Vincent Jacobs’s Reviews > The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious > Status Update

“Why is psychology the youngest of the empirical sciences? Why have we not long since discovered the unconscious and raised up its treasure-house of eternal images? Simply because we had a religious formula for everything psychic-and one that is far more beautiful and comprehensive than immediate experience.“

“…the psyche contains all the images that have ever given rise to myths…”

“[primitive man’s] knowledge of nature is essentially the language and outer dress of an unconscious psychic process.”

“All the mythologized processes of nature, such as summer and winter, the phases of the moon, the rainy sea- sons, and so forth, are in no sense allegories of these objective occurrences; rather they are symbolic expressions of the inner, unconscious drama of the psyche which becomes accessible to man's consciousness by way of projection-that is, mirrored in the events of nature.“

“… man simply didn't know that the psyche contains all the images that have ever given rise to myths, and that our unconscious is an acting and suffering subject with an inner drama which primitive man rediscovers, by means of analogy, in the processes of nature both great and small.”

“All the mythologized processes of nature, such as summer and winter, the phases of the moon, the rainy seasons, and so forth, are in no sense allegories of these objective occurrences; rather they are symbolic expressions of the inner, unconscious drama of the psyche which becomes accessible to man's consciousness by way of projection-that is, mirrored in the events of nature.“

“It is not enough for the primitive to see the sun rise and set; this external observation must at the same time be a psychic happening: the sun in its course must represent the fate of a god or hero who, in the last analysis, dwells nowhere except in the soul of man.”

“Primitive man is not much interested in objective explanations of the obvious, but he has an imperative need-or rather, his unconscious psyche has an irresistible urge-to assimilate all outer sense experiences to inner, psychic events.”