We always find in the patient a conflict which at a certain point is connected with the great problems of society. Hence, when the analysis is pushed to this point, the apparently individual conflict of the patient is revealed as a universal conflict of his environment and epoch.
By soul I mean, first of all, a perspective rather than a substance, a viewpoint toward things rather than a thing itself. Between us and events, between the doer and the deed, there is a reflective moment—and soul-making means differentiating this middle ground.
I had learned that all the greatest and most important problems of life are fundamentally insoluble. (…) They can never be solved, but only outgrown.
We should not forget that in any psychological discussion we are not saying anything about the psyche, but that the psyche is always speaking about itself.
It can be argued that disorders are the root cause of suffering and so should be the prime target of psychotherapy; but we do not treat disorders, we treat suffering people who are vastly more complex than their diagnosis.
Collectively we live in a culture that discards the past as irrelevant, and individually we are convinced that we create ourselves anew every day.
The European national self, as described by early twentieth century psychoanalysis and analytical psychology, was structured as a modern counterpart to the primitive and colonized other.
The question of psychology today is that its world view is too shrunken. And therefore the whole field tends to shrink. It’s not just shrinks that make it shrink. It shrinks by virtue of its own limited worldview.
Psychotherapy today… Still has a vast amount to unlearn and relearn… but first it must cease thinking neurotically and see the psychic process in true perspective.
It is not the literal return to alchemy that is necessary but a restoration of the alchemical mode of imagining. For in that mode we restore matter to our speech – and that is our aim: the restoration of imaginative matter, not of literal alchemy.
Were we able to discover its psychological necessity, pathologizing would no longer be wrong or right, but merely necessary.
No one can train the personality unless he has it himself… The development of personality means nothing less than the optimum development of the whole human being.
We don’t integrate conflicting tendencies in contemporary life anymore – we live them out.
An individual’s shadow is invariably bound up with the collective shadow of his group, and as he digests his own evil, a fragment of the collective evil is invariably co-digested at the same time.
For a full understanding of Jung, one must go to the dissecting room of the psyche. This of course is a personal analysis.
We can only suppose that culture making is at the same time psyche-making, that the creative work of structuring the one is equivalent to the same work upon the other.
Metaphor is the language of the soul. Through a physical image, metaphor reveals a spiritual truth or condition.
Whatever we call reality is a fantasy that has got stubborn and blocked and become obscured to the flow of psychic energy in it.
Memory, or memoria as it was once called, is a form of imagination. What it recalls into the present is always, in part, a function of perspective currently dominating the present.
The present is haunted by the archetypal dynamics which remind us that any story untold is an unconscious present. An unconscious present is a story which will insist on being told and will spill into our biographies.
Again, progression should not be confused with development, for the continuous flow or current in life is not necessarily development and differentiation,
To understand a thing is a bridge and possibility of returning to the path. But to explain a matter is arbitrary and sometimes even murder. Have you counted the murderers among the scholars?
Alchemical language is a mode of therapy; it is itself therapeutical. – Alchemical Psychology
Jung’s conviction is that the most effective way to redeem or transform the world is first of all to transform the little piece of it that is oneself. – „The Mystery of the Coniunctio”
A collective attitude is always a threat to the individual, even when it is a necessity. It is dangerous because it is very apt to check and smoother all personal differentiation.
Deviation from the truth of the blood begets neurotic restlessness … Restlessness begets meaninglessness, and the lack of meaning in life is a soul sickness whose full extent and full import our age has not yet begun to comprehend.
I said that we have no schools for forty-year-olds. That is not quite true. Our religions were always such schools in the past, but how many people regard them like that today? How many of us older ones have been brought up in such a school and really prepared for the second half of life, or old age, death and eternity?
Why is there such a vast self-help industry in this country? Why do all these selves need help? They have been deprived of something by our psychological culture, a sense that there is some purpose that has come with them into the world.
If we keep this in mind, we can perhaps summon up courage to consider the possibility of a „psychology with a psyche” – that is, a theory of the psyche ultimately based on the postulate of an autonomous, spiritual principle.
If you do not acknowledge your yearning (…) then you do not live your life, but an alien one. But who will live your life if you do not live it? If you give up your self, you live it in others; thereby you become selfish, and thus you deceive others.
Also he whose soul is a garden, needs things, men, and thoughts, but he is their friend and not their slave and fool.
Thus the rational attitude of culture runs into its opposite, namely the irrational devastation of culture.
Immediate self-observation is not enough, by a long way, to enable us to learn how to know ourselves. We need history, for the past continues to flow through us in a hundred channels.
Ironically, a large part of the job of psychotherapy is releasing the soul from the collective neurosis which in the guise of religion sanctifies estrangement of the soul from its own images and experiences.
Something in us wishes to remain a child, to be unconscious or, at most, conscious only of the ego; to reject everything strange, or else subject it to our will; to do nothing, or indulge our own craving for pleasure or power.
Only a life lived in a certain spirit is worth living. It is a remarkable fact that a life lived entirely from the ego is dull not only for the person himself but for all concerned. The fullness of life requires something more than just an ego; it needs spirit.
The reason for evil in the world is that people are not able to tell their stories.
„Where love stops, power begins, and violence, and terror.”
A crucial element in reconstituted emotional relatedness is a playful, imaginal space between therapist and patient.
A complex can be really overcomed only if it is lived out to the full.
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