Showing posts with label Civilization in Transition. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Civilization in Transition. Show all posts

Friday, December 29, 2017

Carl Jung: Fanaticism is ever the brother of doubt,




Has it ever—except in the most benighted periods of history—been observed that a scientific truth needed to be elevated to the rank of a dogma? Truth can stand on its own feet, only shaky opinions require the support of dogmatization. Fanaticism is ever the brother of doubt, ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 335

Doubt and insecurity are indispensable components of a complete life. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 163-174

Doubt is the crown of life because truth and error come together. Doubt is living, truth is sometimes death and stagnation. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis, Page 89.

When you are in doubt you have the greatest opportunity to unite the dark and light sides of life. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis, Page 89.

He who cannot bear doubt does not bear himself. Such a one is doubtful; he does not grow and hence he does not live. Doubt is the sign of the strongest and the weakest. The strong have doubt, but doubt has the weak. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 301.

I do not doubt: I also want evil for the sake of my God. I enter the unequal battle, since it is always unequal and without doubt a lost cause. How terrible and despairing would this battle be otherwise? But precisely this is how it should and will be. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 289.

But fanaticism is always a compensation for hidden doubt. Religious persecutions occur only where heresy is a menace. ~Carl Jung, Analytical Psychology and Education, Page 81.

Fanaticism is due to an unconscious doubt threatening the conscious attitude. For example, dogmatism is merely to protect a creed against an unrecognized doubt. True conviction needs nothing of the sort. Fanaticism is due to a threatened conviction. ~Carl Jung, Cornwall Seminar, Page 18.

Doubt is creative if it is answered by deeds, and so is neurosis if it exonerates itself as having been a phase—a crisis which is pathological only when chronic. Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 332-334

Neurosis is a justified doubt in oneself and continually poses the ultimate question of trust in man and in God. Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 332-334

I for my part prefer the precious gift of doubt, for the reason that it does not violate the virginity of things beyond our ken. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 8.

I am just as much in doubt about myself as before, the more so the more I try to say something definite. It is as though familiarity with oneself alienated one from oneself still further. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 162-163.


Thursday, December 28, 2017

Carl Jung: Where is a height without depth, and how can there be light that throws no shadow? There is no good that is not opposed by evil.





Christ the ideal took upon himself the sins of the world.

But if the ideal is wholly outside then the sins of the individual are also outside, and consequently he is more of a fragment than ever, since superficial misunderstanding conveniently enables him, quite literally, to "cast his sins upon Christ" and thus to evade his deepest responsibilities—which is contrary to the spirit of Christianity. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 9

It is no longer a question of a few dozen voluntary or involuntary old maids here and there, but of millions.

Our legislation and our social morality give no answer to this question.

Or can the Church provide a satisfactory answer?

Should we build gigantic nunneries to accommodate all these women?

Or should tolerated prostitution be increased?

Obviously this is impossible, since we are dealing neither with saints nor sinners but with ordinary women who cannot register their spiritual requirements with the police.

They are decent women who want to marry, and if this is not possible, well—the next best thing. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 248

Where is a height without depth, and how can there be light that throws no shadow? There is no good that is not opposed by evil.

"No man can be redeemed from a sin he has not committed," says Carpocrates; a deep saying for all who wish to understand, and a golden opportunity for all those who prefer to draw false conclusions.

What is down below is not just an excuse for more pleasure, but something we fear because it demands to play its part in the life of the more conscious and more complete man. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 271


Sunday, November 12, 2017

Carl Jung: "A Rejoinder to Dr. Bally" [A response to charges of Anti-Semitism]




A REJOINDER TO DR. BALLY

1 wish to discuss no surmises with Dr. Bally, but prefer to report the facts which led me to take over the editorship of the Zentralblatt filr Psychotherapie.

About three years ago I was elected honorary [vice-] president of the General Medical Society for Psychotherapy.

When, owing to the political upheaval, Professor Kretschmer resigned from the presidency, and the Society like so many other scientific organizations in Germany
received a profound shock, some leading members pressed me—I may say, fervently—to take the chair.

This, I would expressly emphasize, was the presidency not of the German but of the International Society, as is stated in the issue from which Dr. Bally quotes.

Thus a moral conflict arose for me as it would for any decent man in this situation.

Should I, as a prudent neutral, withdraw into security this side of the frontier and wash

my hands in innocence, or should I—as I was well aware—risk my skin and expose myself to the inevitable misunderstandings which no one escapes who, from higher necessity, has to make a pact with the existing political powers in Germany?

Should I sacrifice the interests of science, loyalty to colleagues, the friendship which attaches me to some German physicians, and the living link with the humanities afforded by a common language—sacrifice all this to egotistic comfort and my different political sentiments?

I have seen too much of the distress of the German middle class, learned too much about the boundless misery that often marks the life of a German doctor today, know
too much about the general spiritual wretchedness to be able to evade my plain human duty under the shabby cloak of political subterfuge.

Consequently no other course remained for me but to answer for my friends with the weight of my name and independent position.

As conditions then were, a single stroke of the pen in high places would have sufficed to sweep all psychotherapy under the table.

That had to be prevented at all costs for the sake of suffering humanity, doctors, and—last but not least—science and civilization.

1018 Anybody who has the least notion about present-day Germany knows that no newspaper, no society, nothing, absolutely nothing can exist unless it has been gleichgeschaltet (conformed) by the government.

Consequently the organization of a journal or a society is an affair that has two sides.

I can wish, but whether things will turn out as I wish is another question, the decision for which rests neither with me nor with my colleagues.

Anyone who has to deal with Germany today knows how rapidly things can alter, how one unforeseen decree follows another, and how the political scene changes like lightning.

It is quite impossible to keep abreast of events from abroad, when even inside Germany people are unable, with the best will in the world, to get the political authorities to adopt a clear and binding attitude.

Since the German section of the International Society has to be gleichgeschaltet, and since, moreover, the Zentralblatt is published in Germany, there naturally arose so many difficulties
that more than once we doubted the possibility of a reorganization.

One of these concerned the oath of allegiance and the "purity of political sentiment" required of the German Society.

We in Switzerland can hardly understand such a thing, but we are immediately in the picture if we transport ourselves back three or four centuries to a time when the Church had totalitarian presumptions.

Barbed wire had not been invented then, so there were probably no concentration camps; instead, the Church used large quantities of faggots.

The "modernist" oath of today is a pale and feeble offshoot of an earlier, much more robust and palpable Gleichschaltung.

As the authority of the Church fades, the State becomes the Church, since the totalitarian claim is bound to come out somewhere.

First it was Socialism that entered into the Catholic heritage and again is experimenting with the crassest kind of Gleichschaltung—not, indeed, with a view to buttressing up the kingdom of heaven but to producing an equally millenarian state of bliss (or its substitute) on earth.

Russian Communism has therefore, quite logically, become the totalitarian Church, where even the poorest mouse emits the Bolshevist squeak.

No wonder National Socialism makes the same claims!

It is only consistent with the logic of history that after an age of clerical Gleichschaltung the turn should come for one practised by the secular State.

But even in such an age the spirit is at work in science, in art, philosophy, and religious experience, heedless of whether the contemporary situation be favourable or unfavourable, for
there is something in man that is of divine nature and is not condemned to its own treadmill and imprisoned in its own structure.

This spirit wants to live—which is why old Galileo, when they had done torturing him, recanted, and afterwards, so the story goes, said "But it does move"—only very softly, I'll wager.

Martyrdom is a singular calling for which one must have a special gift.

Therefore it seems to me at least as intelligent not to worry the high inquisition for a while with the exciting news that one has discovered the moons of Jupiter without the authorization
of Aristotle.

Galileo had the childlike eyes of the great discoverer and was not at all wise to his gleichgeschaltet age.

Were he alive today he could sun himself on the beach at Los Angeles in company with Einstein and would be a made man, since a liberal age worships God in the form of science.

But the "metamorphosis of the gods" rolls rumbling on and the State becomes lord of this world: more than half Europe is already swallowed up.

Science and every healing art get seven fat years, then come the seven lean.

They must learn to adapt themselves.

To protest is ridiculous—how protest against an avalanche?

It is better to look out.

Science has no interest in calling down avalanches; it must preserve its intellectual heritage even under the changed conditions.

That is how things stand today.

Neither I nor my German colleagues are responsible for them.

If the German section of the Society wants to exist at all the oath of allegiance is inescapable, as any reasonable person will understand.

It was therefore planned that the managing editor of the Zentralblatt, Dr. Cimbal of Hamburg, would bring out a special issue with statements by leading German psychotherapists, together with a signed introductory statement by the president of the German Society, Professor Goring of Elberfeld, for exclusive circulation in Germany.

Such, too, were the instructions which I gave to the managing editor.

To my great surprise and disappointment Professor Goring's political manifesto was suddenly printed in the current issue of the Zentralblatt [VI 13].

I do not doubt that there were inside political reasons for this, but it was one of those lamentable tactical gaffes which were the bane of German foreign policy even in the Wilhelm era.

In this way my name unexpectedly appeared over a National Socialist manifesto, which to me personally was anything but agreeable.

And yet after all what is help or friendship that costs nothing? The incident is naturally so incriminating as to put my editorship seriously in question.

In Germany everything must be "German" at present if it is to survive.

Even the healing art must be "German," and this for political reasons.

From the standpoint of medicine itself, it is unimportant whether it is called "German" or "French," but it is extremely important that it should live, even if under undeniably
difficult conditions, as I know only too well.

It is a cheap jibe to ridicule "Germanic psychotherapy," but a very different thing to have to rescue medicine for humanity's sake from the seething chaos of revolution.

It is easy to stand by and be funny when the main point is to get a young and insecure science into a place of safety during an earthquake, and that was my aim in helping to reorganize the psychotherapeutic movement in Germany.

Medicine has nothing to do with politics—I only wish it had!—and therefore it can and should be practiced for the good of suffering humanity under all governments.

If the doctors of Petersburg [sic] or Moscow had sought my help I would have acceded without hesitation, because I am concerned with human beings and not with Bolsheviks—and if I was then inevitably branded a Bolshevik it would have bothered me just as little.

Man after all still has a soul and is not just an ox fatted for political slaughter.

If I am called into the arena for the sake of the soul I shall follow the call wherever it may be.

