“…the tensions between the psychic pairs of opposites are eased only gradually; and like the alchemical end-product, which always betrays its essential duality, the unified personality never quite loses the painful sense of innate discordance. Complete redemption from the sufferings of this world is and must remain an illusion. Christ’s earthly life likewise ended not […]
Analytical Psychology
Texts and quotations from Carl Gustav Jung and key Jungian authors (e.g., Marie-Louise von Franz) focusing on archetypal themes, the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious, and the process of individuation, including in romantic relationships.
- 29-Day Program
- Alchemy
- Anger
- Anima and Animus
- Astro-psychology
- Calcination
- Carl Gustav Jung
- Collective unconscious
- Cupid and Psyche
- David Gordon
- Depression
- Desire
- Differentiation
- Duality
- Ego and the Soul
- Feelings
- Good and evil
- Helping others
- How Change Happens
- Individuation
- James Hillman
- Kundalini Awakening
- Lessons of Love
- Liz Greene
- Loneliness
- Love triangles
- Marie-Louise von Franz
- Mental health
- Morgan Scott Peck
- Mother Complex
- Neptune
- Parents and Children
- Projections
- Recommended books
- Reflections
- Relationships
- Selected Articles
- Self-Sacrifice
- Spiritual Transformation
- The Mind
- Thought of the Day
- Venus
02.04.2025
The Archetype of the Trickster
Jung on the psychology of the trickster “Wow, that’s typical Trickster behavior!” I thought when I saw Trump’s brazen lie, “Did I say that? I don’t remember,” hidden behind a sly smile. That’s why I want to share a bit more about this archetype, which is one of the faces of the Shadow—when this Shadow […]
Below is an excerpt from C. G. Jung’s autobiographical work Memories, Dreams, Reflections, from the chapter “Confrontation with the Unconscious,” in which he describes a vision lasting about an hour, as well as a recurring dream. Both proved to be early premonitions of the events that unfolded a year later with the outbreak of the […]
In an interview with Marie Louise von Franz in November 1990, Hein Stufkens asked her about the place of individuation in love relationships. Below is her answer: H.S.: What is the place of individuation in a love relationship? v.Fr.: In a love relation, as Jung once put it, you risk everything. You put yourself on […]
If you have difficulty being taken seriously by others and feel that you do not carry sufficient authority in their eyes, this thought by Marie-Louise von Franz is for you: “People who have integrated a large part of their own darkness possess an invisible authority, as if they had acquired weight and power, and others […]
03.12.2024
The relationship between the conscious and the unconscious is both open conflict and cooperation
“But if we understand anything of the unconscious, we know that it cannot be swallowed. We also know that it is dangerous to suppress it, because the unconscious is life and this life turns against us if suppressed, as happens in neurosis. Conscious and unconscious do not make a whole when one of them is […]
“But I only achieve the feeling of limitlessness when I am extremely limited. Man’s greatest limitation is that ‘self’ which manifests itself in the experience of ‘I am only this’. Only consciousness of our narrow confinement in the self forms the link to the limitlessness of the unconscious. In such awareness we experience ourselves concurrently […]
“There is, so to speak, a “cold” kind of evil and a “hot” kind of evil. The hot evil is carried, no matter whether by demons or by human beings, by an unquenched emotional affect underneath, like a suffocated fire burning and smoldering all the time, and this kind of repressed affect is highly infectious. […]
“The latent ego is in complete identification with the Self (the god, the archetype of the Whole personality). The Self is born, but the ego is made; and in the beginning all is Self. This condition is described by Neumann as uroboros (the tail-eating serpent). Since the Self is the center and totality of being, […]
“Jung says that women with a negative mother-complex often miss the first half of their lives, they walk past it in a dream. Life for them is a constant source of annoyance and irritation. But if they can overcome this negative mother complex, they have a good chance in the second half of life of […]
“Usually you can’t explain to others what has happened because the path of understanding is blocked by prejudice: ‘everyone is the same’, ‘such things don’t exist’, or if they do, they are ‘pathological’, and furthermore, highly irrelevant, ‘to think that such a thing could matter is monstrous hubris’, ‘it’s all just psychology’. The latter objection […]
23.07.2023
Psyche and Amur: The End of the Story
Here are Marie Louise von Franz’s last comments on the end of the story of Amur and Psyche, from which we learn more important things about the development of the soul and the embodiment of love on Earth. “In this ultimate, tragic moment, Eros comes down from Olympus and wakes Psyche, and, with the help […]
