Quotes from C.G. Jung

The next day he went to the archbishop and told him that he was resolved to go out into the world to preach the gospel of God's unending mercy.

How can we doubt that it is his art that explains the artist, and not the insufficiencies and conflicts of his personal life? These are nothing but the regrettable results of the fact that he is an artist—that is to say, a man who from his very birth has been called to a greater task than the ordinary mortal. A special ability means a heavy expenditure of energy in a particular direction, with a consequent drain from some other side of life.

The fact is that if one tries beyond one's capacity to be perfect, the shadow descends into hell and becomes the devil.

The danger, as Nietzsche sees, lies in isolation within oneself: Solitude surrounds and encircles him, ever more threatening, ever more constricting, ever more heart-strangling, that terrible goddess and Mater saeva cupidinum,9

He wants to go the way of the hero, the ideal figure that floats before him, and to share his fate. Yet love still holds him back in the light of day. The libido still has an object which makes life worth living. If this object were abandoned, then the libido would sink down to the subterranean mother for rebirth:

The pathogenic conflict exists only in the present moment. It is just as if a nation wanted to regard its miserable political conditions at the actual moment as due to the past ; as if the Germany of the 19th century had attributed its political dismemberment and incapacity to its suppression by the Romans, instead of having sought the actual sources of her difficulties in the present. Only in the actual present are the effective causes, and only here are the possibilities of removing them.

NevÄ›domá anima je vyslovenÄ› bezvztahovou a autoerotickou bytostí, která netouží po ni?em, kromÄ› úplného ovládnutí jedince, ?ímž se muž stává zvláÅ¡tním a nepÃ…â"¢íznivým zp?sobem zženÅ¡tilým.

Gdy umarÅ'a, jej krewni powiedzieli mi, ?e w ostatnich miesiÄ…cach jej ?ycia charakter jakby od niej odpadaÅ' kawaÅ'ek po kawaÅ'ku, a? w koÅ"cu dziewczyna powróciÅ'a do stanu dwuletniego dziecka i tak zapadÅ'a w swój ostatni sen.

Jung believed that there was a natural and proper path of development for each individual; and that neurosis might actually be a valuable signal which indicated when, through intellectual arrogance, a false set of values or an evasion of responsibilities, a person was straying too far from his own true path.

But the fact remains that the most thorough explanation leaves the patient in many cases an intelligent but still incapable child.

The words that oscillate between nonsense and supreme meaning are the oldest and truest.

The really dangerous people are not the great heretics and unbelievers, but the swarm of petty thinkers, the rationalizing intellectuals, who suddenly discover how irrational all religious dogmas are. Anything not understood is given short shrift, and the highest values of symbolic truth are irretrievably lost. What can a rationalist do with the dogma of the virgin birth, or with Christ's sacrificial death, or the Trinity?

This distinctly suggests a renunciation, an envy of one's own youth, of that time of "effortlessness" which one would so gladly cling on to. But the final stanza portends disaster: a gazing towards the other land, the distant coast of sunrise or sunset. Love no longer holds the poet fast, the bonds with the world are broken, and loudly he calls for help to the mother:

It was by recognizing these facts that science discovered the psyche, and we are now in honour bound to admit its reality. It has been shown that the drive, or instinct, is a condition of psychic activity, while at the same time the psychic processes seem to condition the instincts.

He considered personality to be an achievement, not something given. Moreover, it was essentially an achievement of the second half of life. In the first half of life, a person is, and should be, concerned with emancipating himself from parents and with establishing himself in the world as spouse, parent and effective contributor.

It is no reproach to the Freudian and Adlerian theories that they are based upon the drives; the only trouble is that they are one-sided. The kind of psychology they represent leaves out the psyche, and is suited to people who believe that they have no spiritual needs or aspirations.

The endless dilemma of culture and nature is always a question of too much or too little, never of either-or.

enantiodromia

This function of mediation between the opposites I have termed the transcendent function, by which I mean nothing mysterious, but merely a combined function of conscious and unconscious elements, or, as in mathematics, a common function of real and imaginary quantities.

Only Gnostics and contemporaries qualify, for they alone are both severed from their unconscious and aware of the fact.

An ethical fraternity, with its mythical Nothing, not infused by any archaic-infantile driving force, is a pure vacuum and can never evoke in man the slightest trace of that age-old animal power which drives the migrating bird across the sea. . . .

This new thought was a turning-point in the development of my psychology. It meant that I gradually gave up following associations that led far away from the text of a dream. I chose to concentrate rather on the associations to the dream itself, believing that the latter expressed something specific that the unconscious was trying to say.

Human thought cannot conceive any system or final truth that could give the patient what he needs in order to live: that is, faith, hope, love and insight.

How can you hold that which you are not? Would you really like to force everything which you are not under the yoke of your wretched knowledge and understanding? Remember that you can know yourself, and with that you know enough. But you cannot know others and everything else. Beware of knowing what lies beyond yourself, or else your presumed knowledge will suffocate the life of those who know themselves. A knower may know himself. That is his limit.