Carl Jung Quotations

Introduction

Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you. - Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961)

Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. This thinker's work was influential in the fields of psychiatry, literature, philosophy, religious studies and more. The founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, saw in the younger Jung his potential successor to carry on psychoanalysis, but Jung could not agree with Freud on all points, and they split. Jung formed his own school of psychotherapy. It is called Analytical psychology, analytic psychology and Jungian psychology. What is called individuation is a central part of it. Jung considered it to be the main task of human development. Jung also created some other concepts, like synchronicity, archetypal phenomena, the collective unconscious, the psychological complex, and extraversion and introversion. Some Jung sayings are presented below. some referenced, and some not. All are translated and some are modified to make them saner, or toned down, but still quite compatible with the original Jung expressions. A 'mod' (for moderated) put behind such utterances show which statements are toned down thus.

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Jungian thinking

A collective problem, if not recognized as such, always appears as a personal problem. - Carl Jung

An inflated consciousness is . . . hypnotised by itself and therefore cannot be argued with. It inevitably dooms itself to calamities. - Carl Jung

Any absolutist attitude is always a religious attitude, and in whatever respect a man becomes absolute, there you see his religion. - Carl Jung

Archetypes speak the language of high rhetoric, even of bombast - Carl Jung, 1995, Ch. 6

Christianity . . . gives no answers - Carl Jung, 1995, Ch. 12

By carefully analysing every fascination (we shall) extract from it a portion of our own personality . . . [W]e meet ourselves time and again in a thousand disguises on the path of life. - Carl Jung

Certain difficulties could be necessary for health. - With Carl Jung

Community . . . I fear, produces the flock of sheep that infallibly attracts the wolves. - With Carl Jung

Coping like everybody else can be deplorable enough. - With Carl Jung

Everyone who promises too much is in danger of using evil means in order to carry out his promises. - Carl Jung

Failure to understand them [the images of the unconscious], or a shirking of ethical responsibility, deprives him of his wholeness and imposes a painful fragmentariness on his life. - Carl Jung

God approaches man in the form of symbols. - Carl Jung

I can still recall vividly how Freud said to me, My dear Jung, promise me never to abandon the sexual theory. . . . we must make a dogma of it, an unshakable bulwark. . . . In some astonishment I asked him, A bulwark – against what? which he replied, "Against the black tide of mud!" – and here hesitated for a moment, then added – "Of occultism." - Carl Jung, 1995, Ch. 5

I never think that I am the one who must see to it that cherries grow on stalks. I stand and behold, admiring what nature can do - Carl Jung, 1995, Retrospect

I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud - Carl Jung, Society for Psychical Research

If a man knows more than others, he becomes lonely. - Carl Jung

If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool. [If so, it is very likely projected.] - Carl Jung

In our most private and most subjective lives we are not only the passive witnesses of our age and its sufferers, but also its [co]makers. - Carl Jung

Man nowadays . . . a great deal escapes him . . . as the telling of a good ghost story as we sit by the fireside. - Carl Jung

Many works of man have their origin in creative imagination. What right, then, do we have to disparage fantasy? - With Carl Jung

Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain. - Carl Jung

One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light. - With Carl Jung

Poets . . . create from the very depths of the collective unconscious, voicing aloud what others only dream - Carl Jung, CW 6, 323

Resistance to the organized mass can be effected only by the man who is as well organized in his individuality as the mass itself. - Carl Jung

The deep mind . . . is on the one hand the result and culmination of what has been and on the other a symbolic expression of very much that is to be. - With Carl Jung

The primordial image, or archetype, is a figure--be it a daemon, a human being, or a process . . . wherever creative fantasy is freely expressed. Essentially, therefore, it is a mythological figure. . . - Carl Jung, On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry, in CW 15, 127

The upheaval of our world and the upheaval of our consciousness are one and the same - Carl Jung, The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man, in CW 10, 177

Where power predominates, love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other. - Carl Jung, "On the Psychology of the Unconciousness", 1917

You can take away a man's gods, but only to give him others in return - Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self, in CW 10, 544

Your vision will become clear . . . when you look into your heart . . . Who looks inside, awakens. - Carl Jung