Quotes from C.G. Jung

The personal sphere is indeed disturbed, but such disturbances need not be primary; they may well be secondary, the consequence of an insupportable change in the social atmosphere. The cause of disturbance is, therefore, not to be sought in the personal surroundings, but rather in the collective situation.

Non-directed thinking is in the main subjectively motivated, and not so much by conscious motives as—far more—by unconscious ones.

I could cite many other dreams to the same effect, but these may suffice to show that dreams can be anticipatory and, in that case, must lose their particular meaning if they are treated in a purely causalistic way. These three dreams give clear information about the analytical situation, and it is extremely important for the purposes of therapy that this be rightly understood.

The first doctor understood the situation and sent the patient to the second. Here she drew her own conclusions from her dream, and decided to leave. My interpretation of her third dream disappointed her greatly, but she was distinctly encouraged to go on in spite of all difficulties by the fact that it reported the frontier already crossed.

Snící se rozhodl žít nejen jako netÄ›lesná myÅ¡lenková bytost, nýbrž pÃ…â"¢ijmout a prožít i tÄ›lo a svÄ›t instinkt?, skute?nost problému života i lásky.

Before him exist neither question nor answer.

The "inkblot" test devised by the Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach. The shape of the blot can serve as a stimulus for free association; in fact, almost any irregular free shape can spark off the associative process. Leonardo da Vinci wrote in his Notebooks: "It should not be hard for you to stop sometimes and look into the stains of walls, or ashes of a fire, or clouds, or mud or like places in which Ã¢â'¬Â¦ you may find really marvelous ideas.

A work of art is produced that contains what may truthfully be called a message to generations of men. So Faust touches something in the soul of every German. So also Dante's fame is immortal, while The Shepherd of Hermas just failed of inclusion in the New Testament canon. Every period has its bias, its particular prejudice and its psychic ailment.

could moreover have assured himself beyond all doubt on this point had he taken counsel with his own omniscience.

This emotional value must be kept in mind and allowed for throughout the whole intellectual process of dream interpretation. It is only too easy to lose this value, because thinking and feeling are so diametrically opposed that thinking almost automatically throws out feeling values and vice versa.

This attitude contrasts strangely with the still commoner and more striking idealization of the past, which is praised not merely as the "good old days" but as the Golden Age—and not just by uneducated and superstitious people, but by all those legions of theosophical enthusiasts who resolutely believe in the former existence and lofty civilization of Atlantis.

Unfortunately there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. At all counts, it forms an unconscious snag, thwarting our most well-meant intentions.

I cannot employ the language of science to trace this process of growth in myself, for I cannot experience myself as a scientific problem.

An epoch is like an individual; it has its own limitations of conscious outlook, and therefore requires a compensatory adjustment. This is effected by the collective unconscious in that a poet, a seer or a leader allows himself to be guided by the unexpressed desire of his times and shows the way, by word or deed, to the attainment of that which everyone blindly craves and expects—whether this attainment results in good or evil, the healing of an epoch or its destruction.

nuestra actitud moderna habla con orgullo de las tinieblas de la superstición y de la credulidad medieval o primitiva, olvidando por completo que con nosotros llevamos todo el pasado, escondido en los sótanos del rascacielos que es nuestra conciencia racional.

Para Jung, el yoga representaba un rico almacén de descripciones simbólicas de la experiencia interna y, en particular, del proceso de individuación. Sostenía que «se han observado destacados paralelismos con el yoga (por parte de la psicología analítica) especialmente con el yoga Kundalini y el simbolismo del yoga tántrico, el lamaísmo y el yoga taoísta en China.

He who is most guilty is most innocent; the most holy man is the one most conscious of his sin.

But God, who also does not hear our prayers, wants to become man, and for that purpose he has chosen, through the Holy Ghost, the creaturely man filled with darkness—the natural man who is tainted with original sin and who learnt the divine arts and sciences from the fallen angels.

It is always dangerous to speak of one's own times, because what is at stake in the present is too vast for comprehension.

An invasion from the unconscious is very dangerous for the conscious mind when the latter is not in a position to understand and integrate the contents that have irrupted into it.

Esto le llevó a concluir que «con el paso de los siglos, Occidente producirá su propio yoga, y será sobre las bases establecidas por el cristianismo»51

I stepped into the shadows of the earth, and saw that I am naked and have nothing to cover my poverty. No sooner do you touch the earth than your inner life is over; it flees from you into things.

Here, it seems to me, Schiller has put his finger on something very important, namely, the possibility of separating out an individual nucleus, which can be at one time the subject and at another the object of the opposing functions, though always remaining distinguishable from them. This separation is as much an intellectual as a moral judgment. In one case it comes about through thinking, in another through feeling.

Les rêves sont des compensations de l'attitude consciente. (p. 220)