Excerpts:
- I held, following Hartmann, that our unconscious is not meaningless but contains a mind.
- Fantasy is the creative function—the living form is a result of fantasy.
- When Freud talked of sexuality it was as though he were talking of God—as a man would talk who had undergone a conversion. It was like the Indians talking of the sun with tears in their eyes.
- Freud had a dream on an important theme which I cannot mention. I analyzed it and said there was more to be said if he would give me some points about his private life. He looked at me with a peculiar expression of suspicion in his eyes and said, “I could tell you more but I can’t risk my authority.” Then I knew further analysis was impossible because he put authority above truth.
- It has been said by Léon Daudet that dreams do not only appear in the sleep but, having a life of their own, they continue also during the daytime below the level of consciousness. This is of course not a new idea, but one that cannot be emphasized too often. One is able to catch dreams best at night because one is then passive. However, with a dementia praecox (schizophrenia) patient it can be observed how the dreams come to the surface even in the daytime, because these people are passive all the time, so to speak, and simply turn themselves over to the dream life.
- If I were a case of dementia praecox I would easily spread my dreams over the whole world and take it that the destruction of the world was indicated, whereas in reality all that might be indicated would be the destruction of my relation to the world.
- But the technical rule with regard to fantasy is to stick to the picture that comes up until all its possibilities are exhausted.
- If once the resistance to free contact with the unconscious can be overcome, and one can develop the power of sticking to the fantasy, then the play of the images can be watched. Any artist is doing that quite naturally, but he is getting only the aesthetic values out of it while the analyst tries to get at all the values, ideational, aesthetic, feeling, and intuitional.
- The criterion of art is that it grips you.
- One can take art as a form of dream. Just as the dream seeks to maintain a psychological balance by filling out the daytime conscious attitude by the unconscious elements, so art balances the general public tendency of a given time.
- The hero, as I told you, is the symbol of the greatest value recognized by us.
- It must of course be remembered that there is no objective statement that is not subjective to a certain extent.
- The extravert bases himself on the value of the outer object, the introvert on that of the inner object.
- Introverts want to see little things grow big and big things grow little. Extraverts like great things—they do not want to see good things going into worse, but always into better.
- Impersonal feeling and thinking are very relativistic. When we look at them they seem something extraordinary, whereas in reality they are dead
- We seek life, not efficiency
- In animals and in primitive peoples, the pairs of opposites are closer together than in so-called civilized peoples, hence both animals and primitives part with life more easily than do. In other words, because of our dissociation, the pairs of opposites are much further apart. This gives us our increased psychical energy, and the price we pay is one-sidedness.
- Today we have lost to a great extent this sense of the immanence of thought, as one might put it, and have instead the illusion of making our thoughts ourselves. We are not convinced that our thoughts are original beings that walk about in our brains, and we invent the idea that they are powerless without our gracious creative act.
- Extreme fanaticism I found to rest on a concealed doubt.
- All kinds of primitive practices are to be understood as an effort on the part of man to make himself receptive to a revelation from nature.
- If he admits that the conflicting parties are parts of himself, he assumes responsibility for the problem they represent. In the same way I can see no sense in our blaming the war for things that have happened to us. Each of us carried within himself the elements that brought on the war.
- Dissolving an image means that you become that image. Doing away with the concept of God means that you become that God. This is so because if you dissolve an image it is always consciously, and then the libido invested in the image goes into the unconscious. The stronger the image the more you are caught by it in the unconscious, so if you give up the hero in the conscious you are forced into the hero role by the unconscious.
- Primitives show a much more balanced psychology than we do for the reason that they have no objection to letting the irrational come through, while we resent it.
- I have been tremendously impressed with the animal character of the unconscious of woman, and I have reason to think that her relation to the Dionysian element is a very strong one.
- and that it was just as confusing to her to have these feeling values trampled underfoot by the unfeeling man as often happened, as it was upsetting to the man to have his intellectual values “messed together” by the unthinking woman.
- My idea is that feeling is an unthinking kind of appreciation on the one side, and on the other a dynamic relation.
- It is of reality as it is that sensation speaks, not reality as it might have been nor as it might be, but as it is now. Therefore sensation gives only a static image of reality, and this is the basic principle of the sensation type. Now, intuition carries with it a similar feeling of certainty, but of a different kind of reality. It speaks of the reality of possibilities.
- Thus, for example, I can take the concept freedom, and show it to be a highly abstract static concept; that is, I can keep it an idea, but freedom can convey also a powerful feeling. In the same way, the phrase “my country” can be taken abstractly or emotionally.
- To sum up, we have considered four kinds of realities: (1) static reality that comes to us through sensation; (2) the dynamic reality revealed by intuition; (3) static images given us by thinking; (4) dynamic images sensed by feeling.
- The individual cannot be understood merely as a static entity.