Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology quotes

It is the task of the future to judge and expand the findings of both schools, and to work at the development of the new psychology, which is still in its infancy.

It will be a relief to many students of the unconscious to see it in another aspect than that of "a wild beast couched, waiting its hour to spring."

Some readers have gathered that view of it from the writings of the Viennese School, a view which is at most that dangerous thing "a half-truth."

These fearful persons should be reminded that they possess an unconscious in spite of themselves, and that they share it in common with every human being. It is an extension of the individual.

To study it is to deepen the self.

All new discoveries have at one stage been called dangerous, and all new philosophies have been deemed heresies. It is as though we would once more consign radium to its dust-heaps, lest some day the new radiancy should over-power mankind.

These fearful persons should be reminded that they possess an unconscious in spite of themselves, and that they share it in common with every human being. It is an extension of the individual. To study it is to deepen the self.

All new discoveries have at one stage been called dangerous, and all new philosophies have been deemed heresies.

It is as though we would once more consign radium to its dust-heaps, lest some day the new radiancy should over-power mankind. Indeed this particular thing has proved at once most dangerous and most precious.

By exclusive reduction to causes, the primitive trends of a personality are reinforced; this is only helpful when at the same time these primitive tendencies are balanced by recognition of their symbolic value.

Analysis and reduction lead to causal truth; this by itself does not help living, but brings about resignation and hopelessness.

On the other hand, the recognition of the intrinsic value of a symbol leads to constructive truth and helps us to live. It induces hopefulness and furthers the possibility of future development.

It is in the construction of the second person that there lies the far-reaching difference between Léonie II. and Ivenes. Both are psychogenic. But Léonie I. receives in Léonie II. what really belongs to her, while S. W. builds up a person beyond herself.

It cannot be said "she deceives herself" into, but that "she dreams herself" into the higher ideal state.

[69]

The association experiment, too, is not merely a method for the reproduction of separated word couplets, but it is a kind of pastime, a conversation between experimenter and test-person. In a certain sense it is still more than that.

Words really represent condensed actions, situations, and things.

When I give a stimulus word to the test-person, which denotes an action, it is as if I represented to him the action itself, and asked him, "How do you behave towards it? What do you think of it?

One can make use of many special methods of computing, but they are not all equally good and equally exact.

(One must always resort to calculation, as appearances are enormously deceptive.)

The method which is most to be recommended is that of the probable average of the reaction time. It shows at a glance the difficulties which the person in the experiment had to overcome in the reaction.

One must get rid of the idea that educated and intelligent test-persons are able to see and admit their own complexes.

Every human mind contains much that is unacknowledged and hence unconscious as such; and no one can boast that he stands completely above his complexes.

Those who persist in maintaining that they can, are not aware of the spectacles upon their noses.

Every human mind contains much that is unacknowledged and hence unconscious as such; and no one can boast that he stands completely above his complexes.

Those who persist in maintaining that they can, are not aware of the spectacles upon their noses.

It has long been thought that the association experiment enables one to distinguish certain intellectual types. That is not the case. The experiment does not give us any particular insight into the purely intellectual, but rather into the emotional processes.

For it is known that emotionally accentuated things are better retained in memory than indifferent things. This is quite true, but it does not hold for the linguistic expression of an emotionally accentuated content.

On the contrary, one very easily forgets what he has said under emotion, one is even apt to contradict himself about it.

Indeed, the efficacy of cross-examinations in court depends on this fact. The reproduction method therefore serves to render still more prominent the complex stimulus.

She reproduced a large number of fancies of faithlessness, reproaches against her husband, etc. Her prudishness and jealousy were merely a projection of her own sexual wishes on her husband.

Because she was faithless in her fancies and did not admit it to herself she was jealous of her husband.

For the stimulus words corresponding to the numbers, see the list on pages 94 and 95.

The father and mother impress deeply into the child's mind the seal of their personality; the more sensitive and mouldable the child the deeper is the impression.

Thus things that are never even spoken about are reflected in the child.

