Quotes About Unconscious

In these circumstances, when consciousness is insufficiently differentiated from the unconscious, and the ego from the group, the group member finds himself as much at the mercy of group reactions as of unconscious constellations.

Thus, on the primitive level, conscious realization is called eating. When we talk of the conscious mind "assimilating" an unconscious content, we are not saying much more than is implied in the symbol of eating and digesting.

Emotion manifests itself simultaneously with an alteration of the internal secretions, the circulation, blood pressure, respiration, etc., but equally, unconscious contents excite, and in neurotic cases disturb, the sympathetic nervous system either directly, or indirectly, via the emotions aroused.

The more unconscious the whole of a man's personality is and the more germinal his ego, the more his experience of the whole will be projected upon the group.

It is only now, in the present crisis of modern man, whose over accentuation of the conscious, cortical side of himself has led to excessive repression and dissociation of the unconscious, that it has become necessary for him to 'link back" with the medullary region.

The fusion of areas of consciousness which for us are more or less clearly defined leads, as it were, to a perpetual game of hide-and-seek with ourselves and to a confusion of ego positions. Emotional instability, ambivalent pleasure-pain reactions, the interchangeability of inside and outside, of individual and group—all these result in an insecurity for the ego which is intensified by the powerfully emotional and affective "vectors" of the unconscious.

Thus, as the ego develops, it is imperative to prevent a situation from arising in which the dynamic-emotional component of an unconscious image or archetype would drive the ego into an instinctive reaction and so overwhelm consciousness.

If the emergence of an archetype is not immediately followed by an instinctive reflex action, so much the better for conscious development, because the effect of the emotional-dynamic components is to disturb, or even prevent, objective knowledge, whether this be of the external world or of the psychic world of the collective unconscious.

Even personal complexes, i.e., semiconscious "split offs" which belong to the upper layers of the personal unconscious and are affectively charged and "feeling-toned," can evoke physical alterations in the circulatory system, in the respiration, blood pressure, and so on.

The self-generating power of the soul is man's true and final secret, by virtue of which he is made in the likeness of God the creator and distinguished from all other living things. These images, ideas, values, and potentialities of the treasure hidden in the unconscious are brought to birth and realized by the hero in his various guises—savior and man of action, seer and sage, founder and artist, inventor and discoverer, scientist and leader.

Whenever the energy-charge of unconscious contents becomes excessive, they discharge themselves from the unconscious and are projected.

Ego consciousness is a sense organ which perceives the world and the unconscious by means of images, but this image-forming capacity is itself a psychic product, not a quality of the world. Image formation alone makes perception and assimilation possible.

All unconscious contents have, as complexes, a specific tendency, a striving to assert themselves. Like living organisms, they devour other complexes and enrich themselves with their libido.

some ceremony or course of action, always precedes the formulation of the myth, and it is obvious that action must come before knowledge, the unconscious deed before the spoken content.

Ego formation can only proceed by way of distinction from the nonego and consciousness only emerge where it detaches itself from what is unconscious; and the individual only arrives at individuation when he marks himself off from the anonymous collective.

IN THE COURSE of Western development, the essentially positive process of emancipating the ego and consciousness from the tyranny of the unconscious has become negative.

so long as culture is "in balance," the individuals contained in it normally stand in an adequate relationship to the collective unconscious, even if this is only a relationship to the archetypal projections of the cultural canon and to its highest values.

it can be shown that philosophical and scientific thinking gradually developed out of symbolic thinking by progressively emancipating itself from the emotional-dynamic components of the unconscious.

through the masculinization and emancipation of ego consciousness the ego becomes the "hero." The story of the hero, as set forth in the myths, is the history of this self-emancipation of the ego, struggling to free itself from the power of the unconscious and to hold its own against overwhelming odds.

Perseus defeats the unconscious through the typical act of conscious realization.

The assimilation of unconscious contents, in whatever form, leads not only to an enrichment of the conscious material but to an enrichment of libido, which makes itself felt, subjectively, as excitement, vivacity, and a joy that sometimes borders on intoxication; and, objectively, as a heightening of interest, a broadened and intensified capacity for work, mental alertness, etc.

Man experiences the "masculine" structure of his conscious as peculiarly his own, and the "feminine" unconscious as something alien to him, whereas woman feels at home in her unconscious and out of her element in consciousness.

The two interpretations are mutually complementary. The structural—objective—interpretation seeks to embrace the whole span of the structure represented by the person of Faust, and then combine it with the genetic interpretation which recognizes that the Faust figure stands for the totality of Goethe's psychic situation, both conscious and unconscious, and for the whole history of his development.

A significant analogy may be found in dreams, which are compensations of consciousness directed by centroversion.