Anthony Stevens > Quotes

“If a man knows more than others, he becomes lonely,”
― Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction

“There are things that are not yet true today, perhaps we dare not find them true, but tomorrow they may be. So every man whose fate is to go his individual way must proceed with hopefulness and watchfulness, ever conscious of his loneliness and its dangers”
― Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction

“In many cases in psychiatry, the patient who comes to us has a story that is not told, and which as a rule no one knows of. To my mind, therapy only really begins after the investigation of that wholly personal story. It is the patient’s secret, the rock against which he is shattered. If I know his secret story, I have a key to the treatment. . . . In therapy the problem is always the whole person, never the symptom alone. We must ask questions which challenge the whole personality. (MDR 118)”
― Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction

“the despair displayed by young children on loss of their mother is a normal response to frustration of their absolute need for her presence ... children usually manage to survive, it is true, but at the cost of developing a defensive attitude to emotional detachment, and by becoming self-absorbed and self-reliant to an unusual degree. Typically, they are left with lasting doubts about their capacity to elicit care and affection.”
― Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction

“To be normal’, he said, ‘is the ideal aim of the unsuccessful.”
― Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction

“It is indeed no small matter to know one’s own guilt and one’s own evil, and there is certainly nothing to be gained by losing sight of one’s shadow. When we are conscious of our guilt we are in a more favourable position – we can at least hope to change and improve ourselves”
― Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction

“To Jung, the purpose of life was to realize one's own potential, to follow one's own perception of the truth, and to become a whole person in one's own right. This was the goal of individuation, as he later called it. If he was to keep faith with himself, he had to go his own way: it would have been impossible for him to spend his life playing second fiddle in a two-man band.”
― Anthony Stevens

“The need to create a citadel in which to hide from the world is characteristic of people with a schizoid disposition”
― Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction

“I feel it is the duty of one who goes his own way to inform society of what he finds on his voyage of discovery,’ he wrote.”
― Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction

“What distinguishes the Jungian approach to developmental psychology from virtually all others is the idea that even in old age we are growing towards realization of our full potential. This”
― Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction

“My patients brought me so close to the reality of human life that I could not help learning essential things from them. Encounters with people of so many different kinds and on so many different psychological levels have been for me incomparably more important than fragmentary conversations with celebrities”
― Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction

“The specious idea that gender differences are due entirely to culture, and have nothing to do with biological or archetypal predispositions, still enjoys wide currency in our society, yet it rests on the discredited tabula rasa theory of human development and is at variance with the overwhelming mass of anthropological and scientific evidence.”
― Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction

“through the miracle of consciousness, the human psyche provides the mirror in which Nature sees herself reflected.”
― Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction

“In addition to the Self, Jung postulated archetypal components which play specific roles in the psychic development and social adjustment of everyone. These include the ego, persona, shadow, anima, and animus. Jung considered these to be archetypal structures which are built into the personal psyche in the form of complexes during the course of development. Each is a psychic organ operating in accordance with the biological principles of adaptation, homeostasis, and growth.”
― Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction

“To be normal is the ideal aim of the unsuccessful" ~ Carl Gustav Jung (1987-1961) as cited in Anthony Stevens”
― Anthony Stevens

“Through shadow projection we are able to turn our enemies into ‘devils’ and convince ourselves that they are not men and women like ‘us’, but monsters unworthy of humane consideration. National leaders can make unscrupulous use of this propensity in order to achieve their own political purposes”
― Anthony Stevens, On Jung

“I feel it is the duty of one who goes his own way to inform society of what he finds on his voyage of discovery" ~ Carl Gustave Jung”
― Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction

“Neurosis, he said, in the nearest he came to a definitive definition, is the suffering of a soul that has not found its meaning.”
― Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction

“Jung never disagreed with Freud’s view that personal experience is of crucial significance for the development of each individual, but he denied that this development occurred in an unstructured personality. On the contrary, for Jung, the role of personal experience was to develop what is already there – to activate the archetypal potential already present in the Self. Our psyches are not simply a product of experience, any more than our bodies are merely the product of what we eat. A”
― Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction

“Now I knew what it was, and knew even more: that man is indispensable for the completion of creation; that, in fact, he himself is the second creator of the world, who alone has given to the world its objective existence – without which, unheard, unseen, silently eating, giving birth, dying, heads nodding through hundreds of millions of years, it would have gone on in the profoundest night of non-being down to its unknown end. Human consciousness created objective existence and meaning, and man found his indispensable place in the great process of being.”
― Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction

“The most demanding part of a Jungian analysis occurs when the analysand (the person undergoing analysis) begins to confront his own shadow. That this should be difficult is not surprising since the whole shadow complex is tinged with feelings of guilt and unworthiness, and with fears of rejection should its true nature be discovered or exposed. However painful the process may be, it is necessary to persevere because much Self potential and instinctive energy is locked away in the shadow and therefore unavailable to the total personality.”
― Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction

“The coexistence of these two sharply contrasting personalities within the same individual is as apparent in literature as in life: Dorian Gray, the handsome, witty, man-about-town, keeps his portrait hidden where no one can see it, for it bears all the features of his vicious secret life; Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde are the same man, by turns respectable physician and monstrous ogre; the popular TV personality with the compassionate manner and caring smile can be a hysterical termagant at home with her family.”
― Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction

“How can we enable the unconscious to realize itself? By granting it freedom of expression and then examining what it has expressed.”
― Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction

“(1) that the equipment consists of four psychological functions, which he named sensation, thinking, feeling, and intuition, all of which are available a priori to everybody, and (2) that individuals differ in regard to which of the four functions they use for preference.”
― Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction

“the ego begins to confront the Self and the Self the ego, and through the mediation of the transcendent function (which we will examine later) bring about the attainment of personality integration and higher consciousness.”
― Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction

“Those who reject the archetypal hypothesis remain unimpressed by the discovery of parallel themes in myths derived from different parts of the world,”
― Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction

“Jung’s gift for transcending the confines of his own consciousness began, as we have seen, in the fantasy games of his childhood.”
― Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction

“cryptomnesia (lit. hidden memory) – that although he had lost all conscious recollection of Binet’s work, it had none the less borne fruit in his personal unconscious.”
― Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction

“Where the parents are not 'good enough' the rest of the programme for life may be distorted and later stages in the archetypal sequence may fail to be realized. Thus, the boy whose father was inadequate or absent may fail to actualize his masculine potential sufficiently to establish the social or vocational role his talents equip him for, or he may be unable to sustain a relationship with a member of the opposite sex long enough for him to become an adequate husband or father himself.”
― Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction

“Sexual differentiation begins approximately six weeks after conception, when in male children the gonads are formed and begin to manufacture male hormone, which has a profound effect on the future development of the embryo. In the female, on the other hand, the ovaries are not formed until the sixth month, by which time the greater size, weight, and muscular strength of the male is already established. This is the biological basis of the sexual dimorphism apparent in the great majority of societies known to anthropology, where child-rearing is almost invariably the responsibility of women, and hunting and warfare the responsibility of men. These differences have less to do with cultural `stereotypes' than some fashionable contemporary notions would have us believe. While it is true that at all ages males and females have far more in common than they have differences between them, there can be no doubt that some differences exist which have their roots in the biology of our species. Jung was quite clear about this. Again and again, he refers to the masculine and the feminine as two great archetypal principles, coexisting as equal and complementary parts of a balanced cosmic system, as expressed in the interplay of yin and yang in Taoist philosophy. These archetypal principles provide the foundations on which masculine and feminine stereotypes begin to do their work, providing an awareness of gender. Gender is the psychic recognition and social expression of the sex to which nature has assigned us, and a child's awareness of its gender is established by as early as eighteen months of age.”
― Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction