Carl Jung (1875 – 1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and the founder of analytical psychology. The core idea of analytical psychology is that, for a better understanding of an individual’s psyche, one needs to take into consideration the personality type and the power of the unconscious.
Jung was one of Freud’s apprentices, and many, including Freud, thought that he would be the one to carry on his work. Nevertheless, Jung had his own brilliant ideas that were in contradiction with some of his teacher’s. As expected, different temperaments and viewpoints led to numerous arguments, the end of a fruitful collaboration and the end of a friendship.
He, along with Freud, was responsible for popularizing the idea that a person’s interior life merited not just attention but dedicated exploration -- a notion that has since propelled tens of millions of people into psychotherapy. Freud, who started as Jung’s mentor and later became his rival, generally viewed the unconscious mind as a warehouse for repressed desires, which could then be codified and pathologized and treated. Jung, over time, came to see the psyche as an inherently more spiritual and fluid place, an ocean that could be fished for enlightenment and healing.
Whether or not he would have wanted it this way, Jung -- who regarded himself as a scientist -- is today remembered more as a countercultural icon, a proponent of spirituality outside religion and the ultimate champion of dreamers and seekers everywhere, which has earned him both posthumous respect and posthumous ridicule. Jung’s ideas laid the foundation for the widely used Myers-Briggs personality test and influenced the creation of Alcoholics Anonymous. His central tenets — the existence of a collective unconscious and the power of archetypes -- have seeped into the larger domain of New Age thinking while remaining more at the fringes of mainstream psychology.
Here are several well-known Jung quotes:
You are what you do, not what you say you’ll do.
The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.
We cannot change anything unless we accept it
Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.
I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.
Thinking is difficult, that’s why most people judge.
Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darkness of other people.
Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.
I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud.
A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them. As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being. Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.
The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.
Where love rules, there is no will to power, and where power predominates, love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.
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.
Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent.