Jung and Culture
We always find in the patient a conflict which at a certain point is connected with the great problems of society. Hence, when the analysis is pushed to this point, the apparently individual conflict of the patient is revealed as a universal conflict of his environment and epoch. Neurosis is nothing less than an individual attempt, however unsuccessful, to solve a universal problem; indeed it cannot be otherwise, for a general problem, a “question,” is not an ens per se [thing in itself], but exists only in the hearts of individuals.
“New Paths in Psychology” (1912), CW 7, § 438.
The machines which we have invented, for instance, are now our masters. Machines are running away with us, they are demons; they are like those huge old saurians that existed when man was a sort of lizard-monkey and deadly afraid of their hooting and tooting. By his will man has invented a Mesozoic world again, monsters that crush thousands by their voice and their weight. The enormous machines in factories, the enormous steamers and trains and automobiles, all that has become so overwhelming that man is the mere victim of it. Look at the city of New York. Nobody can tell me that man feels like a king in New York. He is just an ant on an ant heap and doesn’t count at all, he is superfluous there, the ant heap is the thing that counts. It is a town which should be inhabited by giants; then I would believe that those buildings belonged to them. A big city is like a holocaust of humanity, as Zola expressed it. Man has built his own funeral pyre and it is destroying him, and so our whole world is being destroyed. It has taken the bread away from millions, and production is still going on like mad; that is really at the bottom of the actual crisis.
Visions: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1930–1934, Vol. I (9 December 1931), p. 502.
Nowadays we can see as never before that the peril which threatens all of us comes not from nature, but from man, from the psyches of the individual and the mass. The psychic aberration of man is the danger. Everything depends upon whether or not our psyche functions properly. If certain persons lose their head nowadays, a hydrogen bomb will go off.
Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962), p. 132.
We are awakening a little to the feeling that something is wrong in the world, that our modern prejudice of overestimating the importance of the intellect and the conscious mind might be false. We want simplicity. We are suffering, in our cities, from a need of simple things. We would like to see our great railroad terminals deserted, the streets deserted, a great peace descend upon us.
“Americans Must Say ‘No’” (1939), C. G. Jung Speaking, p. 49.
The power of inertia in man is far stronger than his spirit of enterprise; from time to time somebody has a fit of enterprise and does something, but the world in general exists by inertia. So the primordial man personifies the enormous power of inertia in the first place, yet within that is a peculiar kind of longing which causes fits of enterprise at times, bringing about greater or smaller disturbances, and it also causes a certain movement which one prefers to call development or evolution. But it is very questionable whether there is any such thing as improvement in the world; we can only say there is movement, change. Sometimes there is complication, sometimes things get simpler, but whether it is really a movement for the better is most questionable. For the basic predisposition in the human being is that tremendous power of inertia, and the spirit within that inertia is more irrational and fitful; so it is exceedingly difficult to form a definite judgment about it.
Visions: Notes from the Seminar Given in 1930–1934, Vol. II (7 June 1933), p. 1034.
All human control comes to an end when the individual is caught in a mass movement. Then the archetypes begin to function, as happens also in the lives of individuals when they are confronted with situations that cannot be dealt with in any of the familiar ways.
“Wotan” (1936), CW 10, § 395.
It is obvious that a social group consisting of stunted individuals cannot be a healthy and viable institution; only a society that can preserve its internal cohesion and collective values, while at the same time granting the individual the greatest possible freedom, has any prospect of enduring vitality. As the individual is not just a single, separate being, but by his very existence presupposes a collective relationship, it follows that the process of individuation must lead to more intense and broader collective relationships and not to isolation.
Psychological Types (1921), CW 6, § 758.
[I] feel and know myself to be one of many, and what moves the many moves me. In our strength we are independent and isolated, are masters of our own fate; in our weakness we are dependent and bound, and become unwilling instruments of fate, for here it is not the individual will that counts but the will of the species.
“Woman in Europe” (1927), CW 10, § 261.
