Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961) was a Swiss psychologist. He was the founder of analytical psychology and established many significant methods of psychiatric therapy.
Born in Kesswil, Switzerland, Jung studied medicine at the universities of Basle and Zürich. He made his name as a psychiatrist with his physiological and psychological studies of schizophrenia. He initially collaborated with Sigmund Freud on psychoanalytic theories of personality but split-up later because of Freud’s obsession with sexuality as the determinant of personality.
Jung’s foremost interest was the unconscious backdrop of conscious life; he assigned much meaning to dreams. He originated the concept of an introvert and extrovert personality and the four psychological functions—sensation, intuition, thinking, and feeling.
Jung is not regarded as a systematic philosopher, but his religious and spiritual vision—in particular, his interest in oriental religion—have had their influence. In his most important work, The Psychology of the Unconscious (1912,) he described his belief of a collective unconscious, which he synthesized with a theory of archetypes for studying the history and psychology of religion.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Carl Gustav Jung
Caution has its place, no doubt, but we cannot refuse our support to a serious venture which challenges the whole of the personality. If we oppose it, we are trying to suppress what is best in man—his daring and his aspirations. And should we succeed, we should only have stood in the way of that invaluable experience which might have given a meaning to life. What would have happened if Paul had allowed himself to be talked out of his journey to Damascus?
—Carl Gustav Jung
Topics: Caution
The images of the unconscious place a great responsibility upon a man. Failure to understand them, or a shirking of ethical responsibility, deprives him of his wholeness and imposes a painful fragmentariness on his life.
—Carl Gustav Jung
Topics: Thought
Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.
—Carl Gustav Jung
Topics: Will, Sanity
To confront a person with their own shadow is to show them their own light.
—Carl Gustav Jung
Topics: Light
I want to be freed neither from human beings, nor from myself, nor from nature; for all these appear to me the greatest of miracles.
—Carl Gustav Jung
Topics: Nature
We cannot change anything unless we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses.
—Carl Gustav Jung
Topics: Acceptance, Helping
Psychoanalysis cannot be considered a method of education if by education we mean the topiary art of clipping a tree into a beautiful artificial shape. But those who have a higher conception of education will prize most the method of cultivating a tree so that it fulfils to perfection its own natural conditions of growth.
—Carl Gustav Jung
Topics: Psychiatry
The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances; if there is any reaction, both are transformed.
—Carl Gustav Jung
Topics: Personality, Romance, Help, Meeting, Cooperation
Not to be able to grow old is just as ridiculous as to be unable to outgrow childhood.
—Carl Gustav Jung
It is only our deeds that reveal who we are.
—Carl Gustav Jung
Topics: Action
All the greatest and most important problems of life are fundamentally insolvable. They can never be solved, but only outgrown.
—Carl Gustav Jung
Topics: Acceptance, Problems, Problem-solving, Realistic Expectations
Unfortunately, there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and darker it is. If an inferiority is conscious, one always has a chance to correct it
—Carl Gustav Jung
Topics: Personality
The wise man who is not heeded is counted a fool, and the fool who proclaims the general folly first and loudest passes for a prophet and Fuhrer, and sometimes it is luckily the other way round as well, or else mankind would long since have perished of stupidity.
—Carl Gustav Jung
Topics: Leaders, Leadership
The man who promises everything is sure to fulfill nothing, and everyone who promises too much is in danger of using evil means in order to carry out his promises, and is already on the road to perdition.
—Carl Gustav Jung
Topics: Promises
Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain.
—Carl Gustav Jung
Topics: Thinking
Resistance to the organized mass can be effected only by the man who is as well organized in his individuality as the mass itself.
—Carl Gustav Jung
Topics: Individuality
There is no coming to consciousness without pain.
—Carl Gustav Jung
Topics: Pain, Difficulties, Adversity
Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.
—Carl Gustav Jung
Topics: Understanding, Imitation
Find out what a person fears most and that is where he will develop next.
—Carl Gustav Jung
Topics: Growth
We can keep from a child all knowledge of earlier myths, but we cannot take from him the need for mythology
—Carl Gustav Jung
A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them.
—Carl Gustav Jung
Topics: Passion
The Christian missionary may preach the gospel to the poor naked heathen, but the spiritual heathen who populate Europe have as yet heard nothing of Christianity.
—Carl Gustav Jung
Topics: Evangelism
The word “happiness” would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.
—Carl Gustav Jung
Topics: Sadness, Joy, Balance
Only that which changes remains true.
—Carl Gustav Jung
Without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of the imagination is incalculable.
—Carl Gustav Jung
Topics: Imagination
It is on the whole probably that we continually dream, but that consciousness makes such a noise that we do not hear it.
—Carl Gustav Jung
Topics: Dreams
Masses are always breeding grounds of psychic epidemics.
—Carl Gustav Jung
Called or not called, God is present.
—Carl Gustav Jung
The psychological context of dream-contents consists in the web of associations in which the dream is naturally embedded. Theoretically we can never know anything in advance about this web, but in practice it is sometimes possible, granted long enough experience. Even so, careful analysis will never rely too much on technical rules; the danger of deception and suggestion is too great. In the analysis of isolated dreams above all, this kind of knowing in advance and making assumptions on the grounds of practical expectation or general probability is positively wrong. It should therefore be an absolute rule to assume that every dream, and every part of a dream, is unknown at the outset, and to attempt an interpretation only after carefully taking up the context. We can then apply the meaning we have thus discovered to the text of the dream itself and see whether this yields a fluent reading, or rather whether a satisfying meaning emerges.
—Carl Gustav Jung
Topics: Assumptions
There are as many nights as days, and the one is just as long as the other in the year’s course. Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word ‘happy’ would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.
—Carl Gustav Jung
Topics: Happiness, Sadness
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