Cg Jung Famous Quotes

Our famous scientific reality does not afford us the slightest protection against the so-called irreality of the unconscious. Something works behind the veil of fantastic images, whether we give this something a good name or a bad. It is something real, and for this reason its manifestations must be taken seriously. But first the tendency to concretization must be overcome; in other words, we must not take the fantasies literally when we approach the question of interpreting them. While we are in the grip of the actual experience, the fantasies cannot be taken literally enough.

There is no doubt that the shock of an... emotional experience is often needed to make people wake up and pay attention to what they are doing. There's a famous case of the 13th century Spanish Hidalgo, Raimon Lull, who finally (after a long chase) succeeded in meeting the lady he admired at a secret rendezvous. She silently opened her dress and showed him her breast, rotten with cancer. The shock changed Lull's life; he eventually became an eminent Theologian and one of the Church's greatest missionaries. In the case of such a sudden change one can often prove that an archetype has been at work for a long time in the unconscious, skillfully arranging circumstances that will lead to the crisis... such experiences seem to show that archetypal forms are not just static patterns. They are Dynamic factors that manifest themselves in impulses, just as spontaneously as the instincts. Certain dreams, visions, or thoughts can suddenly appear; and however carefully one investigates, one cannot find out what causes them. This does not mean that they have no cause; they certainly have. But it is so remote or obscure that one cannot see what it is.

But I have said enough about the negative side of the anima. There are just as many important positive aspects. The anima is, for instance, responsible for the fact that a man is able to find the right marriage partner. Another function is at least equally important: Whenever a man’s logical mind is incapable of discerning facts that are hidden in his unconscious, the anima helps him to dig them out. Even more vital is the role that the anima plays in putting a man’s mind in tune with the right inner values and thereby opening the way into more profound inner depths. It is as if an inner “radio” becomes tuned to a certain wave length that excludes irrelevancies but allows the voice of the Great Man to be heard. In establishing this inner “radio” reception, the anima takes on the role of guide, or mediator, to the world within and to the Self. That is how she appears in the example of the initiations of shamans that I described earlier; this is the role of Beatrice in Dante’s Paradiso, and also of the goddess Isis when she appeared in a dream to Apuleius, the famous author of The Golden Ass, in order to initiate him into a higher, more spiritual form of life.

Freud’s incest theory describes certain fantasies that accompany the regression of libido and are especially characteristic of the personal unconscious as found in hysterical patients. Up to a point they are infantile-sexual fantasies which show very clearly just where the hysterical attitude is defective and why it is so incongruous. They reveal the shadow. Obviously the language used by this compensation will be dramatic and exaggerated. The theory derived from it exactly matches the hysterical attitude that causes the patient to be neurotic. One should not, therefore, take this mode of expression quite as seriously as Freud himself took it. It is just as unconvincing as the ostensibly sexual traumata of hysterics. The neurotic sexual theory is further discomfited by the fact that the last act of the drama consists in a return to the mother’s body. This is usually effected not through the natural channels but through the mouth, through being devoured and swallowed (pl. LXII), thereby giving rise to an even more infantile theory which has been elaborated by Otto Rank. All these allegories are mere makeshifts. The real point is that the regression goes back to the deeper layer of the nutritive function, which is anterior to sexuality, and there clothes itself in the experiences of infancy. In other words, the sexual language of regression changes, on retreating still further back, into metaphors derived from the nutritive and digestive functions, and which cannot be taken as anything more than a façon de parler. The so-called Oedipus complex with its famous incest tendency changes at this level into a “Jonah-and-the-Whale” complex, which has any number of variants, for instance the witch who eats children, the wolf, the ogre, the dragon, and so on. Fear of incest turns into fear of being devoured by the mother. The regressing libido apparently desexualizes itself by retreating back step by step to the presexual stage of earliest infancy. Even there it does not make a halt, but in a manner of speaking continues right back to the intra-uterine, pre-natal condition and, leaving the sphere of personal psychology altogether, irrupts into the collective psyche where Jonah saw the “mysteries” (“représentations collectives”) in the whale’s belly. The libido thus reaches a kind of inchoate condition in which, like Theseus and Peirithous on their journey to the underworld, it may easily stick fast. But it can also tear itself loose from the maternal embrace and return to the surface with new possibilities of life.

So a certain feeling of inferiority and inefficiency, which was always present in Nietzsche, is back of that language, causing him to choose the big words in order to hit the goal. For to him the world was always exceedingly dull, nobody had ears or eyes or a feeling heart, so he had to knock at the doors with a sledgehammer. But when people locked the doors, he attacked them with such fearful words that they became frightened. His contemporary Jakob Burckhardt, the famous historian, grew quite afraid when he read Zarathustra — as I know from people in Basel who were acquainted with them both. It was uncanny to him; it was the language that overcame him. He shut the door to Nietzsche because he was too troublesome, he made too big a noise. And one always has the impression in reading Zarathustra, that it does not really reach people. Nietzsche felt that too and therefore he increased the weight of it in order to make it sink in. If he would only wait, be a bit more patient, a bit less noisy, then it would sink in; certain passages in Zarathustra are of supreme beauty, but others are in very bad taste, and the effect of the whole is somewhat endangered by that style. Jung, C. G.. Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939. Two Volumes: 1-2, unabridged (Jung Seminars) (p. 29-30). Princeton University Press

For instance, if you have a peculiar sensation in your hand, and at the same time in your foot, there is a conflict between the two; one is above and the other below, and you don't know whether you should look first here or there. So all the pluralistic elements of your mind can be the cause for a conflict, if it is only the struggle for the priority of attention — you don't know to which you should attend first. It is also like a flock and a shepherd; the flock consists of a plurality, and if the units of a flock disperse, the shepherd must gather them together. And so the ego consciousness is the shepherd of a flock of psychical units, and if the shepherd is killed, the flock disperses. That would be schizophrenia. The splitting of the mind is a separating of the units, and then each unit behaves as if it were a little ego consciousness, and if there is a remnant of the shepherd left somewhere, if his ears at least remain, he will hear voices. The units behave like little egos and they speak with sheeplike intelligence. One observes the same phenomenon in mediumistic experiments, where certain fragments of the mind are split off. The psyche is exceedingly dissociable. The fact that the mind really is based upon a plurality makes this a serious danger. One also observes very frequently in schizophrenics that as soon as the flock disperses, as soon as the war breaks out, the fragments of consciousness are projected into different parts of the body, so that they begin to speak with a certain amount of consciousness. [...] It is a very frequent thing that patients localize their voices somewhere in the body. We say quite normally, "It was as if my heart said to me," or, "as if I heard a voice within." But schizophrenics hear voices coming out of their feet or head or eyes. I have a patient who says: "Today I have voices in my upper lip." Or, "Now they are occupied with my navel." The voices are also personified as infinitely small men, who in thousands, like ants, walk over the body. That famous case, Schreber, was such a fellow. He found dozens of little men upon his eyelids, trying to raise or lower them, or walking upon his skin; and time and again one of the little men lost his independence and merged with the patient's consciousness. He always got angry and cursed when that happened. That would be a relative dissociation — the parts are not all absolutely independent; at times they join on again. It would be as if the frozen surface of a lake were broken up so that fragments were drifting on the surface, and then occasionally two pieces would join and freeze together and become a unit again. That is the moment when the little man says "Damn it!" — and merges with consciousness. Jung, C. G.. Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939. Two Volumes: 1-2, unabridged (Jung Seminars) (p. 363-364). Princeton University Press.