Psychotherapist Quotes

“The judgment of the intellect is, at best, only the half of truth.”

“The creative process, so far as we are able to follow it at all, consists in the unconscious activation of an archetypal image and elaborating and shaping the image into the finished work. By giving it shape, the artist translates it into the language of the present and so makes it possible for us to find our way back to the deepest springs of life.”

“Hitler's unconscious seems to be female.”

“In the second half of life the necessity is imposed of recognizing no longer the validity of our former ideals but of their contraries. Of perceiving the error in what was previously our conviction, of sensing the untruth in what was our truth, and of weighing the degree of opposition, and even of hostility, in what we took to be love.”

“In each of us there is another whom we do not know.”

“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.”

“To be normal is the ultimate aim of the unsuccessful.”

“The most intense conflicts, if overcome, leave behind a sense of security and calm which is not easily disturbed, or else a brokenness that can hardly be healed. Conversely, it is just these intense conflicts and their conflagration which are needed in order to produce valuable and lasting results.”

“I am astonished, disappointed, pleased with myself. I am distressed, depressed, rapturous. I am all these things at once and cannot add up the sum.”

“You are what you do, not what you say you'll do.”

“Instinct is like Nature herself - prodigiously conservative, and yet transcending her own historical conditions in her acts of creation.”

“People cannot stand too much Reality.”

“I would rather be whole than good.”

“Psychological type is nothing static - it changes in the course of life.”

“I must also have a dark side if I am to be whole.”

“The maintenance of secrets acts like a psychic poison which alienates the possessor from the community.”

“It is really the mistake of our age. We think it is enough to discover new things, but we don't realize that knowing more demands a cor­responding development of morality.”

“To ask the right question is already half the solution of a problem.”

“The term "self" seems a suitable one for the unconscious substrate whose actual exponent in consciousness is the ego. The ego stands to the self as the moved to the mover, or as object to subject, because the determining factors that radiate outward from the self surround the ego on all sides and are therefore supraordinate to it. The self, like the unconscious, as an a priori existent out of which the ego evolves. It is, so to speak, an unconscious prefiguration of the ego. It is not I who create myself; rather, I happen to myself.”

“In my case Pilgrim's Progress consisted in my having to climb down a thousand ladders until I could reach out my hand to the little clod of earth that I am.”

“What you resist persist.”

“Our whole educational problem suffers from a one-sided approach to the child who is to be educated, and from an equally one-sided lack of emphasis on the uneducatedness of the educator.”

“Conflict exists strictly as an opportunity to raise our consciousness.”

“Where love stops, power begins, and violence, and terror”

“The unconscious is not a demoniacal monster, but a natural entity which, as far as moral sense, aesthetic taste, and intellectual judgment go, is completely neutral.It only becomes dangerous when our conscious attitude to it is hopelessly wrong. To the degree that we repress it, its danger increases.”