The child imitates the gesture, and just as the gesture of the parent is the expression of an emotional state, so in turn the gesture gradually produces in the child a similar feeling, as it feels itself, so to speak, into the gesture.

dreams bring the analogies to the surface; the same may be observed also in dementia præcox.) In German as well as in numerous foreign fairy tales one frequently finds such characteristic childish comparisons.

Fairy tales seem to be the myths of the child, and therefore contain among other things the mythology which the child weaves concerning the sexual processes.

The spell of the fairy tale poetry, which is felt even by the adult, is explained by the fact that some of the old theories are still alive in our unconscious minds.

This stream of thought is no arbitrary interpretation. Anna meanwhile grew a little older and her interest in her father took on a special colouring which is hard to describe.

Language has no words to describe the quite unique kind of tender curiosity which shone in the child's eyes.

Anna once took marked delight in assisting the gardener while he was sowing grass, without apparently divulging the profound significance of her play. About a fortnight later she began to observe with great pleasure the young grass sprouting.

In such cases the parents must look after their own complexes and complex tendencies and not make capital out of them at the expense of the child.

The idea should be dismissed once for all that children are to be held in bondage by their parents or that they are their toys.

They are characteristic and new beings. In the matter of enlightenment on sexual things it can be affirmed that they suffer from the preconceived opinion that the truth is harmful.

The fact of the extreme similarity between the reaction-type of the offspring and the parents is matter for thought. The association experiment is nothing but a small section from the psychological life of a man.

At bottom daily life is nothing but an extensive and many-varied association experiment; in essence we react in life just as we do in the experiments.

Although this truth is evident, still it requires a certain consideration and limitation. Let us take as an instance the case of the unhappy mother of forty-five years and her unmarried daughter of sixteen.

others rise up and win to freedom, only to be dragged back later to the old paths, caught in the noose of the neurosis. You cannot even maintain that these unhappy people are neurotic or "degenerates."

If we normal people examine our lives from the psychoanalytic standpoint, we too perceive how a mighty hand guides us insensibly to our destiny and not always is this hand a kindly one.

[157] We often call it the hand of God or of the Devil, for the power of the infantile constellation has become mighty during the course of the centuries in affording support and proof to all the religions.

The effect of the dream can only be explained by its being "le vrai mot de la situation," i.e. that the dream formed the fit expression for something that was already in the air.

It was the spark which fell into the powder magazine.

The material contains all the proofs essential for this view. I have repeatedly drawn attention to their own unrecognised participation in the dream by Marie's school-companions, and the special points of interest where any of them have added their own phantasies or dreams.

On waking, the dream became a subtle instrument of her hatred, because the wish-idea was also that of her school companions, as it always is in rumours of this kind. Revenge certainly had its triumph, but the recoil upon Marie herself was still more severe.

Such is the rule when our impulses are given over to the unconscious.

Marie X. was expelled from school, but upon my report she was allowed to return to it.

a high measure of discretion as to the accuracy of individual results is consequently required, but this in nowise obliges us to pass over in silence what is active and living, for fear of being execrated as unscientific.

There must be no parleying with the superstition-phobia of the modern mind; for this itself is a means by which the secrets of the unconscious are kept veiled.

It is of special interest to see how the problems of the patient are mirrored in the unconscious of his wife. His wife had the following dream: She dreamt, and this is the whole dream: "Luke 137." The analysis of the number gives the following.

Thus the doctor is blind to the mental attitude of the patient to the exact extent that he does not see himself and his own subconscious problems.

Therefore I maintain that a doctor must be analysed before he practises analysis.

Otherwise the practice of analysis can easily be a great disappointment to him, because he can, under certain circumstances, reach a point where further progress is impossible, a situation which may make him lose his head.

For instance, it is quite incorrect to assume that the snake, when it appears in dreams, has a merely phallic meaning; just as incorrect as it is to deny that it may have a phallic meaning in some cases.

Every symbol has more than one meaning.

I can therefore not admit the correctness of exclusively sexual interpretations, such as appear in some psychoanalytic publications, for my experience has made me regard them as one-sided and therefore insufficient.

One only has to hear this material in order to understand at once that the patient's dream is not so much the fulfilment of infantile desires, as it is the expression of biological duties which he has hitherto neglected because of his infantilism.

Biological justice, which is inexorable, sometimes compels the human being to atone in his dreams for the duties which he has neglected in real life.

This dream is a typical example of the prospective and teleological function of dreams in general, a function that has been especially emphasised by my colleague Dr. Maeder.

The patient's salvation is not to be found by thrusting him back again into primitive sexuality; this would leave him on a low plane of civilisation whence he could never obtain freedom and complete restoration to health.

Retrogression to a state of barbarism is no advantage at all for a civilised human being.

The above-mentioned formula, according to which the sexuality of a dream is a symbolic or analogous expression, naturally also holds good in the case of dreams occurring in the beginning of an analysis.

Thus the human being attains the same sense of unity and totality, the same confidence, the same capacity for self-sacrifice in his conscious existence that belongs unconsciously and instinctively to wild animals.

Every reduction, every digression from the course that has been laid down for the development of civilisation does nothing more than turn the human being into a crippled animal; it never makes a so-called natural man of him.

My numerous successes and failures in the course of my analytic practice have convinced me of the invariable correctness of this psychological orientation. We do not help the neurotic patient by freeing him from the demand made by civilisation;

You may ask why the neurotic has a special inclination not to accomplish his necessary tasks. Here let me point out that no living being adjusts itself easily and smoothly to new conditions.

The principle of the minimum of effort is valid everywhere.

A sensitive and somewhat inharmonious character, as a neurotic always is, will meet special difficulties and perhaps more unusual tasks in life than a normal individual, who as a rule has only to follow the well-established line of an ordinary life.

With regard to your question as to the applicability of the cathartic method, the following is my standpoint: every method is good if it serves its purpose, including every method of suggestion, even Christian Science, Mental Healing, etc.

"A truth is a truth, when it works."

It is quite another question whether a scientific physician can answer for it to his conscience should he sell little bottles of Lourdes-water because that suggestion is at times very useful.

I regard the conscience-searching question of the doctor's remaining true to his scientific convictions as rather unimportant in comparison with the incomparably weightier question as to how he can best help his patient. The doctor must, on occasion, be able to play the augur.

Mundus vult decipi—but the cure is no deception.

It is true that there is a conflict between ideal conviction and concrete possibility. But we should ill prepare the ground for the seed of the future, were we to forget the tasks of the present, and sought only to cultivate ideals.

But we should ill prepare the ground for the seed of the future, were we to forget the tasks of the present, and sought only to cultivate ideals. That is but idle dreaming.

Do not forget that Kepler cast horoscopes for money, and that countless artists have been condemned to work for wages.

The selfsame passion for truth possesses us both when we think of pure research, and the same desire to cure when we are considering therapy.

I do not know what else to tell you beforehand. I must wait for further questions. In regard to questions of morality and education let me say that these belong to the later stages of the analysis, wherein they find—or should find—solutions for themselves.

You cannot compile recipes out of psychoanalysis.

You write that a solid knowledge of the psychoanalytic literature is necessary for initiation into psychoanalysis. I should agree, but with a certain reservation:

So the line of least resistance does not signify eo ipso the avoidance of unpleasure so much as the just balancing of unpleasure and pleasure. Painful activity by itself leads to no result but exhaustion.

Man must be able to take pleasure in his life, or the struggle of life has no reward.

What direction the patient's future life should take is not ours to judge. We must not imagine we know better than his own nature—or we prove ourselves educators of the worst kind.

So we renounce any attempt to give a direction, and occupy ourselves only with setting in proper relief all that analysis brings into the light of day, in order that the patient may see clearly, and be in a position to draw the appropriate conclusions.

Anything that he has not himself won, he does not in the long run believe in; and all that he has received from authority keeps him still infantile.

