#quotes&notes

[jungiananalysis]

No psychotherapist should lack that natural reserve which prevents people from riding roughshod over mysteries they do not understand and trampling them flat. This reserve will enable him to pull back in good time when he encounters the mystery of the patient’s difference from himself, and to avoid the danger— unfortunately only too real— of committing psychic murder in the name of therapy. For the ultimate cause of a neurosis is something positive which needs to be safeguarded for the patient; otherwise he suffers a psychic loss, and the result of the treatment is at best a defective cure... The childhood experience of a neurotic is not, in itself, negative; far from it. It becomes negative only when it finds no suitable place in the life and outlook of the adult. The real task of analysis, it seems to me, is to bring about a synthesis between the two.

C.G. Jung, The Collected Works, Volume 16, para. 564.

[jungiananalysis]

All words are psychic organisms; each has at its core some fundamental human experience and there will be an image of that experience embedded in the etymology of the word. As one traces the way its usage has evolved, a whole organism unfolds.

Edward F. Edinger, The Aion Lectures, Lecture 1, p. 15, 24:34. 

[jungiananalysis]

Jung on Psychosynthesis

Paul Bishop (ed.), Jung in Contexts. 

As early as 1909, however, while starting work on ‘Transformations and Symbols of the Libido’, Jung had speculated in a letter to Freud of  April 1909 about the existence of ‘some quite special complex, a universal one having to do with the prospective tendencies in man’. From this speculation, Jung developed the notion of a psychology that did not just look back to the past but also looked forward to the future: ‘If there is a “psych[o]analysis” there must also be a “psychosynthesis” which creates future events according to the same laws.’16 Thus the logical distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments as set out by Kant in the first Critique became, for Jung, the conceptual basis of the distinction between what he saw as two entirely different psychologies. One of them—Freud’s—deals with the source of the neurosis (and hence, so Jung thought, says nothing new), whilst the other—Jung’s own—would deal with the trajectory of the neurosis and its implications for the future development of the patient (and hence, so Jung thought, would show what it meant). It remains unclear, however, why retrospective enquiry should be any less ‘synthetic’ than prospective enquiry. One might be forgiven for thinking that Jung merely presents the analogy between analytic/synthetic psychology and a concern with the past and with the future, rather than arguing for it. Yet the emphasis on ‘synthesis’ is intimately bound up with Jung’s redefinition of libido, and the goal of Jungian therapy. (4)

Footnote: Later, the notion of psychosynthesis was taken up by the psychologist Hans Trüb (1889–1949), while the Italian psychologist Roberto Assagioli (1888–1974) founded his own school of therapy on the term ‘psychosynthesis’.

[jungiananalysis]

The Archetype

C.G. Jung, The Collected Works, Vol. 9i, para. 173-4.

The archetype is really far less a scientific problem than an urgent question of psychic hygiene. Even if all proofs of the existence of archetypes were lacking, and all the clever people in the world succeeded in convincing us that such a thing could not possibly exist, we would have to invent them forthwith in order to keep our highest and most important values from disappearing into the unconscious. For when these fall into the unconscious the whole elemental force of the original experience is lost. What then appears in its place is fixation on the mother-imago; and when this has been sufficiently rationalized and “corrected,” we are tied fast to human reason and condemned from then on to believe exclusively in what is rational. That is a virtue and an advantage on the one hand, but on the other a limitation and impoverishment, for it brings us nearer to the bleakness of doctrinairism and “enlightenment.” This Déesse Raison emits a deceptive light which illuminates only what we know already, but spreads a darkness over all those things which it would be most needful for us to know and become conscious of. The more independent “reason” pretends to be, the more it turns into sheer intellectuality which puts doctrine in the place of reality and shows us man not as he is but how it wants him to be.

