Modern Man in Search of a Soul (Routledge Classics)

by C.G. Jung

The dream is specifically the utterance of the unconscious. We may call consciousness the daylight realm of the human psyche, and contrast it with the nocturnal realm of unconscious psychic activity which we apprehend as dreamlike fantasy.

No one doubts the importance of conscious experience; why then should we question the importance of unconscious happenings?

The relation between conscious and unconscious is compensatory. This fact, which is easily verifiable, affords a rule for dream interpretation. It is always helpful, when we set out to interpret a dream, to ask: What conscious attitude does it compensate?

The horse is dynamic power and a means of locomotion; it carries one away like a surge of instinct. It is subject to panics like all instinctive creatures who lack higher consciousness.

The dream speaks in images, and gives expression to instincts, that are derived from the most primitive levels of nature. Consciousness all too easily departs from the law of nature; but it can be brought again into harmony with the latter by the assimilation of unconscious contents. By fostering this process we lead the patient to the rediscovery of the law of his own being.

What we call fantasy is simply spontaneous psychic activity; and it wells up whenever the repressive action of the conscious mind relaxes or ceases altogether, as in sleep.

When it was possible to make the suicidal leaning conscious, common-sense could helpfully intervene; the patients could then recognize and avoid those situations that tempted them to self-destruction.

It seems to be a sin in the eyes of nature to hide our insufficiency—just as much as to live entirely on our inferior side.

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.

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.

Our world is so exceedingly rich in delusions that a truth is priceless, and no one will let it slip because of a few exceptions with which it cannot be brought into accord.

A man can hope for satisfaction and fulfilment only in what he does not yet possess; he cannot find pleasure in something of which he has already had too much.

this latter factor as a disturbing or healing one. The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed. We should expect the doctor to have an influence on the patient in every effective psychic treatment; but this influence can only take place when he too is affected by the patient. You can exert no influence if you are not susceptible to influence.

He will let them see that to expect solutions from others is a way of remaining childish;

What was a normal goal for the young man, inevitably becomes a neurotic hindrance to the older person.

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

It is of especial importance for me to know as much as possible about primitive psychology, mythology, archæology and comparative religion, for the reason that these fields afford me priceless analogies with which I can enrich the associations of my patients.

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.

He who would fathom the psyche must not confuse it with consciousness, else he veils from his own sight the object he wishes to explore.

The enigmatic oneness of the living being has as its necessary corollary the fact that bodily traits are not merely physical, nor mental traits merely psychic.

there is an exclusively psychic apparatus ready for our use in the making of decisions which works also by habit and therefore unconsciously.

Introversion or extraversion, as a typical attitude, means an essential bias which conditions the whole psychic process, establishes the habitual reactions, and thus determines not only the style of behaviour, but also the nature of subjective experience. And not only so, but it also denotes the kind of compensatory activity of the unconscious which we may expect to find.

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

Just as the lion strikes down his enemy or his prey with his fore-paw, in which his strength resides, and not with his tail like the crocodile, so our habitual reactions are normally characterized by the application of our most trustworthy and efficient function; it is an expression of our strength.

The predominance of a function leads us to construct or to seek out certain situations while we avoid others, and therefore to have experiences that are peculiar to us and different from those of other people.

In the struggle for existence and adaptation everyone instinctively uses his most developed function, which thus becomes the criterion of his habitual reactions.

We are always at a disadvantage in using the inferior function because we cannot direct it, being in fact even its victims.

Our psychic processes are made up to a large extent of reflections, doubts and experiments, all of which are almost completely foreign to the unconscious, instinctive mind of primitive man. It is the growth of consciousness which we must thank for the existence of problems; they are the dubious gift of civilization.

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.

Psychic birth, and with it the conscious distinction of the ego from the parents, takes place in the normal course of things at the age of puberty with the eruption of sexual life. The physiological change is attended by a psychic revolution. For the various bodily manifestations give such an emphasis to the ego that it often asserts itself without stint or measure. This is sometimes called “the unbearable age”.

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.

Many—far too many—aspects of life which should also have been experienced lie in the lumber-room among dusty memories. Sometimes, even, they are glowing coals under grey ashes.

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.

It is particularly fatal for such people to look backward. For them a prospect and a goal in the future are indispensable. This is why all great religions hold the promise of a life beyond; it makes it possible for mortal man to live the second half of life with as much perseverance and aim as the first.

I must prevent my critical powers from destroying my creativeness.

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.

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.

It never occurs to him that he might be able to rule nature; it is civilized man who strives to dominate nature and therefore devotes his greatest efforts to the discovery of natural causes which will give him the key to nature’s secret laboratory. That is why he strongly resents the idea of arbitrary powers and denies them. Their existence would amount to proof that his attempt to dominate nature is futile after all.

According to both accounts, human individuality is nothing in its own right, but rather the accidental product of forces contained in the objective environment.

Looked at from without, the psyche appears to us to be essentially a reflection of external happenings—to be not only occasioned by them, but to have its origin in them.

All our knowledge is conditioned by the psyche which, because it alone is immediate, is superlatively real. Here there is a reality to which the psychologist can appeal—namely, psychic reality.

But just as the fire is the psychic image of a physical process whose nature is unknown so my fear of the ghost is a psychic image from a mental source; it is just as real as the fire, for my fear is as real as the pain caused by the fire.

Did reason and good intentions save us from the World War, or have they ever saved us from any other catastrophic nonsense? Have any of the great spiritual and social revolutions sprung from reasoning—let us say the transformation of the Græco-Roman world into the age of feudalism, or the explosive spread of Islamic culture?

We have come to understand that psychic suffering is not a definitely localized, sharply delimited phenomenon, but rather the symptom of a wrong attitude assumed by the total personality.

It must be clearly understood that the mere fact of living in the present does not make a man modern, for in that case everyone at present alive would be so. He alone is modem who is fully conscious of the present.

The man whom we can with justice call “modern” is solitary. He is so of necessity and at all times, for every step towards a fuller consciousness of the present removes him further from his original “participation mystique” with the mass of men—from submersion in a common unconsciousness.

Only the man who is modern in our meaning of the term really lives in the present; he alone has a present-day consciousness, and he alone finds that the ways of life which correspond to earlier levels pall upon him.

unless he is proficient, the man who claims to be modern is nothing but an unscrupulous gambler. He must be proficient in the highest degree, for unless he can atone by creative ability for his break with tradition, he is merely disloyal to the past.

“Today” stands between “yesterday” and “tomorrow”, and forms a link between past and future; it has no other meaning. The present represents a process of transition, and that man may account himself modern who is conscious of it in this sense.

Let man but accumulate his materials of destruction and the devil within him will soon be unable to resist putting them to their fated use.