This naïve belief of mine in the human soul may, from the Olympian standpoint of a hypertrophied intellect or of partisan blindness, appear laughable, suspect, unpatriotic, and God knows what.

I do not pride myself on being a good Christian, but I do believe in the saying, "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's."

The doctor who, in wartime, gives his help to the wounded of the other side will surely not be held a traitor to his country.

There is no sense in us doctors facing the National Socialist regime as if we were a party.

As doctors we are first and foremost men who serve our fellows, if necessary under all the aggravations of a given political situation.

We are neither obliged nor called upon to make protests from a sudden access of untimely political zeal and thus gravely to endanger our medical activity.

My support of the German doctors has nothing to do with any political attitude.

If it is interpreted politically—which has doubtless happened already or soon will—the interpretations are a reflection on those who make them.

I have never been in a position to stop the formation of myths.

024 Admittedly I was incautious, so incautious as to do the very thing most open to misunderstanding at the present moment: I have tabled the Jewish question.

This I did deliberately.

My esteemed critic appears to have forgotten that the first rule of psychotherapy is to talk in the greatest detail about all the things that are the most ticklish and dangerous, and the most misunderstood.

The Jewish problem is a regular complex, a festering wound, and no responsible doctor could bring himself to apply methods of medical hush-hush in this matter.

As to the difference between Jewish and "Aryan-Germanic-Christian-European" psychology, it can of course hardly be seen in the individual products of science as a whole.

But we are not so much concerned with these as with the fundamental fact that in psychology the object of knowledge is at the same time the organ of knowledge, which is true of no other science.

It has therefore been doubted in all sincerity whether psychology is possible as a science at all.

In keeping with this doubt I suggested years ago that every psychological theory should be criticized in the first instance as a subjective confession.

For, if the organ of knowledge is its own object, we have every reason to examine the nature of that organ very closely indeed, since the subjective premise is at once the object of knowledge which is therefore limited from the start.

This subjective premise is identical with our psychic idiosyncrasy.

The idiosyncrasy is conditioned (1) by the individual, (2) by the family, (3) by the nation, race, climate, locality, and history.

1 have in my time been accused of "Swiss wooden-headedness."

Not that I have anything against possessing the national vices of the Swiss; I am also quite ready to suppose that I am a bigoted Swiss in every respect.

I am perfectly content to let my psychological confession, my so-called "theories," be criticized as a product of Swiss wooden-headedness or queer-headedness, as betraying the sinister influence of my theological and medical forbears, and, in general, of our Christian and German heritage, as exemplified for instance by Schiller and Meister Eckhart.

I am not affronted when people call me "Teutonically confused," "mystical," "moralistic," etc.

I am proud of my subjective premises, I love the Swiss earth in them, I am grateful to my theological forbears for having passed on to me the Christian premise, and I also admit my so-called "father complex": I do not want to knuckle under to any "fathers" and never shall (see "queer-headedness").

1027 May it not therefore be said that there is a Jewish psychology too, which admits the prejudice of its blood and its history?

And may it not be asked wherein lie the peculiar differences between an essentially Jewish and an essentially Christian outlook?

Can it really be maintained that I alone among psychologists have a special organ of knowledge with a subjective bias, whereas the Jew is apparently insulted to the core if one assumes him to be.


Presumably he would not have one assume that his insights are the products of a mere cipher, or that his brain emerged only today from the featureless ocean of non-history.

I must confess my total inability to understand why it should be a crime to speak of "Jewish" psychology.

If 1 were in the position—as Dr. Bally supposes me to be—of not being able to point to a single difference between the two psychologies, it would amount to exactly the same thing as not being able to make plausible the difference between the peculiarities of the English and the Americans, or the French and the Germans.

I have not invented these differences; you can read about them in innumerable books and newspapers; as jokes they are on everybody's tongue, and anyone who fails to see that
there are one or two psychological differences between Frenchmen and Germans must have come from the back of beyond and know nothing about our European madhouse.

Are we really to believe that a tribe which has wandered through history for several thousand years as "God's chosen people" was not put up to such an idea by some quite special psychological peculiarity?

If no differences exist, how do we recognize Jews at all?

1029 Psychological differences obtain between all nations and races, and even between the inhabitants of Zurich, Basel, and Bern. (Where else would all the good jokes come from?)

There are in fact differences between families and between individuals.

That is why I attack every levelling psychology when it raises a claim to universal validity, as for instance the Freudian and the Adlerian.

All levelling produces hatred and venom in the suppressed and misjudged; it prevents any broad human understanding.

All branches of mankind unite in one stem—yes, but what is a stem without separate branches?

Why this ridiculous touchiness when anybody dares to say anything about the psychological difference between Jews and Christians? Every child knows that differences exist.

103° It seems to be generally assumed that in tabling the discussion of ethnological differences my sole purpose was to blurt out my "notorious" anti-Semitism.

Apparently no one believes that I—and others—might also have something good and appreciative to say.

Whatever it be, and however critical it be, I would never have the audacity to maintain that "ten tribes are accursed and two alone holy."

That saying comes from no Christian.

My criticism and appreciation will always keep well outside this glaring contrast, and will contain nothing that cannot be discussed civilly.

I express no value-judgments, nor do I intend any veiled ones.

I have been engaged for many years on the problem of imponderable differences which everybody knows and nobody can really define.

They are among the most difficult problems of psychology and probably for that reason are a taboo area which none may enter on pain of death.

To many people it is an insult if one credits them with a special psychological idiosyncrasy, and in dealing with parties and nations one must be even more careful.

That is why any investigation of these imponderables is so extraordinarily difficult, because, as well as doing his work, the investigator has to perform a grotesque egg-balancing dance
around highly charged sensibilities.

It is high time the practicing psychologist understood more about these psychic imponderabilia, because from them arise a good half of the things that go wrong in the world.

Anyone who could define the nature of these imponderable differences would truly have gazed deep into the mystery of the human soul.

For my part, I do not belong to those savants who concern themselves exclusively with what is known already—an extremely useful activity, no doubt—but prefer to sniff around territories where nothing is yet known.

103 2 Consequently I am amused to find myself cast in the role of the nitwit who is unable to spot a single difference between Jews and Christians.

It is, in spite of Bally, an undoubted fact that the difference exists, just as water existed before the chemist discovered H20; but it cannot be grasped as yet, because all the views that have been put forward so far are unsatisfactory.

These purely cognitive difficulties have, however, nothing to do with the question of whether the imponderables exist.

I intend shortly to publish a few no doubt very inadequate and arguable apergus on this subject.

I am as little capable as anybody else of putting forward anything final, but I shall be content if I succeed in provoking discussion.

I would like to bring the parties together round a conference-table, so that they could at last get to know and acknowledge their differences.

Very often this sort of knowledge is the way to understanding. I wish I could do the same for the brothers in enmity on the left and right of the Rhine.

Naturally nothing like this can be attempted without inviting the kicks of both sides.

Would the cure be successful? The possibility of defeat in a good cause has never alarmed me.

But, my public will object, why raise the Jewish problem today of all days and in Germany of all places?

Pardon me, I raised it long ago, as anybody knows who is acquainted with the literature.

I did not speak about it only since the revolution; I have been officially campaigning for criticism of subjective psychological premises as a necessary reform in psychology ever
since 1913.

This has nothing to do with the form of the German state.

If I am to be exploited for political ends, there's nothing I can do to stop it.

Or can anyone stop anything he pleases in Germany? It is rather late in the day for my critical attitude to attract attention only now, and it is, alas, characteristic that it should be construed in such a way as to suggest that Nazism alone has lent wings to my criticism.

It is, I frankly admit, a highly unfortunate and disconcerting coincidence that my scientific programme should, without any assistance of mine and against my express wish, have been lined up with a political manifesto.

But an event of this kind, although regrettable in itself, often has the consequence of ventilating problems which would otherwise be sedulously avoided. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Pages 535-544

Friday, October 13, 2017

Carl Jung: CW 10 "Civilization in Transition" - Quotations





Our cerebral consciousness is like an actor who has forgotten that he is playing a role. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 332

And just as the material of the body that is ready for life has need of the psyche in order to be capable of life, so the psyche presupposes the living body in order that its images may live. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 618

For the Chinese, "spirit" does not signify order, meaning, and everything that is good: on the contrary, it is a fiery and sometimes dangerous power. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 939

It is a fact that cannot be denied the wickedness of others becomes our own wickedness because it kindles something evil in our own hearts. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 408

In the realm of consciousness we are our own masters; we seem to be the "factors" themselves. But if we step through the door of the shadow we discover with terror that we are the objects of unseen factors, ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 49

If only people could realize what an enrichment it is to find one's own guilt, what a sense of honour and spiritual dignity! ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 416

The world is still full of betes noires and scapegoats, just as it formerly teemed with witches and werewolves. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 130

The wise man learns only from his own guilt. He will ask himself: Who am I that all this should happen to me? To find the answer to this fateful question he will look into his own heart. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 152

The danger that faces us today is that the whole of reality will be replaced by words. This accounts for that terrible lack of instinct in modern man, particularly the city-dweller. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 882

We never appreciate how dependent we are on lucky ideas—until we find to our distress that they will not come. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 305

The mere act of enlightenment may have destroyed the spirits of nature, but not the psychic factors that correspond to them, such as suggestibility, lack of criticism, fearfulness, propensity to superstition and prejudice—in short, all those qualities which make possession possible. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 431

All human control comes to an end when the individual is caught in a mass movement. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 395

In our most private and most subjective lives we are not only the passive witnesses of our age, and its sufferers, but also its makers. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 315

Words like "Society" and "State" are so concretized that they are almost personified. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 554

It is not the will of individuals that moulds the destinies of nations, but supra-personal factors, the spirit and the earth, which work in mysterious ways and in unfathomable darkness. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 921

But it cannot be denied that in the course of the last two centuries Christianity, no less than Confucianism in China and Buddhism in India, has largely forfeited its educative activity. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 326

Most men are erotically blinded—they commit the unpardonable mistake of confusing Eros with sex. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 255

Resistance to the organized mass can be effected only by the man who is as well organized in his individuality as the mass itself. I fully realize that this proposition must sound well-nigh unintelligible to the man of today. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 43.

People go on blithely organizing and believing in the sovereign remedy of mass action, without the least consciousness of the fact that the most powerful organizations can be maintained only by the greatest ruthlessness of their leaders and the cheapest of slogans. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 40.

