Modern Man in Search of a Soul (Routledge Classics)

by C.G. Jung

Nothing is unclear to the understanding; it is only when we fail to understand that things appear unintelligible and confused.

No language exists that cannot be misused.

The psyche is a self-regulating system that maintains itself in equilibrium as the body does. Every process that goes too far immediately and inevitably calls forth a compensatory activity.

Instead of taking a dogmatic stand that rests upon the illusion that we know something because we have a familiar word for it, I prefer to regard the symbol as the announcement of something unknown, hard to recognize and not to be fully determined.

the unconscious life destroys itself.

How can I be substantial if I fail to cast a shadow? I must have a dark side also if I am to be whole; and inasmuch as I become conscious of my shadow I also remember that I am a human being like any other.

After all, the essential thing is not the shadow, but the body which casts it.

Nothing influences our conduct less than do intellectual ideas. But when an idea is the expression of psychic experience which bears fruit in regions as far separated and as free from historical relation as East and West, then we must look into the matter closely. For such ideas represent forces that are beyond logical justification and moral sanction; they are always stronger than man and his brain. Man believes indeed that he moulds these ideas, but in reality they mould him and make him their unwitting mouthpiece.

Adler obviously has his eye on repressed and socially unsuccessful people whose one passion is for self-assertion. These people are neurotic because they always imagine themselves oppressed and tilt at the windmills of their own fancies, thus putting the goal they most desire quite out of reach.

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 Occidentals had learned to tame and subject the psyche, but we knew nothing about its methodical development and its functions.

For that matter, 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.

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

Truth to tell, I have a very high opinion of fantasy. To me, it is actually the maternally creative side of the masculine spirit.

However far-fetched it may sound, experience shows that many neuroses are caused by the fact that people blind themselves to their own religious promptings because of a childish passion for rational enlightenment.

The importance of individual life may always be denied by the “educator” whose pride it is to breed mass-men. But any other person will sooner or later be driven to find this meaning for himself.

The continuity of nature knows nothing of those antithetical distinctions which the human intellect is forced to set up as helps to understanding.

Whatever we look at, and however we look at it, we see only through our own eyes. For this reason a science is never made by one man, but by many.

I had observed that apparently passive natures are in reality not so much passive as given to forethought.

Every one of us gladly turns away from his problems; if possible, they must not be mentioned, or, better still, their existence is denied. We wish to make our lives simple, certain and smooth—and for that reason problems are tabu. We choose to have certainties and no doubts—results and no experiments—without even seeing that certainties can arise only through doubt, and results through experiment.

It even seems as if young people who have had to struggle hard for their existence are spared inner problems, while those for whom adaptation for some reason or other is made easy, run into problems of sex or conflicts growing from the sense of inferiority.

Whoever protects himself against what is new and strange and thereby regresses to the past, falls into the same neurotic condition as the man who identifies himself with the new and runs away from the past. The only difference is that the one has estranged himself from the past, and the other from the future. In principle both are doing the same thing; they are salvaging a narrow state of consciousness.

The nearer we approach to the middle of life, and the better we have succeeded in entrenching ourselves in our personal standpoints and social positions, the more it appears as if we had discovered the right course and the right ideals and principles of behaviour. For this reason we suppose them to be eternally valid, and make a virtue of unchangeably clinging to them.

The neurotic is rather a person who can never have things as he would like them in the present, and who can therefore never enjoy the past.

Moneymaking, social existence, family and posterity are nothing but plain nature—not culture. Culture lies beyond the purpose of nature.

In spite of the fact that by far the larger part of mankind does not know why the body needs salt, everyone demands it none the less because of an instinctive need. It is the same in the things of the psyche.

In my picture of the world there is a vast outer realm and an equally vast inner realm; between these two stands man, facing now one and now the other, and, according to his mood or disposition, taking the one for the absolute truth by denying or sacrificing the other.

Everything that is unconscious in ourselves we discover in our neighbour, and we treat him accordingly. We no longer subject him to the test of drinking poison; we do not burn him or put the screws on him; but we injure him by means of moral verdicts pronounced with the deepest conviction. What we combat in him is usually our own inferior side.

The power that rules us comes from the external world, and through it alone are we permitted to live.

Every creative person is a duality or a synthesis of contradictory aptitudes. On the one side he is a human being with a personal life, while on the other side he is an impersonal, creative process.

The secret of artistic creation and of the effectiveness of art is to be found in a return to the state of participation mystique—to that level of experience at which it is man who lives, and not the individual, and at which the weal or woe of the single human being does not count, but only human existence. This is why every great work of art is objective and impersonal, but none the less profoundly moves us each and all.

Just as formerly the assumption was unquestionable that everything that exists takes its rise from the creative will of a God who is spirit, so the nineteenth century discovered the equally unquestionable truth that everything arises from material causes.

Consciousness today has grown enormously in breadth and extent, but unfortunately only in spatial dimensions; its temporal reach has not increased, for were that the case we should have a much more living sense of history.

The mad tricks that memory plays sometimes leave us in helpless amazement, and at any time unexpected fantasies may run through our minds. We only believe that we are masters in our own house because we like to flatter ourselves.

Truth that appeals to the testimony of the senses may satisfy reason, but it offers nothing that stirs our feelings and expresses them by giving a meaning to human life.

It is true that nature tears down what she has herself built up—yet she builds it once again.

Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses.

Neurosis is an inner cleavage—the state of being at war with oneself.