Carl Gustav Jung

“ What seems more flighty, more inconstant, and more lawless than a fancy, a rapidly passing thought? It is not, however, lawless, and not free, but closely determined within the limits of the milieu. If, therefore, even the superficial and manifestly most flighty formations of the intellect are altogether subject to the milieu-constellation, what should we expect for the more important conditions of the mind , for the emotions, wishes, hopes, and intentions? ”

“ It often happens that the test person actually does not know what to answer to the stimulus word. The test person waives any reaction; for the moment he totally fails to obey the original instructions, and shows himself incapable of adapting himself to the experimenter. If this phenomenon occurs frequently in an experiment it signifies a higher degree of disturbance in adjustment. I call attention to the fact that it is quite indifferent what reason the test person gives for the refusal. Some find that too many ideas suddenly occur to them, others, that not enough ideas come to their minds. ”

“ One usually pays little heed to children in every stage of life; in all essential matters, they are treated as not responsible, and in all unessential matters, they are trained with an automatic precision.
Under resistances there always lies a question, a conflict, of which we hear at later times and on other occasions. But usually one forgets to connect the thing heard with the resistances. Thus, on another occasion Anna put to her mother the following difficult questions:
Anna: “I should like to become a nurse when I grow big,—why did you not become a nurse?” ”

“ We may err, as all human beings err. But the continual holding up to us of our mistakes,—perhaps they are worse than mistakes,—does not help us to see things more distinctly. We should prefer to see wherein we err. That should be shown to us in our own sphere of experience. Thus far, however, no one has succeeded in meeting us on our own ground, and in giving us a different conception of the things which we ourselves see. We must still complain that our critics are persisting in complete ignorance and without the slightest notion about the matters in question. ”

“ He explained to the child, who listened with the greatest attention, that the mother is like the soil and the father like the gardener; that the father provides the seed which grows in the mother, and thus gives origin to a baby. ”

“ Anna, too, could get a child in the same way if she were big. Why did not the mother become such a plain nurse, that is to say, how did she get a child if not in the same way as the nurse? Like the nurse, Anna, too, could get a child, but how that fact might be changed in the future or how she might come to resemble her mother in respect to getting children is not clear to her. From this resulted the thoughtful question, “Indeed, shall I be a different woman from you? Shall I be different in every respect?” The stork theory evidently had come to naught, the dying theory met a similar fate ”

“ Unfortunately our knowledge of the finer mental processes in the child is so meagre that we are after all not in any position to say where the greater trouble lies, whether in the parents, in the child, or in the conception of the milieu. ”

“ In every neurotic we see how the constellation of the infantile milieu influences not only the character of the neurosis but also life’s destiny, in its very details. Numberless unhappy choices of profession and matrimonial failures can be traced to this constellation. There are, however, cases where the profession has been happily chosen, where the husband or wife leaves nothing to be desired, and where still the person does not feel well but works and lives under constant difficulties. ”

“ The spell of the fairy tale poetry, which is felt even by the adult, is explained by the fact that some of the old theories are still alive in our unconscious minds. We experience a strange, peculiar and familiar feeling when a conception of our remotest youth is again stimulated. Without becoming conscious it merely sends into consciousness a feeble copy of its original emotional strength.
The problem how the child gets into the mother was difficult to solve. ”

“ In order to understand the matter comprehensively we must bear in mind that the association experiments cannot deal with a separated psychic function, for any psychic occurrence is never a thing in itself, but is always the resultant of the entire psychological past. The association experiment, too, is not merely a method for the reproduction of separated word couplets, but it is a kind of pastime, a conversation between experimenter and test person. ”

“ For hours she rummaged through these works looking for pictures of volcanoes and earthquakes, and asking questions continually. We are here confronted by an energetic effort to sublimate the fear into an eager desire for learning, which at this age made a decidedly premature exaction; but, as in many a gifted child which suffers from precisely the same difficulty, many effects of this immature sublimation were surely not to her advantage. ”

“ If we suppose that the imperfect reproductions are distributed regularly and without choice among all the reactions there will be a greater number of them for A (in comparison to B and C) even as reactions to critical words, since A has the greater number of imperfect reproductions. Admitting such a uniform distribution of the imperfect reproductions, it is easy to calculate how many we ought to expect to belong to each individual kind of reaction. ”

“ It very often happens that children are erroneously treated as quite imprudent and irrational beings. Thus on indulgently remarking to an intelligent father, whose 4-year-old daughter masturbated excessively, that care should be exercised in the presence of the child which slept in the same room with the parents, I received the following indignant reply, “I can absolutely assure you that the child knows nothing about sexual matters.” ”

“ A predicate type can also betray itself through the external behavior, as, for example, through a particular affectation, enthusiastic exclamations, an embellished behavior, and the constrained sounding language so often observed in society. The complex type shows no particular tendency except the concealment of a complex, whereas the definition and predicate types betray a positive tendency to exert in some way a definite influence on the experimenter. ”

“ From the conversation with the grandmother it could be seen that this theory was capable of wide application, namely, it not only solved in a comforting manner the painful idea of parting and dying, but at the same time it solved satisfactorily the riddle of the origin of children. Such solutions which kill at least two birds with one stone were formerly tenaciously adhered to in science, and even in the child they cannot be made retrograde without some shock. ”