One of the most baffling facts which has been revealed through analysis, is that when you analyze a person, you have not only that individual on your hands, but it is as if you were analyzing a whole group. It has magic effects in the distance, even in people who are not immediately related to the patient.
Visions: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1930–1934, Vol. I (25 November 1931), p. 475.
The vast majority of people are quite incapable of putting themselves individually into the mind of another. This is indeed a singularly rare art, and, truth to tell, it does not take us very far. Even the man whom we think we know best and who assures us himself that we understand him through and through is at bottom a stranger to us. He is different. The most we can do, and the best, is to have at least some inkling of his otherness, to respect it, and to guard against the outrageous stupidity of wishing to interpret it.
The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious (1916/1928), CW 7, § 363.
The sole and natural carrier of life is the individual, and that is so throughout nature.
“Psychotherapy Today” (1945), CW 16, § 224.
Through the shifting of interest from the inner to the outer world our knowledge of nature was increased a thousandfold in comparison with earlier ages, but knowledge and experience of the inner world were correspondingly reduced. The religious interest, which ought normally to be the greatest and most decisive factor, turned away from the inner world, and great figures of dogma dwindled to strange and incomprehensible vestiges, a prey to every sort of criticism.
Symbols of Transformation (1912/1952), CW 5, § 113.
In the last resort it is neither the “eighty-million-strong-nation” nor the State that feels peace and happiness, but the individual. Nobody can ever get round the simple computation that a million noughts in a row do not add up to one, just as the loudest talk can never abolish the simple psychological fact that the larger the mass the more nugatory is the individual.
Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955–56), CW 14, § 196.
The great events of world history are, at bottom, profoundly unimportant. In the last analysis, the essential thing is the life of the individual. This alone makes history, here alone do the great transformations first take place, and the whole future, the whole history of the world, ultimately spring as a gigantic summation from these hidden sources in individuals. In our most private and most subjective lives we are not only the passive witnesses of our age, and its sufferers, but also its makers.
“The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man” (1933/1934), CW 10, § 315.
Yet the real carrier of life is the individual. He alone feels happiness, he alone has virtue and responsibility and any ethics whatsoever. The masses and the state have nothing of the kind. Only man as an individual being lives; the state is just a system, a mere machine for sorting and tabulating the masses. Anyone, therefore, who thinks in terms of men minus the individual, in huge numbers, atomizes himself and becomes a thief and a robber to himself. He is infected with the leprosy of collective thinking and has become an inmate of that insalubrious stud-farm called the totalitarian State. Our time contains and produces more than enough of that “crude sulphur” which with “arsenical malignity” prevents man from discovering his true self.
Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955–56), CW 14, § 194.
Collective thinking and feeling and collective effort are far less of a strain than individual functioning and effort; hence there is always a great temptation to allow collective functioning to take the place of individual differentiation of the personality.
The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious (1928), CW 7, § 239.
But the principal and indeed the only thing that is wrong with the world is man.
“After the Catastrophe” (1945), CW 10, § 441.
Instead of being at the mercy of wild beasts, earthquakes, landslides, and inundations, modern man is battered by the elemental forces of his own psyche. This is the World Power that vastly exceeds all other powers on earth. The Age of Enlightenment, which stripped nature and human institutions of gods, overlooked the God of Terror who dwells in the human soul.
“The Development of Personality” (1934), CW 17, § 302.
No one can claim to be immune to the spirit of his own epoch or to possess anything like a complete knowledge of it. Regardless of our conscious convictions, we are all without exception, in so far as we are particles in the mass, gnawed at and undermined by the spirit that runs through the masses. Our freedom extends only as far as our consciousness reaches.
“Paracelsus as a Spiritual Phenomenon” (1942), CW 13, § 153.
If man cannot exist without society, neither can he exist without oxygen, water, albumen, fat, and so forth. Like these, society is one of the necessary conditions of his existence. It would be ludicrous to maintain that man lives in order to breathe air. It is equally ludicrous to maintain that the individual exists for society. “Society” is nothing more than a term, a concept for the symbiosis of a group of human beings. A concept is not a carrier of life. The sole and natural carrier of life is the individual, and that is so throughout nature.
“Psychotherapy Today” (1945), CW 16, § 224.
[I]f the individual is not truly regenerated in spirit, society cannot be either, for society is the sum total of individuals in need of redemption.
The Undiscovered Self (1957), CW 10, § 536.
As individuals we are not completely unique, but are like all other men. Hence a dream with a collective meaning is valid in the first place for the dreamer, but it expresses at the same time the fact that his momentary problem is also the problem of other people. This is often of great practical importance, for there are countless people who are inwardly cut off from humanity and oppressed by the thought that nobody else has their problems. Or else they are those all-too-modest souls who, feeling themselves nonentities, have kept their claim to social recognition on too low a level. Moreover, every individual problem is somehow connected with the problem of the age, so that practically every subjective difficulty has to be viewed from the standpoint of the human situation as a whole. But this is permissible only when the dream really is a mythological one and makes use of collective symbols.
“The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man” (1933/1934), CW 10, § 323.
Our age has shifted all emphasis to the here and now, and thus brought about a daemonization of man and his world. The phenomenon of dictators and all the misery they have wrought springs from the fact that man has been robbed of transcendence by the shortsightedness of the super-intellectuals. Like them, he has fallen a victim to unconsciousness. But man’s task is the exact opposite: to become conscious of the contents that press upward from the unconscious. Neither should he persist in his unconsciousness, nor remain identical with the unconscious elements of his being, thus evading his destiny, which is to create more and more consciousness. As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being. It may even be assumed that just as the unconscious affects us, so the increase in our consciousness affects the unconscious.
Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962), p. 326.
Every advance, every conceptual achievement of mankind, has been connected with an advance in self-awareness; man differentiated himself from the object and faced Nature as something distinct from her. Any reorientation of psychological attitude will have to follow the same road.
“General Aspects of Dream Psychology” (1916/1928/1948), CW 8, § 523.
On the surface it may look as if the war had no effect at all, as if it had taught man nothing. Governments go on playing the same tricks as before. The world is spending two and a half millions more in preparation than before the war. Human psychology today is as if people had learned absolutely nothing. German psychology remains the same. And look at Italy! It is as if she had not lost half a million young men. They are propagating like rabbits down there, in preparation. It is the psychology of despair. That is what Mussolini is doing. Everywhere it looks as if nothing had been learned. Nevertheless such a thing cannot happen without affecting the processes of our psychology; it has left deep marks, but we are not psychological enough to link up our own individual difficulties with it. The war accounts for the disorientation of the individual in our time. The religious and moral and philosophical confusion, even the confusion in our art, is due to the World War.
Visions: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1930–1934, Vol. I (12 November 1930), p. 77.
When Nietzsche said “God is dead,” he uttered a truth which is valid for the greater part of Europe. People were influenced by it not because he said so, but because it stated a widespread psychological fact. The consequences were not long delayed: after the fog of–isms, the catastrophe. Nobody thought of drawing the slightest conclusions from Nietzsche’s pronouncement. Yet it has, for some ears, the same eerie sound as that ancient cry which came echoing over the sea to mark the end of the nature gods: “Great Pan is dead.”
Psychology and Religion (1938/1940), CW 11, § 145.
The coming new age will be as vastly different from ours as the world of the 19th century was from that of the 20th with its atomic physics and its psychology of the unconscious. Never before has mankind been torn into two halves, and never before was the power of absolute destruction given into the hand of man himself. It is a “godlike” power that has fallen into human hands.
Letter to Pater Lucas Menz, O.S.B., 22 February 1955, Letters, Vol. II, p. 225.
The great work of art is a product of the time, of the whole world in which the artist is living, and of the millions of people who surround him, and of the thousands of currents of thought and the myriad streams of activity which flow around him.
