“So long as you feel the human contact, the atmosphere of mutual confidence, there is no danger; and even if you have to face the terrors of insanity, or the shadowy menace of suicide, there is still that area of human faith, that certainty of understanding and of being understood, no matter how black the night.” (4:181)  Jung

 

“When a patient begins to feel the inescapable nature of his inner development, he may easily be overcome by a panic fear that he is slipping helplessly into some kind of madness he can no longer understand.  More than once I have had to reach for a book on my shelves, bring down an old alchemist, and show my patient his terrifying fantasy in the form in which it appeared four hundred years ago.  This has a calming effect, because the patient then sees that he is not alone in the strange world which nobody understands but is part of the great stream of human history, which has experienced countless times the very things that he regards as a pathological proof of his craziness.”  (50:325)   Jung

 

“Nobody can fall so low unless he has a great depth.  If such a thing can happen to a man, it challenges his best and highest on the other side; that is to say, this depth corresponds to a potential height, and the blackest darkness to a hidden light.” 43  Jung

 

“Each of us is equipped with a psychic disposition that limits our freedom in high degree and makes it practically illusory.  Not only is “freedom of the will” an incalculable problem philosophically, it is also a misnomer in the practical sense, for we seldom find anybody who is not influenced and indeed dominated by desires, habits, impulses, prejudices, resentments, and by every conceivable kind of complex.  All these natural facts function exactly like an Olympus full of deities who want to be propitiated, served, feared and worshiped, not only by the individual owner of this assorted pantheon, but by everybody in his vicinity.”  74:143.  Jung

 

“Disappointment, always a shock to the feelings, is not only the mother of bitterness but the strongest possible incentive to a differentiation of feeling.  The failure of a pet plan, the disappointing behavior of someone one loves, can supply the impulse either for a more or less brutal outburst of affect or for a modification and adjustment of feeling, and hence for its higher development.  This culminates in wisdom if feeling is supplemented by reflection and rational insight.  Wisdom is never violent; where wisdom reigns there is no conflict between thinking and feeling.”  48:334  Jung  “Opposites can be united only in the form of compromise or irrationally, some new thing arising between them which, though different form both, yet has the power to take up their energies in equal measure as an expression of both and of neither.  Such an expression cannot be contrived by reason, it can only be created through living.”  69:169  Jung

 

“The most intense conflicts, if overcome, leave behind a sense of security and calm which is not easily disturbed, or else a brokeness that can hardly be healed.  Conversely, it is just these intense conflicts and their conflagration which are needed in order to produce valuable and lasting results.” 54:50  Jung

 

“The small world of the child, the family milieu, is the model for the big world.  The more intensely the family sets its stamp on the child, the more he will be emotionally inclined, as an adult, to see in the great world his former small world.  Of course this must not be taken as a conscious intellectual process.  On the contrary, the patient feels and sees the difference between now and then, and tries as well as he can to adapt himself.  Perhaps he will even believe himself perfectly adapted, since he may be able to grasp the situation intellectually, but that does not prevent his emotions from lagging far behind his intellectual insight… (101:312)  Jung

 

“The patient has not to learn how to get rid of his neurosis, but how to bear it.  His illness is not a gratuitous and therefore meaningless burden; it is his own self, the “other” whom, from childish laziness or fear, or for some other reason, he was always seeking to exclude from his life.  In this way, as Freud rightly says, we turn the ego into a “seat of anxiety” which it would never be if we did not defend ourselves against ourselves so neurotically.  (95:360)  Jung

 

“The childhood experience of a neurotic is not, in itself, negative; far from it.  It becomes negative only when it finds no suitable place in the life and outlook of the adult.  The real task of analysis, it seems to me, is to bring about a synthesis between the two. (82:564)  Jung

 

“Anyone who wants to know the human psyche will learn next to nothing from experimental psychology.  He will be better advised to put away his scholar’s gown, bid farewell to his study, and wander with human heart thru the world.  There, in the horrors of prisons, lunatic asylums and hospitals, in drab suburban pubs, in brothels and gambling hells, in the salons of the elegant, the Stock Exchange, Socialist meetings, churches, revivalists gatherings and ecstatic sects, through love and hate, through the experience of passion in every form in his own body, he would reap richer stores of knowledge than text-books a foot thick could give him, and he will know how to doctor the sick with real knowledge of the human soul.”  (104c:409)  Jung “The labors of the doctor as well as the quest of the patient are directed toward that hidden and as yet unmanifest “whole” man, who is at once the greater and the future man.  But the right way to wholeness is made up, unfortunately, of fateful detours and wrong turnings.  It is a longissima via, not straight but snakelike, a path that unites the opposites in the manner of the guiding caduceus, a path whose labyrinthine twists and turns are not lacking in terrors.  It is on this longissima via that we meet with those experiences which are said to be “inaccessible.”  Their inaccessibility really consists in the fact that they cost us an enormous amount of effort: they demand the very thing we most fear, namely the “wholeness” which we talk about so glibly and which lends itself to endless theorizing, though in actual life we give it the widest possible berth.  It is infinitely more popular to go in for “compartment psychology,” where the left-hand pigeon-hole does not know what is in the right.” (72:6)  Jung

 

“We have experienced things so unheard of and so staggering that the question of whether such things are in any way reconcilable with the idea of a good God has become burningly topical.  It is no longer a problem for experts in theological seminaries, but a universal religious nightmare, to the solution of which even a layman in theology like myself can, or perhaps must, make a contribution.”  From Answer to Job,  Jung

 

“Everyone who becomes conscious of even a fraction of his unconscious gets outside his own time and social stratum into a kind of solitude.”  48:258  Jung

 

“The shadow is a tight passage, a narrow door, whose painful constriction no one is spared who goes down to the deep well.  But one must learn to know oneself in order to know who one is.  For what comes after the door is, surprisingly enough, a boundless expanse full of unprecedented uncertainty, with apparently no inside and no outside, no above and no below, no here and no there, no mine and no thine, no good and no bad.  It is the world of water, where all life floats in suspension; where the realm of the sympathetic system, the soul of everything living, begins, where I am indivisibly this and that; where I experience the other in myself and the other-than-myself experiences me.  10:45  Jung

 

“It is well to remind ourselves of St. Paul and his split consciousness: on one side he felt he was the apostle directly called and enlightened by God, and, on the other hand, a sinful man who could not pluck out the “thorn in the flesh” and rid himself of the Satanic angel who plagued him.  That is to say, even the most enlightened person remains what he is, and is never more than his own limited ego before the One who dwells within him, whose form has no knowable boundaries, who encompasses him on all sides, fathomless as the abysms of the earth and vast as the sky.”  7:758  Jung

 

“If you sum up what people tell you about their experiences, you can formulate it this way: They came to themselves, they could accept themselves, they were able to become reconciled to themselves, and thus were reconciled to adverse circumstances and events.  This is almost like what used to be expressed by saying: he has made his peace with God, he has sacrificed his own will, he has submitted himself to the will of God.”  74:138  Jung