Living with the Primordial Images of the Unconscious Do we ever understand what we think? We only understand that kind of thinking which is a mere equation, from which nothing comes out but what we have put in. That is the working of the intellect. But besides that, there is a thinking in…
The Transformation of Archetypes Another well-known expression of the archetypes is myth and fairy tale. “But here too we are dealing with forms that have received a specific stamp and have been handed down through long periods of time. The term “archetype” thus applies only indirectly to the “representations collectives,” since it designates only those…
The Metaphor of Archetypes and Rivers “Archetypes are like riverbeds which dry up when the water deserts them, but which it can find again at any time. An archetype is like an old watercourse along which the water of life has flowed for centuries, digging a deep channel for itself. The longer it has…
A well-written autobiography that captures a life well-lived, in a Jungian way: From a review by Stephen Morrisey: Robert Johnson’s Balancing Heaven and Earth is a memoir and celebration of the inner life, the world of dreams, active imagination, and mystical vision. Johnson writes, “I sometimes wonder if all suffering is a vision…
Ophic Egg (Jacob Bryant, 1774) The Philosophical Egg “The egg is a germ of life with a lofty symbolical significance. It is not just a cosmogonic symbol — it is also a “philosophical one”. As the former it is the Orphic Egg, the world’s beginning; as the latter, the philosophical egg of the medieval…
Probably none of my empirical concepts has met with so much misunderstanding as the idea of the collective unconscious…. I. Definition The collective unconscious is part of the psyche which can be negatively distinguished from a personal unconscious by the fact that it does not, like the latter, owe its existence to personal experience and…
Carl Jung: Projection of the Collective Unconscious The collective unconscious – so far as we can say anything about it at all – appears to consist of mythological motifs or primordial images, for which reason the myths of all nations are its real exponents. In fact, the whole of mythology could be taken…
Carl Jung: The mandala as a compensation for a disordered psychic state “In such cases it is easy to see how the severe pattern imposed by a circular image of this kind compensates the disorder of the psychic state– namely through a the construction of a central point to which everything is related,…
“The alchemists saw it in the transformation of the chemical substance. So if one of them sought transformation, he discovered it outside in matter, whose transformation cried out to him, as it were, “I am the transformation!” But some were clever enough to know, “It is my own transformation-not a personal transformation, but the transformation…