Instinct is anything but a blind and indefinite impulse, since it proves to be attuned and adapted to a definite external situation. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 49.

Just as the chaotic movements of the crowd, all ending in mutual frustration, are impelled in a definite direction by a dictatorial will, so the individual in his dissociated state needs a directing and ordering principle. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Pages 43-44.

The individual who is not anchored in God can offer no resistance on his own resources to the physical and moral blandishments of the world. For this he needs the evidence of inner, transcendent experience which alone can protect him from the otherwise inevitable submersion in the mass. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 258.

Just as man, as a social being, cannot in the long run exist without a tie to the community, so the individual will never find the real justification for his existence and his own spiritual and moral autonomy anywhere except in an extramundane principle capable of relativizing the overpowering influence of external factors. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 258.

Even domestic animals, to whom we erroneously deny a conscience, have complexes and moral reactions. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 446.

Archaic man believes it to be the sun, and civilized man believes it to be the eye—so far, at any rate, as he reflects at all and does not suffer from the disease of the poets. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 135

Great innovations never come from above; they come invariably from below, just as trees never grow from the sky downward, but upward from the earth. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 177

And it is just the people from the obscurer levels who follow the unconscious drive of the psyche; it is the much-derided, silent folk of the land, who are less infected with academic prejudices than the shining celebrities are wont to be. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 177

The primitives I observed in East Africa took it for granted that "big" dreams are dreamed only by "big" men - medicine-men, magicians, chiefs, etc. This may be true on a primitive level. But with us these dreams are dreamed also by simple people, more particularly when they have got themselves, mentally or spiritually, in a fix. ~Carl Jung. CW 10, Page 324.

`Even if the whole world were to fall to pieces, the unity of the psyche would never be shattered. And the wider and more numerous the fissures on the surface, the more the unity is strengthened in the depths. ~Carl Jung; CW 10, Para 310.

The danger that faces us today is that the whole of reality will be replaced by words. This accounts for that terrible lack of instinct in modern man, particularly the city-dweller. He lacks all contact with life and the breath of nature. He knows a rabbit or a cow only from the illustrated paper, the dictionary, or the movies, and thinks he knows what it is really like-and is then amazed that cowsheds "smell," because the dictionary didn't say so. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 882.

The struggle between light and darkness has broken out everywhere. The rift runs through the whole globe, and set the fire that is smoldering and glowing Germany ablaze wherever we look. The conflagration that broke out in Germany was the outcome of psychic conditions that are universal. Carl Jung, CW 10, para 485.

To confront a person with his shadow is to show him his own light. Once one has experienced a few times what it is like to stand judgingly between the opposites, one begins to understand what is meant by the self. Anyone who perceives his shadow and his light simultaneously sees himself from two sides and thus gets in the middle. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 872.

. . . the spirit is the life of the body seen from within, and the body the outward manifestation of the life of the spirit - the two being really one. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 195.

In some way or other we are part of a single, all-embracing psyche, a single “greatest man." ~Carl Jung, CW 10: Page 175.

The man who has attained consciousness of the present is solitary. The "modern" man has at all times been so, for every step towards fuller consciousness removes him further from his original, purely animal participation mystique with the herd, from submersion in a common unconsciousness. Every step forward means tearing oneself loose from the maternal womb of unconsciousness in which the mass of men dwells. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 150

The art of interpreting dreams cannot be learnt from books. Methods and rules are good only when we can get along without them. Only the man who can do it anyway has real skill, only the man of understanding really understands. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 327

We still attribute to the other fellow all the evil and inferior qualities that we do not like to recognize in ourselves, and therefore have to criticize and attack him, when all that has happened is that an inferior “soul” has emigrated from one person to another. The world is still full of betes noires and scapegoats, just as it formerly teemed with witches and werewolves. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 130.

The marked tendency of the Western democracies to internal dissension is the very thing that could lead them to a more hopeful path. ~Carl Jung; CW 10; Page 225.

Any large company composed of wholly admirable persons has the morality and intelligence of an unwieldy, stupid and violent animal. ~Carl Jung; CW 10; Page 228

Archetypes are like riverbeds which dry up when the water deserts them, but which it can find again at any time. An archetype is like an old watercourse along which the water of life has flowed for centuries, digging a deep channel for itself. The longer it has flowed in this channel the more likely it is that sooner or later the water will return to its old bed. ~Carl Jung: CW 10, Page 395.

The heaping together of paintings by Old Masters in museums is a catastrophe; likewise, a collection of a hundred Great Brains makes one big fathead. ~Carl Jung; CW 10, Para 944.

The development of modern art with its seemingly nihilistic trend towards disintegration must be understood as the symptom and symbol of a mood of universal destruction and renewal that has set its mark on our age. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Pages 303-304.

It is possible to have an attitude to the external conditions of life only when there is a point of reference outside them. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, par. 506.

Even domestic animals, to whom we erroneously deny a conscience, have complexes and moral reactions. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 446.

Until now it has not truly and fundamentally been noted that our time, despite the prevalence of irreligiosity, is so to speak congenitally charged with the attainment of the Christian epoch, namely with the supremacy of the word, that Logos which the central figure of Christian faith represents. The word has literally become our God and has remained so" ~Carl Jung, CW 10, §554.

I tried to give a general view of the structure of the unconscious. Its contents, the archetypes, are as it were the hidden foundations of the conscious mind, or, to use another comparison, the roots which the psyche has sunk not only in the earth in the narrower sense but in the world in general. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 31.

Archetypes are systems of readiness for action, and at the same time images and emotions. They are inherited with the brain structure—indeed, they are its psychic aspect. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 31.

We shall have to reckon with quite unusual difficulties in dealing with it, and the first of these is that the archetype and its function must be understood far more as a part of man's prehistoric, irrational psychology than as a rationally conceivable system. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 31.

Phylogenetically as well as ontogenetically we have grown up out of the dark confines of the earth; hence the factors that affected us most closely became archetypes, and it is these primordial images which influence us most directly, and therefore seem to be the most powerful. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 32.

I would like to suggest that every psychic reaction which is out of proportion to its precipitating cause should be investigated as to whether it may be conditioned at the same time by an archetype. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 32.

We should make the archetype responsible only for a definite, minimal, normal degree of fear; any pronounced increase, felt to be abnormal, must have special causes. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 33.

People measure their self-knowledge by what the average person in their social environment knows of himself, but not by the real psychic facts which are for the most part hidden from them. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Par. 491

The upheaval of our world and the upheaval of our consciousness are one and the same. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 177.

Thinking is difficult, therefore let the herd pronounce judgment! ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 344, Para 652.

The dream is a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses of the soul, opening into that cosmic night which was psyche long before there was any ego consciousness, and which will remain psyche no matter how far our ego-consciousness extends. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Pages 144-145

Religion means dependence on and submission to the irrational facts of experience. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 505.

Where is a height without depth, and how can there be light that throws no shadow? There is no good that is not opposed by evil. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 271.

Think of nearly two thousand years of Christian Idealism followed, not by the return of the Messiah and the heavenly millennium, but by the World War among Christian nations with its barbed wire and poison gas. What a catastrophe in heaven and on earth! ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Pages 76-77

When you walk with naked feet, how can you ever forget the earth? ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page, Para 988

Therefore, never ask what a man does, but how he does it. If he does it from love or in the spirit of love, then he serves a god; and whatever he may do is not ours to judge, for it is ennobled. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 234

Love is a force of destiny whose power reaches from heaven to hell. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 198.

A man is ill, but the illness is nature’s attempt to heal him. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 361

From the illness itself we can learn so much for our recovery, and what the neurotic flings away as absolutely worthless contains the true gold we should never have found elsewhere. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 361

It is the privilege and the task of maturer people, who have passed the meridian of life, to create culture. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 272

Consciousness is a precondition of being. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 528

Knowledge of God is a transcendental problem. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 565

The attainment of consciousness was the most precious fruit of the tree of knowledge, the magical weapon which gave man victory over the earth, and which we hope will give him a still greater victory over himself. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 289

The fact that individual consciousness means separation and opposition is something that man has experienced countless times in his long history. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 290

Eternal truths are never true at any given moment in history. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 1004

If the individual is not truly regenerated in spirit, society cannot be either, for society is the sum total of individuals in need of redemption. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 536

In our strength we are independent and isolated, are masters of our own fate; in our weakness we are dependent and bound, and become unwilling instruments of fate, for here it is not the individual will that counts but the will of the species. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 261

But, precisely because the truest and most devoted love is also the most beautiful, let no man seek to make it easy. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 232

He is a sorry knight who shrinks from the difficulty of loving his lady. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 232

Love is like God: both give themselves only to their bravest knights. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 232

Every true and deep love is a sacrifice. The lover sacrifices all other possibilities, or rather, the illusion that such possibilities exist. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 231

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

A psychology of neurosis that sees only the negative elements empties out the baby with the bath-water, since it neglects the positive meaning and value of these “infantile”—i.e., creative—fantasies. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 355

Just as there is a relationship of mind to body, so there is a relationship of body to earth. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 19

A civilization does not decay, it regenerates. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 299

Was it not Meister Eckhart who said: “For this reason God is willing to bear the brunt of sins and often winks at them, mostly sending them to people for whom he has prepared some high destiny. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 440

Without guilt, unfortunately, there can be no psychic maturation and no widening of the spiritual horizon. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 440

I know people who feel that the strange power in their own psyche is something divine, for the very simple reason that it has given them an understanding of what is meant by religious experience. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 312.

They [Religions] express the whole range of the psychic problem in mighty images; they are the avowal and recognition of the soul, and at the same time the revelation of the soul’s nature. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 367

Mere continuation can be left to the animals, but inauguration is the prerogative of man, the one thing he can boast of that lifts him above the beasts. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 268

Unlived life is a destructive, irresistible force that works softly but inexorably. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 252

Here each of us must ask: Have I any religious experience and immediate relation to God, and hence that certainty which will keep me, as an individual, from dissolving in the crowd? Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 564

Religion, as the careful observation and taking account of certain invisible and uncontrollable factors, is an instinctive attitude peculiar to man, and its manifestations can be followed all through human history. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 512

A creed coincides with the established Church or, at any rate, forms a public institution whose members include not only true believers but vast numbers of people who can only be described as “indifferent” in matters of religion and who belong to it simply by force of habit. Here the difference between a creed and a religion becomes palpable. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 508.

