Harris Judith Rachel - The quotable Jung

THE QUOTABLE JUNG

THE QUOTABLE

COLLECTED AND EDITED BY JUDITH R. HARRIS

WITH THE COLLABORATION OF TONY WOOLFSON

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY

Copyright 2016 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press,

41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

press.princeton.edu

Jacket photograph Douglas Glass/Paul Popper/Popperfoto/Getty Images

All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The quotable Jung / collected and edited by Judith R. Harris with the collaboration of Tony Woolfson. Hardcover Edition.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-691-15559-3 (hardback)

1. Jung, C. G. (Carl Gustav), 18751961. 2. Jungian psychology.

I. Harris, Judith, editor. II. Woolfson, Tony, editor.

III. Jung, C. G. (Carl Gustav), 18751961.

BF315.Q86 2015

150.1954dc23

2015008350

This book has been composed in Minion Pro text with ITC Kabel Std. display.

Printed on acid-free paper.

Printed in the United States of America

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

I dedicate this book to the spirit of C. G. Jung

Contents

Preface

In the early 1970s in Boston, Massachusetts, I met up with a friend for lunch, as we often did between practice sessions. We were both studying and preparing for careers in piano performance, and we had many a conversation about the true nature of the creative process. On this particular cold and rainy day, which has stuck in my memory for more than forty years, my friend appeared with a gift for me, a book he had found in a secondhand bookstore and which he insisted I read immediatelyMemories, Dreams, Reflections by Carl Gustav Jung.

I was twenty years old at the time, and, like many of us who have entered the world of the unconscious as Jung had done, this was my first encounter with his work. In my teens I had avidly read many of Freuds works, as well as Horney, Rogers, Erickson, and others, but nothing compared to the impact of Jungs memoirs given to me on that fateful day in Boston all those years ago.

Not long afterward, I read Jungs Commentary to The Secret of the Golden Flower, which sparked my interest in yoga and the psyche-body connection. Almost twenty years later, I moved to Zrich and began my training at the C. G. Jung Institute in Ksnacht, where I graduated as a Jungian analyst in 1999.

Like many of us, I had long been searching for a spiritual dimension through which to find a deeper meaning in my life. Having lived in the artistic world, I had been trying to understand how men and women like J. S. Bach, Vincent Van Gogh, and Virginia Woolf had been able to enter into seemingly mysterious places. All I could come up with was the realization that something bigger and greater lay behind and within these creative geniuses. I remained bewildered until I read Memories, Dreams, Reflections and then I began to find my way.

Jung was addressing the same questions I had been wrestling with all my life. Is there a God? And. if so, what about the apparently tragic events that occur in the course of a lifetime? Is it possible to find meaning in suffering?

From the very beginning of my discovery of Jung, I began to record my dreams and note down certain passages in Jungs works that held a special meaning for me and to which I felt I might want to return at different points in my life. Slowly, over the years, my own concordance of quotes from various volumes of Jung began to emerge, and later on this evolved further into an extensive compendium of quotes from the collected works, the seminars, the letters, his memoirs, and other smaller works. This compendium not only provided a never-ending source of material for my own teaching and writing, but it also enriched many an analytic hour in my own practice. Most important of all, keeping a record of these significant passages brought a much greater depth to my understanding of the wisdom of C. G. Jung. By the time the idea for The Quotable Jung emerged, I had already compiled well over five hundred computer files on different topics, all of which could be found in Jungs works.

Fred Appel of Princeton University Press came down to The Red Book Symposium in Washington, D.C., in June 2010 and approached The Philemon Foundation with the idea of doing a Quotable Jung to follow The Quotable Jefferson, The Quotable Einstein, The Quotable Thoreau, and The Quotable Kierdegaard.

Jolande Jacobi had already compiled an anthology for the Bollingen Foundation, that was first published in 1945, a second edition of which was published by Princeton University Press in 1970, some years after Jungs death. Many more works of Jung had been published between 1945 and 1970, including six books of major importance, among them Jungs last seminal work, Mysterium Coniunctionis, his magnum opus concerning the fundamental problem of the opposites.

Jolande Jacobis compilation, Psychological Reflections, was the single most comprehensive work of its kind for nearly half a century, and many are the readers that are indebted to her for the depth of her scholarship.

Forty-four years later, The Quotable Jung draws on even more newly published material, in particular, the Visions Seminars (two volumes), the Nietzsche Seminars (two volumes), The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga, and the Letters (two volumes), which all bring us much closer to the man Jung himself, especially because in those seminars and letters, Jung speaks freely and in a language that a layperson can easily understand.

To this list, we can now add The Red Book, published in 2009 after many years shrouded in secrecy and mystery. We are now able to follow in much greater detail Jungs own confrontation with the unconscious and appreciate his unequalled efforts in self-exploration, a task many of us strive to undertake for ourselves.

This volume will introduce the reader to the ideas of Carl Gustav Jung. I am sure that only a few readers will know that although for many years Sigmund Freud has been a household name for most people, a century ago Jung was by far the better known of the two, especially in the United States. This was mainly due to Jungs pioneering work on the Association Experiment, a test devised by Jung to demonstrate the reality and autonomy of unconscious complexes. To Jung we also owe an understanding of everyday terms like introverted and extraverted. Unlike Freud, who concentrated on retrieving repressed childhood memories in his patients, Jung was actually more interested in a prospective, future-oriented approach to analysis that emphasized the value of dream interpretation as the vehicle for understanding the messages of the unconscious as the guiding light of the soul.

Jung also recognized the therapeutic value of authentic, subjective religious experience, which is not necessarily to be found within the houses of worship of denominational religions but rather through the confrontation with the divine as wholly Other.

There is a widespread belief that Jung is not easy reading, and if The Quotable Jung can help to dispel that preconception, it will already have achieved its purpose. The breadth and depth of Jungs knowledge ranks among the highest of any civilization, spanning almost sixty years and thousands and thousands of pages. The wisdom to be found in even the necessarily abbreviated subject matter in this book should whet every readers appetite for more. My faith is, then, that readers will find the Jung in these pages eminently readable and approachable, for he was a truly original thinker, a human being filled with kindness and compassion, and one of the greatest healers of all time.