The Psychology of Carl Jung

As reflected in his writings

Unfortunately there is no doubt about the fact that man is, as a whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. If an inferiority is conscious, one always has a chance to correct it. It is constantly in contact with other interests, so that it is steadily subjected to modifications. But if it is repressed and isolated from consciousness, it never gets corrected.
—from Psychology and Religion, 1940.

To strive for perfection is a high ideal. But I say: “Fulfill something you are able to fulfill rather than run after what you will never achieve.” Nobody is perfect. Remember the saying: “None is good but God alone.” [Luke 18:19], and nobody can be. It is an illusion. We can modestly strive to fulfill ourselves and to be as complete human beings as possible, and that will give us trouble enough.
—from Analytical Psychology: Its Theory and Practice, The Tavistock Lectures: 149

What are religions? Religions are psychotherapeutic systems. What are we doing, we psychotherapists? We are trying to heal the suffering of the human mind, of the human psyche or the human soul, and religions deal with the same problem.
—from Man and His Symbols

Religion is a defense against the experience of God

For the sake of mental stability and even physiological health, the unconscious and the conscious must be integrally connected and thus move on parallel lines. If they are split apart or “dissociated,” psychological disturbance follows. In this respect, dream symbols are the essential message carriers from the instinctive to the rational parts of the human mind, and their interpretation enriches the poverty of consciousness so that it learns to understand again the forgotten language of the instincts.
—from Man and His Symbols

Everything to do with religion, everything it is and asserts, touches the human soul so closely that psychology least of all can afford to overlook it. The more unconscious we are of the religious problem in the future, the greater the danger of our putting the divine germ within us to some ridiculous or demonical use, puffing ourselves up with it instead of remaining conscious that we are no more than the stable in which the Lord is born.
-from A Psychological Approach to the Dogma of the Trinity, CW 11

The dammed-up instinct-forces
in civilized man are immensely more destructive, and hence more dangerous, than the instincts of the primitive, who in a modest degree is constantly living his negative instincts. Consequently no war of the historical past can rival a war between civilized nations in its colossal scale of horror.
—from Psychological Types, 1921

The utterances of the heart—in contrast to those of a discriminating intellect—always apply to the whole. The strings of the heart sing, like those of the Aeolian harp, only to the soft breath of portending mood which does not drown the sound but listens to it. What the heart hears are the great, all-embracing things of life, the experiences which we do not arrange but which we ourselves suffer.
—1932

Intellect is only one among several psychological functions, and therefore does not suffice to give a complete picture of the world. Feeling, for instance, which is another psychological function, sometimes arrives at different conclusions from those of the intellect, and we cannot always prove that the conclusions of feeling are necessarily inferior to those of the intellect.

To live in perpetual flight from ourselves is a bitter thing, and to live with ourselves demands a number of Christian virtues which we must apply to our own case, such as patience, love, faith, hope, and humility. It is all very fine to make our neighbour happy by applying them to him, but the demon of self-reflection so easily claps us on the back and says, "Well done!" And because this is a great psychological truth it must be stood on its head for an equal number of people so as to give the devil something to carp at. But - does it make us happy when we have to apply these virtues to ourselves? when I am the recipient of my own gifts, the least among my brothers whom I must take to my bosom? when I must admit that I need all my patience, my love, my faith, and even my humility, and that I myself am my own devil, the antagonist who always wants the opposite in everything? Can we ever really endure ourselves? "Do unto others . . ." - this is as true of evil as of good.

If one reflects upon what consciousness really is, one is deeply impressed by the extremely wonderful fact that an event which occurs within the cosmos produces simultaneously an inner image, thus it also occurs within, so to speak: in other words, it becomes conscious.

Simple things are always the most difficult. In actual life it requires the greatest discipline to be simple, and the acceptance of oneself is the essence of the moral problem and the epitome of a whole outlook upon life. That I feed the hungry, that I forgive an insult, that I love my enemy in the name of Christ -- all these are undoubtedly great virtues. What I do unto the least of my brethren, that I do unto Christ. But what if I should discover that the least among them all, the poorest of all the beggars, the most impudent of all the offenders, the very enemy himself -- that these are within me, and that I myself stand in need of the alms of my own kindness, that I myself am the enemy who must be loved -- what then?

