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. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 145.
Jung said that people often confused reality with psychological reality. When Nietzsche did not grasp the psychological reality of Zarathustra, then he is Zarathustra and is mad. ~Carl Jung, Jung My Mother and I, Page 88
It is of course a fundamental mistake to imagine that when we see the non-value in a value or the untruth in a truth, the value or the truth ceases to exist. It has only become relative. Everything human is relative, because everything rests on an inner polarity; for everything is a phenomenon of energy. Energy necessarily depends on a preexisting polarity, without which there could be no energy. There must always be high and low, hot and cold, etc., so that the equilibrating process—which is energy—can take place. Therefore the tendency to deny all previous values in favour of their opposites is just as much of an exaggeration as the earlier one-sidedness. And in so far as it is a question of rejecting universally accepted and indubitable values, the result is a fatal loss. One who acts in this wav empties himself out with his values, as Nietzsche has already said. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 115
The discovery of the “higher” man, and also the “ugliest” man, expresses the regulating influence [of the unconscious]. For the “higher” men want to drag Zarathustra down to the collective sphere of average humanity as it always has been. While the “ugliest” man is actually the personification of the counteraction. But the roaring lion of Zarathustra’s moral conviction forces all these influences, above all the feeling of pity, back again into the cave of the unconscious. Thus the regulating influence is suppressed, but not the secret counteraction of the unconscious, which from now on becomes clearly noticeable in Nietzsche’s writings. First he [Nietzsche] seeks his adversary in Wagner, whom he cannot forgive for Parsifal, but soon his whole wrath turns against Christianity and in particular against St. Paul, who in some ways suffered a fate similar to Nietzsche’s. As is well known, Nietzsche’s psychosis first produced an identification with the “Crucified Christ” and then with the dismembered Dionysus. With this catastrophe the counteraction at last broke through to the surface. ~Carl Jung, CW 8 Para162
Until recently psychology was a special branch of philosophy, but now we are coming to something which Nietzsche foresaw—the rise of psychology in its own right, so much so that it is even threatening to swallow philosophy. The inner resemblance between the two disciplines consists in this, that both are systems of opinion about objects which cannot be fully experienced and therefore cannot be adequately comprehended by a purely empirical approach. Both fields of study thus encourage speculation, with the result that opinions are formed in such variety and profusion that many heavy volumes are needed to contain them all. Neither discipline can do without the other, and the one invariably furnishes the unspoken—and generally unconscious—assumptions of the other. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 659
When a summit of life is reached, when the bud unfolds and from the lesser the greater emerges, then, as Nietzsche says, “One becomes Two,” and the greater figure, which one always was but which remained invisible, appears to the lesser personality with the force of a revelation. He who is truly and hopelessly little will always drag the revelation of the greater down to the level of his littleness and will never understand that the day of judgment for his littleness has dawned. But the man who is inwardly great will know that the long-expected friend of his soul, the immortal one, has now really come, “to lead captivity captive” [Ephesians 4:8]; that is, to seize hold of him by whom this immortal had always been confined and held prisoner, and to make his life flow into that greater life—a moment of deadliest peril! ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 217
One might almost say that the dream goes on with the “explanation” of what is happening in the square space. Animals are to be changed into men; a “shapeless life-mass” is to be turned into a transfigured (illuminated) human head by magic contact with a reptile. The animal lump or life-mass stands for the mass of the inherited unconscious which is to be united with consciousness. This is brought about by the ceremonial use of a reptile, presumably a snake. The idea of transformation and renewal by means of a serpent is a well-substantiated archetype. It is the healing serpent, representing the god. It is reported of the mysteries of Sabazius:(A golden snake is let down into the lap of the initiated and taken away again from the lower parts). Among the Ophites, Christ was the serpent. Probably the most significant development of serpent symbolism as regards renewal of personality is to be found in Kundalini yoga. The shepherd’s experience with the snake in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra would accordingly be a fatal omen (and not the only one of its kind the prophecy at the death of the rope-dancer) ~Carl Jung, CW 12 Para 184
And what kind of an answer did the next generation give to the individualism of Nietzsche’s superman? It answered with a collectivism, a mass organization, a herding together of the mob, tam ethice quarn physice, that made everything that went before look like a bad joke. Suffocation of the personality and an impotent Christianity that may well have received its death-wound—such is the unadorned balance-sheet of our time. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 559
Man takes the place of the Creator. Medieval alchemy prepared the way for the greatest intervention in the divine world order that man has ever attempted: alchemy was the dawn of the scientific age, when the daemon of the scientific spirit compelled the forces of nature to serve man to an extent that had never been known before. It was from the spirit of alchemy that Goethe wrought the figure of the “superman” Faust, and this superman led Nietzsche’s Zarathustra to declare that God was dead and to proclaim the will to give birth to the superman, to “create a god for yourself out of your seven devils” ~Carl Jung, CW 13 ¶ 163
All this happens because the anima contains the secret of the precious Stone, for, as Nietzsche says, “all joy wants eternity.” Thus the legendary Ostanes, speaking of the secret of the “philosophy,” says to his pupil Cleopatra: “In you is hidden the whole terrible and marvellous secret. Make known to us how the highest descends to the lowest, and how the lowest ascends to the highest, and how the midmost draws near to the highest, and is made one with it.” This “midmost” is the Stone, the mediator which unites the opposites. Such sayings have no meaning unless they are understood in a profoundly psychological sense ~Carl Jung, CW 13 ¶ 131
It was from the spirit of alchemy that Goethe wrought the figure of the “superman” Faust, and this superman led Nietzsche’s Zarathustra to declare that God was dead and to proclaim the will to give birth to the superman, to “create a god for yourself out of your seven devils.” ~Carl Jung, CW 13, Para 163.
Medieval alchemy prepared the way for the greatest intervention in the divine world order that man has ever attempted alchemy was the dawn of the scientific age, when the daemon of the scientific spirit compelled the forces of nature to serve man to an extent that had never been known before. It was from the spirit of alchemy that Goethe wrought the figure of the “superman” Faust, and this superman led Nietzsche’s Zarathustra to declare that God was dead and to proclaim the will to give birth to the superman, to “create a god for yourself out of your seven devils.” Here we find the true roots, the preparatory processes deep in the psyche, which unleashed the forces at work in the world today. Science and technology have indeed conquered the world, but whether the psyche has gained anything is another matter. ~Carl Jung, CW 13, Para 163
The historical conditions which preceded Freud were such that they made a phenomenon like himself necessary, and it is precisely the fundamental tenet of his teaching namely, the repression of sexuality that is most clearly conditioned in this historical sense. Like his greater contemporary Nietzsche, Freud stands at the end of the Victorian era, which was never given such an appropriate name on the Continent despite the fact that it was just as characteristic of the Germanic and Protestant countries as of the Anglo-Saxon. The Victorian era was an age of repression, of a convulsive attempt to keep anaemic ideals artificially alive in a framework of bourgeois respectability by constant moralizings. These ideals were the last offshoots of the collective religious ideas of the Middle Ages, and shortly before had been severely shaken by the French Enlightenment and the ensuing revolution. Hand in hand with this, ancient truths in the political field had become hollow and threatened to collapse. It was still too soon for the final overthrow, and consequently all through the nineteenth century frantic efforts were made to prevent the Christian Middle Ages from disappearing altogether. Political revolutions were stamped out, experiments in moral freedom were thwarted by middle-class public opinion, and the critical philosophy of the late eighteenth century reached its end in a renewed, systematic attempt to capture the world in a unified network of thought on the medieval model. But in the course of the nineteenth century, enlightenment slowly broke through, particularly in the form of scientific materialism and rationalism. ~Carl Jung, CW 15 Para 45
This conception of man, considered historically, is a reaction against the Victorian tendency to see everything in a rosy light and yet to describe everything sub rosa. It was an age of mental “pussyfooting” that finally gave birth to Nietzsche, who was driven to philosophize with a hammer. So it is only logical that ethical motives as determining factors in human life do not figure in Freud’s teaching. He sees them in terms of conventional morality, which he justifiably supposes would not have existed in this form, or not have existed at all, if one or two bad-tempered patriarchs had not invented such precepts to protect themselves from the distressing consequences of their impotence. Since then these precepts have unfortunately gone on existing in the super-ego of every individual. This grotesquely depreciative view is a just punishment for the historical fact that the ethics of the Victorian age were nothing but conventional morality, the creation of curmudgeonly praeceptores mundi. ~Carl Jung, CW 15 Para 48
Like Nietzsche, like the Great War, and like James Joyce, his literary counterpart, Freud is an answer to the sickness of the nineteenth century. That is indeed his chief significance. For those with a forward-looking view he offers no constructive plan, because not even with the boldest effort or the strongest will would it ever be possible to act out in real life all the repressed incest-wishes and other incompatibilities in the human psyche. ~Carl Jung, CW 15 Para 52
Freud was first and foremost a “nerve specialist” in the strictest sense of this word, and in every respect he always remained one. By training he was no psychiatrist, no psychologist, and no philosopher. In philosophy he lacked even the most rudimentary elements of education. He once assured me personally that it ha
d never occurred to him to read Nietzsche. This fact is of importance in understanding Freud’s peculiar views, which are distinguished by an apparently total lack of any philosophical premises. His theories bear the unmistakable stamp of the doctor’s consulting-room. His constant point of departure is the neurotically degenerate psyche, unfolding its secrets with a mixture of reluctance and ill-concealed enjoyment under the critical eye of the doctor. ~Carl Jung, CW 15 Para 61
Freud was a great destroyer, but the turn of the century offered so many opportunities for debunking that even Nietzsche was not enough. Freud completed the task, very thoroughly indeed. He aroused a wholesome mistrust in people and thereby sharpened their sense of real values. All that gush about man’s innate goodness, which had addled so many brains after the dogma of original sin was no longer understood, was blown to the winds by Freud, and the little that remains will, let us hope, be driven out for good and all by the barbarism of the twentieth century. ~Carl Jung, CW 15 Para 69
