Jung Quotes

“If a man knows more than others, he becomes lonely,”
― Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction

“There are things that are not yet true today, perhaps we dare not find them true, but tomorrow they may be. So every man whose fate is to go his individual way must proceed with hopefulness and watchfulness, ever conscious of his loneliness and its dangers”
― Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction

“To be normal’, he said, ‘is the ideal aim of the unsuccessful.”
― Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction

“the despair displayed by young children on loss of their mother is a normal response to frustration of their absolute need for her presence ... children usually manage to survive, it is true, but at the cost of developing a defensive attitude to emotional detachment, and by becoming self-absorbed and self-reliant to an unusual degree. Typically, they are left with lasting doubts about their capacity to elicit care and affection.”
― Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction

“In many cases in psychiatry, the patient who comes to us has a story that is not told, and which as a rule no one knows of. To my mind, therapy only really begins after the investigation of that wholly personal story. It is the patient’s secret, the rock against which he is shattered. If I know his secret story, I have a key to the treatment. . . . In therapy the problem is always the whole person, never the symptom alone. We must ask questions which challenge the whole personality. (MDR 118)”
― Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction

“It is indeed no small matter to know one’s own guilt and one’s own evil, and there is certainly nothing to be gained by losing sight of one’s shadow. When we are conscious of our guilt we are in a more favourable position – we can at least hope to change and improve ourselves”
― Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction

“I feel it is the duty of one who goes his own way to inform society of what he finds on his voyage of discovery,’ he wrote.”
― Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction

“The need to create a citadel in which to hide from the world is characteristic of people with a schizoid disposition”
― Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction

“My patients brought me so close to the reality of human life that I could not help learning essential things from them. Encounters with people of so many different kinds and on so many different psychological levels have been for me incomparably more important than fragmentary conversations with celebrities”
― Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction

“Neurosis, he said, in the nearest he came to a definitive definition, is the suffering of a soul that has not found its meaning.”
― Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction

“In addition to the Self, Jung postulated archetypal components which play specific roles in the psychic development and social adjustment of everyone. These include the ego, persona, shadow, anima, and animus. Jung considered these to be archetypal structures which are built into the personal psyche in the form of complexes during the course of development. Each is a psychic organ operating in accordance with the biological principles of adaptation, homeostasis, and growth.”
― Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction

“Now I knew what it was, and knew even more: that man is indispensable for the completion of creation; that, in fact, he himself is the second creator of the world, who alone has given to the world its objective existence – without which, unheard, unseen, silently eating, giving birth, dying, heads nodding through hundreds of millions of years, it would have gone on in the profoundest night of non-being down to its unknown end. Human consciousness created objective existence and meaning, and man found his indispensable place in the great process of being.”
― Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction

“through the miracle of consciousness, the human psyche provides the mirror in which Nature sees herself reflected.”
― Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction

“The specious idea that gender differences are due entirely to culture, and have nothing to do with biological or archetypal predispositions, still enjoys wide currency in our society, yet it rests on the discredited tabula rasa theory of human development and is at variance with the overwhelming mass of anthropological and scientific evidence.”
― Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction

“Jung never disagreed with Freud’s view that personal experience is of crucial significance for the development of each individual, but he denied that this development occurred in an unstructured personality. On the contrary, for Jung, the role of personal experience was to develop what is already there – to activate the archetypal potential already present in the Self. Our psyches are not simply a product of experience, any more than our bodies are merely the product of what we eat. A”
― Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction

“What distinguishes the Jungian approach to developmental psychology from virtually all others is the idea that even in old age we are growing towards realization of our full potential. This”
― Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction

“I feel it is the duty of one who goes his own way to inform society of what he finds on his voyage of discovery" ~ Carl Gustave Jung”
― Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction

“I feel it is the duty of one who goes his own way to inform society of what he finds on his voyage of discovery,”
― Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction

“But unlike many of his detractors, one suspects, Jung worked on his shadow: ‘It is indeed no small matter to know one’s own guilt and one’s own evil, and there is certainly nothing to be gained by losing sight of one’s shadow. When we are conscious of our guilt we are in a more favourable position – we can at least hope to change and improve ourselves’ (CW X, para. 440).”
― Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction

“Western society, detached from its Judeo-Christian roots, was compulsively materialistic, spiritually impoverished, and technologically obsessed. Collectively we were perpetuating the mistake of the alchemists, projecting our spiritual aspirations into material things in the delusion that we were pursuing the highest value. This had encouraged us to treat each other as economic commodities and exploit the physical resources of the planet while neglecting, to our own detriment, the spiritual resources of the Self. The only remedy for our civilization’s ‘loss of soul’ was a massive reinvestment in the inner life of the individual, so as to re-establish a personal connection with ‘the mythic world in which we were once at home by right of birth’ (MDR 237). Deprived of the symbolism of myth and religion, people were cut off from meaning, and society was doomed to die.”
― Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction

“Clinical diagnoses are important, since they give the doctor a certain orientation. But they do not help the patient. The crucial thing is the story. For it alone shows the human background and the human suffering, and only at that point can the doctor’s therapy begin to operate”
― Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction

“Merlin was born of an illicit union between the devil and an innocent virgin and thus emerged as a counterbalance to the figure of Christ.”
― Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction

“In fact, most of Freud’s hypotheses have proved untenable in the light of dream research, while Jung’s have stood the test of time. For example, the well-established observation that all mammals dream and that human infants devote much of their time to REM (rapid eye movement) dream sleep, both in the womb and post-natally, would seem to dispose of the idea that dreams are disguised expressions of repressed wishes or that their primary function is to preserve sleep. It is more likely that dreams are, as Jung maintained, natural products of the psyche, that they perform some homeostatic or self-regulatory function, and that they obey the biological imperative of adaptation in the interests of personal adjustment, growth, and survival.”
― Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction

“cryptomnesia (lit. hidden memory) – that although he had lost all conscious recollection of Binet’s work, it had none the less borne fruit in his personal unconscious.”
― Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction

“A further distinction between people depends on whether they habitually place greater emphasis on the importance of outer objective events or inner subjective ones (i.e. whether their attitude to reality is characteristically extraverted or introverted).”
― Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction

“(1) that the equipment consists of four psychological functions, which he named sensation, thinking, feeling, and intuition, all of which are available a priori to everybody, and (2) that individuals differ in regard to which of the four functions they use for preference.”
― Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction

“Archetypes are ‘identical psychic structures common to all’ (CW V, para. 224), which together constitute ‘the archaic heritage of humanity’ (CW V, para. 259).”
― Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction

“By projecting his psyche into the stone he gave the stone life, identity, consciousness, doing what the alchemists did as they gazed into the prima materia in their retorts. He came to see the imagination as the psychic quicksilver out of which everything of value is created; for the material world of objects is devoid of all meaning save that which we grant it in the psyche.”
― Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction

“Jung’s gift for transcending the confines of his own consciousness began, as we have seen, in the fantasy games of his childhood.”
― Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction

“Those who toe the party line do not choose their own way but submerge their potential for wholeness in a relatively unconscious existence of collective conformity.”
― Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction