Psychologist Carl Jung Quotes

The healthy man does not torture others - generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers. Carl Jung Swiss psychologist (1875 - 1961)

Back in the 1930s, Carl Jung, the eminent thinker and psychologist, put it this way: Criticism has 'the power to do good when there is something that must be destroyed, dissolved or reduced, but [it is] capable only of harm when there is something to be built.

The healthy man does not torture others—generally, it is the tortured who turn into torturers. — Carl Gustav Jung, Swiss psychologist (1875 - 1961)

Carl Jung, the renowned psychologist, summed it up: “The foundation of all mental illness is the avoidance of true suffering.

The idea of universal consciousness suffuses both Western and Eastern thought and philosophy, from the “collective unconscious” of psychologist Carl Jung, to unified field theory, to the investigations of the Institute of Noetic Sciences founded by Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell in 1973. Though some of the Methodist ministers of my youth might be appalled, I feel blessed by the thought of sharing with an octopus what one website (loveandabove.com) calls “an infinite, eternal ocean of intelligent energy.” Who would know more about the infinite, eternal ocean than an octopus? And what could be more deeply calming than being cradled in its arms, surrounded by the water from which life itself arose? As Wilson and I pet Kali’s soft head on this summer afternoon, I think of Paul the Apostle’s letter to the Philippians about the power of the “peace that passeth understanding . . .

I learned two very important lessons from Carl Jung, the famous Swiss depth psychologist, about “doing unto others as you would have them do unto you” or “loving your neighbour as yourself.” The first lesson was that neither of these statements has anything to do with being nice. The second was that both are equations, rather than injunctions. If I am someone’s friend, family member, or lover, then I am morally obliged to bargain as hard on my own behalf as they are on theirs. If I fail to do so, I will end up a slave, and the other person a tyrant. What good is that? It is much better for any relationship when both partners are strong. Furthermore, there is little difference between standing up and speaking for yourself, when you are being bullied or otherwise tormented and enslaved, and standing up and speaking for someone else. As Jung points out, this means embracing and loving the sinner who is yourself, as much as forgiving and aiding someone else who is stumbling and imperfect.

As Nietzsche remarked, where pride is insistent enough, memory prefers to give way. Thus, among the lost memories, we encounter not a few that owe their subliminal state (and there incapacity to be voluntary reproduced) to their disagreeable and incompatible nature. The psychologist calls these repressed contents.

As the psychologist Carl Jung once said, ‘If our civilization were to perish, it would be due more to stupidity than to evil.

As the psychologist Carl Jung said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.

Do not cling to the shore, but set sail for exotic lands and places no longer found on maps. Walk on hallowed grounds. Blaze new trails. The term synchronicity was coined in the 1950s by the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, to describe uncanny coincidences that seem to be meaningful. The Greek roots are syn-, "together," and khronos, "time." Synchronicity is the effector of Gnosis. Explore the Bogomils and the Cathars not just through books but, if at all possible, by visiting their lands, cemeteries and descendants. Finally, explore the most contemporary manifestations of Gnosticism: the writings of C.G. Jung, Jorge Luis Borges, Aleister Crowley, René Guénon, Hermann Hesse, Philip K. Dick, and Albert Camus. Gradually, you will begin to understand the various thought currents and systems existing in Gnosticism, and you will have begun to understand what does and does not appeal to you in Gnostic thought.

Corrie ten Boom once said that if the devil can’t make you sin, he’ll make you busy. There’s truth in that. Both sin and busyness have the exact same effect—they cut off your connection to God, to other people, and even to your own soul. The famous psychologist Carl Jung had this little saying: Hurry is not of the devil; hurry is the devil.

The psychologist has come to see that nothing is achieved by telling, persuading, admonishing, giving good advice.

It’s actually ironic that you should be afraid of feeling your feelings; as an overeater, what you have created for yourself and have had to endure are some of the most painful emotions there are. The horrible feelings of failure that are endemic to the chronic overeater make your tolerance for pain already higher than you think. The pain you’re trying to avoid is nothing compared to the pain you’ve already lived through. The Swiss psychologist Carl Jung said: “All neurosis is a substitute for legitimate suffering.” Any pathological tendency—overeating included—represents the twisted energies of unprocessed pain. The pathology is not ended by suppressing your pain, but by feeling the legitimate suffering it is seeking to express.

I learned two very important lessons from Carl Jung, the famous Swiss depth psychologist, about “doing unto others as you would have them do unto you” or “loving your neighbour as yourself.” The first lesson was that neither of these statements has anything to do with being nice. The second was that both are equations, rather than injunctions. If I am someone’s friend, family member, or lover, then I am morally obliged to bargain as hard on my own behalf as they are on theirs. If I fail to do so, I will end up a slave, and the other person a tyrant. What good is that?

Logic, reason, and common sense are your best tools for synthesizing reality and understanding what to do about it. Be wary of relying on anything else. Unfortunately, numerous tests by psychologists show that the majority of people follow the lower-level path most of the time, which leads to inferior decisions without their realizing it. As Carl Jung put it, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” It’s even more important that decision making be evidence-based and logical when groups of people are working together. If it’s not, the process will inevitably be dominated by the most powerful rather than the most insightful participants, which is not only unfair but suboptimal. Successful organizations have cultures in which evidence-based decision making is the norm rather than the exception.

To speak of a science of individual psychology is already a contradiction in terms. It is only the collective element in the psychology of an individual that constitutes an object for science; for the individual is by definition something unique that cannot be compared with anything else. A psychologist who professes a “scientific” individual psychology is simply denying individual psychology. He exposes his individual psychology to the legitimate suspicion of being merely his own psychology. The psychology of every individual would need its own manual, for the general manual can deal only with collective psychology.

Marie-Louis von Franz, a Swiss psychologist, noticed a disturbing trend in the mid-20th century – many men and women who were well into their adult years remained psychologically stunted in their maturation. They occupied the bodies of adults, but their mental development failed to keep pace. on Franz saw this as such a pressing issue that in 1959 she gave a series of lectures on the psychology of the Puer Aeternus, which is Latin for “eternal child”. While originally this term was used in mythology to refer to a child god who remains forever young, her teacher Carl Jung had adopted the term for psychological purposes to describe the individual who, like Peter Pan, fails to grow up.

By the time I first encountered Jung, as a teenager in the early 1970s, this was certainly happening. Jung may not have been accepted by mainstream intellectuals—Freud was their psychologist of choice—but he had certainly been adopted by the counterculture. When I first read Memories, Dreams, Reflections—his “so-called autobiography”—Jung was part of a canon of “alternative” thinkers that included Hermann Hesse, Alan Watts, Carlos Castaneda, D. T. Suzuki, R. D. Laing, Aldous Huxley, Jorge Luis Borges, Aleister Crowley, Timothy Leary, Madame Blavatsky, and J. R. R. Tolkien, to name a few. That his face appeared on the cover of the Beatles’ famous Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album, in a crowd of other unorthodox characters, was endorsement enough.

But Jung did speak out against Hitler some years before he left the society. In 1936 he condemned the Fuehrer as a “raving berserker” and a man “possessed” who had set Germany on its “course toward perdition.”37 And a year earlier, in his lecture series at London’s Tavistock Clinic, Jung broke off his remarks to refer to his prophecy of 1918. “I saw it coming,” he told his fellow psychologists, “I said in 1918 that the ‘blond beast’ is stirring in its sleep and that something will happen in Germany. No psychologist then understood at all what I meant . . .” Commenting on the power of the archetypes to overrun conscious decision, Jung called them “the great decisive forces.”38 They “get you below the belt and not in your mind, your brain just counts for nothing, your sympathetic system is gripped.”39 Remarks like these led to accusations that Jung gave people a way of avoiding responsibility for their actions: they didn’t decide to become Nazis, the archetypes “made them do it.” Yet they are remarkably similar to what the philosopher Jean Gebser, who had firsthand experience of Nazism, believed was at work: the “magical structure of consciousness,” which Gebser characterized as a “vegetative intertwining of all living things,” and which requires a “sacrifice of consciousness” and “occurs in the state of trance, or when consciousness dissolves as a result of mass reactions, slogans, or ‘isms.’ ” Curiously, Gebser believed the “magical structure” was also responsible for synchronicities,40 and in an interview in 1938, Jung himself said that “Hitler’s power is not political; it is magic.”41

The Transcendent Function,” was written in 1916, while Jung was in the middle of his “deep reaching interior metamorphosis.” (He was serving a stint of military duty, stationed near the Gotthard Pass at the time.) Yet it wasn’t published until 1957, and only then when Jung was asked to contribute to a student publication, not something many of his readers would see. For forty years it remained in Jung’s files, off-limits to the general public. Jung discussed the ideas in seminars and lectures, but usually only with his closest students, rather like an initiate sharing the most profound mysteries with only his most devoted pupils. Although subsequent Jungian analysts have recognized their importance, neither idea plays a prominent role in any of Jung’s major works. For example, in Mysterium Coniunctionis , Jung’s alchemical magnum opus, active imagination warrants only a brief mention, again not by name, and the transcendent function is mentioned only twice. As is often the case with Jung’s ideas, we need to go to his followers for anything like a clear definition.19 Some suggest Jung kept quiet about active imagination because he considered it possibly dangerous. In a note, he cautioned that through it “subliminal contents . . . may overpower the conscious mind and take possession of the personality.”20 That Jung came upon it precisely when his own subliminal contents were mutinying against his ego makes this a reasonable concern. Yet there may have been other reasons. Weak egos might fragment practicing active imagination, but what would his peers think of a psychologist who talked to people in his head? As with his public and private opinions about spirits and the occult, Jung seems to have kept quiet about things that could threaten his persona as a scientist.

The relationship among faith, knowledge, and belief is suggested by a story involving the famous depth psychologist Carl Jung. In the last year of his life, he was interviewed for a BBC television documentary. The interviewer asked him, "Dr. Jung, do you believe in God?" Jung said, "Believe? I do not believe in God - I know." The point: the more one knows God, the less faith as belief is involved. But faith as belief still has a role: it can provide a basis for responding even when one does not know for sure, and it can also get one through periods of time in which firsthand experiences of God are lacking.

Psychologist Carl Jung, in his book Modern Man in Search of a Soul, wrote, “About a third of my cases are suffering from no clinically definable neurosis, but from the senselessness and emptiness of their lives. This can be described as the general neurosis of our time.”3 Jung wrote those words in the early part of the twentieth century, but with every passing year and decade their truth has become even more glaring. Holocaust

If a habit remains mindless, you can’t expect to improve it. As the psychologist Carl Jung said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”9

ever since the groundbreaking work of Carl Jung in the first half of the twentieth century, most depth psychologists have argued that the journey into elderhood is a spiritual passage above all, and that the purpose of the second half of our lives is to grow into the person that we were always meant to become. Jung believed that aging fulfilled a necessary function, saying: “A human being would certainly not grow to be seventy or eighty years old if this longevity had no meaning for the species. The afternoon of human life must also have a significance of its own …”3

Before we can effectively build new habits, we need to get a handle on our current ones. This can be more challenging than it sounds because once a habit is firmly rooted in your life, it is mostly nonconscious and automatic. If a habit remains mindless, you can’t expect to improve it. As the psychologist Carl Jung said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.

Like the kachinas, Barbie is both toy and mythic object—modern woman and Ur-woman—navelless, motherless, an incarnation of "the One Goddess with a Thousand Names." In the reservoir of communal memory that psychologist Carl Jung has termed the "collective unconscious," Barbie is an archetype of something ancient, matriarchal, and profound.

Krisis, the ancient Greek word from which the modern term is derived, doesn’t mean something terrible. It means a ‘turning point,’ a moment for a major decision. Across the other side of the planet, the Chinese developed a word for ‘crisis’ that also brings with it a sense of change. Their word contains two characters: One means ‘emergency’ and the other ‘opportunity.’ Within every crisis there is something dangerous, which we can, and must, pay attention to. Yet, after we have dealt with the most pressing issues, we get access to an opportunity too. We can use any crisis as a turning point to find more peace, purpose, and power inside us. Some wisdom traditions, such as the Eleusinian Mysteries in Ancient Greece, even created artificial crises for their adepts to ensure they got their money’s worth. Few people want to engage in a transformational experience and not come out with a change in attitude or a shift in consciousness! A good crisis is the gateway to this. It serves as the incentive to switch on. The great psychologist Carl Jung believed that even psychotic crises could be deciphered as turning points for transformation and change. So every crisis is asking you: Which way will you turn? Toward the future or the past? Up onto the Breakthrough Curve or back into your comfort zone

In 1933 a German branch of the International Society was founded with Matthias Göring as president; needless to say it was gleichgeschaltet and Göring ensured that the rest of the society followed suit. Jung countered Göring by redrafting the society’s rules, allowing Jewish members who had been forced to resign from the German branch to join as individuals. As editor of the society’s journal, Jung made sure that work by Jewish members continued to be published, and that work by Jewish psychologists was reviewed. But as the journal was published in Germany, Jung had little hands-on control, and was enraged when Göring inserted a pro-Nazi statement in an issue in 1933, endorsing Mein Kampf as a core text for all psychotherapists and obliging all members to declare their loyalty to the Fuehrer. The statement was supposed to be included in only the German edition of the journal, but Göring overstepped Jung—something he did more than once—and Jung was furious to find his name among the statement’s endorsers.

