jungian-psychologists

"Protestants have tried to make their religion completely logical and sensible... The result is that the average Western Protestant, completely cut off from his own myth, turns to the Vedas or theosophy, to Masonry, or to a struggle for power, or even war, to give him mythological symbols which his faith does not encompass."

"Morton Kelsey, the most prolific writer among twentieth century Christian mystics."

"How seldom do we look at the mythological pattern as it moves deep within the lives of individuals, prompting them to meet fate, to meet events following almost exactly the meaning outlined by the myth."

"The greater the man, the more subject he is to the ravaging effects of the negative side of this reality."

"Almost any reality which we fail to confront and deal with in some way, will try to possess us. This is as true of autonomous complexes or spirits as of germs and bacteria."

"Psychologically and spiritually, whether one calls them complexes or spiritual beings, they can be either upbuilding, creative forces, or negative and destructive influences."

"In the early years of Christianity the Church was known to be a place to bring those who were sick, either mentally or physically... A vital Christianity still has this power."

"Religious practice provides three... mythological methods of coming to terms with spiritual reality and finding the treasure within it. One way is to study the myth in its historical context... And for modern Christians this means trying to see the psychological meaning of myth in the development of human consciousness. A second way is through ritual in which the mythological story is acted out... And third, he can sometimes step into the myth imaginatively through meditation, actually entering the spiritual world... and becoming active and effective in it."

"There is no painless way of coming into contact with spiritual reality."

"Myth and ritual act as transformers in bringing people the value of spiritual reality, just as an electrical transformer... The dream also provides the same kind of stepped-down encounter."

"The problem confronting the modern church is... to discover this new, and yet very old way of looking at reality mythologically. This is the Platonic, the psychological, the Christian way of expressing spiritual reality, through images and symbols, and it is the only way of approaching this realm as a living reality. Otherwise it must be broken down into elements and is dead."

"Myth can act almost like throwing open a window to reveal reality that is not being touched by the rational, Aristotelian approach."

"Even the church, which in ages past was custodian of man's myths, has turned its back upon myth, has forgotten its meaning, and has lost the ability to interpret and use it."

"The neurotic, it has been said, worries about castles in the air, while the psychotic lives in them. ...The hysterical person can copy reliably nearly any disease syndrome. ...Destructive emotional causes or influences may play a part in any disease, whatever the class or immediate cause."

"The Eastern or Greek Orthodox tradition has never turned its back upon the dream or the myth. ...it has continued to believe that spiritual reality is mediated to men through mythological images in story and actions, and in the pictorial representation of the icon."

"Man cannot remain well psychologically, let alone socially, if he loses contact with the unconscious and its symbolic and mythological life."

"One interesting confirmation of this viewpoint comes from the widespread dream research of William Dement... Not only did these subjects who were deprived of their dreams step up the frequency of their attempts to dream, but if they continued to be cut off from completing their dreams, they soon began to show signs of nervous breakdown."

"As Jung worked with patients from all over the world, he began to study the mythologies of different peoples... Folklore and mythology... appeared as the collective dreams of a people, expressing for the group what poetic imagination, phantasies, visions and dreams express for the individual. Both the individual and collective types of experience are vital to human life."

"The unconscious reveals its meaning imaginatively, through symbols and images, and it speaks... a basically mythological language."

"One of the most important ways of understanding the unconscious—indeed, as Freud saw it, the royal road to discovering the nature of its contents—is the dream. And what is a dream but a series of images that tell a story?"

"Western man, religious or not, came to believe that he was nothing but a shell of mechanically functioning matter, built to house his rational consciousness. ...Strangely enough, just as people were trying to get used to that kind of world, science began to see it differently. ...the scientific truths they had once considered universal and absolutely certain were only partly true."

"The success of a ministry depends more upon one's capacity to relate and to care, than [on] one's theological background."

"I learned that all people can be touched, with genuine caring and understanding."

"The inner journey is as individual as our thumbprint. We need to guide others on their way and never impose our way upon them."

"If humankind is open to another dimension of reality, then the dream may be one of the most common avenues through which God reaches out to us."

""What's this Chungian analyst?" he asked. "Five years' training in Zurich at the C. G. Jung Institute," I said. "Jung was a student of Freud until they quarreled." "Oh, yes," he said. "Dreams and all that kind of thing." I felt his dismissal; I made no response."

