The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious Quotes

“A group experience takes place on a lower level of consciousness than the experience of an individual. This is due to the fact that, when many people gather together to share one common emotion, the total psyche emerging from the group is below the level of the individual psyche. If it is a very large group, the collective psyche will be more like the psyche of an animal, which is the reason why the ethical attitude of large organizations is always doubtful. The psychology of a large crowd inevitably sinks to the level of mob psychology. If, therefore, I have a so-called collective experience as a member of a group, it takes place on a lower level of consciousness than if I had the experience by myself alone.”
― C.G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious

“Real liberation comes not from glossing over or repressing painful states of feeling, but only from experiencing them to the full.”
― C.G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious

“Were it not for the leaping and twinkling of the soul, man would rot away in his greatest passion, idleness.”
― C.G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious

“The mirror does not flatter, it faithfully shows whatever looks into it; namely, the face we never show to the world because we cover it with the persona, the mask of the actor.”
― C.G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious

“If it be true that there can be no metaphysics transcending human reason, it is no less true that there can be no empirical knowledge that is not already caught and limited by the a priori structure of cognition.”
― C.G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious

“When, for instance, a highly esteemed professor in his seventies abandons his family and runs off with a young red-headed actress, we know that the gods have claimed another victim.”
― C.G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious

“there is good reason for supposing that the archetypes are the unconscious images of the instincts themselves, in other words, that they are patterns of instinctual behaviour.”
― C.G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious

“That the gods die from time to time is due to man’s sudden discovery that they do not mean anything, that they are made by human hands, useless idols of wood and stone.”
― C.G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious

“We have let the house our fathers built fall into decay, and now we try to break into Oriental palaces that our fathers never knew. Anyone who has lost the historical symbols and cannot be satisfied with substitutes is certainly in a very difficult position today: before him there yawns the void, and he turns away from it in horror. What is worse, the vacuum gets filled with absurd political and social ideas, which one and all are distinguished by their spiritual bleakness.”
― C.G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious

“[R]eal liberation comes not from glossing over or repressing painful states of feeling, but only from experiencing them to the full.… By accepting the darkness, the patient has not, to be sure, changed it into light, but she has kindled a light that illuminates the darkness within. By day no light is needed, and if you don’t know it is night you won’t light one, nor will any light be lit for you unless you have suffered the horror of darkness.”
― C.G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious

“But the very fact that this process is unconscious gives us the reason why man has thought of everything except the psyche in his attempts to explain myths. He simply didn’t know that the psyche contains all the images that have ever given rise to myths, and that our unconscious is an acting and suffering subject with an inner drama which primitive man rediscovers, by means of analogy, in the processes of nature both great and small.11 [9]”
― C.G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious

“[22]“The fact is that archetypal images are so packed with meaning in themselves that people never think of asking what they really do mean...In reality, however, he has merely discovered that up till then he has never thought about his images at all. And when he starts thinking about them, he does so with the help of what he calls “reason”—which in point of fact is nothing more than the sum-total of all his prejudices and myopic viwes.”
― C.G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious

“The primitive mentality does not invent myths, it experiences them. Myths are original revelations of the preconscious psyche, involuntary statements about unconscious psychic happenings, and anything but allegories of physical processes.7 Such allegories would be an idle amusement for an unscientific intellect. Myths, on the contrary, have a vital meaning. Not merely do they represent, they are the psychic life of the primitive tribe, which immediately falls to pieces and decays when it loses its mythological heritage, like a man who has lost his soul. A tribe’s mythology is its living religion “whose loss is always and everywhere, even among the civilized, a moral catastrophe. But religion is a vital link with psychic processes independent of and beyond consciousness, in the dark hinterland of the psyche. Many of these unconscious processes may be indirectly occasioned by consciousness, but never by conscious choice. Others appear to arise spontaneously, that is to say, from no discernible or demonstrable conscious cause”
― C.G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious

“We should never forget that in any psychological discussion we are not saying anything about the psyche, but that the psyche is always speaking about itself. It is no use thinking we can ever get beyond the psyche by means of the “mind,” even though the mind asserts that it is not dependent on the psyche. How could it prove that?”
― C.G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious

“I have noticed that people usually have not
much difficulty in picturing to themselves what is meant by the shadow, even if they would have preferred instead a bit of Latin or Greek jargon that sounds more “scientific.” But it costs them enormous difficulties to understand what the anima is. They accept her easily enough when she appears in novels or as a film star, but she is not understood at all when it comes to seeing the role she plays in their own lives, because she sums up
everything that a man can never get the better of and never finishes coping with. Therefore it remains in a perpetual state of emotionality which must not be touched. The degree of unconsciousness one meets with in this connection is, to put it mildly, astounding. Hence it is practically impossible
to get a man who is afraid of his own femininity to understand what is meant by the anima.”
― C.G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious

“So far as we have any information about man, we know that he has always and everywhere been under the influence of dominating ideas. Any one who alleges that he is not can immediately be suspected of having exchanged a known form of belief for a variant which is less known both to himself and to others.”
― C.G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious

“...Whoever goes into the mirror of the water will first see his own face[:] whoever goes to himself risks a confrontation with himself. [...]

