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.

By taking refuge in the doctor’s self-confidence and “profound” understanding, the patient loses all sense of reality, falls into a stubborn transference, and retards the cure.

It is hard to realize how badly we are fooled by the abuse of ideas; it even seems as if the unconscious had a way of strangling the physician in the coils of his own theory.

It is of the first importance for the assimilation of dream-contents that no violence be done to the real values of the conscious personality. If the conscious personality is destroyed, or even crippled, there is no one left to do the assimilating.

The very number of present-day “psychologies” amounts to a confession of perplexity.

appears to be a conscience in mankind which severely punishes the man who does not somehow and at some time, at whatever cost to his pride, cease to defend and assert himself, and instead confess himself fallible and human.

To be “normal” is a splendid ideal for the unsuccessful, for all those who have not yet found an adaptation.

As is well known, one can get along for quite a time with an inadequate theory, but not with inadequate therapeutic methods.

there are even cases where an apparently outspoken materialism has its source in the denial of a religious disposition.

In every single case we must consider the question whether an attitude or a so-called habitus exists in its own right, or is perhaps only a compensation for the opposite.

About a third of my cases are suffering from no clinically definable neurosis, but from the senselessness and emptiness of their lives.

I share all my readers’ prejudices against dream interpretation as being the quintessence of uncertainty and arbitrariness.

to enter a realm of immediate experience is most stimulating for those who have done their utmost in the personal and rational spheres of life and yet have found no meaning and no satisfaction there.

For it all depends on how we look at things, and not on how they are in themselves. The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.

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.

To be a particle in a mass has meaning and charm only for the man who has not yet advanced to that stage, but none for the man who has experienced it to satiety.

It is highly important for a young person who is still unadapted and has as yet achieved nothing, to shape the conscious ego as effectively as possible—that is, to educate the will. Unless he is positively a genius he even may not believe in anything active within himself that is not identical with his will. He must feel himself a man of will, and he may safely depreciate everything else within himself or suppose it subject to his will—for without this illusion he can scarcely bring about a social adaptation.

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

Heretofore it has been thought that psychology could dispense with empirical data and be created as it were by decree—a prejudice under which we are still labouring.

Clinical studies are based upon the description of symptoms, and the step from this to the descriptive study of the psyche is comparable to the step from a purely symptomatic pathology to the pathology of the cell and of metabolism.

Intelligence, like stupidity, is not a function but a modality; the term tells us nothing more than how a function works.

It is the growth of consciousness which we must thank for the existence of problems; they are the dubious gift of civilization.

Instinct is nature and seeks to perpetuate nature; while consciousness can only seek culture or its denial.

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.

And then society does not value these feats of the psyche very highly; its prizes are always given for achievement and not for personality—the latter being rewarded, for the most part, posthumously.

The meaning and design of a problem seem not to lie in its solution, but in our working at it incessantly.

We wholly overlook the essential fact that the achievements which society rewards are won at the cost of a diminution of personality.

The wine of youth does not always clear with advancing years; oftentimes it grows turbid.

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.

Especially among southern races one can observe that older women develop rough and deep voices, incipient moustaches, hard facial expressions and other masculine traits. On the other hand, the masculine physique is toned down by feminine features, as for instance adiposity and softer facial expressions.

If we explain our scientific views to an intelligent native he will credit us with a ludicrous superstitiousness and a disgraceful want of logic.

The psychologist, to be sure, may never abandon his claim to investigate and establish causal relations in complicated psychic events. To do so would be to deny psychology the right to exist. Yet he can never make good this claim in the fullest sense, because the creative aspect of life which finds its clearest expression in art baffles all attempts at rational formulation.

And is that which science calls the “psyche” not merely a question-mark arbitrarily confined within the skull, but rather a door that opens upon the human world from a world beyond, now and again allowing strange and unseizable potencies to act upon man and to remove him, as if upon the wings of the night, from the level of common humanity to that of a more than personal vocation?

Even in our civilizations the people who form, psychologically speaking, the lowest stratum, live almost as unconsciously as primitive races.

The very fact that we have such a psychology is to me symptomatic of a profound convulsion of spiritual life.

We used to regard foreigners—the other side—as political and moral reprobates; but the modern man is forced to recognize that he is politically and morally just like anyone else.

“There are your man-made gods, mere snares and delusions tainted with human baseness—whited sepulchres full of dead men’s bones and of all uncleanness”.

abandon him to that perplexity which is the special note of our day.

there is a good story about the American president, “silent Cal” Coolidge. When he returned after an absence one Sunday morning his wife asked him where he had been. “To church”, he replied. “What did the minister say?” “He talked about sin.” “And what did he say about sin?” “He was against it.”