Carl Gustav Jung 1875-1961

In a career that spanned more than 60 years of professional life, C.G. Jung set the precedent for psychology as a mode of being-in-the-world. At the core of Jung’s thinking is the confrontation with the shadow. He believed shadow integration to be the apprentice-work of adult development and self-realization, suggesting that we each must rediscover a deeper source of our own spiritual life. “To do this,” Jung exhorted, we are “obliged to struggle with evil, to confront the shadow, to integrate to integrate the devil. There is no other choice.”

"Jung saw the present-day culmination of evil as typical of the historical catastrophes that tend to accompany the great transitions from one age to another, in our case the end of the Piscean age and the beginning of the Aquarian. In fact we are even menaced with a total eradication of life on our earth, either gradually, through the destruction of the environment, or through a global war. The increase in criminality, the occurrence of holocausts, and so on, are a first warning. Everyone is talking about these problems these days, and nobody knows what ought to be done. Apppeals to reason seem to echo away unheard. . . Jung also did not have a simple answer, but he was convinced that every individual who undertook to come to terms with the evil in himself would make a more effective contribution toward the salvation of the world than idealistic external machinations would. Here we are talking about more than just insight into one's personal shadow; we are speaking also of a struggle with the dark side of God (or the Self), which the human being cannot face but must, as Job did."
(cf Marie-Louise von Franz. Psychotherapy, Shambhala, 1993, p. 194-5.)

Here is Jung, in his own words:


"In the last analysis, most of our difficulties come from losing contact with our instincts, with the age-old unforgotten wisdom stored up in us. And where do we make contact with this old man or old woman in us?

In our dreams."

"Why is it that just now especially we interest ourselves in psychology? The answer is, everyone is in dire need of it. . . We live in a time when there dawns upon us a realization that the people living on the other side of the mountain are not made up exclusively of red-headed devils responsible for all of the evil on this side of the mountain."
(Introduction to M. Esther Harding’s Way of all Women)

"I am Swiss. I am obliged, like my country, to develop myself in a vertical dimension...In a vaster country one can develop oneself horizontally. If I had been born in America, I’d have covered miles."
(1941)

"The meeting with oneself is, at first, the meeting with one’s own shadow. The shadow is a tight passage, a narrow door, whose painful constriction no one is spared who goes down to the deep well."

"Science is the art of creating suitable illusions which the fool believes or argues against, but the wise man enjoys for their beauty or their ingenuity, without being blind to the fact that they are human veils and curtains concealing the abysmal darkness of the Unknowable."
(Letters, 1929)

"A psycho-neurosis must be understood, ultimately, as the suffering of a soul which has not discovered its meaning."

"The only real danger that exists is man himself. He is the great danger, and we are pitifully unaware of it. We know nothing of man, far too little. His psyche should be studied, because we are the origin of all coming evil."

"I am not, however, addressing myself to the happy possessors of faith, but to those many people for whom the light has gone out, the mystery has faded, and God is dead. For most of them there is no going back, and one does not know either whether going back is the better way. To gain an understanding of religious matters, probably all that is left us today is the psychological approach. That is why I take these thought-forms that have become historically-fixed, try to melt them down again and pour them into moulds of immediate experience."
(Psychology and Religion, 1937)

"The Shadow is something very evasive. I don’t know mine. I study it by the reaction of those around me. We depend on the reflection of the mirror of our entourage.
When it is not good, self-criticism is in order."
(1953)

"The love problem Is part of mankind's heavy toll of suffering, and nobody should be ashamed of having to pay his or her tribute."


"Where love reigns, there is no will to power; and where the will to power is paramount, love is lacking. The one is but the shadow of the other."

"In the last analysis, the essential thing is the life of the individual. This alone makes history, here alone do the great transformations first take place, and the whole future, the whole history of the world, ultimately springs as a gigantic summation from these hidden sources in individuals. In our most private and most subjective lives we are not only the passive witnesses of our age, and its sufferers, but also its makers."
(The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man)

"Why is it that just now especially we interest ourselves in psychology? The answer is, everyone is in dire need of it. . .We live in a time when there dawns upon us a realization that the people living on the other side of the mountain are not made up exclusively of red-headed devils responsible for all of the evil on this side of the mountain."

"The art of life is the most distinguished and rarest of all the arts. Who ever succeeded in draining the whole cup with grace?"

"The main interest of my work is not concerned with the treatment of neuroses but rather with the approach to the numinous. But the fact is that the approach to the numinous is the real therapy, and inasmuch as you attain to the numinous experiences, you are released from the curse of pathology. Even the very disease takes on a numinous character."
(letter to P.W. Martin, 1945)

"The question remains: How am I to live with this? What attitude is required if I am to be able to live in spite of evil? In order to find valid answers to these questions, a complete spiritual renewal is needed. And this cannot be given gratis; each [person] must try to achieve it for [her/him]self. Neither can old formulas, which once had a value, be brought into force again. The eternal truths cannot be transmitted mechanically; in every epoch they must be born anew from the human psyche."
(“After the Catastrophe,” 1945)

"In the last resort there is no good that cannot produce evil and no evil that cannot produce good."

"In habentibus symbolum facilior est transitus." (For those who have a symbol, it is easier to change)
(C.G. Jung, citing the Latin proverb)

"The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious,
it happens outside, as fate."

"I am not, however, addressing myself to the happy possessors of faith, but to those many people for whom the light has gone out, the mystery has faded, and God is dead. For most of them there is no going back, and one does not know either whether going back is the better way. To gain an understanding of religious matters, probably all that is left us today is the psychological approach. That is why I take these thought-forms that have become historically-fixed, ry to melt them down again and pour them into moulds of immediate experience."
(1937, Psychology and Religion)

"The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances; if there is any reaction, both are transformed."

“What I admire most in Jung,” said Italian film director Frederico Fellini, “is the fact that he found a meeting place between science and magic, between reason and fantasy. He has allowed us to go through life abandoning ourselves to the lure of the mystery, with the comfort of knowing that it could be assimilated by reason. My admiration is the sort felt for an elder brother, for someone who knows more than you do and teaches it to you. It is the admiration we owe to one of the great traveling companions of this century: the prophet-scientist.”
(Frederico Fellini, Fellini on Fellini)

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