Quotes About Interpretation

A story told by the conscious mind has a beginning, a development, and an end, but the same is not true of a dream. Its dimensions in time and space are quite different; to understand it you must examine it from every aspect-just as you may take an unknown object in your hands and turn it over and over until you are familiar with every detail of its shape.

Because there are innumerable things beyond the range of human understanding, we constantly use symbolic terms to represent concepts that we cannot define or fully comprehend. This is one reason why all religions employ symbolic language or images. But this conscious use of symbols is only one aspect of a psychological fact of great importance: Man also produces symbols unconsciously and spontaneously, in the form of dreams.

Myths, however, consist of symbols that were not invented but happened.

it seemed to me I was living in an insane asylum of my own making. I went about with all these fantastic figures: centaurs, nymphs, satyrs, gods and goddesses, as though they were patients and I was analyzing them. I read a Greek or a Negro myth as if a lunatic were telling me his anamnesis.

A work of art must relate something that does not appear in its visible form.

Those who do not realize the special feeling tone of the archetype end with nothing more than a jumble of mythological concepts, which can be strung together to show that everything means anything—or nothing at all. All the corpses in the world are chemically identical, but living individuals are not. Archetypes come to life only when one patiently tries to discover why and in what fashion they are meaningful to a living individual.

22]"The fact is that archetypal images are so packed with meaning in themselves that people never think of asking what they really do mean...In reality, however, he has merely discovered that up till then he has never thought about his images at all. And when he starts thinking about them, he does so with the help of what he calls "reason"—which in point of fact is nothing more than the sum-total of all his prejudices and myopic viwes.

Psihopatologia ÅŸtie cu suficient? siguran?? ce îi poate face inconÅŸtientul conÅŸtiinÅ£ei.

The sign is always less than the concept it represents, while a symbol always stands for something more than its obvious and immediate meaning. Symbols, moreover, are natural and spontaneous products. No genius has ever sat down with a pen or a brush in his hand and said: "Now I am going to invent a symbol.

This fact, as I shall later explain, has a direct and important bearing upon the interpretation of dreams. It is obvious that if you assume the dream to be symbolic, you will interpret it differently from a person who believes that the essential energizing thought or emotion is known already and is merely "disguised" by the dream. In the latter case, dream interpretation makes little sense, for you find only what you already know.

I can confirm by a modern dream the element of prognosis (or precognition) that can be found in an old dream quoted by Artemidorus of Daldis, in the second century A.D.: A man dreamed that he saw his father die in the flames of a house on fire. Not long afterward, he himself died in a phlegmone (fire, or high fever), which I presume was pneumonia.

another common peculiarity of hysterics, namely, that of taking everything personally, of never being able to remain objective, and of allowing themselves to be carried away by momentary impressions; this again shows the characteristics of the enhanced object-libido.

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.

We allow the images to rise up, and maybe we wonder about them, but that is all. We do not take the trouble to understand them, let alone draw ethical conclusions from them. This stopping-short conjures up the negative effects of the unconscious.

Intuition does not say what things 'mean' but sniffs out their possibilities. 'Meaning' is given by thinking.

If, for instance, I determine the weight of each stone in a bed of pebbles and get an average weight of five ounces, this tells me very little about the real nature of the pebbles.

For it is the function of consciousness not only to recognize and assimilate the external world through the gateway of the senses, but to translate into visible reality the world within us.

no such thing as chance, and that every act and every expression has its own meaning, determined by the inner feelings and wishes of the individual.

You must know one thing above all: a succession of words does not have only one meaning. But men strive to assign only a single meaning to the sequence of words, in order to have an unambiguous language.

The symbol-producing function of our dreams is an attempt to bring our original mind back to consciousness, where it has never been before, and where it has never undergone critical self-reflection. We have been that mind, but we have never known it.

The relation between conscious and unconscious is compensatory. This fact, which is easily verifiable, affords a rule for dream interpretation. It is always helpful, when we set out to interpret a dream, to ask: What conscious attitude does it compensate?

It is always helpful, when we set out to interpret a dream, to ask: What conscious attitude does it compensate

The dream-content is to be taken in all seriousness as something that has actually happened to us; it should be treated as a contributory factor in framing our conscious outlook.

Thus the interpretation of dreams, whether by the analyst or by the dreamer himself, is for the Jungian psychologist an entirely personal and individual business (and sometimes an experimental and very lengthy one as well) that can by no means be undertaken by rule of thumb.