Freud was a great destroyer, but the turn of the century offered so many opportunities for debunking that even Nietzsche was not enough. Freud completed the task, very thoroughly indeed. He aroused a wholesome mistrust in people and thereby sharpened their sense of real values. All that gush about man’s innate goodness, which had addled so many brains after the dogma of original sin was no longer understood, was blown to the winds by Freud, and the little that remains will, let us hope, be driven out for good and all by the barbarism of the twentieth century. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 69
Nothing would be more mistaken than to suppose that the poet is working with second-hand material. On the contrary, the primordial experience is the source of his creativeness, but it is so dark and amorphous that it requires the related mythological imagery to give it form. In itself it is wordless and imageless, for it is a vision seen “as in a glass, darkly.” It is nothing but a tremendous intuition striving for expression. It is like a whirlwind that seizes everything within reach and assumes visible form as it swirls upward. Since the expression can never match the richness of the vision and can never exhaust its possibilities, the poet must have at his disposal a huge store of material if he is to communicate even a fraction of what he has glimpsed and must make use of difficult and contradictory images in order to express the strange paradoxes of his vision. Dante decks out his experience in all the imagery of heaven, purgatory, and hell; Goethe brings in the Blocksberg and the Greek underworld; Wagner needs the whole corpus of Nordic myth, including the Parsifal saga; Nietzsche resorts to the hieratic style of the bard and legendary seer; Blake presses into his service the phantasmagoric world of India, the Old Testament, and the Apocalypse; and Spitteler borrows old names for the new figures that pour in alarming profusion from his muse’s cornucopia. Nothing is missing in the whole gamut that ranges from the ineffably sublime to the perversely grotesque. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 151
One’s contemporaries are always dense and never understand that what appears to them unseemly ebullience comes less from personal temperament than from the still unknown wellsprings of a new age. How people looked askance at Nietzsche’s volcanic emotion, and how long he will be spoken of in times to come! Even Paracelsus has now been gratefully disinterred after four hundred years in an attempt to resuscitate him in modern dress. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 4
I saw Nietzsche’s “blond beast” looming up, with all that it implies. I felt sure that Christianity would be challenged and that the Jews would be taken to account. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para
When Nietzsche wrote his prophetic masterpiece, Thus Spake Zarathustra, he certainly had not the faintest notion that the superman he had created out of his personal misery and inefficiency would become a prophetic anticipation of a Fuhrer or Duce. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1333
Hypertrophy of intellectual intuition” is a diagnosis I would apply also to Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and many others. I myself am one-sided in this respect. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 64
The second attempt, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, remained a meteor that never reached the earth, as the coniunctio oppositorum had not and could not have taken place. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 453.
The philosophical influence that has prevailed in my education dates from Plato, Kant, Schopenhauer, Ed. v. Hartmann and Nietzsche. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 500.
All in all Nietzsche was to me the only man of that time who gave some adequate answers to certain urgent questions which then were more felt than thought. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 622.
Aside from normal forgetting several cases that involve the “forgetting” of disagreeable memories that one is only too ready to lose. As Nietzsche remarked, where pride is insistent enough, memory prefers to give way. Thus, among the lost memories, we encounter not a few that owe their subliminal state to their disagreeable and incompatible nature. The psychologist calls these repressed contents. ~Carl Jung; Man and His symbols; Page 22.
Inasmuch as you say these creative forces are in Nietzsche or in me or anywhere else, you cause an inflation, because man does not possess creative powers, he is possessed by them. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 57.
There is little difference between Nietzsche’s life and the life of a saint; he forsook his ordinary life and went into the woods. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 57
For the archetype is nothing human; no archetype is properly human. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1343.
