Carl Gustav Jung

“ 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 ”

“ In the place of the father, with his constellating virtues and faults, there appears, on the one hand, an altogether sublime deity, on the other the devil, in modern times for the most part largely whittled away by the perception of one's own moral responsibility. Elevated love is attributed to the former, a lower sexuality to the latter. As soon as we approach the territory of the neurosis, the antithesis is stretched to the utmost limit. God becomes the symbol of the most complete sexual repression, the Devil the symbol of sexual lust. ”

“ If now we survey all the far-reaching possibilities of the infantile constellation we are forced to say that in essence our life's fate is identical with the fate of our sexuality. If Freud and his school devote themselves first and foremost to tracing out the individual's sexuality it is certainly not in order to excite piquant sensations, but to gain a deeper insight into the driving forces that determine that individual's fate. ”

“ This beautiful fable has become a cherished paradigm for my analysis, for by no means infrequent are such cases where the father-demon has laid his hand upon his daughter, so that her whole life long, even when she does marry, there is never a true union, because her husband's image never succeeds in obliterating the unconscious and eternally operative infantile father-ideal. ”

“ In my experience the father is usually the decisive and dangerous object of the child's phantasy, and if ever it happens to be the mother, I have been able to discover behind her a grandfather to whom she belonged in her heart. ”

“ He who has missed the happiness of woman's love falls back, as a substitute, upon some gushing friendship, upon masturbation, upon religiosity; should he be a neurotic he plunges still further back into the conditions of childhood which have never been quite forsaken, to which indeed the normal is fettered by more than one link—he returns to the relationship to father and mother. ”

“ But all this does not go so far as to say that we must cast the blame of inherited sins upon our parents. A sensitive child whose intuition is only too quick in reflecting in his own soul all the excesses of his parents must, lay the blame for his fate on his own characteristics. But, as our last case shows, this is not always so, for the parents can (and unfortunately only too often do) fortify the evil in the child's soul, preying upon the child's ignorance to make him the slave of their complexes. In our case this attempt on the part of the father is quite obvious. ”

“ The patient would always meekly fetch her father spirits from the inn, although this gave rise perpetually to anger and altercations. But she finds her husband “all right.” He is a good, patient fellow with only one failing: he does not obey her father enough; she finds that incomprehensible, and would rather have her husband knuckle under to her father. All said and done, father is still father. In the frequent quarrels she always took her father's part. But she has nothing to say against her husband and he is usually right in his protests, but one must help one's father. ”

“ For those unversed in psychoanalysis let me point out that up to her forty-sixth year the patient did but reproduce most faithfully the milieu of her earliest youth. The sexuality which announced itself so late and so drastically, even here only led to a deteriorated edition of the father-surrogate; to this she is brought by this late blossoming sexuality. Despite repression, the neurosis betrays the ever-fluctuating eroticism of the aging woman who still wants to please (affectation) but dares not acknowledge her sexuality. ”

“ What we see in the development of the world-process, the original source of the changes in the Godhead, we see also in the individual. Parental power guides the child like a higher controlling fate. But when he begins to grow up, there begins also the conflict between the infantile constellation and the individuality, the parental influence dating from the prehistoric (infantile) period is repressed, sinks into the Unconscious but is not thereby eliminated; by invisible threads it directs the individual creations of the ripening mind as they appear. ”

“ If we are ever disposed to see some demonic power at work controlling mortal destiny, surely we can see it here in these melancholy silent tragedies working themselves out slowly, torturingly, in the sick souls of our neurotics. ”

“ During the consultation the child always hangs on to his mother, a pretty, youthful woman. The parents' marriage is a happy one, but the father is strict, and the boy (the eldest child) is rather afraid of him. The mother compensates for the father's strictness by corresponding tenderness, to which the boy responds so much that he never gets away from his mother's apron-strings. He never plays with his schoolfellows, never goes alone into the street unless he has to go to school. He fears the boys' roughness and violence and plays thoughtful games at home or helps his mother with housework. ”

“ Thus he destroyed the ceremonial constraint of the Law and gave the example of a personal loving relationship to God. The later imperfect sublimation of the Christian Mass leads again to the ceremonial of the Church from which occasionally the minds capable of sublimation among the saints and reformers have been able to free themselves. Not without cause therefore does modern theology speak of “inner” or “personal” experiences as having great enfranchising power, for always the ardour of love transmutes the dread and constraint into a higher, freer type of feeling. ”

“ If we can strip off the veils shrouding the problems of individual destiny, we can afterwards widen our view from the history of the individual to the history of nations. And first of all we can look at the history of religions, at the history of the phantasy-systems of whole peoples and epochs. ”

“ The fact of the extreme similarity between the reaction-type of the offspring and the parents is matter for thought. The association experiment is nothing but a small section from the psychological life of a man. At bottom daily life is nothing but an extensive and many-varied association experiment; in essence we react in life just as we do in the experiments. Although this truth is evident, still it requires a certain consideration and limitation. Let us take as an instance the case of the unhappy mother of forty-five years and her unmarried daughter of sixteen. ”

“ One peculiarity which stands out in the works and views of Freud is that the relationship to the father is seen to possess an overwhelming importance. This importance of the father in the moulding of the child's psycho-sexuality may also be discovered in a quite other and remote field, in the investigation of the family. [3] The most recent thorough investigations demonstrate the predominating influence of the father often lasting for centuries. The mother seems of less importance in the family. ”

“ It is ever so in life when we draw back before too great an obstacle—the menace of some severe disappointment or the risk of some too far-reaching decision—the energy stored up for the solution of the task flows back impotent ”

“ Even the unhappy marriage is determined in every way through the father, for the patient marries the divorced wife of his eldest brother, which is as if he married his mother. His wife is also the representative of the mother-surrogate, of the friend who died in childbed.
The neurosis started at the moment when the libido had obviously withdrawn from this relationship of infantile constellation, and approached, for the first time, the sexual end determined by the individual. ”

“ The fathers who allow their children no independent possession of their own emotions, who fondle their daughters with ill-concealed eroticism and tyrannical passion, who keep their sons in leading-strings, force them into callings and finally marry them off “suitably,” and the mothers who even in the cradle excite their children with unhealthy tenderness, later on make them into slavish dolls, and then at last, out of jealousy, destroy their children's love-life fundamentally, they all act not otherwise than this stupid and brutal boor. ”

“ Sarah, the daughter of Raguel in Ecbatana, desires to marry; but her evil fate wills it that seven times, one after another, she chooses a husband who dies on the marriage-night. The evil spirit Asmodi, by whom she is persecuted, kills these husbands. She prays to Jehovah to let her die rather than suffer this shame again. She is despised even by her father's maid-servants. ”

“ To adapt herself to life, this girl either will have to surmount the obstacles of her familial milieu, or, unable to free herself from them, she will succumb to the fate to which such an adaptation predisposes her. ”

“ We often call it the hand of God or of the Devil, for the power of the infantile constellation has become mighty during the course of the centuries in affording support and proof to all the religions. ”

“ In this case also the whole movement of a life takes place in the magic circle of the familial constellation. The relation to the father is the strongest and most momentous issue; its masochistic homosexual colouring stands out clearly everywhere. ”

“ But when we look back along our life's path and fix our eyes chiefly upon our unfortunate steps and their consequences, often we cannot understand how we came to do this and leave that undone, and it seems as if some power outside ourselves had directed our steps. ”

“ The Patriarchs are an intermediate stage towards the deity. The neurotic fear and dread of the Jewish religion, the imperfect, not to say unsuccessful attempt at the sublimation of a still too barbarous people, gave rise to the excessive severity of the Mosaic Law, the ceremonial constraint of the neurotic. ”

“ But the daughter is not married to the father and therefore does not need this adaptation. She has taken it over from the influence of her milieu, and later on will try to adapt herself to the world with this familial disharmony. In so far as an ill-assorted marriage is unsuitable the adaptation resulting from it is unsuitable. ”

“ The word-predicate type transparently applies an excessive amount of emotion externally and displays emotions with the unconscious, but nevertheless obvious endeavour to awaken echoing emotions in the experimenter. ”

“ As he approached manhood there developed on his neck a series of ulcers, some of which opened and continually discharged pus, giving such a dirty, ugly creature a horrible appearance. His intelligence did not grow with his years, so he stayed on as servant in the peasant's house without any recognised wage. ”