He must rather be put in such a position as will enable him to take control of his own life. It is the art of the psychoanalyst to follow the patient's apparently mistaken paths without prejudice, and thus to discover his strayed and separated sheep.

In nerve-therapy we get so many wonderful experiences—unforeseen and impossible to foresee—that surely we ought to dismiss all hope of being infallibly able to point out the right path.

The roundabout way and even the wrong way are necessary.

If you deny this you must also deny that the errors in the history of the whole world have been necessary. That indeed were a world-conception fit for a schoolmaster. For psychoanalysis this view suits not at all.

But although we must do full justice to the force of suggestion, we must not overrate it.

The patient is no empty sack into which you may stuff whatever you like; on the contrary, he brings his own predetermined contents which strive obstinately against suggestion and always obtrude themselves afresh.

Through analytic "suggestions," only the outward form is determined, never the content—this is always being freshly impressed upon my notice. The form is the unlimited, the ever-changing; but the content is fixed, and only to be assailed slowly and with great difficulty.

In the past nothing can be altered, and in the present little, but the future is ours and capable of raising life's intensity to its highest pitch.

A little space of youth belongs to us, all the rest of life belongs to our children.

Thus does your question as to the significance of the loss of faith in authority answer itself. The neurotic is ill not because he has lost his old faith, but because he has not yet found a new form for his finest aspirations.

And thus the view is only of the present, never of the future. But it was of most profound psychological significance when Christianity first discovered, in the orientation towards the future, a redeeming principle for mankind.

In the past nothing can be altered, and in the present little, but the future is ours and capable of raising life's intensity to its highest pitch.

A little space of youth belongs to us, all the rest of life belongs to our children.

Thus does your question as to the significance of the loss of faith in authority answer itself.

The neurotic is ill not because he has lost his old faith, but because he has not yet found a new form for his finest aspirations.

ON THE IMPORTANCE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS IN PSYCHOPATHOLOGY[182]

But, as I have said, the correlation between the anatomical findings and the psychological picture of the disease is so loose that it is extremely desirable to study the psychological side of it thoroughly.

Psychiatry is the stepchild of medicine.

All the other branches of medicine have one great advantage over it—the scientific methods can be applied; there are things to be seen, and felt, physical and chemical methods of investigation to be followed:

Function has become the dependent accessory of its organs, the mind the dependent accessory of the brain. In modern mental therapy the mind has been the loser, whilst great progress has been made in cerebral anatomy; of the mind we know less than nothing.

Current psychiatry behaves like a man who thinks he can unriddle the meaning and importance of a building by a mineralogical investigation of its stones.

Let us attempt to realise in which mental diseases obvious changes in the brain are found, and what is their proportion.

The unconscious wanted to be left in peace with its illusion. Shortly afterwards he again came to B——, the place of old memories. Then he felt something strange stir in his soul, an uneasy feeling, akin to Nietzsche's—

Civilised man no longer believes in demons, he calls in the doctor.

Our patient wanted to be hypnotised. Then madness overcame him. What was going on in him?

the model is Imago. I may take for granted that you know his book of that name. The psychological gulf, however, between the creation of the artist and the insane person is great.

The world of the artist is one of solved problems; the world of reality, that of unsolved problems.

The mental patient is a faithful image of this reality.

The most absurd things are in reality symbols of ideas which are not only generally understandable, but also universally operative in the human heart.

In insanity we do not discover anything new and unknown, but we look at the foundation of our own being, the source of those life-problems in which we are all engaged.

The number of psychoanalytic investigations into the psychology of dementia præcox has considerably increased since the publication of my book upon the subject.[202] When, in 1903, I made the first analysis of a case of dementia præcox, there dawned on me a premonition of the …

Nevertheless we should be a little disappointed.

We do not read "Faust" just in order to discover that also we are, in all things, "human, all too human."

Alas, we know that but too well already. Let any one who has not yet learnt it go for a little while out into the world and look at it without preconceptions and with open eyes.

In this objective conception there is comprised the whole worth and worthlessness of current experimental psychology and psychoanalysis. The scientific mind, thinking causally, is incapable of understanding what is ahead; it only understands what is past, that is, retrospective.

Like Ahriman, the Persian devil, it has the gift of After-Knowledge.

But this spirit is only one half of a complete comprehension. The other more important half is prospective or constructive; if we are not able to understand what lies ahead, then nothing is understood.

from an objective standpoint it must be judged as such, in so far as objective is regarded as identical with scientific or causal. Looked at from within, however, constructive understanding means redemption.

"Creation—that is the great redemption from suffering and easiness of living."

[210]

The subjective activity of the mind can be judged from without, just as one can, in the end, so judge everything. But this judgment is inadequate, because it is the very essence of the subjective that it cannot be judged objectively.

We cannot measure distance in pints.

The subjective can be only understood and judged subjectively, that is, constructively. Any other judgment is unfair and does not meet the question.

This procedure may expose him to the suspicion of being deranged himself; or at least risks a misunderstanding which is considered terribly disgraceful—he may himself have some world-philosophy! The confirmation of such a possibility is as bad as being "unscientific."

But every one has a world-philosophy though not every one knows he has.

And those who do not know it have simply an unconscious and therefore inadequate and archaic philosophy. But everything psychological that is allowed to remain in the mind neglected and not developed, remains in a primitive state.

Such work extends far beyond empirical concepts but that is in accordance with the nature of the human soul which has never hitherto rested content with experience alone.

Everything new in the human mind proceeds from speculation.

Mental development proceeds by way of speculation, never by way of limitation to mere experience.

… unexampled flood of mendacity, and man's incapacity to arrest the bloody demon—are they not, one and all, better adapted than anything else, to force obtrusively the problem of the chaotic unconscious—which slumbers uneasily beneath the ordered world of consciousness,—before the eyes of every thinking individual?

This war has inexorably shown to the man of culture that he is still a barbarian.

It testifies also what an iron scourge awaits him, if ever again it should occur to him to make his neighbour responsible for his own bad qualities. The psychology of the individual corresponds to the psychology of nations.

Passing from one strophe to another he suddenly altered the key, and she, quite unconscious of what she was doing, sang on in the altered key.

Thus she heard—yet did not hear.

The various forms of systematic blindness present similar phenomena. We have the case of a man suffering from complete hysterical blindness. In the course of the treatment he recovers his sight, but at first, and for some long time, only partially:

In the course of the treatment he recovers his sight, but at first, and for some long time, only partially: he could see everything with one exception—people's heads. He saw all the people around him without heads.

Thus he saw—yet did not see.

From a large number of like experiences it has long been concluded that it is only the patient's consciousness which does not see, does not hear, but the sense-function has nothing at all the matter with it.

And the greater our experience the clearer does it become that in all cases with such traumatic experiences analysed up to the present, there co-exists a special kind of disturbance which can only be described as a derangement in the sphere of love.

Not all of us give due credit to the anomalous nature of love, reaching high as heaven, sinking low as hell, uniting in itself all extremes of good and evil, of lofty and low.

[225]

whence comes neurosis. Neurosis then is most intimately bound up with the problem of our times and represents an unsuccessful attempt of the individual to solve the general problem in his own person.

Neurosis is a tearing in two of the inner self.

For most men the reason of this cleavage is the fact that their conscious self desires to hold to its moral ideal, whilst the unconscious strives after the amoral ideal, steadfastly rejected by the conscious self.

… sexuality, but in reality this is a sinful pose assumed for goodness knows what reasons, for down below they have a decorous soul which has somehow gone astray in their unconscious, just as has the real immoral nature in the case of apparently moral people.

Extremes of conduct always arouse suspicions of the opposite tendencies in the unconscious.

It was necessary to make this general statement in order to elucidate the idea of the "erotic conflict" in analytical psychology, for it is the key to the conception of neurosis. We can now proceed to consider the psychoanalytic technique.

As Freud says: "

Dream-analysis is the via regia to the unconscious.

" Dream-analysis leads us into the deepest personal secrets, and it is therefore an invaluable instrument in the hand of the psychotherapist and educator.

After all, does a more moral view-point exist than the let-instinct-live theory? Is there a more heroic morality than this? That is why Nietzsche, the heroic, is especially partial to it.

It is natural and inborn cowardice that makes people say, "God preserve me from following my instincts," thinking that they thus prove their high moral standard.

They do not understand that following one's bent is really much too costly for them, too strenuous, too dangerous, and finally it cuts somewhat against that sense of decency which most people associate rather with taste than with a categorical imperative.

This height could only be maintained by means of most careful diet, choice climate and above all by many opiates. Finally, the tension of this living shattered his brain.

He spoke of yea-saying, but lived the nay.

His horror of people, especially of the animal man, who lives by instinct, was too great. He could not swallow the toad of which he so often dreamt, and which he feared he must yet gulp down.

But these ego instincts drag out an obscure existence, according to his psychology, alongside the broad, all-too-broad, development of the sexual theme. In reality, however, human nature wages a cruel and hardly-to-be-ended warfare between the ego-principle and that of formless instinct.

The ego is all barriers; instinct, on the other hand, is without any limits.

Both principles are equally powerful. In a certain sense men may account themselves fortunate in being conscious of only one instinct: therefore he who is wise avoids getting to know the other.

But, the astonished reader asks, what is supposed to be the use of neurosis? What does it effect? Whoever has had a pronounced case of neurosis in his immediate environment, knows all that can be "effected" by a neurosis.

In fact, there is altogether no better means of tyrannising over a whole household than by a striking neurosis.

Heart attacks, choking fits, convulsions of all kinds achieve enormous effects, that can hardly be surpassed.

A person is only half understood when one knows how everything in him came about. Only a dead man can be explained in terms of the past, a living one must be otherwise explained.

Life is not made up of yesterdays only, nor is it understood nor explained by reducing to-day to yesterday.

Life has also a to-morrow, and to-day is only understood if we are able to add the indications of to-morrow to our knowledge of what was yesterday. This holds good for all expressions of psychological life, even for symptoms of disease.

but the soul itself is not solely either the one or the other, or even both together, it is also that which it has made and will make out of them both.

A person is only half understood when one knows how everything in him came about.

Only a dead man can be explained in terms of the past, a living one must be otherwise explained. Life is not made up of yesterdays only, nor is it understood nor explained by reducing to-day to yesterday.

A person is only half understood when one knows how everything in him came about.

Only a dead man can be explained in terms of the past, a living one must be otherwise explained.

Life is not made up of yesterdays only, nor is it understood nor explained by reducing to-day to yesterday.

But to his great disappointment no interest for his business presented itself. Neither the application of patience nor determination availed to help. His energy would not by any means be forced back into the business. His condition naturally became worse than before.

Energy that hitherto had been actively creative was now turned back into himself, with fearfully destructive force.

His creative genius rose up, so to speak, in revolt against him, and instead of, as before, producing great organisations in the world, his demon now created equally clever systems of hypochondriac fallacies, by which the man was absolutely crushed.

These energies can be arbitrarily applied, as has already been said, at the very most only for a short time. They resist following the rationally presented possibilities for any length of time.

Psychic energy is indeed a fastidious thing, that insists upon having its own conditions fulfilled.

There may be ever so much energy existing, but we cannot make it useful, so long as we do not succeed in finding a congenial channel for it.

We are laudably and usefully endeavouring to exterminate so far as is practicable the chaos of what is irrational, both in and around us. Apparently we are making considerable progress with this process.

A mental patient once said to me, "Last night, doctor, I disinfected the whole heavens with sublimate, and yet did not discover any God."

Something of the kind has happened to us. Heraclitus, the ancient, that really very wise man, discovered the most wonderful of all psychological laws, namely, the regulating function of antithesis.

That is a fact of which every pedant of civilisation should take note. What is irrational cannot and may not be stamped out.

The gods cannot and may not die.

