Carl Jung
Carl Jung
Carl Gustav Jungwas a Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology. His work has been influential not only in psychiatry but also in philosophy, anthropology, archaeology, literature, and religious studies. He was a prolific writer, though many of his works were not published until after his death...
NationalitySwiss
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth26 July 1875
CityKesswil, Switzerland
CountrySwitzerland
Healing proceeds from the depths to the heights.
The dynamic principle of fantasy is play, a characteristic also of the child, and as such it appears inconsistent with the principle of serious work. But without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable. It is therefore short-sighted to treat fantasy, on account of its risky or unacceptable nature, as a thing of little worth.
The reason for such an “unreasonable” attitude with me is that I am not at all sure what will happen to me after death. I have good reasons to assume that things are not finished with death. Life seems to be an interlude in a long story.
So they speak soothingly about progress and the greatest possible happiness, forgetting that happiness is itself poisoned if the measure of suffering has not been fulfilled.
A special ability means a heavy expenditure of energy in a particular direction, with a consequent drain from some other side of life.
I have no theory about dreams. I do not know how dreams arise. On the other hand, I know that if we meditate on a dream sufficiently long and thoroughly – if we take the boat with us and turn it over and over – something almost always comes out of it.
Continuous creation is to be thought of not only as a series of successive acts of creation, but also as the eternal presence of the one creative act.
Metaphysical assertions, however, are statements of the psyche, and are therefore psychological. Whenever the Westerner hears the word “psychological,” it always sounds to him like “only psychological.
I had to make a confession of faith in stone. That was the beginning of the tower, the house I built for myself at Bollingen.
The meaning and design of a problem seem not to lie in its solution, but in our working at it incessantly.
The inner man has access to the sense organs of god.
Here and there it happened in my practice that a patient grew beyond himself because of unknown potentialities, and this became an experience of prime importance to me. I had learned in the meanwhile that the greatest and most important problems of life are all in a certain sense insoluble. They must be so because they express the necessary polarity inherent in every self-regulating system. They can never be solved, but only outgrown.
Simple things are always the most difficult.
Caution has its place, no doubt, but we cannot refuse our support to a serious venture which challenges the whole of the personality. If we oppose it, we are trying to suppress what is best in man - his daring and his aspirations. And should we succeed, we should only have stood in the way of that invaluable experience which might have given a meaning to life.