Quotes by Carl Jung
Welcome to our collection of quotes (with shareable picture quotes) by Carl Jung. We hope you enjoy pondering them and that you will share them widely.
Wikipedia Summary for Carl Jung
Carl Gustav Jung ( YUUNG; born Karl Gustav Jung, German: [kaʁl ˈjʊŋ]; 26 July 1875 – 6 June 1961), was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology. Jung's work has been influential in the fields of psychiatry, anthropology, archaeology, literature, philosophy, psychology and religious studies. Jung worked as a research scientist at the famous Burghölzli hospital, under Eugen Bleuler. During this time, he came to the attention of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. The two men conducted a lengthy correspondence and collaborated, for a while, on a joint vision of human psychology.
Freud saw the younger Jung as the heir he had been seeking to take forward his "new science" of psychoanalysis and to this end secured his appointment as President of his newly founded International Psychoanalytical Association. Jung's research and personal vision, however, made it impossible for him to follow his older colleague's doctrine and a schism became inevitable. This division was personally painful for Jung and resulted in the establishment of Jung's analytical psychology as a comprehensive system separate from psychoanalysis.
Among the central concepts of analytical psychology is individuation—the lifelong psychological process of differentiation of the self out of each individual's conscious and unconscious elements. Jung considered it to be the main task of human development. He created some of the best known psychological concepts, including synchronicity, archetypal phenomena, the collective unconscious, the psychological complex and extraversion and introversion.
Jung was also an artist, craftsman and builder as well as a prolific writer. Many of his works were not published until after his death and some are still awaiting publication.
Becoming conscious is of course a sacrilege against nature; it is as though you had robbed the unconscious of something.
Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.
Longer Version/[Notes]:
Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.
The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances; if there is any reaction, both are transformed.
The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances. If there is any reaction, both are transformed.
Healing comes only from that which leads the patient beyond himself and beyond his entanglements with ego.
Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart . Who looks inside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.
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.
A psychoneurosis must be understood, ultimately, as the suffering of a soul which has not discovered its meaning.
What did you do as a child that made the hours pass like minutes? Herein lies the key to your earthly pursuits.
My evenings are taken up very largely with astrology. I make horoscopic calculations in order to find a clue to the core of psychological truth.
We want to have certainties and no doubts- results and no experiments- without even seeing that certainties can arise only through doubt and results only thorough experiment.
Every Mother contains her daughter in herself and every daughter her mother and every mother extends backwards into her mother and forwards into her daughter.
The squaring of the circle is a stage on the way to the unconscious, a point of transition leading to a goal lying as yet unformulated beyond it. It is one of those paths to the centre.
For, in order to turn the individual into a function of the State, his dependence on anything beside the State must be taken from him.
Most of our difficulties come from losing contact with our instincts, with the age-old forgotten wisdom stored up in us.
Blind acceptance never leads to a solution; at best it leads only to a standstill and is paid for heavily in the next generation.
Our intellect has achieved the most tremendous things, but in the meantime our spiritual dwelling has fallen into disrepair.
One of the main functions of formalized religion is to protect people against a direct experience of God.
A criminal becomes a popular figure because he unburdens in no small degree the consciences of his fellow man, for now they know once more where evil is to be found.
If only simplicity were not the most difficult of all things. It consists of watching objectively the development of any fragment of fantasy.
The more one sees of human fate and the more one examines its secret springs of action, the more one is impressed by the strength of unconscious motives and by the limitations of free choice.
Insight that dawns slowly seems to me to have more lasting effects than a fitful idealism, which is unlikely to hold out for long.
The individual disposition is already a factor in childhood; it is innate, and not acquired in the course of a life.
Man is in need if a symbolical life- badly in need. We only live banal, ordinary, rational or irrational things- but we have no symbolic life. Where do we live symbolically? Nowhere except where we participate in the ritual of life.
The fact is that certain ideas exist almost everywhere and at all times and can even spontaneously create themselves quite independently of migration and tradition.
Man is the microcosm of the macrocosm ; the God on earth is built on the pattern of the God in nature. But the universal consciousness of the real Ego transcends a million fold the self-consciousness of the personal for false ego.
Whenever we give up, leave behind, and forget too much, there is always the danger that the things we have neglected will return with added force.
My own understanding is the sole treasure I possess, and the greatest. Though infinitely small and fragile in comparison with the powers of darkness, it is still a light, my only light.
Consciousness can keep only a few images in full clarity at one time, and even this clarity fluctuates.
We can keep from a child all knowledge of earlier myths, but we cannot take from him the need for mythology.
It is on the whole probably that we continually dream, but that consciousness makes such a noise that we do not hear it.
Recognition of the reality of evil necessarily relativizes the good, and the evil likewise, converting both into halves of a paradoxical whole.
Science...is part and parcel of our knowledge and obscures our insight only when it holds that the understanding given by it is the only kind there is.
In the child, consciousness rises out of the depths of unconscious psychic life, at first like separate islands, which gradually unite to form a 'continent,' a continuous landmass of consciousness. Progressive mental development means, in effect, extension of consciousness.
Psychiatrists classify a person as neurotic if he suffers from his problems in living, and a psychotic if he makes others suffer.
People are never helped in their suffering by what they think for themselves, but only by revelation of a wisdom greater than their own. It is this which lifts them out of their distress.
There was need of a phantastic, indestructible optimism, and one far removed from all sense of reality, in order, for example, to discover in the shameful death of Christ really the highest salvation and the redemption of the world.
No dream symbol can be separated from the individual who dreams it, and there is no definite or straightforward interpretation of any dream.
Science has destroyed even the refuge of the inner life. What was once a sheltering haven has become a place of terror.
But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the programme of life's morning -- for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.
Man's unconscious... contains all the patterns of life and behaviour inherited from his ancestors, so that every human child, prior to consciousness, is possessed of a potential system of adapted psychic functioning.
An old man who cannot bid farewell to life appears as feeble and sickly as the young man who is unable to embrace it.
A complex is a cluster of energy in the unconscious, charged by historic events, reinforced through repitition, embodying a fragment of our personality, and generating a programmed response and an implicit set of expectations.
We must be able to let things happen in the psyche. For us, this becomes a real art... Consciousness is forever interfering, helping, correcting, and negating, never leaving the single growth of the psychic processes in peace.
The less we understand of what our fathers and forefathers sought, the less we understand ourselves, and thus we help with all our might to rob the individual of his roots and his guiding instincts, so that he becomes a particle in the mass, ruled only by what Nietzsche called the spirit of gravity.
The decisive question for man is: Is he related to something infinite or not? That is the telling question of his life. Only if we know that the thing which truly matters is the infinite can we avoid fixing our interest upon futilities, and upon all kinds of goals which are not of real importance.
The collective unconscious contains the whole spiritual heritage of mankind's evolution born anew in the brain structure of every individual.
Creative powers can just as easily turn out to be destructive. It rests solely with the moral personality whether they apply themselves to good things or to bad. And if this is lacking, no teacher can supply it or take its place.
How can anyone see straight when he does not see himself and the darkness he unconsciously carries with him into all his dealings?
While personal problems are not overlooked, the analyst keeps an eye on their symbolic aspects, for healing comes only from what leads the patient beyond himself and beyond his entanglement in the ego.
You must go in quest of yourself, and you will find yourself again only in the simple and forgotten things.
I have always said to my pupils: Learn as much as you can about symbolism; then forget it when you are analyzing a dream.
Conflicts create the fire of affects and emotions; and like every fire it has two aspects: that of burning and that of giving light.
The darkness which clings to every personality is the door into the unconscious and the gateway of dreams, from which those two twilight figures, the shadow and the anima, step into our nightly visions or, remaining invisible, take possession of our ego-consciousness.
It is a bewildering thing in human life that the things that cause the greatest fear is the source of the greatest wisdom.
Anyone who attempts to do both, to adjust to his group and at the same time pursue his individual goal, becomes neurotic.
My mandalas were cryptograms concerning the state of the self which was presented to me anew each day...I guarded them like precious pearls....It became increasingly plain to me that the mandala is the center. It is the exponent of all paths. It is the path to the center, to individuation.
There are all too many who, on account of their notorious ineptitude, thrive better in a rationalist system than in freedom. Freedom is one of those difficult things.
His retreat into himself is not a final renunciation of the world, but a search for quietude, where alone it is possible for him to make his contribution to the life of the community.
It is a common illusion to believe that what we know today is all we ever can know. Nothing is more vulnerable than scientific theory, which is an ephemeral attempt to explain facts and not an everlasting truth in itself.
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.
If you think along the lines of Nature then you think properly. from the video Carl Jung speaks about death.
Fortunately, in her kindness and patience, Nature has never put the fatal question as to the meaning of their lives into the mouths of most people. And where no one asks, no one needs to answer.
I came to Freud for facts. I read 'The Interpretation of Dreams' and I thought- 'Oh, here is a man who is not just theorizing away, here is a man who has got facts.'
If I accept the fact that a god is absolute and beyond all human experiences, he leaves me cold. I do not affect him, nor does he affect me. But if I know that a god is a powerful impulse in my soul, at once I must concern myself with him, for then he can become important.
Perhaps this sounds very simple, but simple things are always the most difficult. In actual life it requires the greatest discipline to be simple, and the acceptance of oneself is the essence of the moral problem and the epitome of a whole outlook upon life.
We do not know whether Hitler is going to found a new Islam. He is already on the way; he is like Mohammad. The emotion in Germany is Islamic; warlike and Islamic. They are all drunk with wild god. That can be the historic future.
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.
When you succeed in awakening the Kundalini, so that it starts to move out of its mere potentiality, you necessarily start a world which is totally different from our world. It is the world of eternity.
The dream is a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses of the soul, opening into that cosmic night which was psyche long before there was any ego-consciousness, and which will remain psyche no matter how far our ego-consciousness extends.
I could not say I believe. I know! I have had the experience of being gripped by something that is stronger than myself, something that people call God.
God has fallen out of containment in religion and into human hearts--God is incarnating. Our whole unconscious is in an uproar from the God Who wants to know and to be known.
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.
I had always been impressed by the fact that there are surprisingly many individuals who never use their minds if they can avoid it, and yet are not stupid, and an equal number who obviously do use their minds but in an amazingly stupid way.
It is high time that we realized that it is pointless to praise the light and preach it if nobody can see it. It is much more needful to preach the art of seeing.
Deep down, below the surface of the average man's conscience, he hears a voice whispering, There is something not right, no matter how much his rightness is supported by public opinion or moral code.
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.
But the meaning of life is not ... explained by one's business life, nor is the deep desire of the human heart answered by a bank account.
Archetypes, in spite of their conservative nature, are not static but in a continuous dramatic flux. Thus the self as a monad or continuous unit would be dead. But it lives inasmuch as it splits and unites again. There is no energy without opposites!
We carry our past with us, to wit, the primitive and inferior man with his desires and emotions, and it is only with an enormous effort that we can detach ourselves from this burden. If it comes to a neurosis, we invariably have to deal with a considerably intensified shadow.
Our whole educational problem suffers from a one-sided approach to the child who is to be educated, and from an equally one-sided lack of emphasis on the uneducatedness of the educator.
So the lion is the law-breaker. Just as to the primitive man the lion is the lawbreaker, the great nuisance, dangerous to human beings and to animals, that breaks into the Kraal at night and fetches the bull out of the herd: he is the destructive instinct.
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.
The psychotherapist learns little or nothing from his successes. They mainly confirm him in his mistakes, while his failures, on the other hand, are priceless experiences in that they not only open up the way to a deeper truth, but force him to change his views and methods.
Gnosticism was stamped out completely and its remnants are so badly mangled that special study is needed to get any insight at all into its inner meaning.
For the alchemist the one primarily in need of redemption is not man, but the deity who is lost and sleeping in matter.
Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. At all counts, it forms an unconscious snag, thwarting our most well-meant intentions.
The mind has grown to its present state of consciousness as an acorn grows into an oak, or as saurians developed into mammals.
A purely psychological explanation is ruled out... the discs show signs of intelligent guidance, by quasi-human pilots.
The apparently unendurable conflict is proof of the rightness of your life. A life without contradiction is only half a life; or else a life in the Beyond, which is destined only for angels. But God loves human beings more than the angels.
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.
In sleep, fantasy takes the form of dreams. But in waking life, too, we continue to dream beneath the threshold of consciousness, especially when under the influence of repressed or other unconscious complexes.
Seldom, or perhaps never, does a marriage develop into an individual relationship smoothly and without crises; there is no coming to consciousness without pain.
