Quotes About Carl Jung

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.

We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect; we apprehend it just as much by feeling. Therefore, the judgment of the intellect is, at best, only the half of truth, and must, if it be honest, also come to an understanding of its inadequacy.

One of the main functions of organized religion is to protect people against a direct experience of God.

Synchronicity is the coming together of inner and outer events in a way that cannot be explained by cause and effect and that is meaningful to the observer.

Our psyche is set up in accord with the structure of the universe, and what happens in the macrocosm likewise happens in the infinitesimal and most subjective reaches of the psyche.

If I want to understand an individual human being, I must lay aside all scientific knowledge of the average man and discard all theories in order to adopt a completely new and unprejudiced attitude.

Alcohol is the reduced form of spirit. Therefore, many people, lacking spirit, take to drink. They fill themselves with alcohol.

A natural function which has existed from the beginning, like the religious function, cannot be disposed of with rationalistic and so-called enlightened criticism.

Do not throw yourself against what has become, enraged or bent on destruction. What will you put in its place? Do you not know that if you are successful in destroying what has become, you will then turn the will of destruction against yourself? But anyone who makes destruction their goal will perish through self-destruction. Much rather respect what has become, since reverence is a blessing.

Man's estrangement from the mythical realm and the subsequent shrinking of his existence to the mere factual—that is the major cause of mental illness.

this integration [of the shadow]…leads to disobedience and disgust, but also to self-reliance, without which individuation is unthinkable.

Analysis should release an experience that grips us or falls upon us as from above, an experience that has substance and body such as those things which occurred to the ancients. If I were going to symbolize it I would choose the Annunciation." - Seminar 1925

the spirit of regression, [which] threatens us with bondage to the mother and with dissolution and extinction in the unconscious.

If such a compensatory move of the unconscious is not integrated into consciousness in an individual, it leads to a neurosis or even to a psychosis.

that is, towards the unconscious, the only available source of religious experience.

What most people overlook or seem unable to understand is the fact that I regard the psyche as real.

This is certainly not to say that what we call the unconscious is identical with God or is set up in his place. It is simply the medium from which religious experience seems to flow. As to what the further cause of such experience may be, the answer to this lies beyond the range of human knowledge. Knowledge of God is a transcendental problem.

Projection is one of the commonest psychic phenomena…Everything that is unconscious in ourselves we discover in our neighbour, and we treat him accordingly.

Great talents are the most lovely and often the most dangerous fruits on the tree of humanity. They hang upon the most slender twigs that are easily snapped off.

During my medical education at the University of Basle I found vivisection horrible, barbarous and above all unnecessary

I was forced to realize how culturally laden, to the point of inadequacy, psychotherapy was for Danny. I now know how the famous Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung felt in 1925 after spending time with an Indigenous man: Jung was made aware, he said, of his "imprisonment in the cultural consciousness of the white man." Freud, along with all the other European founding fathers of psychotherapy, knew nearly nothing of Indigenous culture, and neither did I. But as my father used to say,

Understanding does not cure evil, but it is a definite help, inasmuch as one can cope with a comprehensible darkness.

It is also possible for the unconscious or an archetype to take complete possession of a man and to determine his fate down to the smallest detail

Maybe the only thing each of us can see is our own shadow. Carl Jung called this his shadow work. He said we never see others. Instead we see only aspects of ourselves that fall over them. Shadows. Projections. Our associations. The same way old painters would sit in a tiny dark room and trace the image of what stood outside a tiny window, in the bright sunlight. The camera obscura. Not the exact image, but everything reversed or upside down.