Carl Jung

Carl Gustav Jung (IPA: [ˈkarl ˈgʊstaf ˈjʊŋ]) (26 July 1875 – 6 June 1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist and founder of analytical psychology.

Quotes



 * The little world of childhood with its familiar surroundings is a model of the greater world. The more intensively the family has stamped its character upon the child, the more it will tend to feel and see its earlier miniature world again in the bigger world of adult life. Naturally this is not a conscious, intellectual process.
 * The Theory of Psychoanalysis (1913)


 * Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health.
 * "The Transcendent Function" ("Die Transzendente Funktion") (1916)
 * Volume 8: Structure & Dynamics of the Psyche, The Collected Works of C. G. Jung (1969)


 * Since the Devil is the adversary of Christ he should occupy a position equivalent to his and be the Son of God as well. Satan would be the first Son of God and Christ the second.
 * Siccome il Diavolo è l’avversario di Cristo dovrebbe occupare una posizione equivalente alla sua ed essere pure lui Figlio di Dio. Satana sarebbe il primo Figlio di Dio e Cristo il secondo.
 * Essai d’interprétation psycologique du dogme de la Trinité, in Essai sur la symbolique de l’esprit, Paris, 1991, p. 207. As quoted in Curzio Nitoglia, Satanismo nella Psicologia Analitica di Jung: peggio della Psiacanalisi di Freud, Qui Europa (July 4, 2016)


 * Since [in the Middle Ages] the psychic relation to woman was expressed in the collective worship of Mary, the image of woman lost a value to which human beings had a natural right. This value could find its natural expression only through individual choice, and it sank into the unconscious when the individual form of expression was replaced by a collective one. In the unconscious the image of woman received an energy charge that activated the archaic and infantile dominants. And since all unconscious contents, when activated by dissociated libido, are projected upon the external object, the devaluation of the real woman was compensated by daemonic features. She no longer appeared as an object of love, but as a persecutor or witch. The consequence of increasing Mariolatry was the witch hunt,.that indelible blot on the later Middle Ages.
 * Psychological Types (1921), CW 6. P.344


 * Whereas logic and objectivity are usually the predominant features of a man's outer attitude, or are at least regarded as ideals, in the case of a woman it is feeling. But in the soul it is the other way round: inwardly it is the man who feels, and the woman who reflects. Hence a man's greater liability to total despair, while a woman can always find comfort and hope; accordingly a man is more likely to put an end to himself than a woman. However much a victim of social circumstances a woman may be, as a prostitute for instance, a man is no less a victim of impulses from the unconscious, taking the form of alcoholism and other vices.
 * Psychological Types (1921). CW 6. P.805


 * This whole creation is essentially subjective, and the dream is the theater where the dreamer is at once scene, actor, prompter, stage manager, author, audience, and critic.
 * General Aspects of Dream Psychology (1928)


 * The conscious side of woman corresponds to the emotional side of man, not to his "mind." Mind makes up the soul, or better, the "animus" of woman, and just as the anima of a man consists of inferior relatedness, full of affect, so the animus of woman consists of inferior judgments, or better, opinions.
 * The Secret of the Golden Flower (1931) Commentary by C.G.Jung in CW 13: Alchemical Studies. P. 60


 * Here and there it happened in my practice that a patient grew beyond himself because of unknown potentialities, and this became an experience of prime importance to me. I had learned in the meanwhile that the greatest and most important problems of life are all in a certain sense insoluble. They must be so because they express the necessary polarity inherent in every self-regulating system. They can never be solved, but only outgrown.
 * The Secret of the Golden Flower, ibid.


 * "Education to personality" has become a pedagogical ideal that turns its back upon the standardized—the collective and normal—human being. It thus fittingly recognizes the historical fact that the great, liberating deeds of world history have come from leading personalities and never from the inert mass that is secondary at all times and needs a demagogue if it is to move at all. The paean of the Italian nation is addressed to the personality of the Duce, and dirges of other nations lament the absence of great leaders.
 * Lecture, The Inner Voice, Kulturbund, Vienna (1932); quoted in The Integration of Personality, Farrar & Rinehart, NY (1939)


 * The dream is the small hidden door in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul, which opens to that primeval cosmic night that was soul long before there was conscious ego and will be soul far beyond what a conscious ego could ever reach.
 * The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man (1934)


 * For a woman, the typical danger emanating from the unconscious comes from above, from the "spiritual" sphere personified by the animus, whereas for a man it comes from the chthonic realm of the "world and woman," i.e., the anima projected on to the world.
 * "A Study in the Process of Individuation" (1934) In CW 9, Part I: The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. P. 559


 * Emotion is the chief source of all becoming-conscious. There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion.
 * Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype (1938)


 * I find that all my thoughts circle around God like the planets around the sun, and are as irresistibly attracted by Him. I would feel it to be the grossest sin if I were to oppose any resistance to this force.
 * Sources: David John Tacey (2007). How to read Jung. W.W. Norton & Co, p. 35; Charles Bartruff Hanna (1967). The Face of the Deep: The Religious Ideas of C.G. Jung. “The” Westminster Press, p. 18; Nándor Fodor (1971). Freud, Jung, and occultism. University Books. p. 12; Wayne G. Rollins (1983). Jung and the Bible. p. 123


 * There is no question but that Hitler belongs in the category of the truly mystic medicine man. As somebody commented about him at the last Nürnberg party congress, since the time of Mohammed nothing like it has been seen in this world. His body does not suggest strength. The outstanding characteristic of his physiognomy is its dreamy look. I was especially struck by that when I saw pictures taken of him in the Czechoslovakian crisis; there was in his eyes the look of a seer. This markedly mystic characteristic of Hitler's is what makes him do things which seem to us illogical, inexplicable, and unreasonable. ... So you see, Hitler is a medicine man, a spiritual vessel, a demi-deity or, even better, a myth.
 * During an interview with H. R. Knickerbocker, first published in Hearst's International Cosmopolitan (January 1939), in which Jung was asked to diagnose Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Joseph Stalin, later published in Is Tomorrow Hitler's? (1941), by H. R. Knickerbocker, also published in The Seduction of Unreason : The Intellectual Romance with Fascism (2004) by Richard Wolin, Ch. 2 : Prometheus Unhinged : C. G. Jung and the Temptations of Aryan Religion, p. 75


 * No nation keeps its word. A nation is a big, blind worm, following what? Fate perhaps. A nation has no honour, it has no word to keep. ... Hitler is himself the nation. That incidentally is why Hitler always has to talk so loud, even in private conversation — because he is speaking with 78 million voices.
 * During an interview with H. R. Knickerbocker (1939), quoted in A Life of Jung (2002) by Ronald Hayman, p. 360


 * A mother-complex is not got rid of by blindly reducing the mother to human proportions. Besides that we run the risk of dissolving the experience "Mother" into atoms, thus destroying something supremely valuable and throwing away the golden key which a good fairy laid in our cradle. That is why mankind has always instinctively added the pre-existent divine pair to the personal parents—the "god"father and "god"-mother of the newborn child—so that, from sheer unconsciousness or shortsighted rationalism, he should never forget himself so far as to invest his own parents with divinity.
 * "Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype" (1939) In CW 9, Part I: The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious P.172


 * The overdevelopment of the maternal instinct is identical with that well-known image of the mother which has been glorified in all ages and all tongues. This is the motherlove which is one of the most moving and unforgettable memories of our lives, the mysterious root of all growth and change; the love that means homecoming, shelter, and the long silence from which everything begins and in which everything ends. Intimately known and yet strange like Nature, lovingly tender and yet cruel like fate, joyous and untiring giver of life-mater dolorosa and mute implacable portal that closes upon the dead. Mother is motherlove, my experience and my secret. Why risk saying too much, too much that is false and inadequate and beside the point, about that human being who was our mother, the accidental carrier of that great experience which includes herself and myself and all mankind, and indeed the whole of created nature, the experience of life whose children we are? The attempt to say these things has always been made, and probably always will be; but a sensitive person cannot in all fairness load that enormous burden of meaning, responsibility, duty, heaven and hell, on to the shoulders of one frail and fallible human being—so deserving of love, indulgence, understanding, and forgiveness—who was our mother. He knows that the mother carries for us that inborn image of the mater nature and mater spiritualis, of the totality of life of which we are a small and helpless part.
 * "Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype" (1939) In CW 9, Part I: The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious P.172


 * The woman who fights against her father still has the possibility of leading an instinctive, feminine existence, because she rejects only what is alien to her. But when she fights against the mother she may, at the risk of injury to her instincts, attain to greater consciousness, because in repudiating the mother she repudiates all that is obscure, instinctive, ambiguous, and unconscious in her own nature.
 * "Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype" (1939). In CW 9, Part I: The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. P. 186


 * The healthy man does not torture others—generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.
 * In Du, May 1941


 * Not for a moment dare we succumb to the illusion that an archetype can be finally explained and disposed of. Even the best attempts at explanation are only more or less successful translations into another metaphorical language. (Indeed, language itself is only an image.) The most we can do is dream the myth onwards and give it a modern dress. And whatever explanation or interpretation does to it, we do to our own souls as well, with corresponding results for our own well-being. The archetype — let us never forget this — is a psychic organ present in all of us. A bad explanation means a correspondingly bad attitude toward this organ, which may thus be injured. But the ultimate sufferer is the bad interpreter himself.
 * The Psychology of the Child Archetype [Das göttliche Kind] (1941), 1963 translation, II, 1 : The Archetype as a Link with the Past; also in Collected Works, Vol. 9, Part I, p. 160


 * No one can flatter himself that he is immune to the spirit of his own epoch, or even that he possesses a full understanding of it. Irrespective of our conscious convictions, each one of us, without exception, being a particle of the general mass, is somewhere attached to, colored by, or even undermined by the spirit which goes through the mass. Freedom stretches only as far as the limits of our consciousness.
 * Paracelsus the Physician (1942)


 * The more remote and unreal the personal mother is, the more deeply will the son's yearning for her clutch at his soul, awakening that primordial and eternal image of the mother for whose sake everything that embraces, protects, nourishes, and helps assumes maternal form, from the Alma Mater of the university to the personification of cities, countries, sciences and ideals.
 * "Paracelsus as a Spiritual Phenomenon" (1942) In CW 13: Alchemical Studies P.47


 * The secret is that only that which can destroy itself is truly alive.
 * Psychology and Alchemy (1944)


 * As the animus is partial to argument, he can best be seen at work in disputes where both parties know they are right. Men can argue in a very womanish way, too, when they are anima-possessed and have thus been transformed into the animus of their own anima.
 * Aion (1951). CW 9, Part II: P.29


 * When animus and anima meet, the animus draws his sword of power and the anima ejects her poison of illusion and seduction. The outcome need not always be negative, since the two are equally likely to fall in love (a special instance of love at first sight).
 * Aion (1951). CW 9, Part II: P.338.30


 * We are so captivated by and entangled in our subjective consciousness that we have forgotten the age-old fact that God speaks chiefly through dreams and visions.
 * The Symbolic Life (1953); also in Man and His Symbols (1964)


 * We do not know whether Hitler is going to found a new Islam. (He is already on the way; he is like Mohammed. The emotion in Germany is Islamic; warlike and Islamic. They are all drunk with a wild god.)
 * The Symbolic Life — in The Collected Works: The Symbolic Life. Miscellaneous Writings (1977), p. 281


 * The unconscious is not just evil by nature, it is also the source of the highest good: not only dark but also light, not only bestial, semihuman, and demonic but superhuman, spiritual, and, in the classical sense of the word, "divine."
 * The Practice of Psychotherapy, p. 364 (1953)


 * Our blight is ideologies — they are the long-expected Antichrist!
 * The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation (1954)


 * We can never legitimately cut loose from our archetypal foundations unless we are prepared to pay the price of a neurosis, any more than we can rid ourselves of our body and its organs without committing suicide.
 * J.B. Priestley, Times Literary Supplement, London (August 6, 1954)


 * Every father is given the opportunity to corrupt his daughter's nature, and the educator, husband, or psychiatrist then has to face the music. For what has been spoiled by the father can only be made good by a father, just as what has been spoiled by the mother can only be repaired by a mother. The disastrous repetition of the family pattern could be described as the psychological original sin, or as the curse of the Atrides running through the generations.
 * Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955) CW 14: P. 232


 * The wise man who is not heeded is counted a fool, and the fool who proclaims the general folly first and loudest passes for a prophet and Führer, and sometimes it is luckily the other way round as well, or else mankind would long since have perished of stupidity.
 * Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955)


 * Eros is a superhuman power which, like nature herself, allows itself to be conquered and exploited as though it were impotent. But triumph over nature is dearly paid for. Nature requires no explanations of principle, but asks only for tolerance and wise measure. "Eros is a mighty daemon," as the wise Diotima said to Socrates. We shall never get the better of him, or only to our own hurt. He is not the whole of our inward nature, though he is at least one of its essential aspects.
 * Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, CW 7 (1957). "On the Psychology of the Unconscious" P.32f


 * The persona, the ideal picture of a man as he should be, is inwardly compensated by feminine weakness, and as the individual outwardly plays the strong man, so he becomes inwardly a woman, i.e., the anima, for it is the anima that reacts to the persona. But because the inner world is dark and invisible to the extraverted consciousness, and because a man is all the less capable of conceiving his weaknesses the more he is identified with the persona, the persona's counterpart, the anima, remains completely in the dark and is at once projected, so that our hero comes under the heel of his wife's slipper. If this results in a considerable increase of her power, she will acquit herself none too well. She becomes inferior, thus providing her husband with the welcome proof that it is not he, the hero, who is inferior in private, but his wife. In return the wife can cherish the illusion, so attractive to many, that at least she has married a hero, unperturbed by her own uselessness. This little game of illusion is often taken to be the whole meaning of life.
 * Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, CW 7 (1957). "The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious" P.309


 * We know as little of a supreme being as of Matter. But there is as little doubt of the existence of a supreme being as of Matter. The world beyond is reality, and experiential fact. We only don't understand it.
 * Letter to Morton Kelsey (1958) as quoted by Morton Kelsey, Myth, History & Faith: The Mysteries of Christian Myth & Imagination (1974) Ch.VIII


 * Metaphysical assertions, however, are statements of the psyche, and are therefore psychological. ... Whenever the Westerner hears the word “psychological,” it always sounds to him like “only psychological.”
 * Psyche and Symbol (1958), p. 285


 * Our psychology is ... a science of mere phenomena without any metaphysical implications. [It] Treats all metaphysical claims and assertions as mental phenomena, and regards them as statements about the mind and its structure.
 * Psychology and Religion: West and East (1958), p. 476, as cited in Psychotherapy East and West (1961), p. 14


 * ...the relatively unconscious man driven by his natural impulses because, imprisoned in his familiar world, he clings to the commonplace, the obvious, the probable, the collectively valid, using for his motto: 'Thinking is difficult. Therefore, let the herd pronounce judgement.'
 * Frequently misquoted as "Thinking is difficult, that's why most people judge" and close variants.
 * Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky.  (1959), C.G. Jung, R.F.C. Hull (translator) (Princeton Press, 1979, ISBN 9780691018225


 * [T]here are as many nights as days, and the one is just as long as the other in the year's course. Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word "happy" would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.
 * "The Art of Living", interview with journalist Gordon Young first published in 1960


 * Even if the whole world were to fall to pieces, the unity of the psyche would never be shattered. And the wider and more numerous the fissures on the surface, the more the unity is strengthened in the depths.
 *  Civilization in Transition (1964)


 * If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool.
 * Mysterium Coniunctionis, from The Collected Works of C. G. Jung (1966)


 * The whole nature of man presupposes woman, both physically and spiritually. His system is tuned into woman from the start, just as it is prepared for a quite definite world where there is water, light, air, salt, carbohydrates etc..
 * "Two Essays in Analytical Psychology" In CW 7: P. 188 (1967)


 * One of the most difficult tasks men can perform, however much others may despise it, is the invention of good games and it cannot be done by men out of touch with their instinctive selves.
 * Jung and the Story of Our Time, Laurens van der Post (1977)


 * That higher and "complete" man is begotten by the "unknown" father and born from Wisdom, and it is he who, in the figure of the puer aeternus—"vultu mutabilis albus et ater"—represents our totality, which transcends consciousness. It was this boy into whom Faust had to change, abandoning his inflated onesidedness which saw the devil only outside. Christ's "Except ye become as little children" is a prefiguration of this, for in them the opposites lie close together; but what is meant is the boy who is born from the maturity of the adult man, and not the unconscious child we would like to remain.
 * Answer to Job, R. Hull, trans. (1984), pp. 157-158


 * Nature must not win the game, but she cannot lose. And whenever the conscious mind clings to hard and fast concepts and gets caught in its own rules and regulations—as is unavoidable and of the essence of civilized consciousness—nature pops up with her inescapable demands.
 * Alchemical Studies


 * The idea of an all-powerful divine Being is present everywhere, unconsciously if not consciously, because it is an archetype. There is in the psyche some superior power, and if it is not consciously a god, it is the "belly" at least, in St. Paul's words. I therefore consider it wiser to acknowledge the idea of God consciously, for, if we do not, something else is made God, usually something quite inappropiate and stupid such as only an "enlightened" intellect could hatch forth.
 * C. G. Jung. 2014. Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Volume 7: Two Essays in Analytical Psychology. Princeton University Press. p. 71


 * When one is not understood one should as a rule lower one's voice, because when one really speaks loudly enough and is not heard, it is because people do not want to hear. One had better begin to mutter to oneself, then they get curious.
 * Nietzsche's Zarathustra (1988), p. 30


 * When we assume God to be a guiding principle—well, sure enough, a god is usually characteristic of a certain system of thought or morality. For instance, take the Christian God, the summum bonum: God is love, love being the highest moral principle; and God is spirit, the spirit being the supreme idea of meaning. All our Christian moral concepts derive from such assumptions, and the supreme essence of all of them is what we call God.
 * Nietzsche's Zarathustra (1988), p. 40

Psychological Types, or, The Psychology of Individuation (1921)

 * The dynamic principle of fantasy is play, a characteristic also of the child, and as such it appears inconsistent with the principle of serious work. But without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable. It is therefore short-sighted to treat fantasy, on account of its risky or unacceptable nature, as a thing of little worth.
 * Ch. 1, p. 82


 * The great problems of life — sexuality, of course, among others — are always related to the primordial images of the collective unconscious. These images are really balancing or compensating factors which correspond with the problems life presents in actuality. This is not to be marvelled at, since these images are deposits representing the accumulated experience of thousands of years of struggle for adaptation and existence.
 * Ch. 5, p. 271


 * 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.
 * Variant translation: We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect. The judgement of the intellect is only part of the truth.
 * Conclusion, p. 628

"Woman in Europe" (1927)
"Women In Europe" (1927). In CW 10: Civilization in Transition.


 * What can a man say about woman, his own opposite? I mean of course something sensible, that is outside the sexual program, free of resentment, illusion, and theory. Where is the man to be found capable of such superiority? Woman always stands just where the man's shadow falls, so that he is only too liable to confuse the two. Then, when he tries to repair this misunderstanding, he overvalues her and believes her the most desirable thing in the world.
 * P. 236


 * It is a woman's outstanding characteristic that she can do anything for the love of a man. But those women who can achieve something important for the love of a thing are most exceptional, because this does not really agree with their nature. Love for a thing is a man's prerogative. But since masculine and feminine elements are united in our human nature, a man can live in the feminine part of himself, I and a woman in her masculine part. None the less the feminine element in man is only something in the background, as is the masculine element in woman. If one lives out the opposite sex in oneself one is living in one's own background, and one's real individuality suffers. A man should live as a man and a woman as a woman.
 * P. 243


 * Unconscious assumptions or opinions are the worst enemy of woman; they can even grow into a positively demonic passion that exasperates and disgusts men, and does the woman herself the greatest injury by gradually smothering the charm and meaning of her femininity and driving it into the background. Such a development naturally ends in profound psychological disunion, in short, in a neurosis.
 * P.245


 * The discussion of the sexual problem is only a somewhat crude prelude to a far deeper question, and that is the question of the psychological relationship between the sexes. In comparison with this the other pales into insignificance, and with it we enter the real domain of woman. Woman's psychology is founded on the principle of Eros, the great binder and loosener, whereas from ancient times the ruling principle ascribed to man is Logos.
 * P.254

Contributions to Analytical Psychology (1928)

 * The woman is increasingly aware that love alone can give her full stature, just as the man begins to discern that spirit alone can endow his life with its highest meaning. Fundamentally, therefore, both seek a psychic relation to the other, because love needs the spirit, and the spirit love, for their fulfillment.
 * p. 185


 * Seldom, or perhaps never, does a marriage develop into an individual relationship smoothly and without crises; there is no coming to consciousness without pain.
 * p. 193


 * The growth of the mind is the widening of the range of consciousness, and ... each step forward has been a most painful and laborious achievement.
 * p. 340

Psychology and Poetry (June 1930)

 * All ordinary expression may be explained causally, but creative expression which is the absolute contrary of ordinary expression, will be forever hidden from human knowledge.


 * For his [the artist's] life is, of necessity, full of conflicts, since two forces fight in him: the ordinary man with his justified claim for happiness, contentment, and guarantees for living on the one hand, and the ruthless creative passion on the other, which under certain conditions crushes all personal desires into the dust.


 * There is rarely a creative man who does not have to pay a high price for the divine spark of his greatest gifts...the human element is frequently bled for the benefit of the creative element and to such an extent that it even brings out the bad qualities, as for instance, ruthless, naive egoism (so-called "auto-eroticism"), vanity, all kinds of vices—and all this in order to bring to the human I at least some life-strength, since otherwise it would perish of sheer inanition.

Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933)



 * It is imperative that we should not pare down the meaning of a dream to fit some narrow doctrine. ... No language exists that cannot be misused. It is hard to realize how badly we are fooled by the abuse of ideas, it even seems as if the unconscious had a way of strangling the physician in the coils of his own theory.
 * p 11; this was originally listed here in a somewhat misleading form combining it with another statement on the interpretations of dreams on p. 14: No language exists that cannot be misused ... Every Interpretation is hypothetical, for it is a mere attempt to read an unfamiliar text.


 * Every interpretation is hypothetical, for it is a mere attempt to read an unfamiliar text. An obscure dream, taken by itself, can rarely be interpreted with any certainty, so that I attach little importance to the interpretation of single dreams. With a series of dreams we can have more confidence in our interpretations, for the later dreams correct the mistakes we have made m handling those that went before. We are also better able, in a dream series, to recognize the important contents and basic themes.
 * p. 14


 * The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.
 * p. 49


 * It is in applied psychology, if anywhere, that today we should be modest and grant validity to a number of apparently contradictory opinions; for we are still far from having anything like a thorough knowledge of the human psyche, that most challenging field of scientific enquiry. For the present we have merely more or less plausible opinions that defy reconciliation.
 * p. 57


 * For it all depends on how we look at things, and not on how they are in themselves. The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.
 * p. 67


 * The great decisions of human life have as a rule far more to do with the instincts and other mysterious unconscious factors than with conscious will and well-meaning reasonableness. The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases. Each of us carries his own life-form—an indeterminable form which cannot be superseded by any other.
 * p. 69


 * The meaning and design of a problem seem not to lie in its solution, but in our working at it incessantly.
 * p. 103


 * Aging people should know that their lives are not mounting and unfolding but that an inexorable inner process forces the contraction of life. For a young person it is almost a sin — and certainly a danger — to be too much occupied with himself; but for the aging person it is a duty and a necessity to give serious attention to himself.
 * p. 125


 * Every civilized human being, whatever 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 relics of earlier evolutionary stages going back to even the reptilian age, so the human psyche is likewise a product of evolution which, when followed up to its origins, show countless archaic traits.
 * p. 126


 * No psychic value can disappear without being replaced by another of equivalent intensity.
 * p. 209


 * Among all my patients in the second half of life—that is to say, over thirty-five—there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost what the living religions of every age have given their followers, and none of them has been really healed who did not regain his religious outlook.
 * Chap. 11 (Psychotherapists or the Clergy), p. 229

The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (1934)

 * Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 9, Part 1. 2nd ed. (1968), Princeton University Press ISBN 0691018332




 * A more or less superficial layer of the unconscious is undoubtedly personal. I call it the "personal unconscious". But this personal layer rests upon a deeper layer, which does not derive from personal experience and is not a personal acquisition but is inborn. This deeper layer I call the "collective unconscious". I have chosen the term "collective" because this part of the unconscious is not individual but universal; in contrast to the personal psyche, it has contents and modes of behaviour that are more or less the same everywhere and in all individuals.
 * p. 3-4


 * Why is psychology the youngest of the empirical sciences? Why have we not long since discovered the unconscious and raised up its treasure-house of eternal images? Simply because we had a religious formula for everything psychic — and one that is far more beautiful and comprehensive than immediate experience. Though the Christian view of the world has paled for many people, the symbolic treasure-rooms of the East are still full of marvels that can nourish for a long time to come the passion for show and new clothes. What is more, these images — be they Christian or Buddhist or what you will — are lovely, mysterious, richly intuitive.
 * p. 7-8


 * In allem Chaos ist Kosmos und in aller Unordnung geheime Ordnung.
 * Translation: In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.
 * p. 32 (1981 edition)
 * Originally presented at an Eranos conference. (1935)


 * Whereas the personal unconscious consists for the most part of "complexes", the content of the collective unconscious is made up essentially of "archetypes". The concept of the archetype, which is an indispensable correlate of the idea of the collective unconscious, indicates the existence of definite forms in the psyche which seem to be present always and everywhere. Mythological research calls them 'motifs'; in the psychology of primitives they correspond to Levy-Bruhl's concept of "representations collectives," and in the field of comparative religion they have been defined by Hubert and Mauss as 'categories of the imagination'... My thesis, then, is as follows: In addition to our immediate consciousness, which is of a thoroughly personal nature and which we believe to be the only empirical psyche (even if we tack on the personal unconscious as an appendix), there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals.
 * p. 42-43


 * We must now turn to the question of how the existence of archetypes can be proved. Since archetypes are supposed to produce certain psychic forms, we must discuss how and where one can get hold of the material demonstrating these forms. The main source, then, is dreams, which have the advantage of being involuntary, spontaneous products of nature not falsified by any conscious purpose. By questioning the individual one can ascertain which of the motifs appearing in the dream are known to him... Consequently, we must look for motifs which could not possibly be known to the dreamer and yet behave functionally of the archetype known from historical sources.
 * p. 48

The Integration of the Personality (1939)

 * 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.
 * p. 72


 * If there is anything that we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could better be changed in ourselves.
 * p. 285

The Psychology of the Unconscious (1943)
German title Über die Psychologie des Unbewussten. Not to be confused with Psychology of the Unconscious, which was translated in 1916 from the German Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido published in 1912.


 * This world is empty to him alone who does not understand how to direct his libido towards objects, and to render them alive and beautiful for himself, for Beauty does not indeed lie in things, but in the feeling that we give to them.


 * Wo die Liebe herrscht, da gibt es keinen machtwillen, und wo die macht den vorrang hat, da fehlt die Liebe. Das eine ist der Schatten des andern.
 * Translation: Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.
 * P. 97


 * The erotic instinct is something questionable, and will always be so whatever a future set of laws may have to say on the matter. It belongs, on the one hand, to the original animal nature of man, which will exist as long as man has an animal body. On the other hand, it is connected with the highest forms of the spirit. But it blooms only when the spirit and instinct are in true harmony. If one or the other aspect is missing, then an injury occurs, or at least there is a one-sided lack of balance which easily slips into the pathological. Too much of the animal disfigures the civilized human being, too much culture makes a sick animal.

Bollingen Tower inscriptions (1950)



 * Aion is a child at play, gambling; a child's is the kingship. Telesphorus traverses the dark places of the world, like a star flashing from the deep, leading the way to the gates of the sun and the land of dreams.
 * Combining fragments of Heraclitus and Homer


 * I am an orphan, alone; nevertheless I am found everywhere. I am one, but opposed to myself. I am youth and old man at one and the same time. I have known neither father nor mother, because I have had to be fetched out of the deep like a fish, or fell like a white stone from heaven. In woods and mountains I roam, but I am hidden in the innermost soul of man. I am mortal for everyone, yet I am not touched by the cycle of aeons.
 * Combining alchemical assertions

Psychology and Alchemy (1952)

 * Every archetype is capable of endless development and differentiation. It is therefore possible for it to be more developed or less. In an outward form of religion where all the emphasis is on the outward figure (hence where we are dealing with a more or less complete projection) the archetype is identical with externalized ideas but remains unconscious as a psychic factor. When an unconscious content is replaced by a projected image to that extent, it is cut off from all participation in an influence on the conscious mind.  Hence it largely forfeits its own life, because prevented from exerting the formative influence on consciousness natural to it; what is more, it remains in its original form — unchanged, for nothing changes in the unconscious.


 * 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.
 * par. 51 p.46


 * People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. They will practice Indian yoga and all its exercises, observe a strict regimen of diet, learn the literature of the whole world—all because they cannot get on with themselves and have not the slightest faith that anything useful could ever come out of their own souls. Thus the soul has gradually been turned into a Nazareth from which nothing good can come.
 * CW 12, par. 126 (p 99)


 * The assumption that the human psyche possesses layers that lie below consciousness is not likely to arouse serious opposition. But... there could just as well be layers lying above consciousness... The conscious mind can only claim a relatively central position and must put up with the fact that the unconscious psyche transcends and as it were surrounds it on all sides. Unconscious contents connect it backward with the physiological states on the one hand and archetypal data on the other. But it is extended forward by intuitions which are conditioned partly by archetypes and partly by subliminal perceptions depending on the relativity of time and space in the unconscious.
 * p. 132

The Undiscovered Self (1958)



 * Any theory based on experience is necessarily statistical; that is to say, it formulates an ideal average which abolishes all exceptions at either end of the scale and replaces them by an abstract mean. This mean is quite valid though it need not necessarily occur in reality. Despite this it figures in the theory as an unassailable fundamental fact. ... If, for instance, I determine the weight of each stone in a bed of pebbles and get an average weight of 145 grams, this tells me very little about the real nature of the pebbles. Anyone who thought, on the basis of these findings, that he could pick up a pebbles of 145 grams at the first try would be in for a serious disappointment. Indeed, it might well happen that however long he searched he would not find a single pebble weighing exactly 145 grams. The statistical method shows the facts in the light of the ideal average but does not give us a picture of their empirical reality. While reflecting an indisputable aspect of reality, it can falsify the actual truth in a most misleading way.
 * p 6


 * The bigger the crowd, the more negligible the individual.
 * p 14


 * Just as man as a social being, cannot in the long run exist without a tie to the community, so the individual will never find the real justification for his existence, and his own spiritual and moral autonomy, anywhere except in an extramundane principle capable of relativizing the overpowering influence of external factors.
 * p 23


 * It is astounding that man, the instigator, inventor and vehicle of all these developments, the originator of all judgements and decisions and the planner of the future, must make himself such a quantité negligeable.
 * p 45


 * Without consciousness there would, practically speaking, be no world, for the world exists as such only in so far as it is consciously reflected and considered by a psyche. Consciousness is a precondition of being.
 * p 48


 * You can take away a man's gods, but only to give him others in return.
 * p 63


 * The seat of faith, however, is not consciousness but spontaneous religious experience, which brings the individual's faith into immediate relation with God. Here we must ask: Have I any religious experience and immediate relation to God, and hence that certainty which will keep me, as an individual, from dissolving in the crowd?
 * p 85


 * Reason alone does not suffice.
 * p 98


 * We are living in what the Greeks called the right time for a "metamorphosis of the gods," i.e. of the fundamental principles and symbols. This peculiarity of our time, which is certainly not of our conscious choosing, is the expression of the unconscious man within us who is changing. Coming generations will have to take account of this momentous transformation if humanity is not to destroy itself through the might of its own technology and science.
 * p 110

Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle (1960)



 * We Shall Naturally look round in vain the macrophysical world for acausal events, for the simple reason that we cannot imagine events that are connected non-causally and are capable of a non-causal explanation. But that does not mean that such events do not exist... The so-called "scientific view of the world" based on this can hardly be anything more than a psychologically biased partial view which misses out all those by no means unimportant aspects that cannot be grasped statistically.
 * p. 5


 * Primitive superstition lies just below the surface of even the most tough-minded individuals, and it is precisely those who most fight against it who are the first to succumb to its suggestive effects.
 * p. 25


 * Naturally, every age thinks that all ages before it were prejudiced, and today we think this more than ever and are just as wrong as all previous ages that thought so. How often have we not seen the truth condemned! It is sad but unfortunately true that man learns nothing from history.
 * p. 33


 * This grasping of the whole is obviously the aim of science as well, but it is a goal that necessarily lies very far off because science, whenever possible, proceeds experimentally and in all cases statistically. Experiment, however, consists in asking a definite question which excludes as far as possible anything disturbing and irrelevant. It makes conditions, imposes them on Nature, and in this way forces her to give an answer to a question devised by man. She is prevented from answering out of the fullness of her possibilities since these possibilities are restricted as far as practible. For this purpose there is created in the laboratory a situation which is artificially restricted to the question which compels Nature to give an unequivocal answer. The workings of Nature in her unrestricted wholeness are completely excluded. If we want to know what these workings are, we need a method of inquiry which imposes the fewest possible conditions, or if possible no conditions at all, and then leave Nature to answer out of her fullness.
 * p. 35


 * It is sometimes difficult to avoid the impression that there is a sort of foreknowledge of the coming series of events.
 * p. 94


 * My example concerns a young woman patient who, in spite of efforts made on both sides, proved to be psychologically inaccessible. The difficulty lay in the fact that she always knew better about everything. Her excellent education had provided her with a weapon ideally suited to this purpose, namely a highly polished Cartesian rationalism with an impeccably "geometrical" idea of reality. After several fruitless attempts to sweeten her rationalism with a somewhat more human understanding, I had to confine myself to the hope that something unexpected and irrational would turn up, something that burst the intellectual retort into which she had sealed herself. Well, I was sitting opposite of her one day, with my back to the window, listening to her flow of rhetoric. She had an impressive dream the night before, in which someone had given her a golden scarab—a costly piece of jewellery. While she was still telling me this dream, I heard something behind me gently tapping on the window. I turned round and saw that it was a fairly large flying insect that was knocking against the window from outside in the obvious effort to get into the dark room. This seemed to me very strange. I opened the window and immediately and caught the insect in the air as it flew in. It was a scarabaeid beetle, or common rose-chafer, whose gold-green color most nearly resembles that of a golden scarab. I handed the beetle to my patient with the words "Here is your scarab." This broke the ice of her intellectual resistance. The treatment could now be continued with satisfactory results.
 * p. 110

Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1963)