Life calls us forth to independence, and anyone who does not heed this call because of childish laziness or timidity is threatened with neurosis. And once this has broken out, it becomes an increasingly valid reason for running away from life.
Complexes are psychic contents which are outside the control of the conscious mind. They have been split off from consciousness and lead a separate existence in the unconscious, being at all times ready to hinder or to reinforce the conscious intentions.
Not nature, but the genius of mankind, has knotted the hangman's noose with which it can execute itself at any moment.
Far from being a material world, this is a psychic world, which allows us to make only indirect and hypothetical inferences about the real nature of matter. The psychic, alone has immediate reality, and this includes all forms of the psychic, even.
Enlightenment consists not merely in the seeing of luminous shapes and visions, but in making the darkness visible. The latter procedure is more difficult and therefore, unpopular.
In thirty years I have treated many patients. Among all my patients in the second half of life, every one of them fell ill because he had lost that which the living religions of every age had given their followers, and none of them was really healed who did not regain his religious outlook.
I readily admit that I have such a great respect for what happens in the human soul that I would be afraid of disturbing and distorting the silent operation of nature by clumsy interference.
So often among so-called primitives one comes across spiritual personalities who immediately inspire respect, as though they were the fully matured products of an undisturbed fate.
The reason for such an unreasonable attitude with me is that I am not at all sure what will happen to me after death. I have good reasons to assume that things are not finished with death. Life seems to be an interlude in a long story.
Science is not ... a perfect instrument, but it is a superb and invaluable tool that works harm only when taken as an end in itself.
Somewhere, right at the bottom of one's own being, one generally does know where one should go and what one should do. But there are times when the clown we call I behaves in such a distracting fashion that the inner voice cannot make its presence felt.
How difficult it is to reach anything approaching a moderate and relatively calm point of view in the midst of one's emotions.
We know that the wildest and most moving dramas are played not in the theatre but in the hearts of ordinary men and women.
The mass State has no intention of promoting mutual understanding and the relationship of man to man; it strives, rather, for atomization, for the psychic isolation of the individual. The more unrelated individuals are, the more consolidated the State becomes, and vice versa.
Creativity is the art that can give rise to visionary metaphorical relationships, as opposed to purely psy-chological ones.
We are so accustomed to the apparently rational nature of our world that we can scarcely imagine anything happening that cannot be explained by common sense. The primitive man confronted by a shock of this kind would not doubt his sanity; he would think of fetishes, spirits or gods.
I am the triple owner of the world, the finest Turkey, the Lorelei, Germania and Helvetia of exclusively sweet butter and Naples, and I must supply the whole world with macaroni.
The dream is a series of images, which are apparently contradictory and nonsensical, but arise in reality from psychologic material which yields a clear meaning.
One could say, with a little exaggeration, that the persona is that which in reality one is not, but which oneself as well as others think one is.
At times I feel as if I am spread out over the landscape and inside things, and am myself living in every tree, in the plashing of the waves, in the clouds and the animals that come and go, in the procession of the seasons.
The seat of faith, however, is not consciousness but spontaneous religious experience, which brings the individual's faith into immediate relation with God.
The general function of dreams is to try to restore our psychological balance by producing dream material that re-establishes, in a subtle way, the total psychic equilibrium.
If we feel our way into the human secrets of the sick person, the madness also reveals its system, and we recognize in the mental illness merely an exceptional reaction to emotional problems which are not strange to us. -- The Content of the Psychoses.
A book of mine is always a matter of fate. There is something unpredictable about the process of writing, and I cannot prescribe for myself any predetermined course.
The best political, social, and spiritual work we can do is to withdraw the projection of our shadow onto others.
A residual sea of symbols which is shared by all mankind, usually accessed through dreams or altered states, and from which cultures draw images on which to found their religions.
The psyche is a natural phenomenon. All aspects of the psyche, even those which seem pathological or destructive, actually serve the function of furthering our psychological development.
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.
I think that one should view with philosophic admiration the strange paths of the libido and should investigate the purposes of its circuitous ways.
One might expect, perhaps, that a man full of genius could pasture in the greatness of his own thoughts, and renounce the cheap approbation of the crowd which he despises; yet he succumbs to the more powerful impulse of the herd instinct. His searching and his finding, his call, belong to the herd.
To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real.
