Quotations

Top Ten Tidbits About Carl Jung

by Stephen Parker, Ph.D (Article Selection and Commentary) on December 6, 2010

So much on the Internet is ” Top Ten Whatevers” etc.


This Jungcurrents blog is even a “Top Ten Psychoanalytic Blog.“  Seriously. There is even a badge to prove it!  (“Badges, we don’t need to stinking badges.”)


Thought this blog should have some Top Ten Stuff also.

1) Carl was probably a third generation bastard: his grandfather was allegedly the illegitimate son of Goethe.

2) Carl’s first dream was of an “enormous turd crashing through a shiny cathedral roof.”

3) Carl avoided school for six months when he was twelve by fainting when he was supposed to go to school or do his homework.

4) Carl married to the second richest woman in Switzerland

5) Freud fainted in 1912 and Carl carried him to a couch.

6) Carl recommended spirituality as a cure for alcoholism and had an indirect role in the creation of Alcoholics Anonymous.

7) Carl was recruited by John Foster Dulles to be a spy in WWII. (He was #488.)


8) Carl was one of the people on the cover of the Beatles Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

9) The cover of The Police’s final album Synchronicity which was named after Carl Jung’s theory.

10) Carl’s alleged last words were, “Let’s have a really good red wine tonight.”

“”

Mircea Eliade and Carl Jung

by Stephen Parker, Ph.D (Article Selection and Commentary) on October 25, 2010

The decisive question for man is: Is he related to something infinite or not? That is the telling question of his life.

Carl Jung


The history of religions reaches down and makes contact with that which is essentially human: the relation of man to the sacred. The history of religions can play an extremely important role in the crisis we are living through. The crises of modern man are to a large extent religious ones, insofar as they are an awakening of his awareness to an absence of meaning .


Mircea Eliade


Eliade and Jung were two of the most influential intellects in the last hundred years; both were deeply focused on the experience of the sacred, of the Self.


Jung’s background was much more clinical (and necessarily, practical); Eliade’s background was much more academic (and wide-ranging). It is refreshing to read of Eliade’s description of Jung:


In his journal Eliade recounts his first meeting with Jung at a dinner in an Ascona restaurant [1950]:


...He is a captivating old gentleman, utterly without conceit, who is as happy to talk as he is to listen.


What could I write down here first of this long conversation? Perhaps his bitter reproaches of‘official science’?


In university circles he is not taken seriously.‘Scholars have no curiosity,’ he says with Anatole France.‘Professors are satisfied with recapitulating what they learned in their youth and what does not cause any trouble...


(Jung was born in 1875; Eliade was born in 1907. )

Quotation: Journal 1, August 23, 1950, quoted in G. Wehr, Jung, A Biography (Boston 1988),

Source

Jung: Concerning Ourselves With Dreams

by Stephen Parker, Ph.D (Article Selection and Commentary) on September 9, 2010

To concern ourselves with dreams is a way of reflecting on ourselves-a way of self-reflection. It is not our ego-consciousness reflecting on itself; rather, it turns its attention to the objective actuality of the dream as a communication or message from the unconscious, unitary soul of humanity. It reflects not on the ego but on the self; it recollects that strange self, alien to the ego, which was ours from the beginning, the trunk from which the ego grew. It is alien to us because we have estranged ourselves from it through the aberrations of the conscious mind.

“The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man” (1933). In CW 10: Civilization in Transition. pg. 318

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