Woe betide those men who have disinfected heaven with rationalism; God-Almightiness has entered into them, because they would not admit God as an absolute function. They are identified with their unconscious, and are therefore its sport.

This is the enantiodromia that occurs in the individual life of man, as well as in that of peoples. The legend of the Tower of Babel turns out to be a tenable truth.

Only he escapes from the cruel law of enantiodromia who knows how to separate himself from the unconscious—not by repressing it, for then it seizes him from behind—but by presenting it visibly to himself as something that is totally different from him.

This gives the solution of the Scylla and Charybdis problem which I described above. The patient must learn to differentiate in his thoughts between what is the ego and what is the non-ego. The latter is the collective psyche or absolute unconscious.

The unconscious is continually active, creating combinations of its materials; these serve to indicate the future path of the individual. It creates prospective combinations just as our consciousness does, only they are considerably superior to the conscious combinations both in refinement and extent.

The unconscious may therefore be an unparalleled guide for human beings.

The reader must on no account suppose that the complicated psychological changes described must all be passed through in every individual case. In practice the treatment is adjusted according to the therapeutic result attained.

This is a matter in which people are extremely different, just as among species of animals there are some that are stationary and conservative, and others that are evolutionary.

Nature is aristocratic, but not in the sense of having reserved the possibility of differentiation exclusively for those species that stand high.

Similarly, the possibility of the psychological development of human beings is not reserved for specially gifted individuals. In other words:

Therefore every pioneer must take his own path, alone but hopeful, with the open eyes of one who is conscious of its solitude and of the perils of its dim precipices.

Our age is seeking a new spring of life. I found one and drank of it and the water tasted good.

That is all that I can or want to say. My intention and my duty to society is fulfilled when I have described, as well as I can, the way that led me to the spring;

The primordial image has also sprung up naturally in the philosopher, and is nothing but a part of the universal human heritage in which, theoretically at least, every one has a share.

The golden apples come from the same tree whether they are gathered by a locksmith's apprentice or a Schopenhauer.

The recognition of such primordial images obliges me to differentiate between the contents of the unconscious; a differentiation of another kind than that between the pre-conscious and unconscious, or between the subconscious and unconscious. The justification for those distinctions cannot be discussed here;

his virtues and vices are collective. Conflict only begins when a conscious personal development of the mind has already started, whereby the reason becomes aware of the irreconcilable nature of the pairs of opposites. The struggle to repress is the consequence of this realisation.

Man wants to be good, therefore the bad must be repressed; this puts an end to the paradise of the collective psyche.

The repression of the collective psyche, in so far as it was conscious, was a necessity for the development of the personality, because collective psychology and personal psychology are in a certain sense irreconcilable.

An increased disposition to physical disorders may also occasionally be observed, but this occurs only if pleasure be taken therein, thus prolonging this stage unduly.

The wealth of the possibilities of the collective psyche is both confusing and dazzling.

The dissolution of the persona results in the release of phantasy, which apparently is nothing else but the functioning of the collective psyche. This release brings materials into consciousness of whose existence we had no suspicion before.

One may yield to this illusion for a time, but some day he will be obliged to declare with Faust:—

The unconscious cannot be "analysed" to a finish, and thus brought to a standstill.

No one can wrest active force from it for any length of time. Therefore to act according to the method just described is only to deceive one's self, and is nothing but a new edition of an ordinary repression.

For to speak of a scientific individual psychology is in itself a contradictio in adjecto. It is necessarily always only the collective part of an individual psychology that can be the subject of scientific study, for the individual is—according to definition—something unique and incomparable.

A "scientific" individual psychology is a denial of individual psychology.

It may justly be suspected that individual psychology is indeed a projection of the psychology of him who defines it. Every individual psychology must have its own text-book, for the universal text-book only contains collective psychology.

His psychology is individual as well as collective, but not in such a manner as to merge the individual with what is collective, or the collective with what is individual.

The persona must be strictly separated from the concept of the individual, in so far as the persona can be absolutely merged with the collective.

