Carl Jung on the “Soul.” - Anthology

Above all, we know desperately little about the possibilities of continued existence of the individual soul after death, so little that we cannot even conceive how anyone could prove anything at all in this respect.

Moreover, we know only too well, on epistemological grounds, that such a proof would be just as impossible as the proof of God.

Hence we may cautiously accept the idea of karma only if we understand it as psychic heredity in the very widest sense of the word.

Psychic heredity does exist —that is to say, there is inheritance of psychic characteristics such as predisposition to disease, traits of character, special gifts, and so forth. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 845

For when the soul vanished at death, it was not lost; in that other world it formed the living counterpole to the state of death in this world. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 493

The souls or spirits of the dead are identical with the psychic activity of the living; they merely continue it.

The view that the psyche is a spirit is implicit in this.

When therefore something psychic happens in the individual which he feels as belonging to himself, that something is his own spirit.

But if anything psychic happens which seems to him strange, then it is somebody else’s spirit, and it may be causing a
possession.

The spirit in the first case corresponds to the subjective attitude, in the latter case to public opinion, to the time-spirit,
or to the original, not yet human, anthropoid disposition which we also call the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 38

The synchronicity principle possesses properties that may help to clear up the body-soul problem.

Above all it is a fact of causeless order, or rather, of meaningful orderedness, that may throw light on psychophysical parallelism.

The “absolute knowledge” which is characteristic of synchronistic phenomena, a knowledge not mediated by the sense organs, supports the hypothesis of a self-subsistent meaning, or even expresses its existence.

Such a form of existence can only be transcendental, since, as the knowledge of future or spatially distant events shows, it is contained in a psychically relative space and time, that is to say in an irrepresentable space-time continuum. ~Carl Jung, CW, Para 948.

The shadow is a tight passage, a narrow door, whose painful constriction no one is spared who goes down to the deep well.

But one must learn to know oneself in order to know who one is.

For what comes after the door is, surprisingly enough, a boundless expanse full of unprecedented uncertainty, with apparently no inside and no outside, no above and no below, no here and no there, no mine and no thine, no good and no bad.

It is the world of water, where all life floats in suspension; where the realm of the sympathetic system, the soul of everything living, begins; where I am indivisibly this and that; where I experience the other in myself and the other-than myself experiences me. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 45.

Neurosis—let there be no doubt about this—may be any number of things, but never a “nothing but.”

It is the agony of a human soul in all its vast complexity—so vast, indeed, that any and every theory of neurosis is little better than a worthless sketch, unless it be a gigantic picture of the psyche which not even a hundred Fausts could conceive. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 357

A neurosis is by no means merely a negative thing, it is also something positive.

Only a soulless rationalism reinforced by a narrow materialistic outlook could possibly have overlooked this fact.

In reality the neurosis contains the patient’s psyche, or at least an essential part of it; and if, as the rationalist pretends, the neurosis could be plucked from him like a bad tooth, he would have gained nothing but would have lost something very essential to him.

That is to say, he would have lost as much as the thinker deprived of his doubt, or the moralist deprived of his temptation, or the brave man deprived of his fear.

To lose a neurosis is to find oneself without an object; life loses its point and hence its meaning.

This would not be a cure, it would be a regular amputation. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 355

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Carl Jung: Everybody has Two Souls

My contention that man is born equipped with a highly differentiated and fully developed brain with innumerable attributes has often met with antagonism. Most people continue to believe that everything they have become, every reaction of their psychic ego to everyday occurrences, is determined by their education and their environment.

Few people know anything about the ancestral soul and even fewer believe in it.

Aren’t we all the carriers of the entire history of mankind? Why is it so difficult to believe that each of us has two souls?

When a man is fifty years old, only one part of his being has existed for half a century.

The other part, which also lives in his psyche, may be millions of years old. Every newborn child has come into this world with a fully equipped brain.

Although in the early stages of life the mind has not gained complete mastery over the body, it is clearly preconditioned for reacting to the outer world—that is, it has the capacity to do so.

Such mental patterns exert their influence throughout life and remain decisive for a person’s thinking.

The newborn does not begin to develop his mental faculties on the first day of his life.

His mind, a finished structure, is the result of innumerable lives before his and is far from being devoid of content.

It is unlikely that we shall ever discover the remote past, into which the impersonal psyche of the individual reaches only during his lifetime, and that environment and education are decisive influences in this process.

These influences become effective from the first days of a child’s life.

On the whole, the receptivity of a small child’s brain tends to be widely underestimated, but the practicing psychologist has frequent evidence to the contrary.

With neurotics, one constantly comes up against psychic defects that date back to very early childhood experiences.

It is not a rare occurrence for a somewhat severe reprimand administered to a child in his playpen or his bed to affect him during his entire life.

The two souls give rise to frequent contradictions in a person’s thinking and feeling.

Quite often the impersonal and the personal psyche are even in direct opposition.

There are hundreds of examples which demonstrate to the psychologist that two souls live in every man.

Exercising their imagination—which I call the mother of human consciousness—many of my patients painted pictures and described dreams which displayed a strange conformity with definite laws and showed peculiar parallels to Indian and Chinese temple, images.

Where were these people supposed to have obtained knowledge about the ancient temple cultures of the Far East?

I have treated patients who had visions about events which happened hundreds of years ago.

All this can come only from the unconscious, the impersonal soul, the finished brain of the new born in Contemporary man is but the latest ripe fruit on the tree of the human race. None of us knows what we know. ~Carl Jung [Interview in 1932 found in C.G. Jung Speaking; Pages 57-58.