Love has more than one thing in common with religious faith. It demands unconditional trust and expects absolute surrender. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 112

Just as nobody but the believer who surrenders himself wholly to God can partake of divine grace, so love reveals its highest mysteries and its wonder only to those who are capable of unqualified devotion and loyalty of feeling. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 112

The very fact that a man enters into a marriage on trial means that he is making a reservation; he wants to be sure of not burning his fingers, to risk nothing. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 112

Love is not cheap—let us therefore beware of cheapening it! ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 112

All our bad qualities, our egotism, our cowardice, our worldly wisdom, our cupidity—all these would persuade us not to take love seriously. But love will reward us only when we do. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 112

I must even regard it as a misfortune that nowadays the sexual question is spoken of as something distinct from love. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 112

The two questions should not be separated, for when there is a sexual problem it can be solved only by love. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 112

It is one of the most difficult and thankless of tasks to say anything of importance about the civilized man of today ... for the speaker finds himself caught in the same presuppositions and is blinded by the same prejudices as those whom he wishes to view from a superior standpoint. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 104

He alone is modern who is fully conscious of the present. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 149

All human control comes to an end when the individual is caught in a mass movement. Then the archetypes begin to function, as happens also in the lives of individuals when they are confronted with situations that cannot be dealt with in any of the familiar ways. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 395

Resistance to the organized mass can be effected only by the man who is as well organized in his individuality as the mass itself. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 540

It is quite natural that with the triumph of the Goddess of Reason a general neuroticizing of modern man should set in, a dissociation of personality analogous to the splitting of the world today by the Iron Curtain. This boundary line bristling with barbed wire runs through the psyche of modern man, no matter on which side he lives. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 544

If only a world-wide consciousness could arise that all division and all fission are due to the splitting of opposites in the psyche, then we should know where to begin. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 575

The heaping together of paintings by Old Masters in museums is a catastrophe; likewise, a collection of a hundred Great Brains makes one big fathead. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 944

A million zeros joined together do not, unfortunately, add up to one. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 535

The principal and indeed the only thing that is wrong with the world is man. ~ Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 441

Let man but accumulate sufficient engines of destruction and the devil within him will soon be unable to resist putting them to their fated use. It is well known that fire-arms go off of themselves if only enough of them are together. ~Carl Jung, CW 10,

It is a fact that cannot be denied the wickedness of others becomes our own wickedness because it kindles something evil in our own hearts. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 408

All psychological facts which cannot be verified with the help of scientific apparatus and exact measurement are assertions and opinions, and, as such, are psychic realities. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para, 839

Dreams are impartial, spontaneous products of the unconscious psyche, outside the control of the will. They are pure nature; they show us the unvarnished, natural truth, and are therefore fitted, as nothing else is, to give us back an attitude that accords with our basic human nature when our consciousness has strayed too far from its foundations and run into an impasse. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 317

The art of interpreting dreams cannot be learnt from books. Methods and rules are good only when we can get along without them. Only the man who can do it anyway has real skill, only the man of understanding really understands. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 325

One should never forget that one dreams in the first place, and almost to the exclusion of all else, of oneself. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 321

It is amazing how people get caught in words. They imagine that the name postulates the thing—just as if we were doing the devil a serious wrong when we call him a neurosis! ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para

The personality of the patient demands all the resources of the doctor's personality and not technical tricks. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 338

When the ego has been made a "seat of anxiety," someone is running away from himself and will not admit it. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 360

The elementary fact that a person always thinks another's psychology is identical with his own effectively prevents a correct understanding of feminine psychology. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 240

Women are increasingly aware that love alone can give them full stature, just as men are beginning to divine that only the spirit can give life its highest meaning. Both seek a psychic relationship, because love needs the spirit, and the spirit love, for its completion. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 269

The love of woman is not sentiment, as is a man's, but a will that is at times terrifyingly unsentimental and can even force her to self-sacrifice. A man who is loved in this way cannot escape his inferior side, for he can only respond to the reality of her love with his own reality. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 261

In the eyes of the ordinary man, love in its true sense coincides with the institution of marriage, and outside marriage there is only adultery or "platonic" friendship. For woman, marriage is not an institution at all but a human love-relationship. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 255

Relationship is possible only if there is a psychic distance between people, in the same way that morality presupposes freedom. For this reason the unconscious tendency of woman aims at loosening the marriage structure, but not at the destruction of marriage and the family. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 273

Seldom or never does a marriage develop into an individual relationship smoothly and without crises. There is no birth of consciousness without pain. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 331

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

Sexuality dished out as sexuality is brutish; but sexuality as an expression of love is hallowed. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 234

in his long history. And just as for the individual a time of dissociation is a time for sickness, so it is in the life of nations. We can hardly deny that ours is a time of dissociation and sickness. The political and social conditions, the fragmentation of religion and philosophy, the contending schools of modern art and modern psychology all have one meaning in this respect. And does anyone who is endowed with the slightest sense of responsibility feel any satisfaction at this turn of events? If we are honest, we must admit that no one feels quite comfortable in the present-day world; indeed, it becomes increasingly uncomfortable. The word "crisis," so often heard, is a medical expression which always tells us that the sickness has reached a dangerous climax. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 290

So, too, man will be forced to develop his feminine side, to open his eyes to the psyche and to Eros, It is a task he can' not avoid. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 125.

It is, unfortunately, only too clear that if the individual is not truly regenerated in spirit, society cannot be either, for society is the sum total of individuals in need of redemption. I can therefore see it only as a delusion when the Churches try—as apparently they do—to rope the individual into some social organization and reduce him to a condition of diminished responsibility, instead of raising him out of the torpid, mindless mass and making clear to him that he is the one important factor and that the salvation of the world consists in the salvation of the individual soul. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 536

Magic is the science of the jungle. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 63.

Anything that comes upon me with this intensity I experience as numinous, no matter whether I call it divine or devilish or just "fate." ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 871

The unconscious is the only available source of religious experience. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 565

The carrier of this consciousness is the individual, who does not produce the psyche of his own volition but is, on the contrary, preformed by it and nourished by the gradual awakening of consciousness during childhood. If therefore the psyche is of overriding empirical importance, so also is the individual, who is the only immediate manifestation of the psyche. Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 528

All psychological facts which cannot be verified with the help of scientific apparatus and exact measurement are assertions and opinions, and, as such, are psychic realities. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para, 839

Since the gods are without doubt personifications of psychic forces, to assert their metaphysical existence is as much an intellectual presumption as the opinion that they could ever be invented. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 387

The man who has attained consciousness of the present is solitary. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 150

None of us stands outside humanity's black collective shadow. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 297

We should not try to "get rid" of a neurosis, but rather to experience what it means, what it has to teach, what its purpose is. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 179

A neurosis is truly removed only when it has removed the false attitude of the ego. We do not cure it—it cures us. A man is ill, but the illness is nature's attempt to heal him, and what the neurotic flings away as absolutely worthless contains the true gold we should never have found elsewhere. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 361

What I am trying to make clear is the remarkable fact that the will cannot transgress the bounds of the psychic sphere: it cannot coerce the instinct, nor has it power over the spirit, in so far as we understand by this something more than the intellect. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Paras 371-381.

The art of interpreting dreams cannot be learnt from books. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 152.

No one who does not know himself can know others. And in each of us there is another whom we do not know. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 152.

What the Christian sacrament of baptism purports to do is a landmark of the utmost significance in the psychic development of mankind. Baptism endows the individual with a living soul. I do not mean that the baptismal rite in itself does this, by a unique and magical act. I mean that the idea of baptism lifts man out of his archaic identification with the world and transforms him into a being who stands above it. The fact that mankind has risen to the level of this idea is baptism in the deepest sense, for it means the birth of the spiritual man who transcends nature. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 136

But God himself cannot flourish if man's soul is starved. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 275

It is not ethical principles, however lofty, or creeds, however orthodox, that lay the foundations for the freedom and autonomy of the individual, but simply and solely the empirical awareness, the incontrovertible experience of an intensely personal, reciprocal relationship between man and an extramundane authority which acts as a counterpoise to the "world" and its "reason." ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 509

The tremendous compulsion towards goodness and the immense moral force of Christianity are not merely an argument in the latter's favour, they are also a proof of the strength of its suppressed and repressed counterpart —the antichristian, barbarian element. The existence within us of something that can turn against us, that can become a serious matter for us, I regard not merely as a dangerous peculiarity, but as a valuable and congenial asset as well. It is a still untouched fortune, an uncorrupted treasure, a sign of youthfulness, an earnest of rebirth. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 20

Thus, the sickness of dissociation in our world is at the same time a process of recovery, or rather, the climax of a period of pregnancy which heralds the throes of birth. A time of dissociation such as prevailed during the Roman Empire is simultaneously an age of rebirth. Not without reason do we date our era from the age of Augustus, for that epoch saw the birth of the symbolical figure of Christ, who was invoked by the early Christians as the Fish, the Ruler of the aeon of Pisces which had just begun. He became the ruling spirit of the next two thousand years. Like the teacher of wisdom in Babylonian legend, Cannes, he rose up from the sea, from the primeval darkness, and brought a world-period to an end. It is true that he said, "I am come not to bring peace but a sword." But that which brings division ultimately creates union. Therefore his teaching was one of all-uniting love. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 293

Belief is no adequate substitute for inner experience, and where this is absent even a strong faith which came miraculously as a gift of grace may depart equally miraculously. People call faith the true religious experience, but they do not stop to consider that actually it is a secondary phenomenon arising from the fact that something happened to us in the first place which instilled pistis into us—that is, trust and loyalty. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 521

Religion means dependence on and submission to the irrational facts of experience. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 505

For thousands of years the mind of man has worried about the sick soul, perhaps even earlier than it did about the sick body. The propitiation of gods, the perils of the soul and its salvation, these are not yesterday's problems. Religions are psychotherapeutic systems in the truest sense of the word, and on the grandest scale. They express the whole range of the psychic problem in mighty images; they are the avowal and recognition of the soul, and at the same time the revelatio of the soul's nature. From this universal foundation no human soul is cut off; only the individual consciousness that has lost its connection with the psychic totality remains caught in the illusion that the soul is a small circumscribed area, a fit subject for "scientific" theorizing. The loss of this great relationship is the prime evil of neurosis. ~Carl Jung, CW 10 Para 367

The reality of good and evil consists in things and situations that just happen to you, that are too big for you, where you are always facing death. Anything that comes upon me with this intensity I experience as numinous, no matter whether I call it divine or devilish or just "fate." ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 871

Grounds for an unusually intense fear of death are nowadays not far to seek: they are obvious enough, the more so as all life that is senselessly wasted and misdirected means death too. This may account for the unnatural intensification of the fear of death in our time, when life has lost its deeper meaning for so many people, forcing them to exchange the life-preserving rhythm of the aeons for the dread ticking of the clock. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 696

We distinctly resent the idea of invisible and arbitrary forces, for it is not so long ago that we made our escape from that frightening world of dreams and superstitions, and constructed for ourselves a picture of the cosmos worthy of our rational consciousness—that latest and greatest achievement of man. We are now surrounded by a world that is obedient to rational laws. It is true that we do not know the causes of everything, but in time they will be discovered, and these discoveries will accord with our reasoned expectations. There are, to be sure, also chance occurrences, but they are merely accidental, and we do not doubt that they have a causality of their own. Chance happenings are repellent to the mind that loves order. They disturb the regular, predictable course of events in the most absurd and irritating way. We resent them as much as we resent invisible, arbitrary forces, for they remind us too much of Satanic imps or of the caprice of a deus ex machina. They are the worst enemies of our careful calculations and a continual threat to all our undertakings. Being admittedly contrary to reason, they deserve all our abuse, and yet we should not fail to give them their due. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 113

"The stars of thine own fate lie in thy breast," says Seni to Wallenstein—a dictum that should satisfy all astrologers if we knew even a little about the secrets of the heart. But for this, so far, men have had little understanding. Nor would I dare to assert that things are any better today. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 9

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

It is dangerous to avow spiritual poverty, for the poor man has desires, and whoever has desires calls down some fatality on himself. A Swiss proverb puts it drastically: "Behind every rich man stands a devil, and behind every poor man two." ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 28

In our strength we are independent and isolated, and are masters of our own fate; in our weakness we are dependent and bound, and become unwilling instruments of fate, for here it is not the individual will that counts but the will of the species. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para


Great innovations never come from above; they come invariably from below, just as trees never grow from the sky downward, but upward from the earth. The upheaval of our world and the upheaval of our consciousness are one and the same. Everything has become relative and therefore doubtful. And while man, hesitant and questioning, contemplates a world that is distracted with treaties of peace and pacts of friendship, with democracy and dictatorship, capitalism and Bolshevism, his spirit yearns for an answer that will allay the turmoil of doubt and uncertainty. And it is just the people from the obscurer levels who follow the unconscious drive of the psyche; it is the much-derided, silent folk of the land, who are less infected with academic prejudices than the shining celebrities are wont to be. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 177

The "present" is a thin surface stratum that is laid down in the great centres of civilization. If it is very thin, as in Tsarist Russia, it has no meaning, as events have shown. But once it has attained a certain strength, we can speak of civilization and progress, and then problems arise that are characteristic of an epoch. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 239

Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood? ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 266

The time is as great as one thinks it, and man grows to the stature of the time. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 945

The man of the present must work for the future and leave others to conserve the past. He is therefore not only a builder but also a destroyer. He and his world have both become questionable and ambiguous. The ways that the past shows him and the answers it gives to his questions are insufficient for the needs of the present. All the old, comfortable ways are blocked, new paths have been opened up, and new dangers have arisen of which the past knew nothing. It is proverbial that one never learns anything from history, and in regard to present-day problems it usually teaches us nothing. The new path has to be made through untrodden regions, without presuppositions and often, unfortunately, without piety. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 239

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

Western man has no need of more superiority over nature, whether outside or inside. He has both in almost devilish perfection. What he lacks is conscious recognition of his inferiority to the nature around and within him. He must learn that he may not do exactly as he wills. If he does not learn this, his own nature will destroy him. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 870

If you want to learn the greatest lesson India can teach you, wrap yourself in the cloak of your moral superiority, go to the Black Pagoda of Konarak, sit down in the shadow of the mighty ruin that is still covered with the most amazing collection of obscenities, read Murray's cunning old Handbook^ for India, which tells you how to be properly shocked by this lamentable state of affairs, and how you should go into the temples in the evening, because in the lamplight they look if possible "more (and how beautifully!) wicked"; and then analyse carefully and with the utmost honesty all your reactions, feelings, and thoughts. It will take you quite a while, but in the end, if you have done good work, you will have learned something about yourself, and about the white man in general, which you have probably never heard from anyone else. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 1013

How totally different did the world appear to medieval man! For him the earth was eternally fixed and at rest in the centre of the universe, circled by a sun that solicitously bestowed its warmth. Men were all children of God under the loving care of the Most High, who prepared them for eternal blessedness; and all knew exactly what they should do and how they should conduct themselves in order to rise from a corruptible world to an incorruptible and joyous existence. Such a life no longer seems real to us, even in our dreams. Science has long ago torn this lovely veil to shreds. That age lies as far behind as childhood, when one's own father was unquestionably the handsomest and strongest man on earth. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 162

Is a thing beautiful because I attribute beauty to it? Or is it the objective beauty of the thing that compels me to acknowledge it? As we know, great minds have wrestled with the problem whether it is the glorious sun that illuminates the world, or the sun-like human eye. Archaic man believes it to be the sun, and civilized man believes it to be the eye—so far, at any rate, as he reflects at all and does not suffer from the disease of the poets. He must de-psychize nature in order to dominate her; and in order to see his world objectively he must take back all his archaic projections. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 135

For the Chinese, "spirit" does not signify order, meaning, and everything that is good on the contrary, it is a fiery and sometimes dangerous power. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 939

I am convinced that a truly scientific attitude in psychology must lead to the conclusion that the dynamic processes o£ the psyche cannot be reduced to this or that concrete instinct—we should merely find ourselves back at the stage of the phlogiston theory. We shall be obliged to take the instincts as constituent parts of the psyche, and then abstract our principle of explanation from their mutual relationship. I have therefore pointed out that we would do well to posit a hypothetical quantity, an "energy," as a psychological explanatory principle, and to call it "libido" in the classical sense of the word, without harbouring any prejudice with regard to its substantiality. With the help of such a quantity, the psychodynamic processes could be explained in an unobjectionable manner, without that unavoidable distortion which a concrete ground of explanation necessarily entails. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 7

The man who promises everything is sure to fulfil nothing, and everyone who promises too much is in danger of using evil means in order to carry out his promises, and is already on the road to perdition. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para, 413

The judgment of others is not in itself a standard of value, it may be no more than a useful piece of information. The individual has a right, indeed it is his duty, to set up and apply his own standard of value. In the last resort ethics are the concern of the individual. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 912

I am neither spurred on by excessive optimism nor in love with high ideals, but am merely concerned with the fate of the individual human being—that infinitesimal unit on whom a world depends, and in whom, if we read the meaning of the Christian message aright, even God seeks his goal. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 588


We say that it is egoistic or "morbid" to be preoccupied with oneself; one's own company is the worst, "it makes you melancholy"—such are the glowing testimonials accorded to our human make-up. They are evidently deeply ingrained in our Western minds. Whoever thinks in this way has obviously never asked himself what possible pleasure other people could find in the company of such a miserable coward. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 323

Nothing in us ever remains quite uncontradicted, and consciousness can take up no position which will not call up, somewhere in the dark corners of the psyche, a negation or a compensatory effect, approval or resentment. The "other" in us always seems alien and unacceptable; but if we let ourselves be aggrieved the feeling sinks in, and we are the richer for this little bit of self-knowledge ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 918

Only a fool is interested in other people's guilt, since he cannot alter it. The wise man learns only from his own guilt. He will ask himself: Who am I that all this should happen to me? To find the answer to this fateful question he will look into his own heart. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 152

We still attribute to the other fellow all the evil and inferior qualities that we do not like to recognize in ourselves, and therefore have to criticize and attack him, when all that has happened is that an inferior "soul" has emigrated from one person to another. The world is still full of betes noires and scapegoats, just as it formerly teemed with witches and werewolves. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 130

It is just the beam in one's own eye that enables one to detect the mote in one's brother's eye. The beam in one's own eye does not prove that one's brother has no mote in his. But the impairment of one's own vision might easily give rise to a general theory that all motes are beams. The recognition and taking to heart of the subjective determination of knowledge in general, and of psychological knowledge in particular, are basic conditions for the scientific and impartial evaluation of a psyche different from that of the observing subject. These conditions are fulfilled only when the observer is sufficiently informed about the nature and scope of his own personality. He can, however, be sufficiently informed only when he has in large measure freed himself from the levelling influence of collective opinions and thereby arrived at a clear conception of his own individuality. ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 10

If only people could realize what an enrichment it is to find one's own guilt, what a sense of honour and spiritual dignity! ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 416

To confront a person with his shadow is to show him his own light. Once one has experienced a few times what it is like to stand judgingly between the opposites, one begins to understand what is meant by the self. Anyone who perceives his shadow and his light simultaneously sees himself from two sides and thus gets in the middle. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 872

Only an exceedingly naive and unconscious person could imagine that he is in a position to avoid sin. Psychology can no longer afford childish illusions of this kind; it must ensue the truth and declare that unconsciousness is not only no excuse but is actually one of the most heinous sins. Human law may exempt it from punishment, but Nature avenges herself more mercilessly, for it is nothing to her whether a man is conscious of his sin or not. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 676

Christ the ideal took upon himself the sins of the world. But if the ideal is wholly outside then the sins of the individual are also outside, and consequently he is more of a fragment than ever, since superficial misunderstanding conveniently enables him, quite literally, to "cast his sins upon Christ" and thus to evade his deepest responsibilities—which is contrary to the spirit of Christianity. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 9

We psychologists have learned, through long and painful experience, that you deprive a man of his best resource when you help him to get rid of his complexes. You can only help him to become sufficiently aware of them and to start a conscious conflict within himself. In this way the complex becomes a focus of life. Anything that disappears from your psychological inventory is apt to turn up in the guise of a hostile neighbour, who will inevitably arouse your anger and make you aggressive. It is surely better to know that your worst enemy is right there in your own heart. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 456

The people who fancy they are sure of themselves are the ones who are truly unsure. Our whole life is unsure, so a feeling of unsureness is much nearer to the truth than the illusion and bluff of sureness. In the long run it is the better adapted man who triumphs, not the wrongly self-confident, who is at the mercy of dangers from without and within. ~Carl Jung, CW 10. Para 18

It seems to be very hard for people to live with riddles or to let them live, although one would think that life is so full of riddles as it is that a few more things we cannot answer would make no difference. But perhaps it is just this that is so unendurable, that there are irrational things in our own psyche which upset the conscious mind in its illusory certainties by confronting it with the riddle of its existence. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 307

The only thing that cannot be improved upon is morality, for every alteration of traditional morality is by definition an immorality. This bon mot has an edge to it, against which many an innovator has barked his shins. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 114

Nothing is so jealous as a truth. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 190

No doubt it is a great nuisance that mankind is not uniform but compounded of individuals whose psychic structure spreads them over a span of at least ten thousand years. Hence there is absolutely no truth that does not spell salvation to one person and damnation to another. All universalisms get stuck in this terrible dilemma, ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 36

For a moral man the ethical problem is a passionate question which has its roots in the deepest instinctual processes as well as in his most idealistic aspirations. The problem for him is devastatingly real. It is not surprising, therefore, that the answer likewise springs from the depths of his nature. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 289

Why do we always forget that there is nothing majestic or beautiful in the wide domain of human culture that did not grow originally from a lucky idea? What would become of mankind if nobody had lucky ideas anymore? It would be far truer to say that our consciousness is a sack which has nothing in it except what chances to fall into it. We never appreciate how dependent we are on lucky ideas—until we find to our distress that they will not come. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 305

The true genius nearly always intrudes and disturbs. He speaks to a temporal world out of a world eternal. He says the wrong things at the right time. Eternal truths are never true at any given moment in history. The process of transformation has to make a halt in order to digest and assimilate the utterly impractical things that the genius has produced from the storehouse of eternity. Yet the genius is the healer of his time, because anything he reveals of eternal truth is healing. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 1004

Nature, as we know, is not so lavish with her boons that she joins to a high intelligence the gifts of the heart also.As a rule, where one is present the other is missing, and where one capacity is present in perfection it is generally at the cost of all the others. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 569

Has it ever—except in the most benighted periods of history—been observed that a scientific truth needed to be elevated to the rank of a dogma? Truth can stand on its own feet, only shaky opinions require the support of dogmatization. Fanaticism is ever the brother of doubt, ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 335

The danger that faces us today is that the whole of reality will be replaced by words. This accounts for that terrible lack of instinct in modern man, particularly the city-dweller. He lacks all contact with life and the breath of nature. He knows a rabbit or a cow only from the illustrated paper, the dictionary, or the movies, and thinks he knows what it is really like—and is then amazed that cowsheds "smell," because the dictionary didn't say so. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 882

One o£ the most fundamental characteristics of every civilization is the quality of permanence, something created by man and wrested from the meaningless flux of nature. Every house, every bridge, every street, is a witness to the value of duration in the midst of change. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 923

He who is rooted in the soil endures. Alienation from the unconscious and from its historical conditions spells rootlessness. That is the danger that lies in wait for the conqueror of foreign lands, and for every individual who, through one-sided allegiance to any kind of -ism, loses touch with the dark, maternal, earthy ground of his being. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 103


No one can make history who is not willing to risk everything for it, to carry the experiment with his own life through to the bitter end, and to declare that his life is not a continuation of the past, but a new beginning. Mere continuation can be left to the animals, but inauguration is the prerogative of man, the one thing he can boast of that lifts him above the beasts. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 268

No man can begin with the present; he must slowly grow into it, for there would be no present but for the past. A young person has not yet acquired a past, therefore he has no present either. He does not create culture, he merely exists. It is the privilege and the task of maturer people, who have passed the meridian of life, to create culture. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 272

It is obvious that in handling "big" dreams intuitive guesswork will lead nowhere. Wide knowledge is required, such as a specialist ought to possess. But no dream can be interpreted with knowledge alone. This knowledge, furthermore, should not be dead material that has been memorized; it must possess a living quality, and be infused with the experience of the person who uses it. Of what use is philosophical knowledge in the head, if one is not also a philosopher at heart? ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 324

Most men are erotically blinded—they commit the unpardonable mistake of confusing Eros with sex. A man thinks he possesses a woman if he has her sexually. He never possesses her less, for to a woman the Eros-relationship is the real and decisive one. For her, marriage is a relationship with sex thrown in as an accompaniment. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 255

Traditionally, man is regarded as the marriage breaker. This legend comes from times long past, when men still had leisure to pursue all sorts of pastimes. But today life makes so many demands on men that the noble hidalgo, Don Juan, is to be seen nowhere save in the theatre. More than ever man loves his comfort, for ours is an age of neurasthenia, impotence, and easy chairs. There is no energy left for window-climbing and duels. If anything is to happen in the way of adultery it must not be too difficult. In no respect must it cost too much, hence the adventure can only be of a transitory kind. The man of today is thoroughly scared of jeopardizing marriage as an institution. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 248

Woman nowadays feels that there is no real security in marriage, for what does her husband's faithfulness mean when she knows that his feelings and thoughts are running after others and that he is merely too calculating or too cowardly to follow them? What does her own faithfulness mean when she knows that she is simply using it to exploit her legal right of possession, and warping her own soul? She has intimations of a higher fidelity to the spirit and to a love beyond human weakness and imperfection. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 270

Do our legislators really know what "adultery" is? Is their definition of it the final embodiment of the truth? From the psychological standpoint, the only one that counts for a woman, it is a wretched piece of bungling, like everything else contrived by men for the purpose of codifying love. For a woman, love has nothing to do with "marital misconduct," "extramarital intercourse," "deception of the husband," or any of the less savoury formulas invented by the erotically blind masculine intellect and echoed by the self-opinionated demon in woman.

Children have an almost uncanny instinct for the teacher's personal shortcomings. They know the false from the true far better than one likes to admit. Therefore the teacher should watch his own psychic condition, so that he can spot the source of the trouble when anything goes wrong with the children entrusted to his care. He himself may easily be the unconscious cause of evil. Naturally we must not be too naive in this matter there are people, doctors as well as teachers, who secretly believe that a person in authority has the right to behave just as he likes, and that it is up to the child to adapt as best he may, because sooner or later he will have to adapt to real life which will treat him no better. Such people are convinced at heart that the only thing that matters is material success, and that the only real and effective moral restraint is the policeman behind the penal code. No doubt we are right to open the eyes and ears of our young people to the wide world, but it is the maddest of delusions to think that this really equips them for the task of living. It is the kind of training that enables a young person to adapt himself outwardly to the world and reality, but no one gives a thought to the necessity of adapting to the self, to the powers of the psyche, which are far mightier than all the Great Powers of the earth. A system of education does indeed exist, but it has its origins partly in antiquity and partly in the early Middle Ages. It styles itself the Christian Church. But it cannot be denied that in the course of the last two centuries Christianity, no less than Confucianism in China and Buddhism in India, has largely forfeited its educative activity. Human iniquity is not to blame for this, but rather a gradual and widespread spiritual change, the first symptom of which was the Reformation. It shattered the authority of the Church as a teacher, and thereafter the authoritarian principle itself began to crumble away. The inevitable consequence was an increase in the importance of the individual, which found expression in the modern ideals of humanity, social welfare, democracy, and equality. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 326

Nobody but the absolute believer in the inviolability of traditional marriage could perpetrate such breaches of good taste, just as only the believer in God can really blaspheme. Whoever doubts marriage in the first place cannot infringe against it; for him the legal definition is invalid because, like St. Paul, he feels himself beyond the law, on the higher plane of love. But because the believers in the law so frequently trespass against their own laws, whether from stupidity, temptation, or mere viciousness, the modern woman begins to wonder whether she too may not belong to the same category. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 265

Secretaries, typists, shop-girls, all are agents of this process, and through a million subterranean channels creeps the influence that is undermining marriage. For the desire of all these women is not to have sexual adventures only the stupid could believe that—but to get married. The possessors of that bliss must be ousted, not as a rule by naked force, but by that silent, obstinate desire which, as we know, has magical effects, like the fixed stare of a snake. This was ever the way of women. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 251

It is no longer a question of a few dozen voluntary or involuntary old maids here and there, but of millions. Our legislation and our social morality give no answer to this question. Or can the Church provide a satisfactory answer? Should we build gigantic nunneries to accommodate all these women? Or should tolerated prostitution be increased? Obviously this is impossible, since we are dealing neither with saints nor sinners but with ordinary women who cannot register their spiritual requirements with the police. They are decent women who want to marry, and if this is not possible, well—the next best thing. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 248

It is a bad sign when doctors begin writing books of advice on how to achieve the "perfect marriage." Healthy people need no doctors. Marriage today has indeed become rather precarious. In America about a quarter of the marriages end in divorce. And the remarkable thing is that this time the scapegoat is not the man but the woman. She is the one who doubts and feels uncertain. It is not surprising that this is so, for in post-war Europe there is such an alarming surplus of unmarried women that it would be inconceivable if there were no reaction from that quarter. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 248

Since the aims of the second half of life are different from those of the first, to linger too long in the youthful attitude produces a division of the will. onsciousness still presses forward in obedience, as it were, to its own inertia, but the unconscious lags behind, because the strength and inner resolve needed for further expansion have been sapped. This disunity with oneself begets discontent, and since one is not conscious of the real state of things one generally projects the reasons for it upon one's partner. A critical atmosphere thus develops, the necessary prelude to conscious realization. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 33i

Human relationship leads into the world of the psyche, into that intermediate realm between sense and spirit, which contains something of both and yet forfeits nothing of its own unique character. Into this territory a man must venture if he wishes to meet woman half way. Circumstances have forced her to acquire a number of masculine traits, so that she shall not remain caught in an antiquated, purely instinctual femininity, lost and alone in the world of men. So, too, man will be forced to develop his feminine side, to open his eyes to the psyche and to Eros. It is a task he cannot avoid, unless he prefers to go trailing after woman in a hopelessly boyish fashion, worshipping from afar but always in danger of being stowed away in her pocket. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 258

The masculinity of the woman and the femininity of the man are inferior, and it is regrettable that the full value of their personalities should be contaminated by something that is less valuable. On the other hand, the shadow belongs to the wholeness of the personality the strong man must somewhere be weak, somewhere the clever man must be stupid, otherwise he is too good to be true and falls back on pose and bluff. Is it not an old truth that woman loves the weaknesses of the strong man more than his strength, and the stupidity of the clever man more than his cleverness? ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 261

The question of relationship borders on a region that for a man is dark and painful. He can face this question only when the woman carries the burden of suffering, that is, when he is the "contained"—in other words, when she can imagine herself having a relationship with another man, and as a consequence suffering disunion within herself. Then it is she who has the painful problem, and he is not obliged to see his own, which is a great relief to him. In this situation he is not unlike a thief who, quite undeservedly, finds himself in the enviable position of having been forestalled by another thief who has been caught by the police. Suddenly he becomes an honourable, impartial onlooker. In any other situation a man always finds the discussion of personal relations painful and boring, just as his wife would find it boring if he examined her on the Critique of Pure Reason. For him, Eros is a shadowland which entangles him in his feminine unconscious, in something "psychic," while for woman Logos is a deadly boring kind of sophistry if she is not actually repelled and frightened by it. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 256

Unconscious assumptions or opinions are the worst enemy of woman; they can even grow into a positively demonic passion that exasperates and disgusts men, and does the woman herself the greatest injury by gradually smothering the charm and meaning of her femininity and driving it into the background. Such a development naturally ends in profound psychological disunion, in short, in a neurosis. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 245

It is a woman's outstanding characteristic that she can do anything for the love of a man. But those women who can achieve something important for the love of a thing are most exceptional, because this does not really agree with their nature. Love for a thing is a man's prerogative. But since masculine and feminine elements are united in our human nature, a man can live in the feminine part of himself, and a woman in her masculine part. None the less the feminine element in man is only something in the background, as is the masculine element in woman. If one lives out the opposite sex in oneself one is living in one's own background, and one's real individuality suffers. A man should live as a man and a woman as a woman. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 243

What can a man say about woman, his own opposite? I mean of course something sensible, that is outside the sexual programme, free of resentment, illusion, and theory. Where is the man to be found capable of such superiority? Woman always stands just where the man's shadow falls, so that he is only too liable to confuse the two. Then, when he tries to repair this misunderstanding, he overvalues her and believes her the most desirable thing in the world, ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 236

The discussion of the sexual problem is only a somewhat crude prelude to a far deeper question, and that is the question of the psychological relationships between the sexes. In comparison with this the other pales into insignificance, and with it we enter the real domain of woman. Woman's psychology is founded on the principle of Eros, the great binder and loosener, whereas from ancient times the ruling principle ascribed to man is Logos. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 254

[All that pertains to the opposite sex] has a mysterious charm tinged with fear, perhaps even with disgust. For this reason its charm is particularly attractive and fascinating, even when it comes to us not directly from outside, in the guise of a woman, but from within, as a psychic influence—for instance in the form of a temptation to abandon oneself to a mood or an affect. ~Carl CW 10, Para 244

A conscientious doctor must be able to doubt all his skills and all his theories, otherwise he is be fooled by a system. But all systems mean bigotry and inhumanity. 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

The patient has not to learn how to get rid o£ his neurosis, but how to bear it. His illness is not a gratuitous and therefore meaningless burden; it is his own self, the "other" whom, from childish laziness or fear, or for some other reason, he was always seeking to exclude from his life. In this way, as Freud rightly says, we turn the ego into a "seat of anxiety," which it would never be if we did not defend ourselves against ourselves so neurotically. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 360

Hidden in the neurosis is a bit of still undeveloped personality, a precious fragment of the psyche lacking which a man is condemned to resignation, bitterness, and everything else that is hostile to life. A psychology of neurosis that sees only the negative elements empties out the baby with the bath-water, since it neglects the positive meaning and value of these "infantile"—i.e., creative—fantasies. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 355

Infantilism, however, is something extremely ambiguous. First, it can be either genuine or purely symptomatic; and second, it can be either residuary or embryonic. There is an enormous difference between something that has remained infantile and something that is in the process of growth. Both can take an infantile or embryonic form, and more often than not it is impossible to tell at first glance whether we are dealing with a regrettably persistent fragment of infantile life or with a vitally important creative beginning. To deride these possibilities is to act like a dullard who does not know that the future is more important than the past. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 345

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

It is presumptuous to think we can always say what is good or bad for the patient. Perhaps he knows something is really bad and does it anyway and then gets a bad conscience. From the therapeutic, that is to say empirical, point of view, this may be very good indeed for him. Perhaps he has to experience the power of evil and suffer accordingly, because only in that way can he give up his Pharisaic attitude to other people. Perhaps fate or the unconscious or God —call it what you will—had to give him a hard knock and roll him in the dirt, because only such a drastic experience could strike home, pull him out of his infantilism, and make him more mature. How can anyone find out how much he needs to be saved if he is quite sure that there is nothing he needs saving from? ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 867

Each new case that requires thorough treatment is pioneer work, and every trace of routine then proves to be a blind alley. Consequently the higher psychotherapy is a most exacting business, and sometimes it sets tasks which challenge not only our understanding or our sympathy but the whole man. The doctor is inclined to demand this total effort from his patients, yet he must realize that this same demand only works if he is aware that it also applies to himself. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 3II

To concern ourselves with dreams is a way of reflecting on ourselves—a way of self-reflection. It is not our ego-consciousness reflecting on itself; rather, it turns its attention to the objective actuality of the dream as a communication or message from the unconscious, unitary soul of humanity. It reflects not on the ego but on the self; it recollects that strange self, alien to the ego, which was ours from the beginning, the trunk from which the ego grew. It is alien to us because we have estranged ourselves from it through the aberrations of the conscious mind. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 318

A dream is nothing but a lucky idea that comes to us from the dark, all-unifying world of the psyche. What would be more natural, when we have lost ourselves amid the endless particulars and isolated details of the world's surface, than to knock at the door of dreams and inquire of them the bearings which would bring us closer to the basic facts of human existence? Here we encounter the obstinate prejudice that dreams are so much froth, they are not real, they lie, they are mere wish-fulfilments. All this is but an excuse not to take dreams seriously, for that would be uncomfortable. Our intellectual hybris of consciousness loves isolation despite all its inconveniences, and for this reason people will do anything rather than admit that dreams are real and speak the truth. There are some saints who had very rude dreams. Where would their saintliness be, the very thing that exalts them above the vulgar rabble, if the obscenity of a dream were a real truth? But it is just the most squalid dreams that emphasize our blood-kinship with the rest of mankind, and most effectively damp down the arrogance born of an atrophy of the instincts. Even if the whole world were to fall to pieces, the unity of the psyche would never be shattered. And the wider and more numerous the fissures on the surface, the more this unity is strengthened in the depths. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 305

In each of us there is another whom we do not know. He speaks to us in dreams and tells us how differently he sees us from the way we see ourselves. When, therefore, we find ourselves in a difficult situation to which there is no solution, he can sometimes kindle a light that radically alters our attitude—the very attitude that led us into the difficult situation. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 325

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

As individuals we are not completely unique, but are like all other men. Hence a dream with a collective meaning is valid in the first place tor the dreamer, but it expresses at the same time the fact that his momentary problem is also the problem of other people. This is often of great practical importance, for there are countless people who are inwardly cut off from humanity and oppressed by the thought that nobody else has their problems. Or else they are those all-too-modest souls who, feeling themselves nonentities, have kept their claim to social recognition on too low a level. Moreover, every individual problem is somehow connected with the problem of the age, so that practically every subjective difficulty has to be viewed from the standpoint of the human situation as a whole. But this is permissible only when the dream really is a mythological one and makes use of collective symbols. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 323

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

When we consider the infinite variety of dreams, it is difficult to conceive that there could ever be a method or a technical procedure which would lead to an infallible result. It is, indeed, a good thing that no valid method exists, for otherwise the meaning of the dream would be limited in advance and would lose precisely that virtue which makes dreams so valuable for therapeutic purposes —their ability to offer new points of view. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 319

The dream is a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses of the soul, opening into that cosmic night which was psyche long before there was any ego consciousness, and which will remain psyche no matter how far our ego-consciousness extends. For all ego-consciousness is isolated; because it separates and discriminates, it knows only particulars, and it sees only those that can be related to the ego. Its essence is limitation, even though it reach to the farthest nebulae among the stars. All consciousness separates; but in dreams we put on the likeness of that more universal, truer, more eternal man dwelling in the darkness of primordial night. There he is still the whole, and the whole is in him, indistinguishable from nature and bare of all egohood. It is from these all-uniting depths that the dream arises, be it never so childish, grotesque, and immoral. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 304

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

The psyche consists essentially of images. It is a series of images in the truest sense, not an accidental juxtaposition or sequence, but a structure that is throughout full of meaning and purpose; it is a "picturing" of vital activities. And just as the material of the body that is ready for life has need of the psyche in order to be capable of life, so the psyche presupposes the living body in order that its images may live. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 618

Until now it has not truly and fundamentally been noted that our time, despite the prevalence of irreligiosity, is so to speak congenitally charged with the attainment of the Christian epoch, namely with the supremacy of the word, that Logos which the central figure of Christian faith represents. The word has literally become our God and has remained so. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, §554.

