Carl Jung - Man and His Symbols

Jung lived in Zurich and died in June of 1961. He popularized terms such as extrovert, introvert, and archetype. He believed that dreams were integral - an important part of individual unconscious. Here are some quotes that stuck out to me:

* The general function of dreams is to try to restore our psychological balance by producing dream material that re-establishes, in a subtle way, the total psychic equilibrium. This is what I call the complementary (or compensatory) role of dreams in teh psychic make-up.
* For the sake of mental stability and even physiological health, the unconscious and the conscious must be integrally connected and thus move on parallel lines. If they are split apart or dissociated, psychological disturbance follows. In this respect, dream symbols are the essential message carriers.
* Sign - always less than the concept it represents
* Symbol - stands for something more than immediate meaning
* But if we are to see things in their right perspective, we need to understand the past of man as well as his present. That is why an understanding of myths and symbols is of essential importance. A sane and normal society is one in which people habitually disagree.
* Thought - those who apply intellectual faculty in trying to adapt to people and circumstances.
* Feeling - judgement of value, not an emotion, good, bad, etc. A rational function (like thinking)
* Intuition - an irrational (perceiving) function - tells whence it comes and where it is going
* Sensation - tells you something exists
* A dream cannot produce a definite thought - if it begins to do so, it ceases to be a dream because it crosses the threshold of consciousness.
* Like the instincts, the collective thought patterns of the human mind and innate are inherited.
* While personal complexes never produce more than a personal bias, archtypes create myths, religions, and philosophies that influence and characterize whole nations and epochs of history.
* The very word 'invent' is derived from teh Latin invenire, and means to find and hence to find something by seeking it. In the latter case the word itself hints at some foreknowledge of what you are going to find.
* People in Western Societies have begun to realize that the difficulties confronting us are moral problems, and that the attempts to answer them by a policy of piling up nuclear arms or by economic competition is achieving little, for it cuts both ways.
* But all such attempts have proven singularly ineffective, and will do so as long as we try to convince ourselves and the world that it is only they (i.e. our opponents) who are wrong. It would be much more to the point for us to make a serious attempt to recognize our own shadow (the dark side of our nature), we should be immune to any moral and mental infection, because we are really doing practically the same thing as they. Only we have the additional disadvantage that we neither see nor want to understand what we ourselves are doing, under the cover of good manners.
* Nothing is more vulnerable than scientific theroy, which is an ephemeral attempt to explain facts and not an everlasting truth in itself.
* But the meaning of life is not exhaustively explained by one's business life, nor is the deep desire of the human heart answered by a bank account.
* Hero archtype - falls victim to pride (hubris) - jealousy of gods in myth.
* Hero cycle - trickster, hare, red horn, twin.
* Feminine element of male psyche - Goethe - The Eternal Feminine.
* Initiation archtype - to create the symbolic mood of death from which may spring the symbolic mood of rebirth - youth to maturity. Beauty and the Beast - Father - White Flower
* Symbols of Transcendence - symbols representing man's striving to attain the goal of combination of conscious and unconscious
* Roman God of Medicine - Aesculapius - sign of medical profession is a snake coiled around staff of healing God.
* Inner Center - Greeks - daimon, Egypt - Ba-soul, Romans - genius native, own inner voices and unconscious revelations
* How far self develops depends on whether or not ego is willing to listen to messages of self.
* It is useless to cast furtive glances at the way someone else is developing, because each of us has a unique task of self-realization.
* Shadow-unconscious part of the personality that often appears in dreams in personified form.
* Projection - if people observe their own unconscious tendencies in other people.
* Luther was never sure whether his break from the church was inspired by God or arose from his own pride and obstinacy.
* Shadow usually shows up as same sex - but also as woman-anima for man.
* The most frequent manifestation of the anima takes the form of erotic fantasy.
* Four stages of anima development - 1. Eve - Purely instinctual and biological relations. 2. Faust's Helen - romantic and aesthetic level characterized by several elements. 3. Virgin Mary - figure who raises love (eros) to spiritual devotion. 4. Mona Lisa - wisdom transcending most holy and most pure.
* The anima - woman within.
* The animus - the man within.
* Philosopher's Stone - symbol of man's wholeness - also represented as a pair of lions or as a human couple riding on lions.
* Most frequent symbol of self is a stone.
* Synchronicity - meaningful coincidence of outer and inner events that are not themselves casually connected.
* Landscapes in dreams (as in art) frequently symbolize an inexpressible mood.
* The grail itself symbolizes the inner wholeness for which men have always been searching.
* One cannot influence one's own dreams.
* Evangelists and animal emblems: St. Luke - Ox, St. Mark - Lion, St. John - Eagle, St. Matthew - Man or Angel.
* The familiar dream in which the dreamer is pursued by an animal nearly always indicates that an instinct has been split off from consciousness.
* Man is the only creature with the power to control instinct by his own will, but he is also able to suppress, distort, and wound it - and an animal is never so wild and dangerous as when it is wounded. Suppressed instincts can gain control of a man; they can even destroy him.
* Circle as a symbol of self - ultimate wholeness.
* Gothic - cross, Renaissance - circular ground plans.
* Bramante & Michelangelo - altar stands at center of St. Paul's.
* Circle is symbol of psyche. Square (rectangle) symbol of earthbound matter, of the body and reality.
* The artist has always been the instrument and spokesman of the spirit of his age.
* Fascination arises when the unconscious has been moved.
* It is the aim of the modern artist to give expression to his inner vision of man, to the spiritual background of life and the world.
* Reconciliation of the opposites - conscious and unconscious - surrealism.
* The unconscious (which had conjured up the pictures in the chance configuration of things) is nature.
* The great artists of this century have sought to give visible form to the 'life behind things' and so their works are a symbolic expression of a world behind the consciousness.
* The abstract artists goal was the center of life and things, their changeless background, and an inward certitude. Art had become mysticism.
* In merely abstract paintings the world of the known has completely vanished, nothing is left to form a bridge to the unknown.
* The more horrifying the world becomes the more art becomes abstract.
* As soon as art has to express fear, it must of itself depart from the classical ideal.
* Down and feeling that God is dead has led to Modern Art.
* They (modern artists) were not and are not concerned with the reproduction of nature in pictures, but with the expression of their own emotional experience of nature.
* Left-side - unconscious, right - conscious.
* Persona - mask.