“Diagnosing the Dictators” (1938), C. G. Jung Speaking, p. 128.
Art is just a particular way of decorating the nest in which you lay your eggs. Well, the biological point of view is that you eat and drink, you propagate your species, you sleep, and you die; that is nature, biological life. And in contrast to nature, or beyond nature is the cultural point of view, our civilization. That is the particular achievement of man, no animal ever dreamt of culture. It is a condition by itself, a creation due to the increase of human consciousness, and this has produced a new and different world. The surface of the world has changed. One sees water where water has never been and should not be, a canal that goes even over the hills, against all those laws of nature. And one sees straight roads, straight lines on the earth, which have never been seen before; the only straight line that ever existed in the earth was the furrow of a meteor.
Visions: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1930–1934, Vol. II (22 February 1933), pp. 913–14.
The criterion of art is that it grips you.
Introduction to Jungian Psychology: Notes of the Seminar on Analytical Psychology Given in 1925, p. 57.
Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purposes through him. As a human being he may have moods and a will and personal aims, but as an artist he is “man” in a higher sense—he is “collective man,” a vehicle and moulder of the unconscious psychic life of mankind. That is his office, and it is some times so heavy a burden that he is fated to sacrifice happiness and everything that makes life worth living for the ordinary human being.
“Psychology and Literature” (1930/1950), CW 15, § 157.
The true genius nearly always intrudes and disturbs. He speaks to a temporal world out of a world eternal. He says the wrong things at the right time. Eternal truths are never true at any given moment in history. The process of transformation has to make a halt in order to digest and assimilate the utterly impractical things that the genius has produced from the storehouse of eternity. Yet the genius is the healer of his time, because anything he reveals of eternal truth is healing.
“What India Can Teach Us” (1939), CW 10, § 1004.
There can be no doubt that the unconscious comes to the surface in modern art and with its dynamism destroys the orderliness that is characteristic of consciousness. This process is a phenomenon that can be observed in more or less developed form in all epochs, as for instance under primitive conditions where the habitual way of life, regulated by strict laws, is suddenly disrupted, either by outbreaks of panic coupled by wild lawlessness at solar and lunar eclipses, or in the form of religious license as in the Dionysian orgies, or during the Middle Ages in the monasteries with the reversal of the hierarchical order, and today at carnival time. These episodic or regular disruptions of the accustomed order should be regarded as psychohygienic measures since they give vent from time to time to the suppressed forces of chaos.
Letter to Horst Scharschuch, 1 September 1952, Letters, Vol. II, p. 81.
It makes no difference whether the artist knows that his work is generated, grows and matures within him, or whether he imagines that it is his own invention. In reality it grows out of him as a child its mother.
“Psychology and Literature” (1930/1950), CW 15, § 159.
It seems to me that a characteristic thing of modern art is that it no longer concerns itself with being merely beautiful. It has passed through and beyond mere conventional beauty, and in this it reflects our changed views of life. Before the war we lived in a beautiful world—or perhaps I would better say in a world that was merely sweet and pretty, a world of sticky sentimentality in which nothing brutal nor ugly was given place. Modern art cares nothing for prettiness; in fact, it would rather have the ugly than the pretty; and sometimes, I think, it seeks a new realization of beauty beyond the pale of what was formerly considered possible—in ugliness itself, even.
Introduction to Jungian Psychology: Notes of the Seminar on Analytical Psychology Given in 1925, p. 58.
The artist’s relative lack of adaptation turns out to his advantage; it enables him to follow his own yearnings far from the beaten path, and to discover what it is that would meet the unconscious needs of his age. Thus, just as the one-sidedness of the individual’s conscious attitude is corrected by reactions from the unconscious, so art represents a process of self-regulation in the life of nations and epochs.
“On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry” (1922), CW 15, § 131.
Attainment of consciousness is culture in the broadest sense, and self-knowledge is therefore the heart and essence of this process.
Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962), pp. 324–25.