Quotes from Anthony Stevens

Although we experience the ego as the continuing centre of our existence it is, in fact, merely the Self's executive. 'For indeed our consciousness does not create itself – it wells up from unknown depths. In childhood it awakens gradually, and all through life it wakes each morning out of the depths of sleep from an unconscious condition. It is like a child that is born daily out of the primordial womb of the unconscious

the ego begins to confront the Self and the Self the ego, and through the mediation of the transcendent function (which we will examine later) bring about the attainment of personality integration and higher consciousness.

Through the persona we codify ourselves in a form which we hope will prove acceptable to others.

What distinguishes the Jungian approach to developmental psychology from virtually all others is the idea that even in old age we are growing towards realization of our full potential. This

Unscrupulous leaders can manipulate this mechanism in whole populations. Adolf Hitler, for example, repeatedly described the Jews as Untermenschen (subhumans) and through the skilful use of propaganda was able to induce enough Germans to project their shadow on to them as to make the Holocaust possible. The

1) that the equipment consists of four psychological functions, which he named sensation, thinking, feeling, and intuition, all of which are available a priori to everybody, and (2) that individuals differ in regard to which of the four functions they use for preference.

A further distinction between people depends on whether they habitually place greater emphasis on the importance of outer objective events or inner subjective ones (i.e. whether their attitude to reality is characteristically extraverted or introverted).

How can we enable the unconscious to realize itself? By granting it freedom of expression and then examining what it has expressed.

Though never losing his taste for seclusion, he developed a talent for getting on with people in all walks of life, and those who came to consult or visit him were impressed as much by his courtesy and humour as by his wisdom and the quality of his mind.

Those who toe the party line do not choose their own way but submerge their potential for wholeness in a relatively unconscious existence of collective conformity.

The abandonment of civilized values exposes us collectively to possession by the worst elements of the Shadow.

These researches renewed his commitment to analysis, which he now conceived more as a means to produce personal growth than as a technique for treating mental disorder, and he increasingly devoted his energy to teaching others, whether as pupils or patients, the same methods he had perfected during his own confrontation with the unconscious and which he had excavated in all their bizarre ambiguity from an occult science of the seventeenth century.

Jung's gift for transcending the confines of his own consciousness began, as we have seen, in the fantasy games of his childhood.

By projecting his psyche into the stone he gave the stone life, identity, consciousness, doing what the alchemists did as they gazed into the prima materia in their retorts. He came to see the imagination as the psychic quicksilver out of which everything of value is created; for the material world of objects is devoid of all meaning save that which we grant it in the psyche.

the more secular, materialistic, and compulsively extraverted our civilization became, the greater the unhappiness, 'senselessness and aimlessness' of our lives.

He understood these dreams as showing that the unconscious is the generator of the empirical personality and that the Self assumes human shape in order to enter three-dimensional reality.

Where the parents are not 'good enough' the rest of the programme for life may be distorted and later stages in the archetypal sequence may fail to be realized. Thus, the boy whose father was inadequate or absent may fail to actualize his masculine potential sufficiently to establish the social or vocational role his talents equip him for, or he may be unable to sustain a relationship with a member of the opposite sex long enough for him to become an adequate husband or father himself.

The real therapy only begins when the patient sees that it is no longer father and mother who are standing in his way, but himself . .

Human consciousness created objective existence and meaning, and man found his indispensable place in the great process of being.