"Do you know whose colors these are? [...] These are the colors of the whore of Babylon. Red and purple."

"Ophelia is a little walking owl, bewitched by her unconscious feminine, her father, and what "they say." She never finds her own voice. She never finds her own body or her own feelings and therefore misses life and love in the here and now. Gradually the waters of the unconscious to which she is "native and indued" swallow her."

"If in later life she has mastered her hunger drive by ego control, she may assume that she can control her fate herself. But that ego may in fact be very weak, because it has been built by cutting herself off from the mainstream of life through severe dieting. It is built on negative rather than positive need. In a real life crisis, such an ego may fail to operate because she does not know consciously what her own needs are. [...] An ego which sets itself up against Fate is attempting to usurp the power of the Self; it swings from light to dark, from inflation to depression. Only when her ego is firmly rooted in her own feminine feeling can a woman be released from her compulsive behavior."

"Her [an anorexic's] natural bent is towards perfection, purification, aesthetics. Her ideal is to remove all the superficial veils until only essence is left."

"The confusion of spirit and body is quite understandable in a culture where spirit is concretized in magnificent skyscrapers, where cathedrals have become museums for tourists, where woman-flesh-devil are associated, and nature is raped for any deplorable excuse. [...] Dieting with fierce will-power is the masculine route; dieting with love of her own nature is the feminine. Her only real hope is to care for her own body and experience it as the vessel through which her Self may be born."

"Serious drinkers are like serious eaters or serious noneaters. They are like serious drug-addicts. Their addiction holds a spell over them which acts as some powerful secret at the center of everything they do. The serious eater listens to others talking of diets, Weight Watchers, exercises; she hears them excitedly comparing pounds lost, pounds gained. She hears them encouraging each other, joking, consoling. She is not one of them. She knows the diets better than they do; she knows Weight Watchers is useless for her; she knows her life is on some Almighty Scale that she has to step on alone. She is in some covenant with food — a covenant which she probably does not understand, but which nevertheless exerts some magical, compelling power over her. She hates it; she loves it; she keeps her covenant silent."

"Their [those with eating disorders'] task is to rescue themselves from a drive that is destroying them. Food embodies the false values that their own bodies refuse to assimilate, by which I mean that their bodies become edemic, bloated, allergic, or resort to vomiting the poison out. The unconscious body, and certainly the conscious body, will not tolerate the negative mother."

"We live in a predominately Christian culture which has lost its living connection to the symbolism of wafer and wine. Lacking spiritual sustenance there is a genuine hunger and thirst. The archetypal structure behind the wafer and wine is slowly giving way to a new configuration, but we are in chaos during the transition. That chaos breeds loneliness, fear and alienation. While that sense of aloneness is hard to endure, it can be of supreme value in the analytic process. The new life always comes out of the dispossessed, as Christ came from the cow stable."

"Living by principles is not living your own life. It is easier to try to be better than you are than to be who you are. If you are trying to live by ideals, you are constantly plagued by a sense of unreality. Somewhere you think there must be some joy; it can't be all "must," "ought to," "have to." And when the crunch comes, you have to recognize the truth: you weren't there. Then the house of cards collapses."

"For the first time in history, men and women are seriously exploring the possibilities of relationships based on separateness rather than togetherness. Instead of clinging to Yahweh, to a rigid set of laws established by a jealous Father-God who will rant in fury if he is disobeyed, they are simply ignoring that ranting, walking away from it, and attempting to put their trust in the irrational. In other words, they are trying to live by the spirit."

"The whole, however, had become more than the sum of its parts. The parts concentrate on the periods in the chrysalis when life as we have known it is over. No longer who we were, we know not who we may become. We experience ourselves as living mush, fearful of the journey down the birth canal. The whole has to do with the process of psychological pregnancy—the virgin forever a virgin, forever pregnant, forever open to possibilities."

"The puella mother who has never taken up residence in her own body, and therefore fears her own chthonic nature, is not going to experience pregnancy as a quiet meditation with her unborn child, nor birth as a joyful bonding experience. Although she may go through the motions of natural childbirth, the psyche/soma split in her is so deep that physical bonding between her and her baby daughter does not take place. Her child lives with a profound sense of despair, a despair which becomes conscious if in later years she does active imagination with her body and releases waves of grief and terror that resonate with the initial, primal rejection. [...] The body that appears in dreams wrapped in fire, encircled by a black snake or encumbered by a fish tail from the waist down, may be holding a death-wish too deep for tears."

"Body work must be approached with the same respect and attentiveness that one gives to dreams. The body has a wisdom of its own. However slowly and circuitously that wisdom manifests, once it is experienced it is a foundation, a basis of knowing that gives confidence and total support to the ego. To reach its wisdom requires absolute concentration: dropping the mind into the body, breathing into whatever is ready to be released, and allowing the process of expression until the negative, dammed energy is out, making room for the positive energy, genuine Light, to flood in."

"For years they have known they are in the presence of something stronger than they—a mystery that renders them powerless. Already constellated is a "god consciousness"—awesome and holy—that has nothing to do with the church or with groups. They know they have to engage in a different arena of reality. That arena is the psyche. By virtue of their temperament, training, consciousness, these women are blessed (or cursed) with an introspective nature, an exploring mind, an invincible curiosity about themselves which connects them to their own inner microscope. For better or for worse, they are convinced that the solution to their lives is in submission not to an externally imposed authority which they cannot understand, but to a truth that abides in themselves."

"In a culture whose media extols thinness as the great panacea that will bring happiness, sexuality, self-respect and social acceptance, they are blind to the insidious lies of the false goddess. Possessed by their own damaged instincts, and ironically driven by the same desire for power that their parents used in raising them, some children wolf down food, or reject it, or vomit it out. Whether that rejection of life is concretized in 200 pounds of armor, or 90 pounds of bone, or vomit in the toilet, the surest way out of the neurosis is to try to understand what food symbolizes in the individual psyche and why the energy is pulled in that direction."

"Although the patriarchal ego prides itself on being reasonable, the twentieth century has been anything but the Age of Reason. In our collective neurosis, we have raped the earth, disrupted the delicate balance of nature, and created phallic missiles of mass destruction."

"She faces us with our greatest fear and by showing us the treasure hidden away within it, she takes us to a place where love is born. Love is the true antithesis of fear. It expands where fear constricts. It embraces where fear repels."

"Metaphorically, the body becomes a machine to be driven or a garbage dump to be avoided. At the same time, the magnificent Mother in whose womb we live is mindlessly poisoned and raped. Surely, our insane denial has to be perceived and acted upon."

"In the Seventies, people discussed the first two paradigms and tried to imagine what the next one would be like. Generally, they agreed that the new paradigm would be neither matriarchal nor patriarchal; it would be androgynous. Rather than tribal or hierachial, the structures of such a society would be ecological."

"This is the point where love becomes possible. We see the other with the eye of the heart, an eye not clouded by fear manifesting as need, jealousy, possessiveness, or manipulation. With the unclouded eye of the heart, we can see the other as other. We can rejoice in the other, challenge the other, and embrace the other without losing our own center or taking anything away from the other. We are always other to each other — soul meeting soul, the body awakened with joy. To love unconditionally requires no contracts, bargains, or agreements. Love exists in the moment-to-moment flux of life."

"Dark underbelly to all of this. Sarajevo, where the [Olympic] Games were held in '84, is under threat. The UN and NATO have ordered the Serbs to have their big guns off the surrounding hills by midnight, February 20. All the love that is being manifested in these Games was once manifested in Sarajevo. The cameras pan across the great stadium — bombed out, an empty shell. [...] Ten years ago, all that glory gleamed in the center of what is now a cemetery for the dead killed in a ferocious attack. What sense does it make?"

"Unable to do anything for a month after the ordeal. No more cancer. No more radiation. My doctor pronounced me clear on March 29. Felt the crucifixion this year, and the tomb, and Easter Sunday. Still not sure who has emerged."

"Dismissing poetry is dismissing the glory of the imagination. Teaching English to adolescents for twenty years gives me the authority to say, "Kill the imagination and you kill the soul. Kill the soul and you're left with a listless, apathetic creature who can become hopeless or brutal or both. Kill the metaphor and you kill desire; the image magnetizes the movement of the energy." I will make this clear as I speak. The tax money that is being withdrawn from arts programs in schools will be spent on prisons."

"Thank you, dear Sophia. From every cell in my broken body, my radiant body, I thank you. I am alive. I am free... to live... to die."