When we must deal with problems, we instinctively refuse to try the way that leads through darkness and obscurity. We wish to hear only of unequivocal results, and completely forget that these results can only be brought about when we have ventured into and emerged again from the darkness. But to penetrate the darkness we must summon all the powers of enlightenment that consciousness can offer. 

 

It all depends on how we look at things, and not on how they are in themselves. The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.

There are experiences which can only be experienced and for which reason can never be a substitute. Such experiences are often of inestimable value.

Life is both nonsensical and significant. And when we do not laugh about one aspect and speculate about the other, life is exceedingly banal, and everything is of the smallest proportions; there is then only a tiny sense and a tiny nonsense. In the very first place, nothing signifies anything; for when as yet there were not thinking beings, no one was there to interpret manifestations. It is only for him who does not understand that things must be interpreted. Only the ununderstandable has significance. Man has awakened in a world that he does not understand, and this is why he tries to interpret it. For there is a cosmos in all chaos, secret order in all disorder, unfailing law in all contingency.

It is certain that consciousness consists not only of wishes and fears, but of vastly more than these, and it is highly probable that the unconscious psyche contains a wealth of contents and living forms equal to or even greater than does consciousness, which is characterized by concentration, limitation, and exclusion. 

When I examined the way of development of those persons who, quietly, and as if unconsciously, grew beyond themselves, I saw that their fates had something in common. Whether arising from without or within, the new thing came to all those persons from a dark field of possibilities; they accepted it and developed further by means of it. It seemed to me typical that in some cases the new thing was found outside themselves and in others within; or rather, that it grew into some persons from without and into others from within. But it was never something that came exclusively either from within or from without. If it came from outside the individual, it became an inner experience; if it came from within, it was changed into an outer event. But in no case was it conjured into existence through purpose and conscious willing, but rather seemed to flow out of the stream of time.

I have been deeply impressed with the fact that the new thing prepared by fate seldom or never corresponds to conscious expectation. It is a still more remarkable fact that, though the new thing contradicts deeply rooted instincts as we know them, yet it is a singularly appropriate expression of the total personality, an expression which one could not imagine in a more complete form.

A psychology that treats the mind as an epiphenomenon would do better to call itself brain-physiology, and remain satisfied with the meagre results that such a psychophysiology can yield. The mind deserves to be taken as a phenomenon in its own right; for there are no apparent reasons why it should be regarded as a mere epiphenomenon, dependent though it may be upon the functioning of the brain. One is as little justified in so regarding it as in conceiving life as an epiphenomenon of the chemistry of carbon compounds. 

We have an abysmal horror of the horribleness of our personal unconscious. Therefore Europeans prefer to tell others what they should do. The fact that the improvement of the whole of humanity must begin with the individual, in fact with myself, is a thing which we cannot drive into our heads. Many even think that it is pathological to look into ones' own inner self: as a theologian once assured me, it leads to melancholia.

Whereas we think in periods of years, the unconscious thinks and lives in terms of millennia. So when something happens that seems to us an unexampled novelty, it is generally a very old story indeed. We still forget, like children, what happened yesterday. We are still living in a wonderful new world where man thinks himself astonishingly new and "modern." This is unmistakable proof of the youthfulness of human consciousness, which has not yet grown aware of its historical antecedents.

Everything good is costly, and the development of the personality is one of the most costly of all things. It is a question of yea-saying to oneself, of taking the self as the most serious of tasks, keeping conscious of everything done, and keeping it constantly before one's eyes in all its dubious aspects-truly a task that touches us to the core.

In practice, chance is everywhere, and so obtrusive that we might just as well put our causal philosophy back in our pocket. The whole richness of life is both law-abiding and lawless, rational and irrational. Therefore rationalism and the will which is based on it take us only a short stretch of the way. The further we extend the path chosen by rationalism, the more certain we may be that we are excluding the irrational potentialities of life, which have just as much right to be lived. It is true that man showed a certain purposefulness by being capable of directing his life at all. The development of reasonableness can be justly claimed to be the greatest achievement of humanity. But this does not mean that it must or will continue to be so under all circumstances.