Modern Man in Search of a Soul – Carl G. Jung

I: DREAM ANALYSIS IN ITS PRACTICAL APPLICATION

7. dreams can be anticipatory and, in that case, must lose their particular meaning if they are treated in a purely causalistic way.

8. Initial dreams are often amazingly transparent and clear-cut… As a rule, the dreams become less transparent, and more blurred, shortly after the beginning of the treatment. It becomes increasingly difficult to interpret them

8. Nothing is unclear to the understanding; it is only when we fail to understand that things appear unintelligible and confused. In themselves, dreams are clear—that is, they are just as they must be under the given conditions. If we look back at these “unintelligible” dreams from a later stage of the treatment or from a distance of some years, we are often astounded at our own blindness.

9. For the purposes of therapy, moreover, it is highly important for the analyst to admit his lack of understanding from time to time, for nothing is more unbearable for the patient than to be always understood.

 

9. It is relatively unimportant whether the doctor understands or not, but everything hangs on the patient’s doing so.

 

11. One thing we ought never to forget: almost the half of our lives is passed in a more or less unconscious state. The dream is specifically the utterance of the unconscious.

 

11. No language exists that cannot be misused. It is hard to realize how badly we are fooled by the abuse of ideas… All this being so, I leave theory aside as much as possible in analyzing dreams.

 

12. But I must regard them as hypothetically meaningful in order to find courage to deal with them at all.

 

12. A suitable warning to the dream interpreter—if only it were not so paradoxical—would be: “Do anything you like, only don’t try to understand!”

 

13. We say that the dream has a false front only because we fail to see into it.

 

16. Dreams give information about the secrets of the inner life and reveal to the dreamer hidden factors of his personality.

 

17. The unconscious is not a demonic monster, but a thing of nature that is perfectly neutral as far as moral sense, æsthetic taste and intellectual judgment go. It is dangerous only when our conscious attitude towards it becomes hopelessly false.

 

17. We can take the idea of compensation, so understood, as a law of psychic happening. Too little on one side results in too much on the other. The relation between conscious and unconscious is compensatory.

 

22. look for the meaning of symbols as they relate to the conscious situation—in other words, to treat them as if they were not fixed.

 

27. It is only in actual contact with the facts as they occur that we can come to anything like a satisfactory agreement.

 

II: PROBLEMS OF MODERN PSYCHOTHERAPY

34. To cherish secrets and to restrain emotions are psychic misdemeanors for which nature finally visits us with sickness—that is, when we do these things in private.

 

35. a saying from the Greek mysteries: “Give up what thou hast, and then thou wilt receive.” #sacrifice

 

45. It is obviously not enough for him to know how and why he fell ill, for to understand the causes of an evil does very little towards curing it. We must never forget that the crooked paths of a neurosis lead to as many obstinate habits, and that, despite any amount of understanding, these do not disappear until they are replaced by other habits. But habits are only won by exercise, and appropriate education is the sole means to this end. The patient must be, as it were, prodded into other paths, and this always requires an educating will.

 

46. no confession and no amount of explaining will make the ill-formed tree grow straight, but that it must be trained with the gardener’s art upon the trellis before normal adaptation can be attained.

 

49. You can exert no influence if you are not susceptible to influence.

 

III. THE AIMS OF PSYCHOTHERAPY

59. there also exist more or less individual psyches which refuse to fit into any general scheme.

 

59. there are some people whose attitude is essentially spiritual and others whose attitude is essentially materialistic. #alanwatts

 

60. it seems to me that in psychotherapy especially it is advisable for the physician to not have too fixed a goal.

 

60. there is no recipe for living that suits all cases.

 

62. if we meditate on a dream sufficiently long and thoroughly—if we take it about with us and turn it over and over—something almost always comes of it.

 

64. does a thing or a fact ever mean anything in and of itself? We can only be sure that it is always the human being who interprets, that is, gives meaning to a fact.

 

65. it is well known that we are susceptible only to those suggestions with which we are already secretly in accord.

 

66. The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.

66. I even make an effort to second the patient in his fantasies. Truth to tell, I have a very high opinion of fantasy.

 

66. All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy.

 

68. Many of my more advanced patients, then, begin to paint.

 

70. Many of my patients knew the deeper truth, but did not live it.

 

73. But unfortunately we keep blundering along in the same dogmatic way, as if what we call the real were not equally full of illusion.

IV. A PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORY OF TYPES

86. A certain kind of behavior brings corresponding results, and the subjective understanding of these results gives rise to the experiences which in turn influence behavior, and thus close the circle of an individual’s destiny.

 

93. Sensation establishes what is actually given, thinking enables us to recognize its meaning, feeling tells us its value, and finally intuition points to the possibilities of the whence and whither that lie within the immediate facts.

 

V. THE STAGES OF LIFE

103. The serious problems of life, however, are never fully solved. If it should for once appear that they are, this is the sign that something has been lost. The meaning and design of a problem seem not to lie in its solution, but in our working at it incessantly.

 

108. 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. #lua #brighteyes

 

111. But here my physician’s conscience awakes and urges me to say a word which is essential to this question. I have observed that a directed life is in general better, richer and healthier than an aimless one, and that it is better to go forwards with the stream of time than backwards against it.

 

113. Childhood and extreme old age, to be sure, are utterly different, and yet they have one thing in common: submersion in unconscious psychic happenings.

 

VI. FREUD AND JUNG—CONTRASTS

115. Ideas spring from a source that is not contained within one man’s personal life. We do not create them: they create us.

 

116. True expression consists in giving form to what is observed.

 

VII. ARCHAIC MAN

129. Nothing goes to show that primitive man thinks, feels, or perceives in a way that differs fundamentally from ours. His psychic functioning is essentially the same—only his primary assumptions are different.

 

130. If we try to give our attention to uninteresting matters, we soon notice how feeble our powers of concentration are. We ourselves, like them, are dependent upon emotional undercurrents.

 

132. Primitive man expects more of an explanation. What we call chance is to him arbitrary power.

 

135. What seems to us a wholly senseless heaping-up of single, haphazard occurrences—because we pay attention only to single events and their particular causes—is for primitive man a completely logical sequence of opens and happenings indicated by them.

 

136. The best medicine is never found close at hand, but as far away as possible.

 

136. Chance occurrences occur most often in larger or smaller series or groups.

 

137. There is a real measure of probability that unusual events will coincide in time and place. We must not forget that our experience is not fully to be trusted in this regard. Our observation is inadequate because our point of view leads us to overlook these matters.

 

140. For primitive man, on the contrary, the psychic and the objective coalesce in the external world. In the face of something extraordinary it is not he who is astonished, but rather the thing which is astonishing. It is mana—endowed with magical power. What we would call the powers of imagination and suggestion seem to him invisible forces which act upon him from without.

 

142. Everything that is unconscious in ourselves we discover in our neighbor, and we treat him accordingly. #projection

 

147. Being is a field of force. The primitive mana conception, as we can see, is of the nature of a crude theory of energy.

 

151. Archaic man does what he does—and only civilized man knows what he does.

 

VIII. PSYCHOLOGY AND LITERATURE

153. the creative aspect of life which finds its clearest expression in art baffles all attempts at rational formulation. Any reaction to a stimulus may be causally explained; but the creative act, which is the absolute antithesis of mere reaction, will for ever elude the human understanding. It can only be described in its manifestations; it can be obscurely sensed, but never wholly grasped.

 

157. The disturbing vision of monstrous and meaningless happenings that in every way exceed the grasp of human feeling and comprehension makes quite other demands upon the powers of the artist than do the experiences of the foreground of life.

 

161. The truth is that poets are human beings, and that what a poet has to say about his work is often far from being the most illuminating word on the subject.

 

162. In works of art of this nature—and we must never confuse them with the artist as a person—we cannot doubt that the vision is a genuine, primordial experience, regardless of what reason-mongers may say. The vision is not something derived or secondary, and it is not a symptom of something else. It is true symbolic expression—that is, the expression of something existent in its own right, but imperfectly known. The love-episode is a real experience really suffered, and the same statement applies to vision.

 

162. Human passion falls within the sphere of experience, while the subject of the vision lies beyond it. Through our feelings we experience the known, but our intuitions point to things that are unknown and hidden—that by their very nature are secret.

 

164. [The sun wheel is] a symbol that stands for a psychic happening; it covers an experience of the inner world, and is no doubt as lifelike a representation as the famous rhinoceros with the tick-birds on its back.

 

164. It is therefore to be expected of the poet that he will resort to mythology in order to give his experience its most fitting expression.

