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Thoughts

Originally presented in a lecture series by Jung in 1959/1960.

Page numbers from the pdf.

• Dr. K’s two Health Gamer lecture links.

  • Why Some Men Never Grow up (Puer Aeternus Part 1)
  • Why You’re Not Reaching Your Potential (Puer Aeternus Part 2)

• Puer will move mountains to avoid doing work

  • I’ve been cleaning up my scrap wood… to avoid working on the desk business?

The Little Prince as a blueprint for the puer aeternis.

The Kingdom Without Space - Interesting sounding book from the recounting during the second half of this book. Another puer aeternis based story.

Exceptional Quotes

• If she has a puer aeternus animus, she generally has a creative problem, and the cure for women is unfortunately exactly the same as for men: it is also work. When you say that, do you include having children? Yes, that is sometimes the end of a puer aeternus problem.

• idea that there is something like a defective Self, that in certain people whose fate is very unfortunate the symbol of the Self appears defective, which would mean that such people have no chance in life because the nucleus of their psyche is incomplete and defective. So the whole process of individuation cannot develop from this kernel. I do not agree with this idea because I have never seen such symbols of a defective Self without an accompanying defective attitude of the ego. That means that wherever you find such a defective Self symbol, where it is ambiguous and incomplete and morbid, there is always at the same time an incomplete and morbid attitude of the ego, and therefore it could not be scientifically asserted that the cause of the whole thing lies in a defective Self. It could just as well be said that it was because the ego had such a wrong attitude that the Self cannot come into play positively. If you eat completely wrongly and your stomach consequently does not react properly, you can react one of two ways. You can decide that there is something wrong with your stomach, and go to numbers of doctors about it without telling them that you are eating all wrong, in which case the doctors will conclude that it is very tragic but that you have a defective stomach and it is not possible to find the cause. But, on the other hand, it can just as well be said that if one eats all the wrong things, or does not eat, or eats irregularly, then it is not the stomach which is at fault. Thus the defective Self always goes with an ego which does not function properly and therefore naturally the Self cannot function properly either. If the ego is lazy, inflated, not conscientious, does not perform the duties of the ego-complex, then it is clear that the Self cannot appear positively either.

• That, I think, is one of the trickiest problems in that specific neurotic constellation, that the puer aeternus always tends to grasp at everything which would be the right thing to do and then to draw it back into his fantasy- theory world. He cannot cross the very simple border from fantasy to action.

• The puer aeternus has to learn to carry on with work he does not like, not only with the work where he is carried away by great enthusiasm, which is something that everybody can do. Primitive people who are said to be lazy can do that, for as soon as they are gripped by something they work, even to the point of exhaustion. I would not evaluate that as work but as being carried away by a festival of work. The work which is the cure for the puer aeternus is where he has to kick himself out of bed on a dreary morning and again and again take up the boring job—through sheer will power.

• It could be expressed even more simply by saying that if someone is infantile then he will suffer from terrific emotional moods—ups and downs

• Before he has even touched it the snake comes in and says, “If you don’t like it, you know a way out.” So before he has gone down to earth, he has already had the offer of death. I have met many people with a similar difficult constellation who do that: they live only “on condition,” which means that secretly they constantly flirt with the idea of suicide. At every step of their lives they think they will try something or other and that if it does not work they will kill themselves. The puer aeternus always keeps his revolver in his pocket and constantly plays with the idea of getting out of life if things get too hard.

• I remember him saying once to a puer aeternus type, It does not matter what job you take. The point is that for once you do something thoroughly and conscientiously, whatever it is." This man insisted that if only he could find the right thing, then he would work, but that he could not find it. Jung’s answer was, “Never mind, just take the next bit of earth you can find. Plow it and plant something in it. No matter whether it is business, or teaching, or anything else, give yourself for once to that field which is ahead of you.”

• Death is the goal of life.

• The puer aeternus shadow often does the same thing if no mother or analyst plays that role; every time he wants to go into action he will argue that he should not act until he has thought it over very carefully. One could call it neurotic philosophizing, philosophy at the wrong moment just when action is needed.

Table of Contents

• Lecture 01
• Lecture 02
• Lecture 03
• Lecture 04
• Lecture 05
• Lecture 06
• Lecture 07
• Lecture 08
• Lecture 09
• Lecture 10
• Lecture 11
• Lecture 12

· Lecture 01

page 3:

• The title puer aeternus therefore means eternal youth

page 4:

• the provisional life," that is, the strange attitude and feeling that one is not yet in real life.1 For the time being one is doing this or that, but whether it is a woman or a job, it is not yet what is really wanted, and there is always the fantasy that sometime in the future the real thing will come about.

• often, to a smaller or greater extent, a savior complex, or a Messiah complex

• The one thing dreaded throughout by such a type of man is to be bound to anything whatever. There is a terrific fear of being pinned down

• I know a young man, a classical example of the puer aeternus, who did a tremendous amount of mountaineering but so much hated carrying a rucksack that he preferred to train himself even to sleep in the rain or snow and wrap himself up in a silk raincoat and, with a kind of Yoga breathing, was able to sleep out of doors. He also trained himself to go practically without food, simply in order not to have to carry any weight. He roamed about for years all over the mountains of Europe and other continents, sleeping under trees or in the snow. In a way he led a very heroic existence, just in order not to be bound to go to a hut or carry a rucksack. You might say that this was symbolic, for such a young man in real life does not want to be burdened with any kind of weight. The one thing he absolutely refuses is responsibility for anything, or to carry the weight of a situation.

page 5:

• Many have the charm of youth and the stirring quality of a drink of champagne. Pueri aeterni are generally very agreeable to talk to. They usually have interesting things to talk about and have an invigorating effect upon one. They do not like conventional situations; they ask deep questions and go straight for the truth. Usually they are searching for genuine religion, a search that is typical for people in their late teens.