But what is individual is just that which can never be absorbed in the collective, and is, too, never identical with the collective. Therefore, an identification with the collective or an arbitrary cutting-off from the collective is equivalent to illness; it is pathological.

… is not whether the hay-bundle on the right or the left be the better one, or whether he should begin to eat on the right or the left hand, but what he himself would like to do, what he is eager for—that is the point.

He is thinking of the hay and not of himself, and therefore he does not know what he really wants.

The question is: what at this moment is the natural direction of the growth of this individual?

He is thinking of the hay and not of himself, and therefore he does not know what he really wants.

The question is: what at this moment is the natural direction of the growth of this individual?

This question cannot be settled by any philosophy, religion or good advice, but solely by an unprejudiced review of the psychological germs of life which have resulted from the natural co-operation of the conscious and unconscious on the one hand, and of the individual and …

Thence result certain psychological lines of development of an individual as well as collective nature. No science upon earth could prove the accuracy of these lines; on the contrary, rationalism could very easily prove that they are wrong.

But these lines vindicate their validity by their value for life.

The chief thing in practical treatment is that people should get a hold of their own life, not that the principle of their life should be provable or "right."

No science upon earth could prove the accuracy of these lines; on the contrary, rationalism could very easily prove that they are wrong. But these lines vindicate their validity by their value for life.

The chief thing in practical treatment is that people should get a hold of their own life, not that the principle of their life should be provable or "right."

Of course, true to the spirit of scientific superstition suggestion will be mooted. But it should long ago have been realised that a suggestion is only accepted by one it suits.

Beyond that there is no suggestion, otherwise the treatment of neurosis would be extremely simple, for we should only need to suggest health. This pseudo-scientific talk about suggestion is based upon the unconscious superstition that suggestion actually possesses some real magic power.

No one succumbs to suggestion unless from the very bottom of his heart he be willing to co-operate.

By means of the hermeneutical treatment of the phantasies we arrive at the synthesis of the individual with the collective psyche, put theoretically, that is, but practically, one indispensable condition is yet lacking.

… of the neurotic—a disposition in which he has been confirmed in the course of his illness—to take neither himself nor the world seriously, but always to rely on this or that method or circumstance to effect a cure, quite apart from his own serious co-operation.

"But you can't wash the dog without getting his skin wet."

No cure can be effected without unlimited willingness and absolute seriousness on the part of the patient. There are no magical cures for neurosis. Just as soon as we begin to elaborate the symbolic outlines of the path, the patient must begin to walk thereon.

"But you can't wash the dog without getting his skin wet." No cure can be effected without unlimited willingness and absolute seriousness on the part of the patient.

There are no magical cures for neurosis.

Just as soon as we begin to elaborate the symbolic outlines of the path, the patient must begin to walk thereon. If he delude himself and shirk it, no cure can result.

… live according to what he has seen and recognised as the direction for the time being of his individual life-line, and must continue thereon until a distinct reaction of his unconscious shows him that he is beginning in good faith to go a wrong way.

He who does not possess this moral function of faithfulness to himself will never get rid of his neurosis; but he who has this faithfulness can find the way out.

Neither physician nor patient must yield to the delusion that "being analysed" is in itself sufficient to remove a neurosis. That would be deception and self-delusion. Ultimately it is infallibly the moral factor that decides between health and illness.

Neither physician nor patient must yield to the delusion that "being analysed" is in itself sufficient to remove a neurosis. That would be deception and self-delusion.

Ultimately it is infallibly the moral factor that decides between health and illness.

By the construction of the individual's life-line the ever-varying trends and tendencies of his libido are made conscious.

The hermeneutically constructed life-line is short, for life follows no straight lines that indicate the future long beforehand, for, as Nietzsche says, "All truth is crooked."

Life-lines are therefore neither principles nor ideals of universal validity, but points of view and adaptations of ephemeral validity.

An abatement of vital intensity, a perceptible loss of libido, or an excessive passion or ecstasy—all show that one such line is left, and that a new line begins, or rather should begin.