Quotes About Psychic

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.

Practical experience teaches us as a general rule that a psychic activity can find a substitute only on the basis of equivalence. A pathological interest, for example, an intense attachment to a symptom, can be replaced only by an equally intense attachment to another interest. . .

A verdade é que a morte é uma brutalidade terrível - não pode haver ilusões a esse respeito -, não apenas como acontecimento físico, mas, ainda muito mais, como acontecimento psíquico: uma pessoa é-nos arrebatada e o que fica é um gélido silêncio sepulcral.

For this purpose we must first make it quite clear to ourselves that all knowledge is the result of imposing some kind of order upon the reactions of the psychic system as they flow into our consciousness—an order which reflects the behaviour of a meta-psychic reality, of that which is in itself real.

Medicine has until recently gone on the supposition that illness should be treated and cured by itself; yet voices are now heard which declare this view to be wrong, and demand the treatment of the sick person and not of the sickness. The same demand is forced upon us in the treatment of psychic suffering.

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

Mind is not born as a tabula rasa. Like the body, it has its pre-established individual definiteness; namely, forms of behavior. They become manifest in the ever-recurring patterns of psychic functioning.

To the objective observer it is perfectly clear that the fantasies were products of a psychic energy not under the control of the conscious mind. They were longings, impulses, and symbolic happenings which it was quite unable to cope with either positively or negatively.

The space-time quaternio is the archetypal sine qua non for any apprehension of the physical world—indeed, the very possibility of apprehending it. It is the organizing schema par excellence among the psychic quaternities. In its structure it corresponds to the psychological schema of the functions.93 The 3 : 1 proportion frequently occurs in dreams and in spontaneous mandala-drawings.

In earlier ages, as instinctive concepts welled up in the mind of man, his conscious mind could no doubt integrate them into a coherent psychic pattern. But the "civilized" man is no longer able to do this. His "advanced" consciousness has deprived itself of the means by which the auxiliary contributions of the instincts and the unconscious can be assimilated. These organs of assimilation and integration were numinous symbols, held holy by common consent.

Even the most carefully defined philosophical or mathematical concept, which we are sure does not contain more than we put into it, is nevertheless more than we assume. It is a psychic event and as such partly unknowable. The very numbers you use in counting are more than you take them to be. They are at the same time mythological elements (for the Pythagoreans, they were even divine); but you are certainly unaware of this when you use numbers for practical purpose.

It is the same problem as in Job. As the highest value and supreme dominant in the psychic hierarchy, the God-image is immediately related to, or identical with, the self, and everything that happens to the God-image has an effect on the latter. Any uncertainty about the God-image causes a profound uneasiness in the self, for which reason the question is generally ignored because of its painfulness. But that does not mean that it remains unasked in the unconscious.

Though "instincts" or "drives" can be formulated in physiological and biological terms they cannot be pinned down in that way, for they are also psychic entities which manifest themselves in a world of fantasy peculiarly their own. They

Every concept in our conscious mind, in short, has its own psychic associations. While such associations may vary in intensity (according to the relative importance of the concept to our whole personality, or according to the other ideas and even complexes to which it is associated in our unconscious), they are capable of changing the "normal" character of that concept. It may even become something quite different as it drifts below the level of consciousness.

In my opinion, faith does not exclude thought (which is man's strongest weapon), but unfortunately many believers seem to be afraid of science (and incidentally of psychology) that they turn a blind eye to the numinous psychic powers that forever control man's fate. We have stripped all things of their mystery and numinosity; nothing is holy any longer.

This argument illustrates the way in which archetypes appear in practical experience: They are, at the same time, both images and emotions. One can speak of an archetype only when these two aspects are simultaneous. When there is merely the image, then there is simply a word-picture of little consequence. But by being charged with emotion, the image gains numinosity (or psychic energy); it becomes dynamic, and consequences of some kind must flow from it.

The secret of cultural development is the mobility and disposability of psychic energy. Directed thinking, as we know it today, is a more or less modern acquisition which earlier ages lacked.

Notwithstanding our rationalistic attempts to argue it out of existence, psychic reality is and remains a genuine source of anxiety whose danger increases the more it is denied. The biological instincts then meet not only with outer obstacles but with an internal resistance. The same psychic system which, on one side, is based on the concupiscence of the instincts, rests on the other side on an opposing will which is at least as strong as the biological urge.

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.

It is a fact that in eclipses of consciousness—in dreams, narcotic states and cases of insanity—there come to the surface psychic products or contents that show all the traits of primitive levels of psychic development.

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.

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.

Despite crime's omnipresence, things work in society, because biology compels it. Order eventually restores itself, by psychic equilibrium.

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.