Quotes About Unconscious

Hence it is of the greatest importance that the ego should be anchored in the world of consciousness and that consciousness should be reinforced by a very precise adaptation. For this, certain virtues like attention, conscientiousness, patience, etc., are of great value on the moral side, just as accurate observation of the symptomatology of the unconscious and objective selfcriticism are valuable on the intellectual side.

become conscious of the contents that press upward from the unconscious.

The psyche is still a foreign, almost unexplored country of which we have only indirect knowledge; it is mediated by conscious functions that are subject to almost endless possibilities of deception.

We mean by collective unconscious, a certain psychic disposition shaped by the forces of heredity; from it consciousness has developed. In the physical structure of the body we find traces of earlier stages of evolution, and we may expect the human psyche also to conform in its make-up to the law of phylogeny.

The Buddhist discards the world of unconscious fantasies as useless illusions; the Christian puts his Church and his Bible between himself and the unconscious; and the rational intellectual does not yet know that his consciousness is not his total psyche. This ignorance persists today in spite of the fact that for more than 70 years the unconscious has been a basic scientific concept that is indisputable to any serious psychological investigation.

The unconscious has still another side to it: it includes not only repressed contents, but all psychic material that lies below the threshold of consciousness.

Here I ought to add a word of warning against unintelligent or incompetent dream analysis. There are some people whose mental condition is so unbalanced that the interpretation of their dreams can be extremely risky; in such a case, a very one-sided consciousness is cut off from a correspondingly irrational or "crazy" unconscious, and the two should not be brought together without taking special precautions.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Theseus who descended into Hades and grew fast to the rocks of the underworld, which is to say that the conscious mind, advancing into the unknown regions of the psyche, is overpowered by the archaic forces of the unconscious.

A child, as I have said, possesses a sense of completeness, but only before the initial emergence of his ego-consciousness. In the case of an adult, a sense of completeness is achieved through a union of the consciousness with the unconscious contents of the mind. Out of this union arises what Jung called "the transcendent function of the psyche," by which a man can achieve his highest goal: the full realization of the potential of his individual Self.

Thus, what we call "symbols of transcendence" are the symbols that represent man's striving to attain this goal. They provide the means by which the contents of the unconscious can enter the conscious mind, and they also are themselves an active expression of those contents.

We find . . . in everyday life, where dilemmas are sometimes solved by the most surprising new propositions; many artists, philosophers, and even scientists owe some of their best ideas to inspirations . . . from the unconscious.

When such an invasion happens, we are often faced with a situation in which the unconscious overtakes or "takes over" the conscious mind. The latter has somehow got stuck, with the result that the unconscious takes over the forward-striving function, the process of transformation in time, and breaks the deadlock. The contents then pouring into consciousness are archetypal representations of what the conscious mind should have experienced if deadlock was to be avoided.

conscious mind is able to follow the precise arithmetic rules needed for correctness. On the other hand, for decisions that involve large amounts of information and multiple vague, and perhaps even conflicting, constraints, your unconscious mind is well suited to tackle the issue.

unconscious thought theory (UTT)—an attempt to understand the different roles conscious and unconscious deliberation play in decision making.

providing your conscious brain time to rest enables your unconscious mind to take a shift sorting through your most complex professional challenges.

Becoming conscious is of course a sacrilege against nature; it is as though you had robbed the unconscious of something.

All ages before ours believed in gods in some form or other. Only an unparalleled impoverishment in symbolism could enable us to rediscover the gods as psychic factors, which is to say, as archetypes of the unconscious. No doubt this discovery is hardly credible as yet.

The conscious mind allows itself to be trained like a parrot, but the unconscious does not—which is why St. Augustine thanked God for not making him responsible for his dreams.

When an inner situation is not made conscious it appears outside as fate.