“ Thus every time the patient merged into a love affair the picture of the father inopportunely appeared and prevented her from adjusting herself psychologically to her husband.
I purposely chose this case as an illustration because it is simple, obvious, and quite typical of many marriages which are crippled through the neurosis of the wife. The unhappiness always lies in a too firm attachment to the parents. The offspring remains in the infantile relations. ”

“ This applicability of the experiment shows it possible to strike a concealed (indeed an unconscious) complex by means of a stimulous word; and conversely we may assume with great certainty that behind a reaction which shows a complex indicator there is a hidden complex, even though the test person strongly denies it. One must get rid of the idea that educated and intelligent test persons are able to see and admit their own complexes. Every human mind contains much that is unacknowledged and hence unconscious as such; and no one can boast that he stands completely above his complexes. ”

“ One can make use of many special methods of computing, but they are not all equally good and equally exact. (One must always resort to calculation, as appearances are enormously deceptive.) The method which is most to be recommended is that of the probable average of the reaction time. It shows at a glance the difficulties which the person in the experiment had to overcome in the reaction. ”

“ I see a great many very prolonged times which in itself means that the patient can only adjust himself with difficulty, that his psychological functions proceed with marked internal frictions, with resistances. By far the greater number of neurotics react only under great and hence very distinct resistances, there are, however, cases in which the average reaction times are as short as in the normal and in whom the other complex indicators are lacking, but who, despite that fact, undoubtedly present neurotic symptoms. ”

“ The father is a drunkard and a demoralized creature. We can thus readily understand that his wife perceives an emotional voidness which she naturally betrays by her enhanced predicate type. The same causes cannot, however, operate in the daughter, for in the first place she is not married to a drunkard, and secondly life with all its hopes still lies before her. It is distinctly unnatural for the daughter to show an extreme predicate type expressing personal judgment. She responds to the stimuli of the environment just like her mother. ”

“ Her mother did not wish or was not able to tell her how the eyes grew into the head, hence she did not know how Freddy got into her. It was for this reason that she again tempted her with the old story.
I wish to impress firmly upon parents and educators this instructive example of child psychology. In the learned psychological discussions on the child’s psyche we hear nothing about those parts which are so important for the health and naturalness of our children, nor do we hear more about the child’s emotions and their conflicts; and yet they play a most important rôle. ”

“ Attempts to make her talk and to draw out the truth by means of (insidious) questions were futile, she exerted resistance against resistance, and the introversion of love began. It is evident that the capacity for sublimation in a 4-year-old child is still too slightly developed to be capable of performing more than symptomatic services. The mind, therefore, depends on another compensation, namely, it resorts to one of the relinquished infantile devices for securing love by force, the most preferred is that of crying and calling the mother at night. ”

“ That is the sense of the predicate type. What the 45-year-old woman lacks in emotions; i.e., in love in her marriage relations she seeks to obtain from the outside, and it is for that reason that she is an ardent participant in the Christian Science meetings. If the daughter imitates this situation she does the same thing as her mother, she seeks to obtain emotions from the outside. But for a girl of 16 such an emotional state is to say the least quite dangerous; like her mother she reacts to her environment as a sufferer soliciting sympathy. ”

“ We shall therefore occupy ourselves first with the method of association, a method which has been of valuable assistance to me both practically and theoretically. The association method in vogue in psychology, as well as its history, is of course, so familiar to you that there is no need to speak of it. ”

“ Yet, just as the definition type really conceals a lack of intelligence so the excessive emotional expression conceals or overcompensates an emotional deficiency. This conclusion is very interestingly illustrated by the following discovery:—On investigating the influence of the familiar milieus on the association type it was found that young individuals seldom possess a predicate type, but that on the other hand, the predicate type increases in frequency with the advancing age. In women the increase of the predicate type begins a little after the 40th year, and in men after the 60th. ”

“ During the night little Anna had another dream: “I dreamed about a woman in the city, she had a very big belly.” The chief actor in the dream is always the dreamer himself under some definite aspect; thus the childish play of the day before is fully solved.
Not long thereafter Anna surprised her mother with the following performance: She stuck her doll under her clothes, then pulled it out slowly head downwards, and at the same time remarked, “Look, the little child is coming out, it is now all out.” By this means Anna tells her mother, “You see, thus I apprehend the problem of birth. ”

“ If a neurosis springs up in a person this neurosis contains the counter-argument against the relationship of the patient to the personality with which he is most intimately connected. If the husband has a neurosis the neurosis thus loudly proclaims that he has intensive resistances and contrary tendencies against his wife, and if the wife has a neurosis the wife has a tendency which diverges from her husband. If the person is unmarried the neurosis is then directed against the lover or the sweetheart or against the parents. ”

“ At the age of puberty when it begins to free itself from the spell of the family, it enters into life with so to say a surface of fracture entirely in keeping with that of the father and mother. The frequent and often very deep depressions of puberty emanate from this ”

“ How easy and tempting it would have been, e.g., in the present case, to admire, excite, and develop prematurely the child's eager desire for learning, and thereby develop an unnatural blasè state and a precociousness masking a neurosis. In such cases the parents must look after their own complexes and complex tendencies and not make capital out of them at the expense of the child. The idea should be dismissed once for all that children are held in bondage by, or that they are the toys of, their parents. They are characteristic and new beings. ”