The Essential Jung: Selected Writings

Where love stops, power begins, and violence, and terror.

the twin moral concepts of Saint Augustine: concupiscentia and superbia

If for “person” we substitute “modern society,” it is evident that the latter is suffering from a mental dissociation, i.e., a neurotic disturbance. In view of this, it does not help matters at all if one party pulls obstinately to the right and the other to the left. This is what happens in every neurotic psyche, to its own deep distress, and it is just this distress that brings the patient to the analyst.

Subjectivation (in technical terms, transference and countertransference) creates isolation from the environment, a social limitation which neither party wishes for but which invariably sets in when understanding predominates and is no longer balanced by knowledge. As understanding deepens, the further removed it becomes from knowledge.

These fears are found not only among persons who are frightened by the picture Freud painted of the unconscious; they also troubled the originator of psychoanalysis himself, who confessed to me that it was necessary to make a dogma of his sexual theory because this was the sole bulwark of reason against a possible “eruption of the black flood of occultism.”

Everywhere and at all times there have been rites d’entrée et de sortie whose efficacy is impugned as magic and superstition by rationalists incapable of psychological insight.

Apart from the agglomeration of huge masses in which the individual disappears anyway, one of the chief factors responsible for psychological mass-mindedness is scientific rationalism, which robs the individual of his foundations and his dignity.

Traditionally, the reign of Christ ended with the first millennium, to be succeeded by the reign of Antichrist. This is now nearing its end, coinciding with the entry of the vernal equinox into Aquarius, and the end of the aeon of Pisces.

As a psychologist, therefore, I have neither the inclination nor the competence to mix myself up with metaphysics.

those who deem themselves beyond good and evil are usually the worst tormentors of mankind, because they are twisted with the pain and fear of their own sickness