 * Jung's autobiography, recorded and edited by Aniela Jaffé. (Pantheon Books, 1963). Available at archive.org


 * Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains.
 * Closing lines of the preface


 * I know every numbskull will babble on about "black man," "maneater," "chance," and "retrospective interpretation," in order to banish something terribly inconvenient that might sully the familiar picture of childhood innocence. Ah, these good, efficient, healthy-minded people, they always remind me of those optimistic tadpoles who bask in a puddle in the sun, in the shallowest of waters, crowding together and amiably wriggling their tails, totally unaware that the next morning the puddle will have dried up and left them stranded.
 * On a phallic dream he had as a young child. p. 14


 * Sometimes I had an overwhelming urge to speak, not about that, but only to hint that there were some curious things about me which no one knew of. I wanted to find out whether other people had undergone similar experiences. I never succeeded in discovering so much as a trace of them in others. As a result, I had the feeling that I was either outlawed or elect, accursed or blessed.
 * p. 41


 * My interests drew me in different directions. On the one hand I was powerfully attracted by science, with its truths based on facts; on the other hand I was fascinated by everything to do with comparative religion. [...] In science I missed the factor of meaning; and in religion, that of empiricism.
 * p. 72


 * It is only natural that I should constantly have revolved in my mind the question of the relationship of the symbolism of the unconscious to Christianity as well as to other religions. Not only do I leave the door open for the Christian message, but I consider it of central importance for Western man. It needs, however, to be seen in a new light, in accordance with the changes wrought by the contemporary spirit.


 * As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.
 * p. 326


 * For lack of empirical data I have neither knowledge nor understanding of such forms of being, which are commonly called spiritual. ...Nevertheless, we have good reason to suppose that behind this veil there exists the uncomprehended absolute object which affects and influences us—and to suppose it even, or particularly, in the case of psychic phenomena about which no verifiable statements can be made.
 * pp.351


 * Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others ﬁnd inadmissible.
 * p.356

On my next trip to the United States I went with a group of American friends to visit the Indians of New Mexico, the city-building Pueblos...
 * We always require an outside point to stand on, in order to apply the lever of criticism. This is especially so in psychology, where by the nature of the material we are much more subjectively involved than in any other science. How, for example, can we become conscious of national peculiarities if we have never had the opportunity to regard our own nation from outside? Regarding it from outside means regarding it from the standpoint of another nation. To do so, we must acquire sufficient knowledge of the foreign collective psyche, and in the course of this process of assimilation we encounter all those incompatibilities which constitute the national bias and the national peculiarity. Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves. I understand England only when I see where I, as a Swiss, do not ﬁt in. I understand Europe, our greatest problem, only when I see where I as a European do not ﬁt into the world. Through my acquaintance with many Americans, and my trips to and in America, I have obtained an enormous amount of insight into the European character; it has always seemed to me that there can be nothing more useful for a European than some time or another to look out at Europe from the top of a skyscraper. When I contemplated for the ﬁrst time the European spectacle from the Sahara, surrounded by a civilization which has more or less the same relationship to ours as Roman antiquity has to modem times, I became aware of how completely, even in America, I was still caught up and imprisoned in the cultural consciousness of the white man. The desire then grew in me to carry the historical comparisons still farther by descending to a still lower cultural level.
 * p.246
 * ii. America: The Pueblo Indians (Extract from an unpublished ms) (Random House Digital, 2011)

Man and His Symbols (1964)

 * C.G. Jung, M.-L. von Franz, Joseph L. Henderson, Jolande Jacobi, Aniela Jaffé (Aldus Books, 1964, ISBN 978-0440351832


 * Because we cannot discover God's throne in the sky with a radiotelescope or establish (for certain) that a beloved father or mother is still about in a more or less corporeal form, people assume that such ideas are "not true." I would rather say that they are not "true" enough, for these are conceptions of a kind that have accompanied human life from prehistoric times, and that still break through into consciousness at any provocation.


 * Modern man may assert that he can dispense with them, and he may bolster his opinion by insisting that there is no scientific evidence of their truth. But since we are dealing with invisible and unknowable things (for God is beyond human understanding, and there is no mean of proving immortality), why should we bother with evidence?
 * p. 75-76

The Red Book: Liber Novus (2009)

 * The Red Book: Liber Novus by C. G. Jung. 1st edition. Edited by Sonu Shamdasani. Translated by Mark Kyburz, John Peck, and Sonu Shamdasani. Philemon Foundation and W. W. Norton & Company, 2009. ISBN 978-0393065671.


 * Every step closer to my soul excites the scornful laughter of my devils, those cowardly ear-whisperers and poison-mixers. It was easy for them to laugh, since I had to do strange things.
 * P. 234


 * So it is that you come to know what a real God is. … The God wants my life. He wants to go with me, sit at the table with me, work with me. Above all he wants to be ever-present.
 * P. 291


 * Be silent and listen: have you recognized your madness and do you admit it? Have you noticed that all your foundations are completely mired in madness? Do you not want to recognize your madness and welcome it in a friendly manner? You wanted to accept everything. So accept madness too. Let the light of your madness shine, and it will suddenly dawn on you. Madness is not to be despised and not to be feared, but instead you should give it life. … If you want to find paths, you should also not spurn madness, since it makes up such a great part of your nature. … Be glad that you can recognize it, for you will thus avoid becoming its victim. Madness is a special form of the spirit and clings to all teachings and philosophies, but even more to daily life, since life itself is full of craziness and at bottom utterly illogical. Man strives toward reason only so that he can make rules for himself. Life itself has no rules. That is its mystery and its unknown law. What you call knowledge is an attempt to impose something comprehensible on life.
 * P. 298

The Black Books (2020)

 * The Black Books 1913–1932: Notebooks of Transformation by C. G. Jung. Edited by Sonu Shamdasani. Translated by Martin Liebscher, John Peck, and Sonu Shamdasani. Philemon Foundation and W. W. Norton & Company, 2020. ISBN 978-0393088649.


 * My soul, my soul, where are you? Do you hear me? I speak, I call you—are you there? I have returned, here I am again. I have shaken the dust of all the lands from my feet, and I have come to you again, I am with you. After long years of long wandering, I have come to you anew. Shall I tell you everything I have seen, experienced, and drunk in? Or do you not want to hear about all the noise of life and the world? But one thing you must know, the one thing I have learned is that one must live this life. This life is the way, the long sought-after way to the unfathomable, which we call "divine". There is no other way. All other ways are false paths.
 * Book 2, 12. Nov. 1913

Misattributed

 * Vocatus atque non vocatus, Deus aderit.
 * Called or uncalled, God will be present.
 * This is actually a statement that Jung discovered among the Latin writings of Desiderius Erasmus, who declared the statement had been an ancient Spartan proverb. Jung popularized it, having it inscribed over the doorway of his house, and upon his tomb.
 * Variant translations: Summoned or not summoned, God is present. Invoked or not invoked, God is present Called or not called, the god will be there. Bidden or unbidden, God is present. Bidden or not bidden, God is present. Bidden or not, God is present. Bidden or not bidden, God is there. Called or uncalled, God is there.

Quotes about Jung

 * Jung drew a circle and divided it into four parts, and said a man is three-quarters masculine and one quarter feminine. A woman is three-quarters feminine and one quarter masculine. And that’s a good start. The problem is that he says this is the way it should be, and that’s not the way it is. It is too rigid a form. Some men I have met are three-quarters feminine and one-quarter masculine, and the one-quarter masculine they are — jump back — very strong, fuerte, strong! But they have tremendous feminine development because it is who they are. It is from the souls, not an overlay from cultural family. Gloria Steinem is a great example of a woman who has far more masculine development then she has feminine development. Although now her feminine development appears as though it is coming now. She is 55 -60 years old and now it is coming. So whatever we have, as you know, the role in life is to develop it to its fullness. But also the challenges is to develop its balance, which is also its opposite.
 * Clarissa Pinkola Estés Interview (2019)


 * If you read Jung’s works you will see him constantly contradict himself because he is developing as he goes along.
 * Clarissa Pinkola Estés Interview (2019)


 * I have thought about the animus and the anima, Jung's terms, as I work.
 * 1986 interview in Conversations with Maxine Hong Kingston (1998)


 * According to Jung dreams have many functions for the individual. They first of all compensate for the one-sided conscious attitude of the individual... these experiences tend to balance a person's conscious, outer life. They also reveal those things of which the individual wishes to remain unaware, confronting him with desires he has not faced up to. But dreams do more than this: they give intimations of meaning and reality which the individual has not yet touched, and they can even give directions for achieving this meaning and reality.
 * Morton Kelsey, Myth, History & Faith: The Mysteries of Christian Myth & Imagination (1974) Ch.VII


 * It is... Jung's finding that men who try to live without contact with the unconscious and its symbolic and mythological meaning often fall sick both psychologically and physically. ...Until Jung could help them find contact with their unconscious roots, from which the rational materialism of today had cut them off, they could not get well. ...the real business of religion, as Jung maintained, is to keep men in touch with this level of reality, and this is done largely through the use of myths.
 * Morton Kelsey, Myth, History & Faith: The Mysteries of Christian Myth & Imagination (1974) Ch.VII


 * my father was a Freudian analyst, as well as an anthropologist. He became a lay analyst. Freud said that dreaming is extremely important, and I probably absorbed that. Then I read Jung, and Jung has rather specific theories about dreams. Some of them made sense to me; some of them didn't.
 * 2002 interview in Conversations with Ursula Le Guin (2008)


 * Whereas Freud was for the most part concerned with the morbid effects of unconscious repression, Jung was more interested in the manifestations of unconscious expression, first in the dream and eventually in all the more orderly products of religion and art and morals.
 * Lewis Mumford, in Interpretations and Forecasts (1967)


 * When Carl Jung classified the "rational" functions of the mind he divided them into thinking and feeling. We often consider feeling to be loose and nebulous, but for Jung it was one of the mind's strictly rational functions. Feeling, for Jung, is what assesses the inherent value of things. Feeling looks at the world globally rather than analytically. If thought is not balanced by feeling, then it can become obsessive and one-tracked, giving no attention to the overall meaning of what one is doing. Conversely, if feeling is not tempered by thought, then we are in danger of rushing into events with great enthusiasm and conviction without making proper plans or understanding possible pitfalls.
 * F. David Peat, From Certainty to Uncertainty: The Story of Science and Ideas in the Twentieth Century (2002)


 * There are also root dreams shared by the race as a whole. Most of these are not as symbolic as Jung thought them to be but are literal interpretations of the abilities used by the inner self. For that matter, as you know, flying dreams need not be symbolic of anything.
 * Jane Roberts, in Seth, Dreams & Projections of Consciousness, p. 308-310


 * Much later I read Jung, and when I went to Ireland I heard about an analyst who believed that what you are dominated by in your childhood is whatever your parents really love. I believe that now. I believe that I was dominated by what my father and my mother loved; it came through to me as deep sexuality centered in that forbidden aunt who was the figure of passion and sex in my early life, and through the opera singers and composers of the music that meant so much to them, and through the popular music of that time and the happiness of the young people who sat on the stoops and sang, and through the sadness my parents felt at that custom going out of the city.
 * Muriel Rukeyser “The Education of a Poet” (1976)


 * For Jung, the 'psychic world' (i.e. the world of the mind) was an independent reality, and it was possible to travel there and make the acquaintance of its inhabitants.
 * Colin Wilson in Rudolf Steiner: The Man and His Vision, p. 164 (1985)


 * Jung fiercely resented the implication that he was a hypocritical, self-seeking Judas, a 'rat'. Yet there was just enough truth in it to strike home. He was undoubtedly a man who liked his own way, no matter what the cost to others.
 * Colin Wilson in C. G. Jung: Lord of the Underworld, p. 72 (1984)