movements. Listen to what the unconscious says. Hearken to the voice of that Great Old Man within you who has lived so long, who has seen and experienced so much. Try to understand the will of God: The remarkably potent force of the psyche.

I say: Go slow. Go slow. With every good there comes a corresponding evil, and with every evil a corresponding good. Don’t run too fast into one unless you are prepared to encounter the other. I am not concerned about the world. I am concerned about the people with whom I live. The other world is all in the newspapers. My family and my neighbors are my life—the only life that I can experience. What lies beyond is newspaper mythology. It is not of vast importance that I make a career or achieve great things for myself. What is important and meaningful to my life is that I shall live as fully as possible to fulfill the divine will within me. This task gives me so much to do that I have no time or any other.

Let me point out that if we were all to live in that way we would need no armies, no police, no diplomacy, no politics, no banks. We would have a meaningful life and not what we have now—madness. What nature asks of the apple-tree is that it shall bring forth apples, and of the pear-tree that it shall bring forth pears. Nature wants me to be simply man. But a man conscious of what I am, and of what I am doing. God seeks consciousness in man. This is the truth of the birth and the resurrection of Christ within. As more and more thinking men come to it, this is the spiritual rebirth of the world. Christ, the Logos—that is to say, the mind, the understanding, shining into the darkness.

Christ was a new truth about man. Mankind has no existence. I exist, you exist. But mankind is only a word. Be what God means you to be; don’t worry about mankind which doesn’t exist, you are avoiding looking at what does exist—the self You are like a man who leans over his neighbor’s fence and says to him: “Look, there is a weed. And over there is an-I- other one. And why don’t you hoe the rows deeper? And I why don’t you tie up your vines?” And all the while, his own garden, behind him, is full of weeds. ~Carl Jung [1934]; C.G. Jung Speaks; Pages 67-75.