Nietzsche’s idea is that out of that lack of order, a dancing star should be born. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 106
We have become participants in the divine nature. We are the vessel…of the deity suffering in the body of the “slave” (Phil. 2:5). ~ ~Carl Jung, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, 336, 409, Letters II, 314ff.
Individuation and individual existence are indispensable for the transformation of God. Human consciousness is the only seeing eye of the Deity. ~Carl Jung, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, 336, 409, Letters II, 314ff.
He [Nietzsche] expressed it as “God is dead” and he did not realise that in saying this he was still standing within the dogma, for Christ’s death is one of the secret mysteries of Christianity. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 197.
Schopenhauer was primarily a thinker and secondarily an intuitive, whereas the quantities were reversed in Nietzsche. ~Carl Jung, Lecture IV, 18May1934, Page 105.
Nietzsche had lost the ground under his feet because he possessed nothing more than the inner world of his thoughts which incidentally possessed him more than he it. ~Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections, Page 189
It [Faust] is a link in the Aurea Catena which has existed from the beginnings of philosophical alchemy and Gnosticism down to Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. ~Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections, Page 189
Nietzsche had lost the ground under his feet because he possessed nothing more than the inner world of his thoughts which incidentally possessed him more than he it. ~Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections, Page 189
It [Faust] is a link in the Aurea Catena which has existed from the beginnings of philosophical alchemy and Gnosticism down to Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. ~Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections, Page 189
Freud himself had told me that he had never read Nietzsche; now I saw Freud’s psychology as, so to speak, an adroit move on the part of intellectual history, compensating for Nietzsche’s deification of the power principle. ~Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections, Page 153
Nietzsche, helpless in the hands of his destiny, had to create a “superman” for himself. Freud, I concluded, must himself be so profoundly affected by the power of Eros that he actually wished to elevate it into a dogma aere perennius like a religious numen. ~Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections, Page 153-154
Of course, any creation is a creations beyond oneself, because one is already in existence, and if anything is created it must be beyond. ~Carl Jung, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, Page 49.
I knew the work of Nietzsche very well. He had been a professor at Basel University, and the air was full of talk about Nietzsche; so naturally I had studied his works. And from this I saw an entirely different psychology, which was also psychology—a perfectly competent psychology, but built upon the power drive. ~Carl Jung, Conversations [Evans], Page 12.
“‘You should make friends again with the nearest things,’ said Nietzsche and didn’t. He was wafted away on the great wind, drunk with his own words. Even things, thanks to the meaning immanent in them, answer us as we address them. They are socially minded and afford us delightful company in hours and days of loneliness.” ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 110.
But my family and the knowledge: I have a medical diploma from a Swiss university, I must help my patients, I have a wife and five children, I live at 228 Seestrasse in Kusnacht-these were actualities which made demands upon me and proved to me again and again that I really existed, that I was not a blank page whirling about in the winds of the spirit, like Nietzsche. Nietzsche had lost the ground under his feet because he possessed nothing more than the inner world of his thoughts-which incidentally possessed him more than he it. He was uprooted and hovered above the earth, and therefore he succumbed to exaggeration and irreality. For me, such irreality was the quintessence of horror, for I aimed, after all, at this world and this life. ~Carl Jung, “Jung” by Gerhard Wehr, Page 174
He (Nietzsche) was sincere, which cannot be said of so many academic teachers to whom career and vanity mean infinitely more than the truth. ~Carl Jung, Jung by Gerhard Wehr, Page 56
Her plans for an enclosed garden at the Mellon house-something not only in the mind but in earth and stone-gave him a feeling of peace and restfulness, something to look forward to beyond the abomination of war and Germany’s Nietzschean insanity. ~William Schoenl – C.G. Jung-His Friendships with Mary Mellon & J.B. Priestley, Page 10
Onkel [Jung] said that he first read Nietzsche in the Canton du Valais and was first impressed with its beauty; then he saw it was an amazing tragedy: that it was a slow approach to the world of the shadow. ~Katy Cabot, Jung My Mother and I, Page 187
Nietzsche thought he was writing a gospel to the world in order to make the way for the Lord. The German soldiers read Zarathustra in the trenches: it spoke to their unconscious. ~Katy Cabot, Jung My Mother and I, Page 187-188
“Never does man rise higher, than when he does not know where his fate will lead him.” [Nietzsche] Onkel [Jung] went on to say about himself, I know what I have done, but not what I am. ~Katy Cabot, Jung My Mother and I, Page 405
‘You ask to be free my brother. I ask you not what are you seeking freedom from, but what are you seeking it for. To what end shall your freedom fly. ~Peter Baynes (Quoting Nietzsche), Jung’s Apprentice, Page 254
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