I approach the concept of 'illusion' with care. The fact that we experience life as distinct individuals is not something illusory to discard, but rather a phenomenon to approach with compassionate understanding. Historically, one-sided transcendentalism that dehumanizes human experience by emphasizing its illusory nature has done little to meaningfully impact worldly life on a mass scale. Indeed, the evolutionary challenge of navigating human relationships remains unchanged for millennia. Clinical psychologist John Welwood contends that, 'What is needed is a liberation spirituality that helps people recognize nondual presence as a basis for fully inhabiting their humanity.' The heart of his approach is 'learning to be present with your experience just as it is,' rather than dissecting or judging it through the lens of maya.

Judged against the criterion of the use of available fact, the greatest psychologists of our century are William James and Carl Jung.5 Both of these men avoided the narrow paths of behaviorism and experimentalism. Both fought to preserve experience and consciousness as an area of scientific research. Both kept open to the advance of scientific theory and both refused to shut off eastern scholarship from consideration.

identity politics,” a contemporary tendency to align without question with categorical divisions like political parties, sexual orientation, skin color, class, et cetera, intolerantly, in the name of virtue. The famous psychologists Carl Jung and Dr. Jordan B. Peterson share this scientifically-minded perspective. According to Dr.

We live, however, in a grief-phobic and death-denying society. Consequently, grief and death have been relegated to what psychologist Carl Jung called the shadow. The shadow is the repository of all the repressed and denied aspects of our lives. We send into the shadow the parts of ourselves that we deem unacceptable to ourselves or to others, hoping to disown them. Doing this, we feel we may be spared the discomfort of having to face what has been declared unwelcome.

If a habit remains mindless, you can’t expect to improve it. As the psychologist Carl Jung said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.

Psychologist Carl Jung long ago said that “what you resist not only persists, but will grow in size.

Thus, psychologist Carl Jung noted, “what is a normal goal to a young person becomes a neurotic hindrance in old age.

We live, however, in a grief-phobic and death-denying society. Consequently, grief and death have been relegated to what psychologist Carl Jung called the shadow. The shadow is the repository of all the repressed and denied aspects of our lives.

As we begin this process of opening up to our inner world, we may be frightened by what we discover. For the longer we have spent denying what is going on within the less comfortable we will be with the strange thoughts and disturbing emotions that may rise to the fore. We may even wonder if the state of our psyche is in such disarray that a descent into madness is possible. The psychologist Carl Jung noticed that many of his patients had this very concern, but he believed this concern could be tempered when we recognize that this is but a natural phase in the process of inner growth.

But on the other hand, there is always a risk that the chaos will overwhelm us and rather than leading to a new and better life order, the descent into chaos will lead to a psychological breakdown. Some psychologists suggest that the psychological rebirth only differs from a psychological breakdown by the end result. The stages that lead to a breakdown, in other words, often mirror those that produce the rebirth. Or as Jung explains, the loss of balance that the sacrifice can produce: “. . .is similar in principle to a psychotic disturbance; that is, it differs from the initial stage of mental illness only by the fact that it leads in the end to greater health, while the latter leads to yet greater destruction.” Carl Jung, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology

A creative individual is more likely to be both aggressive and cooperative, either at the same time or at different times, depending on the situation. Having a complex personality means being able to express the full range of traits that are potentially present in the human repertoire but usually atrophy because we think that one or the other pole is “good,” whereas the other extreme is “bad.” This kind of person has many traits in common with what the Swiss analytic psychologist Carl Jung considered a mature personality.

A most interesting attempt at looking through our traditions with a sensitive yet scientific mind can be credited to the Swiss psychologist, Carl Gustav Jung. His analysis of symbols, legends and dreams reveals archetypes and meanings that are the keys to unlocking the secrets of consciousness. Jungian analysis helps to have a better grasp of the content of the human psyche.

As the psychologist Carl Jung put it: ‘I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become’;

In contrast to orthodox notions of climbing up a ladder seeking perfection, psychologist Carl Jung describes the spiritual path as an unfolding into wholeness. Rather than trying to vanquish waves of emotion and rid ourselves of an inherently impure self, we turn around and embrace this life in all its realness—broken, messy, mysterious and vibrantly alive. By cultivating an unconditional and accepting presence, we are no longer battling against ourselves, keeping our wild and imperfect self in a cage of judgment and mistrust. Instead, we are discovering the freedom of becoming authentic and fully alive.