Without consciousness there would, practically speaking, be no world, for the world exists for us only in so far as it is consciously reflected by a psyche. Consciousness is a precondition of being. Thus the psyche is endowed with the dignity of a cosmic principle, which philosophically and in fact gives it a position co-equal with the principle of physical being. The carrier of this consciousness is the individual, who does not produce the psyche of his own volition but is, on the contrary, preformed by it and nourished by the gradual awakening of consciousness during childhood. If therefore the psyche is of overriding empirical importance, so also is the individual, who is the only immediate manifestation of the psyche. Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 528

The man who has attained consciousness of the present is solitary. The "modern" man has at all times been so, for every step towards fuller consciousness removes him further from his original, purely animal participation mystique with the herd, from submersion in a common unconsciousness. Every step forward means tearing oneself loose from the maternal womb of unconsciousness in which the mass of men dwells. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 150

The unconscious is the only available source of religious experience. This is certainly not to say that what we call the unconscious is identical with God or is set up in his place. It is simply the medium from which religious experience seems to flow. As to what the further cause of such experience might be, the answer to this lies beyond the range of human knowledge. Knowledge of God is a transcendental problem. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 565

It suits our hypertrophied and hybristic modern consciousness not to be mindful of the dangerous autonomy of the unconscious and to treat it negatively as an absence of consciousness. The hypothesis of invisible gods or daemons would be, psychologically, a far more appropriate formulation, even though it would be an anthropomorphic projection. But since the development of consciousness requires the withdrawal of all the projections we can lay our hands on, it is not possible to maintain any non-psychological doctrine about the gods. Since the gods are without doubt personifications of psychic forces, to assert their metaphysical existence is as much an intellectual presumption as the opinion that they could ever be invented. Not that "psychic forces" have anything to do with the conscious mind, fond as we are of playing with the idea that consciousness and psyche are identical. This is only another piece of intellectual presumption. "Psychic forces" have far more to do with the realm of the unconscious. Our mania for rational explanations obviously has its roots in our fear of metaphysics, for the two were always hostile brothers. Hence anything unexpected that approaches us from that dark realm is regarded either as coming from outside and therefore as real, or else as an hallucination and therefore not true. The idea that anything could be real or true which does not come from outside has hardly begun to dawn on. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 387


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

Whatever name we may put to the psychic background, the fact remains that our consciousness is influenced by it in the highest degree, and all the more so the less we are conscious of it. The layman can hardly conceive how much his inclinations, moods, and decisions are influenced by the dark forces of his psyche, and how dangerous or helpful they may be in shaping his destiny. Our cerebral consciousness is like an actor who has forgotten that he is playing a role. But when the play comes to an end, he must remember his own subjective reality, for he can no longer continue to live as Julius Caesar or as Othello, but only as himself, from whom he has become estranged by a momentary sleight of consciousness. He must know once again that he was merely a figure on the stage who was playing a piece by Shakespeare, and that there was a producer as well as a director in the background who, as always, will have something very important to say about his acting, ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 332

Besides the "right" kind of conscience there is a "wrong" one, which exaggerates, perverts, and twists evil into good and good into evil just as our own scruples do; and it does so with the same compulsiveness and with the same emotional consequences as the "right" kind of conscience. Were it not for this paradox the question of conscience would present no problem we could then rely wholly on its decisions so far as morality is concerned. But since there is great and justified uncertainty in this regard, it needs unusual courage or—what amounts to the same thing—unshakable faith for a person simply to follow the dictates of his own conscience. As a rule one obeys only up to a certain point, which is determined in advance by the moral code. This is where those dreaded conflicts of duty begin. Generally they are answered according to the precepts of the moral code, but only in a very few cases are they really decided by an individual act of judgment. For as soon as the moral code ceases to act as a support, conscience easily succumbs to a fit of weakness, ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 835

"Conscience," in ordinary usage, means the consciousness of a factor which in the case of a "good conscience" affirms that a decision or an act accords with moraUty and, if it does not, condemns it as "immoral." This view, deriving as it does from the mores^ from what is customary, can properly be called "moral." Distinct from this is the ethical form of conscience, which appears when two decisions or ways of acting, both affirmed to be moral and therefore regarded as "duties," collide with one another. In these cases, not foreseen by the moral code because they are mostly very individual, a judgment is required which cannot properly be called "moral" or in accord with custom. Here the decision has no custom at its disposal on which it could rely. The deciding factor appears to be something else it proceeds not from the traditional moral code but from the unconscious foundation of the personality. The decision is drawn from dark and deep waters.It is true these conflicts of duty are solved very often and very conveniently by a decision in accordance with custom, that is, by suppressing one of the opposites. But this is not always so. If one is sufficiently conscientious the conflict is endured to the end, and a creative solution emerges which is produced by the constellated archetype and possesses that compelling authority not unjustly characterized as the voice of God. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 856


Where is a height without depth, and how can there be Hght that throws no shadow? There is no good that is not opposed by evil. "No man can be redeemed from a sin he has not committed," says Carpocrates; a deep saying for all who wish to understand, and a golden opportunity for all those who prefer to draw false conclusions. What is down below is not just an excuse for more pleasure, but something we fear because it demands to play its part in the life of the more conscious and more complete man. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 271

The optimum of life is not to be found in crude egoism, for fundamentally man is so constituted that the pleasure he gives his neighbour is something essential to him. Nor can the optimum be reached by an unbridled craving for individualistic supremacy, for the collective element in man is so powerful that his longing for fellowship would destroy all pleasure in naked egoism. The optimum can be reached only through obedience to the tidal laws of the libido, by which systole alternates with diastole—laws which bring pleasure and the necessary limitations of pleasure, and also set us those individual life-tDoes neutral Switzerland, with its backward, earthy nature, fulfil any meaningful function in the European system? I think we must answer this question affirmatively. The answer to political or cultural questions need not be only: Progress and Change, but also: Stand still! Hold fast! These days one can doubt in good faith whether the condition of Europe shows any change for the better since the war. Opinions, as we know, are very divided, and we have just heard Spengler's lamentations on the decline of the West. Progress can occasionally go down-hill, and in the face of a dangerously rapid tempo standing still can be a life-saver. Nations, too, get tired and long for political and social stabilization. The Pax Romana meant a good deal to the Roman Empire. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 922

There are two kinds of interference which cause the hackles of the Swiss to rise: political and spiritual. Everyone can understand why they should defend themselves to the utmost against political interference, and this utmost is the art of neutrality born of necessity. But why they should defend themselves against spiritual interference is rather more mysterious. It is, however, a fact, as I can confirm from my own experience. English, American, and German patients are far more open to new ideas than the Swiss. A new idea for the Swiss is always something of a risk; it is like an unknown, dangerous animal, which must if possible be circumvented or else approached with extreme caution. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 916

If it be true that we are the most backward, conservative, stiff-necked, self-righteous, smug, and churlish of all European nations, this would mean that in Switzerland the European is truly at home in his geographical and psychological centre. There he is attached to the earth, unconcerned, self-reliant, conservative, and backward—in other words, still intimately connected with the past, occupying a neutral position between the fluctuating and contradictory aspirations and opinions of the other nations or functions. That wouldn't be a bad role for the Swiss to act as Europe's centre of gravity. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 920

The revolution in our conscious outlook, brought about by the catastrophic results of the [first] World War, shows itself in our inner life by the shattering of our faith in ourselves and our own worth. We used to regard foreigners as political and moral reprobates, but the modern man is forced to recognize that he is politically and morally just like anyone else. Whereas formerly I believed it was my bounden duty to call others to order, I must now admit I need calling to order myself. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 162

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

We need not be ashamed of ourselves as a nation, nor can we alter its character. Only the individual can alter or improve himself, provided he can outgrow his national prejudices in the course of his psychic development.
The national character is imprinted on a man as a fate he has not chosen—like a beautiful or an ugly body. It is not the will of individuals that moulds the destinies of nations, but supra-personal factors, the spirit and the earth, which work in mysterious ways and in unfathomable darkness. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 921

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

The Swiss national character that has been built up over the centuries was not formed by chance; it is a meaningful response to the dangerously undermining influence of the environment. We Swiss should certainly understand why a mind like Keyserling's judges us so harshly, but he should also understand that the very things he taxes us with belong to our most necessary possessions. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, CW 924

Our loveliest mountain, which dominates Switzerland far and wide, is called the Jungfrau—the "Virgin." The Virgin Mary is the female patron saint of the Swiss. Of her Tertullian says: ". . . that virgin earth, not yet watered by the rains," and Augustine: "Truth has arisen from the earth, because Christ is born of a virgin." These are living reminders that the virgin mother is the earth. From olden times the astrological sign for Switzerland was either Virgo or Taurus; both are earth-signs, a sure indication that the earthy character of the Swiss had not escaped the old astrologers. From the earth-boundness of the Swiss come all their bad as well as their good qualities: their down-to earthness, their limited outlook, their non-spirituality, their parsimony, stolidity, stubbornness, dislike of foreigners, mistrustfulness, as well as that awful Schwizerdutsch and their refusal to be bothered, or to put it in political terms, their neutrality. Switzerland consists of numerous valleys, depressions in the earth's crust, in which the settlements of man are embedded. Nowhere are there measureless plains, where it is a matter of indifference where a man lives; nowhere is there a coast against which the ocean beats with its lore of distant lands. Buried deep in the backbone of the continent, sunk in the earth, the Alpine dweller lives like a troglodyte, surrounded by more powerful nations that are linked with the wide world, that expand into colonies or can grow rich on the treasures of their soil. The Swiss cling to what they have, for the others, the more powerful ones, have grabbed everything else. Under no circumstances will the Swiss be robbed of their own. Their country is small, their possessions limited. If they lose what they have, what is going to replace it? ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 914


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

Far too little attention has been paid to the fact that, for all our irreligiousness, the distinguishing mark of the Christian epoch, its highest achievement, has become the congenital vice of our age: the supremacy of the word, of the Logos, which stands for the central figure of our Christian faith. The word has literally become our god, and so it has remained, even if we knew of Christianity only by hearsay. Words like "Society" and "State" are so concretized that they are almost personified. In the opinion of the man in the street, the "State," far more than any king in history, is the inexhaustible giver of all good; the "State" is invoked, made responsible, grumbled at, and so on and so forth. Society is elevated to the rank of a supreme ethical principle; indeed, it is even credited with positively creative capacities. No one seems to notice that this worship of the word, which was necessary at a certain phase of man's mental development, has a perilous shadow side. That is to say, the moment the word, as a result of centuries of education, attains universal validity, it severs its original connection with the divine Person. There is then a personified Church, a personified State; belief in the word becomes credulity, and the word itself an infernal slogan capable of any deception. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 554

The mass as such is always anonymous and always irresponsible. So-called leaders are the inevitable symptoms of a mass movement. The true leaders of mankind are always those who are capable of self-reflection, and who relieve the dead weight of the masses at least of their own weight, consciously holding aloof from the blind momentum of the mass in movement. But who can resist this all engulfing force of attraction, when each man clings to the next and each drags the other with him? Only one who is firmly rooted not only in the outside world but also in the world within. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 326