Whoever looks into the water sees his own image, but behind it living creatures soon loom up.”
― C.G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious

“If we take the trickster as a parallel of the individual shadow, then the question arises whether that trend towards meaning, which we saw in the trickster myth, can also be observed in the subjective and personal shadow. Since this shadow frequently appears in the phenomenology of dreams as a well-defined figure, we can answer this question positively: the shadow, although by definition a negative figure, sometimes has certain clearly discernible traits and associations which point to a quite different background. It is as though he were hiding meaningful contents under an unprepossessing exterior. Experience confirms this; and what is more important, the things that are hidden usually consist of increasingly numinous figures. The one standing closest behind the shadow is the anima,18 who is endowed with considerable powers of fascination and possession. She often appears in rather too youthful form, and hides in her turn the powerful archetype of the wise old man (sage, magician, king, etc.). The series could be extended, but it would be pointless to do so, as psychologically one only understands what one has experienced oneself. The concepts of complex psychology are, in essence, not intellectual formulations but names for certain areas of experience, and though they can be described they remain dead and irrepresentable to anyone who has not experienced them. Thus, I have noticed that people usually have not much difficulty in picturing to themselves what is meant by the shadow, even if they would have preferred instead a bit of Latin or Greek jargon that sounds more “scientific.” But it costs them enormous difficulties to understand what the anima is. They accept her easily enough when she appears in novels or as a film star, but she is not understood at all when it comes to seeing the role she plays in their own lives, because she sums up everything that a man can never get the better of and never finishes coping with. Therefore it remains in a perpetual state of emotionality which must not be touched. The degree of unconsciousness one meets with in this connection is, to put it mildly, astounding. Hence it is practically impossible to get a man who is afraid of his own femininity to understand what is meant by the anima.”
― C.G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious

“what is the fate of great nations but a summation of the psychic changes in individuals?”
― C.G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious

“whether you believe in a demon of the air or in a factor in the unconscious that plays diabolical tricks on you is all one to me. The fact that man’s imagined unity is menaced by alien powers remains the same in either case. Theologians would do better to take account for once of these psychological facts than to go on “demythologizing” them with rationalistic explanations that are a hundred years behind the times.”
― C.G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious

“A man may be convinced in all good faith that he has no religious ideas, but no one can fall so far away from humanity that he no longer has any dominating representation collective.”
― C.G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious

“When our natural inheritance has been dissipated, then the spirit too, as Heraclitus says, has descended from its fiery heights. But when spirit becomes heavy it turns to water, and with Luciferian presumption the intellect usurps the seat where once the spirit was enthroned. The spirit may legitimately claim the patria potestas over the soul; not so the earth-born intellect, which is man's sword or hammer, and not a creator of spiritual worlds, a father of the soul.”
― C.G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious

“A man who is possessed by his shadow is always standing in his own light and falling into his own traps...living below his own level.”
― C.G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious

“How perilously fraught with meaning this Eastern relativity of good and evil is, can be seen from the Indian aphoristic question: “Who takes longer to reach perfection, the man who loves God, or the man who hates him?” And the answer is: “He who loves God takes seven reincarnations to reach perfection, and he who hates God takes only three, for he who hates God will think of him more than he who loves him,”
― C.G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious

“The form the picture had taken was not unreservedly welcome to the patient’s conscious mind. Luckily, however, while painting it Miss X had discovered that two factors were involved. These, in her own words, were reason and the eyes. Reason always wanted to make the picture as it thought it ought to be; but the eyes held fast to their vision and finally forced the picture to come out as it actually did and not in accordance with rationalistic expectations. Her reason, she said, had really intended a daylight scene, with the sunshine melting the sphere free, but the eyes favoured a nocturne with “shattering, dangerous lightning.” This realization helped her to acknowledge the actual result of her artistic efforts and to admit that it was in fact an objective and impersonal process and not a personal relationship.”
― C.G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious

“Conscious and unconscious do not make a whole when one of them is suppressed and injured by the other. If they must contend, let it at least be a fair fight with equal rights on both sides. Both are aspects of life. Consciousness should defend its reason and protect itself, and the chaotic life of the unconscious should be given the chance of having its way too—as much of it as we can stand. This means open conflict and open collaboration at once. That, evidently, is the way human life should be. It is the old game of hammer and anvil: between them the patient iron is forged into an indestructible whole, an “individual.”
― C.G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious

“The so-called civilized man has forgotten the trickster. He remembers him only figuratively and metaphorically, when, irritated by his own ineptitude, he speaks of fate playing tricks on him or of things being bewitched. He never suspects that his own hidden and apparently harmless shadow has qualities whose dangerousness exceeds his wildest dreams. As soon as people get together in masses and submerge the individual, the shadow is mobilized, and, as history shows, may even be personified and incarnated.”
― C.G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious

“Strong natures – or should one rather call them weak? - do not like to be reminded of this [their unconscious nature], but prefer to think of themselves as heroes.”
― C.G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious

“Tibetan Book of the Dead”
― C.G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious

“The things that come to light brutally in insanity remain hidden in the background in neurosis, but they continue to influence consciousness nonetheless. When, therefore, the analysis penetrates the background of conscious phenomena, it discovers the same archetypal figures that activate the deliriums of psychotics.”
― C.G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious