Showing posts with label Guilt. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Guilt. Show all posts

Monday, August 14, 2017

Carl Jung on "Guilt" - Anthology




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

Individuation and collectivity are a pair of opposites, two divergent destinies. They are related to one another by guilt. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 452.

Most people need someone to confess to, otherwise the basis of experience is not sufficiently real. They do not "hear" themselves, cannot contrast themselves with something different, and so they have no outside "control." Everything flows inwards and is answered only by oneself, not by another. It makes an enormous difference whether I confess my guilt only to myself or to another person. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 17

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 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 act of becoming conscious happens to man in darkness. If he can grasp and handle consciousness then the fire brought from Heaven becomes a sacrificial flame, not the wrath of the gods. The acquisition of consciousness by force creates a sense of guilt. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 9.

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

The Bible says, "Whosoever shall say "Racha" to his brother is guilty of hellfire." If we substitute "shadow" for "brother" and implicate the dark brother within, we open out this biblical word into new perspectives. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 25.

He who is most guilty is most innocent; the most holy man is the one most conscious of his sin. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 48.

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

The guilty man is eminently suitable and therefore chosen to become the vessel for the continuing incarnation, not the guiltless one who holds aloof from the world and refuses his tribute to life, for in him the dark God would find no room. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 460.

The view that good and evil are spiritual principles outside us, and that man is caught in the conflict between them is more bearable by far than the insight that the opposites are the ineradicable and indispensable preconditions of all psychic life, so much so that life itself is guilt. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 530

In each of us there is a pitiless judge who makes us feel guilty even if we are not conscious of having done anything wrong. Although we do not know what it is, it is as though it were known somewhere. ~Carl Jung, CW 13, Para 164

The first step in individuation is tragic guilt. The accumulation of guilt demands expiation ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 1094.

But this does not prevent us from being continually licked round by the flames of hell. All of us have to atone, inwardly and outwardly, for this guilt of unconsciousness. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 341-342.

To begin with I did not have the feeling at all that I was guilty of plagiarism with my [anima/animus] theory, but in the last 5 years it has become more and more uncanny as I have discovered quite suspicious traces of it also in the old alchemists, and now the mischief seems complete since it turns out that I was discovered already in the 18th century. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 248.

Guilt is also by no means the only cause of complexes, but with people who are especially sensitive on this point it is a very common complex ingredient, they have a moral complex, and it is as if they were ridden by the devil. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture XI 5July1934, Page 132.

It is indeed no small matter to know one's own guilt and one's own evil, and there is certainly nothing to be gained by losing sight of one's shadow. When we are conscious of our guilt we are in a more favorable position - we can at least hope to change and improve ourselves. ~Carl Jung, CW X, Para 440.

If nevertheless you are still tormented by guilt feelings, then consider for once what sins you have not committed which you would have liked to commit. This might perhaps cure you of your guilt feelings towards your wife. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 27.

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

If nevertheless you are still tormented by guilt feelings, then consider for once what sins you have not committed which you would have liked to commit. This might perhaps cure you of your guilt feelings toward your wife. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 27.

Modern man has heard enough about guilt and sin. He is sorely enough beset by his own bad conscience, and wants rather to know how he is to reconcile himself with his own nature—how he is to love the enemy in his own heart and call the wolf his brother. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 523

Sunday, May 7, 2017

Carl Jung on Genesis and Promethean Guilt




Genesis represents the act of becoming conscious as a taboo infringement, as though knowledge meant that a sacrosanct barrier had been impiously overstepped.

I think that Genesis is right in so far as every step towards greater consciousness is a kind of Promethean guilt: through knowledge, the gods are as it were robbed of their fire, that is, something that was the property of the unconscious powers is torn out of its natural context and subordinated to the whims of the conscious mind.

The man who has usurped the new knowledge suffers, however, a transformation or enlargement of consciousness, which no longer resembles that of his fellow men.

He has raised himself above the human level of his age (“ye shall become like unto God”), but in so doing has alienated himself from humanity.

The pain of this loneliness is the vengeance of the gods, for never again can he return to mankind. He is, as the myth says, chained to the lonely cliffs of the Caucasus, forsaken of God and man.~Carl Jung, “The Relations Between the Ego and the Unconscious” (1953) CW 7: Two Essays on Analytical Psychology. P. 243.