 

164. It is merely a deep presentiment that strives to find expression.

 

164. Since the particular expression can never exhaust the possibilities of the vision, but falls short of it in richness of content, the poet must have at his disposal a huge store of materials if he is to communicate even a few of his intimations. What is more, he must resort to an imagery that is difficult to handle and full of contradictions in order to express the weird paradoxicality of his vision.

 

166. Every period has its bias, its particular prejudice and its psychic ailment.

 

167. Creativeness, like the freedom of the will, contains a secret.

 

168. What is essential in a work of art is that it should rise far above the realm of personal life and speak from the spirit and heart of the poet as man to the spirit and heart of mankind. The personal aspect is a limitation—and even a sin—in the realm of art.

 

168. Every creative person is a duality or a synthesis of contradictory aptitudes.

 

169. We must grant that the artist does not function in an official capacity—the very opposite is nearer the truth.

 

169. Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purposes through him… To perform this difficult office it is sometimes necessary for him to sacrifice happiness and everything that makes life worth living for the ordinary human being.

 

169. The artist’s life cannot be otherwise than full of conflicts, for two forces are within him

 

169. The lives of artists are as a rule so highly unsatisfactory—not to say tragic—because of their inferiority on the human and personal side, and not because of a sinister dispensation. There are hardly any exceptions to the rule that a person must pay dearly for the divine gift of the creative force.

 

170. How can we doubt that it is his art that explains the artist, and not the insufficiencies and conflicts of his personal life?

 

170. A special ability means a heavy expenditure of energy in a particular direction, with a consequent drain from some other side of life.

 

171. A dream never says: “You ought,” or: “This is the truth.” It presents and image in much the same way as nature allows a plant to grow, and we must draw our own conclusions.

 

172. the personal life of the poet cannot be held essential to his art—but at most a help or a hindrance to his creative task.

 

IX. THE BASIC POSTULATES OF ANALYTICAL PSYCHOLOGY

177. But matter is just as inscrutable as mind. As to the ultimate we can know nothing, and only when we admit this do we return to a state of equilibrium.

 

181. The names people give to their experiences are often quite enlightening.

 

185. It is a fact that the unconscious contains subliminal perceptions whose scope is nothing less than astounding.

 

186. But matters stand very differently with the unconscious. It is not concentrated and intensive, but shades off into obscurity; it is highly extensive and can juxtapose the most heterogeneous elements in the most paradoxical way.

 

189. The conflict of nature and mind is itself a reflection of the paradox contained in the psychic being of man.

 

X. THE SPIRITUAL PROBLEM OF MODERN MAN

199. Every good quality has its bad side, and nothing that is good can come into the world without directly producing a corresponding evil.

 

209. For every piece of conscious life that loses its importance and value—so runs the law—there arises a compensation in the unconscious.

 

211. Everything becomes relative and therefore doubtful.

 

214. Superstition and perversity are after all one and the same. They are transitional or embryonic stages from which new and riper forms will emerge.

 

215. The psychic depths are nature, and nature is creative life. It is true that nature tears down what she herself has built up—yet she builds it once again.

 

220. Indeed, I do not forget that my voice is but one voice, my experience a mere drop in the sea, my knowledge no greater than the visual field in a microscope, my mind’s eye a mirror that reflects a small corner of the world, and my ideas—a subjective confession.

 

XI. PSYCHOTHERAPISTS OR THE CLERGY

224. But “meaning” is something mental or spiritual. Call it a fiction if you like. None the less it enables us to influence the course of the disease in a far more effective way than with chemical preparations. We can even influence the biochemical process of the body by it. Whether the fiction rises in me spontaneously, or reaches me from without by way of human speech, it can make me ill or cure me. Nothing is surely more intangible and unreal than fictions, illusions and opinions; and yet nothing is more effective in the psychic and even psychophysical realm.

 

225. And it is only the meaningful that sets us free.

 

225. A psycho-neurosis must be understood as the suffering of a human being who has not discovered what life means for him.

 

234. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses.

 

235. if a doctor wishes to help a human being he must be able to accept him as he is. And he can do this in reality only when he has already seen and accepted himself as he is.

            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 essense of the moral problem and the epitome of a whole outlook upon life.

 

238. It is, moreover, only in the state of complete abandonment and loneliness that we experience the helpful powers of our own natures.

 

240. Light has need of darkness—otherwise how could it appear as light? #watts

 

244. Who are forgiven their many sins? Those who have loved much.