Because It Is the Ancient Psychology of the Objective Psyche Below I share a passage from Jung’s Last Lectures, in which he discusses his views on astrology. Although he commented on the subject many times and in many other places, here his attitude comes across as perhaps the most immediate and direct. The format of […]
“…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 […]
And the paradox of divergence among their followers In psychotherapy, there exists an intriguing phenomenon. It refers to the observation that the founders of the great therapeutic schools — Freud, Jung, Rogers, Perls, Frankl, and others — despite having created theories that clearly distinguish them from one another, share at their core remarkably similar views […]
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 […]
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 […]
“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 […]
” An ancient adept has said: “If the wrong man uses the right means, the right means work in the wrong way.” This Chinese saying, unfortunately only too true, stands in sharp contrast to our belief in the “right” method irrespective of the man who applies it. In reality, everything depends on the man and […]
“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 […]
Healthy Skepticism or Paranoia? There is a great difference between healthy skepticism and paranoia. Conspiracy theories surrounding vaccines are an expression of the latter—a projection of an inner factor that originates in the collective unconscious, the shared soul of humanity. Its contents are the archetypes, and the most fundamental among them is the so-called archetype […]
“He [God] first appears in a hostile form, as an aggressor with whom the hero has to fight.This corresponds to the violence which is inherent in every unconscious dynamism.That is the way in which the god manifests himself, and that is the form in which he has to be overcome.The struggle has its parallel in […]
