Quotes from Carl Jung

Neurosis is an inner cleavage-the state of being at war with oneself.

With Hitler you do not feel that you are with a man. You are with a medicine man, a form of spiritual vessel, a demi-deity, or even better, a myth... He is not a man, but a collective. He is not an individual, but a whole nation.

this integration [of the shadow]…leads to disobedience and disgust, but also to self-reliance, without which individuation is unthinkable.

in what myth does a man live nowadays? In the Christian myth, the answer might be. "Do you live in it?" I asked myself. To be honest, the answer was no. For me it is not what I live by. "Then do we no longer have any myth?" "No, evidently we no longer have any myth." "But then what is your myth – the myth in which you do live?" At this point the dialogue with myself became uncomfortable, and I stopped thinking. I had reached a dead end.

As soon as man was capable of conceiving of the idea of sin, he had recourse to psychic concealment.

The etymology of the word "conscience" tells us that it is a special form of "knowledge" . . .The peculiarity of "conscience" is that it is a knowledge of, or certainty about, the emotional value of the ideas we have concerning the motives of our actions.

I remember once over lunch, out of the blue my guru told me about the question posed by James Joyce: "When he and his daughter spoke the same language and said similar things, why did he become famous and yet his daughter was diagnosed schizophrenic?" Based on Dr. Carl Jung consultation of James Joyce & daughter Lucia.

All mass movements

the "nation" (like the "State") is a personified concept …The nation has no life of its own apart from the individual, and is therefore not an end in itself…. All life is individual life, in which alone the ultimate meaning is to be found.

With the very decision to put his own way above all other ways he has already in large part fulfilled his liberating vocation. He has cancelled the validity of all other ways for himself. He has placed his law above all conventions.

La neurosis es siempre un sustituto de los sufrimientos verdaderos...

Analysis should release an experience that grips us or falls upon us as from above, an experience that has substance and body such as those things which occurred to the ancients. If I were going to symbolize it I would choose the Annunciation." - Seminar 1925

In so far as every individual has his own inborn law of life, it is theoretically possible for every man to follow this law before all others and so to become a personality – that is, to achieve completeness.

just as great personality acts upon society to alleviate, liberate, transform, and heal, so the birth of personality has a restoring effect upon the individual. It is as if a stream that was losing itself in marshy tributaries suddenly discovered its proper bed, or as if a stone that lay upon a germinating seed were lifted away so that the sprout could begin its natural growth.

Everyone in your dreams is you.

In the realm of very small quantities prediction becomes uncertain, if not impossible, because very small quantities no longer behave in accordance with the known natural laws.

To be normal is the ultimate aim of the unsuccessful.

The wildest and most moving dramas are played not in the theatre but in the hearts of ordinary men.

My pilgrim's progress has been to climb down a thousand ladders until I could finally reach out a hand of friendship to the little clod of earth that I am.

Es wäre lächerliche und ungerechtfertigte Selbstüberhebung, wenn wir annehmen wollten, wir seien energischer oder intelligenter als das Altertum - unser Wissensstoff hat zugenommen, nicht aber die Intelligenz. Darum sind wir neuen Ideen gegenüber gerade so borniert und unfähig wie die Menschen in den dunklesten Zeiten des Altertums. An Wissen sind wir reich geworden, nicht aber an Weisheit.

The man whose interests are all outside is never satisfied with what is necessary, but is perpetually hankering after something more and better which, true to his bias, he always seeks outside himself. He forgets completely that, for all his outward successes, he himself remains the same inwardly. . .Obviously the outward lives of men could do with a lot more bettering and beautifying, but those things lose their meaning when the inner man does not keep pace with them.

Behold the secret conspiracy between mother and son, and how each helps the other to betray life.

the spirit of regression, [which] threatens us with bondage to the mother and with dissolution and extinction in the unconscious.

he hopes to be caught, sucked in, enveloped, and devoured. He seeks, as it were, the protecting, nourishing, charmed circle of the mother, the condition of the infant released from every care…No wonder the real world vanishes from sight!