Whether he understands them or not, man must remain conscious of the world of the archetypes, because in it he is still a part of Nature and is connected with his own roots. A view of the world or a social order that cuts him off from the primordial images of life not only is no culture at all but, in increasing degree, is a prison or a stable. If the primordial images remain conscious in some form or other, the energy that belongs to them can flow freely into man. But when it is no longer possible to maintain contact with them, then the tremendous sum of energy stored up in these images, which is also the source of the fascination underlying the infantile parental complex, falls back into the unconscious. The unconscious then becomes charged with a force that acts as an irresistible vis a tergo to whatever view or idea or tendency our intellect may choose to dangle enticingly before our desiring eyes. In this way man is delivered over to his conscious side, and reason becomes the arbiter of right and wrong, of  good and evil. I am far from wishing to belittle the divine gift of reason, man’s highest faculty. But in the role of absolute tyrant it has no meaning —no more than light would have in a world where its counterpart, darkness, was absent. Man would do well to heed the wise counsel of the mother and obey the inexorable law of nature which sets limits to every being. He ought never to forget that the world exists only because opposing forces are held in equilibrium. So, too, the rational is counterbalanced by the irrational, and what is planned and purposed by what is.

[jungiananalysis]

Jolande Jacobi, The Psychology of C.G. Jung: An Introduction with Illustrations, p. 7.

In Diagram 2 the black point in the centre marks our ego; surrounded and sustained by consciousness, it represents the side of the psyche which, especially in our Western culture, is primarily oriented towards adaptation to outward reality. ‘By the ego,’ says Jung, ‘I understand a complex of representations which constitutes the centre of my field of consciousness and appears to possess a very high degree of continuity and identity.’ He defines consciousness as ‘the function or activity which maintains the relation of psychic contents with the ego.’ All our experience of the outer and inner world must pass through our ego in order to be perceived.

[jungiananalysis]

I had the feeling that under it all there must be some quite special complex, a universal one having to do with the prospective tendencies in man. If there is a “psychanalysis” [sic] there must also be a “psychosynthesis” which creates future events according to the same laws. (I see I am writing rather as if I had a flight of ideas.) The leap towards psychosynthesis proceeds via the person of my patient, whose unconscious is right now preparing, apparently with nothing to stop it, a new stereotype into which everything from outside, as it were, fits in conformity with the complex. (Hence the idea of the objective effect of the prospective tendency!)

C.G. Jung, C.G. Jung - Freud Letters, 216–217.

[jungiananalysis]

Jolande Jacobi, The Psychology of C.G. Jung: An Introduction with Illustrations, p. 9. 

The next circle shows the sphere of consciousness, surrounded by contents lying in the unconscious, contents that have been set aside for our consciousness can hold only a very few contents at once - but which at any time can be restored to the level of consciousness, and also contents that we repress because they are disagreeable to us for various reasons - in other worlds, ‘forgotten, repressed, subliminally perceived, thought, and felt matter of every kind.’ Jung calls this sphere the personal unconscious to distinguish it from the collective unconscious, as shown in Diagram 3. The collective part of the unconscious does not include personal acquisitions specific to our individual ego, but only contents resulting ‘from the inherited possibility of psychical functioning in general, namely from the inherited brain structure. This heritage is common to all human beings, perhaps even to all animals, and constitutes the foundation of every individual psyche.

[jungiananalysis]

Jung makes the point that the unconscious authority puts an end to such a conflict of duty by creating a fait accompli. All our unconscious, unwilled actions, all our so-called mistakes, are such faits accomplis. Such mistakes may have two different interpretations: for the young, the appropriate interpretation is that the mistake results from a failure of the will, because the young must have ego consolidation, and the emphasis must be on ego responsibility. If a mistake is made by the young, it is proper that they take responsibility for it. For someone in the second half of life, a mistake is properly understood as an act of God, and this is how I think one should understand so-called mistakes in analytic work with patients. They are meaningful acts of God, and in that sense they are not quite mistakes at all; they are interventions from the unconscious that have a purposefulness still to be discovered.

Edward F. Edinger, The Aion Lectures, p. 42.