Carl Gustav Jung

“ This new life will betake itself along the line of least resistance—or should we not rather say, the least resistances, as a "compromise with all the necessities," in a just balancing of pleasure and unpleasure? It is not we who must arbitrarily seek to determine how matters stand for the patient and what will benefit him; his own nature decides. In other words, we must assume the rôle of the accoucheur who can bring out into the light of day a child already alive, but who must avoid a series of mistakes if the child is to remain able to live and the mother is not to be injured. ”

“ Think of a life with nature; of those wonderful moments when, as lord and fructifier, man drives the plough through the earth, and with kingly gesture scatters the seed of the future harvest; see his justifiable awe before the destructive power of the elements, his joy in the fruitfulness of his wife, who gives him daughters and sons, who mean to him increased working power and enhanced prosperity. ”

“ The psychiatrist will certainly smile at it, for he is thoroughly assured of the universal validity of his causalism, he knows the psyche merely as something that is made, descendent, reactive. Not uncommonly there lurks the unconscious prejudice that the psyche is a brain-secretion.
Looking at such a morbid system without preconception, and asking ourselves what goal this delusional system is aiming at, we see, in fact, firstly, that it is endeavouring to get at something, and secondly, that the patient also devotes all his will-power to the service of the system. ”

“ Should we go further back into history, we shall find that which today we call science, dissolved into an indistinct cloud. The modern culture-creating mind is incessantly occupied in stripping off all subjectivity from experience, and in finding those formulas which bring Nature and her forces to the best and most fitting expression. It would be an absurd and entirely unjustified self-glorification if we were to assume that we are more energetic or more intelligent than the ancients—our materials for knowledge have increased, but not our intellectual capacity. ”

“ However, I thought that Freud could only be refuted by one who himself had thoroughly tried the psychoanalytic method, and who should really investigate like Freud, that is, by studying out patiently and for a long time the daily life, hysteria and dreams from Freud's point of view. He who does not or cannot do this ought not to judge Freud, else he acts like those famous men of science who disdained to look through the telescope of Galileo. Fairness to Freud does not signify, as many fear, a conditionless submission to a dogma ”

“ The analogy of feeling lies in the suffering of the hopeless struggle against the more powerful. It is as if this conflict were accompanied from afar by the sounds of "creation," which brings up a beautiful and mysterious image belonging to the unconscious, and which has not yet forced its way up to the light of the upper world. We surmise, rather than know, that this battle has really something to do with creation, with the struggles between negations and affirmations. ”

“ That which affected the Greeks with horror still remains true, but it is true for us only when we give up a vain illusion that we are different—that is to say, more moral, than the ancients. We of the present day have nearly succeeded in forgetting that an indissoluble common bond binds us to the people of antiquity. With this truth a path is opened to the understanding of the ancient mind; an understanding which so far has not existed, and, on one side, leads to an inner sympathy, and, on the other side, to an intellectual comprehension. ”

“ In so far as experience plays a rôle with these philosophers, it serves only as an allurement or fillip to abstraction, in response to the imperative need to fit forcibly all the chaos of the universe within well-defined limits, which are, in the last resort, the creation of a spirit obedient to its subjective values.
The tough-minded man is positivist and empiricist. He regards only matters of fact. Experience is his master, his exclusive guide and inspiration. It is only empirical phenomena demonstrable in the outside world which count. Thought is merely a reaction to external experience. ”

“ It is not a simple matter to come out boldly and state that every individual is to a large extent the determiner of his own destiny, for only by poets and philosophers has this idea been put forth—not by science; and it is a brave act to make this statement with full consciousness of all its meaning, and to stand ready to prove it by scientific reasoning and procedure. ”

“ For the benefits of civilisation, which strove to grant every individual as much outward freedom as was consistent with the freedom of others, would be well worth the sacrifice of free research. But the age of this use of force against nature is past, civilised man has left this wrong track behind, not arbitrarily, but obeying an inner necessity, and we may look joyfully towards the future. Mankind, advancing in knowledge, will find its way across the ruins of faith in authority to the moral autonomy of the individual. ”

“ Psychiatry, which engages in the exploration of the mind, stands ever at the door seeking in vain to weigh and measure as in the other departments of science. We have long known that we have to do with a definite organ, the brain; but only beyond the brain, beyond the morphological basis do we reach what is important for us—the mind; as indefinable as it ever was, still eluding any explanation, no matter how ingenious. Former ages, endowing the mind with substance, and personifying every incomprehensible occurrence in nature, regarded mental disorder as the work of evil spirits ”

“ Ivenes rather gives the impression of a more artificial product; there is something thought out; despite all her excellences she gives the impression of playing a part excellently; her world-sorrow, her yearning for the other side of things, are not merely piety but the attributes of saintliness. Ivenes is no mere human, but a mystic being who only partly belongs to reality: The mournful features, the attachment to sorrow, her mysterious fate, lead us to the historic prototype of Ivenes—Justinus Kerner’s “Prophetess of Prevorst.” ”

“ Deep within, unnoticed by any one, there may go on a glossing over of the infantile disharmony, or a development of the negative of the parents' character, accompanied by hindrances and conflicts to which she herself has no clue. Or, growing up, she will come into painful conflict with that world of actualities to which she is so ill adapted till one stroke of fate after another gradually opens her eyes to the fact that it is herself, infantile and maladjusted, that is amiss. The source of infantile adaptation to the parents is naturally the affective condition on both sides ”