Quotes About Psyche

Hidden in our problems is a bit of still undeveloped personality, a precious fragment of the psyche. Without this, we face resignation, bitterness and everything else that is hostile to life.

We should never forget that in any psychological discussion we are not saying anything about the psyche, but that the psyche is always speaking about itself. It is no use thinking we can ever get beyond the psyche by means of the "mind," even though the mind asserts that it is not dependent on the psyche. How could it prove that?

There is no Archimedean point from which to judge, since the psyche is indistinguishable from its manifestations. The psyche is the object of psychology, and -fatally enough- also its subject. There is no getting away from this fact. "Psychology and Religion" (1938). In CW 11: Psychology and Religion: West and East. P.8

But the truth is that the unconscious is always there beforehand as a potential system of psychic functioning handed down by generations of man. Consciousness is a late-born descendant of the unconscious psyche. It would certainly show perversity if we tried to explain the lives of our ancestors in terms of their late descendants; and it is just as wrong, in my opinion, to regard the unconscious as a derivative of consciousness. We are nearer the truth if we put it the other way round.

On the contrary, every civilized human being, however high his conscious development, is still an archaic man at the deeper levels of his psyche. Just as the human body connects us with the mammals and displays numerous vestiges of earlier evolutionary stages going back even to the reptilian age, so the human psyche is a product of evolution which, when followed back to its origins, shows countless archaic traits.

Before the beginning of this century, Freud and Josef Breuer had recognized that neurotic symptoms—hysteria, certain types of pain, and abnormal behavior—are in fact symbolically meaningful. They are one way in which the unconscious mind expresses itself, just as it may in dreams; and they are equally symbolic.

No harm is done if now and then one goes astray in this riddle-reading. Sooner or later the psyche rejects the mistake, much as an organism does a foreign body. I need not try to prove that my dream interpretation is correct, which would be a somewhat hopeless undertaking, but must simply help the patient to find what it is that activates him—I was almost betrayed into saying what is actual.

The ground floor stood for the first level of the unconscious. The deeper I went, the more alien and the darker the scene became. In the cave, I discovered remains of a primitive culture, that is, the world of the primitive man within myself—a world which can scarcely be reached or illuminated by consciousness. The primitive psyche of man borders on the life of the animal soul, just as the caves of prehistoric times were usually inhabited by animals before men laid claim to them.

Todo pensamiento, todo sentimiento y toda percepción están compuestos por imágenes psíquicas, y el mismo mundo que nos rodea existe únicamente en la medida en que somos capaces de crear una imagen de él. Nuestro estar presos y limitados por la psique ha provocado en nosotros una impresión tan honda que estamos dispuestos a aceptar que en la psique existen cosas de las que no tenemos conocimiento. Esas cosas son lo que llamamos «lo inconsciente».

A high regard for the unconscious psyche as a source of knowledge is by no means such a delusion as our Western rationalism likes to suppose. We are inclined to assume that, in the last resort, all knowledge comes from without. Yet today we know for certain that the unconscious contains contents which would mean an immeasurable increase of knowledge if they could only be made conscious.

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.

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.

Since faith revolves round those central and perennially important "dominant ideas" which alone give life a meaning, the prime task of the psychotherapist must be to understand the symbols anew, and thus to understand the unconscious, compensatory striving of his patient for an attitude that reflects the totality of the psyche.

A comment on these men is made in the dream: "It is said they are dead." But Henry is alone. Who makes the statement? It is a voice—and when a voice is heard in a dream it is a most meaningful occurrence. Dr. Jung identified the appearance of a voice in dreams with an intervention of the Self. It stands for a knowledge that has its roots in the collective fundamentals of the psyche. What the voice says cannot be disputed.

Numbers thus appear to be a tangible connection between the spheres of matter and psyche

The conflict between the two dimensions of consciousness is simply an expression of the polaristic structure of the psyche, which like any other energic system is dependent on the tension of opposites.

The sacrifice of the animal means, therefore, the sacrifice of the animal nature, the instinctual libido.

The dream, we would say, originates in an unknown part of the psyche and prepares the dreamer for the events of the following day.

To put it in scientific terms: instinctive defence-mechanisms have been developed which automatically intervene when the danger is greatest, and their coming into action is represented in fantasy by helpful images which are ineradicably fixed in the human psyche.

Myths are first and foremost psychic phenomena that reveal the nature of the soul.

it may prove to be that "psyche" and "matter" are actually the same phenomenon, one observed from "within" and the other from "without")

The limitations of our views and our knowledge are nowhere more apparent than in psychological discussions, where it is almost impossible for us to project any other picture than the one whose main outlines are already laid down in our own psyche.

He who would fathom the psyche must not confuse it with consciousness, else he veils from his own sight the object he wishes to explore.

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.