• another type of puer who does not display the charm of eternal youth, nor does the archetype of the divine youth shine through him. On the contrary, he lives in a continual sleepy daze, and that too is a typical adolescent characteristic: the sleepy, undisciplined, long-legged youth who merely hangs around, his mind wandering indiscriminately, so that sometimes one feels inclined to pour a bucket of cold water over his head. The sleepy daze is only an outer aspect, however, and if you can penetrate it, you will find that a lively fantasy life is being cherished within.

• if a man pulls out of this kind of youthful neurosis, then it is through work.

page 6:

• when fascinated or in a state of great enthusiasm. Then he can work twenty-four hours at a stretch or even longer, until he breaks down, but what he cannot do is to work on a dreary, rainy morning when work is boring and one has to kick oneself into it; that is the one thing the puer aeternus usually cannot manage and will use any kind of excuse to avoid.

• the unconscious generally tries to produce a compromise, namely, to indicate the direction in which there might be some enthusiasm or where the psychological energy would flow naturally, for it is of course easier to train oneself to work in a direction supported by one’s instinct. That is not quite so hard as working completely uphill in opposition to your own flow of energy. Therefore it is usually advisable to wait a while and find out where the natural flow of interest and energy lies and then try to get the man to work there. But in every field of work there always comes the time when routine must be faced. All work, even creative, contains a certain amount of boring routine, and that is where the puer aeternus escapes and comes to the conclusion again that “this is not it!"

• the puer aeternus never quite touches the earth. He never quite commits himself to any mundane situation but just hovers over the earth, touching it from time to time, alighting here and there, so that one has to follow such traces as there may be.

page 8:

• problem of the puer aeternus. That is where there is usually a very cold, brutal man somewhere in the background

page 10:

• If she has a puer aeternus animus, she generally has a creative problem, and the cure for women is unfortunately exactly the same as for men: it is also work. When you say that, do you include having children? Yes, that is sometimes the end of a puer aeternus problem.

page 12:

• The question is, how can one grow up and not lose it [childhood]?

• ‘‘Well, it is strange; they have driven out my devils, but with them they have also driven out my angels!”

• Regarding growing up via (Freudian) analysis.

page 19:

• the gesture of impatience. That is typical for the puer aeternus! When he has to take something seriously, either in the outer or the inner world, he makes a few poor attempts and then impatiently gives up.

• The important thing is that he should stick something out. If it is analysis, then analyze seriously, take the dreams seriously, live according to them, or, if not, then take a job and really live the outer life. The important thing is to do something thoroughly, whatever it is. But the great danger, or the neurotic problem, is that the puer aeternus, or the man caught in this problem, tends to do what Saint-Exupéry does here: just put it in a box and shut the lid on it in a gesture of sudden impatience. That is why such people tell you suddenly that they have another plan, that this is not what they were looking for. And they always do it at the moment where things become difficult. It is the everlasting switching which is the dangerous thing, not what they do

· Lecture 02

page 20:

• In France, however, it takes a specific turn, for the French tend to display exaggerated individualism, a kind of protest against all administration, though lately under de Gaulle’s government there has been some change. Since the First World War there has been a tendency in France to revolt and be negative in connection with everything having to do with the pressure of the State, even to the extent that numbers of people voted for Communism, not because they were really Communists in their Weltanschauung but simply as a demonstration against the existing order. Such people would proclaim that since they did not like the lawyers and clowns in Paris who constituted the Government, they intended to vote Communist.

page 23:

• idea that there is something like a defective Self, that in certain people whose fate is very unfortunate the symbol of the Self appears defective, which would mean that such people have no chance in life because the nucleus of their psyche is incomplete and defective. So the whole process of individuation cannot develop from this kernel. I do not agree with this idea because I have never seen such symbols of a defective Self without an accompanying defective attitude of the ego. That means that wherever you find such a defective Self symbol, where it is ambiguous and incomplete and morbid, there is always at the same time an incomplete and morbid attitude of the ego, and therefore it could not be scientifically asserted that the cause of the whole thing lies in a defective Self. It could just as well be said that it was because the ego had such a wrong attitude that the Self cannot come into play positively. If you eat completely wrongly and your stomach consequently does not react properly, you can react one of two ways. You can decide that there is something wrong with your stomach, and go to numbers of doctors about it without telling them that you are eating all wrong, in which case the doctors will conclude that it is very tragic but that you have a defective stomach and it is not possible to find the cause. But, on the other hand, it can just as well be said that if one eats all the wrong things, or does not eat, or eats irregularly, then it is not the stomach which is at fault. Thus the defective Self always goes with an ego which does not function properly and therefore naturally the Self cannot function properly either. If the ego is lazy, inflated, not conscientious, does not perform the duties of the ego-complex, then it is clear that the Self cannot appear positively either.

• If that man were here today he would certainly object and say, “No, it is the other way round, the ego cannot function because the Self is defective.” There we are confronted with the age-old philosophical problem of free will: “Can I want the right thing?” That is the problem which the puer aeternus man will generally put to you. He will say that he knows that everything goes wrong because he is lazy, but that he cannot want not to be lazy! That perhaps that is his neurosis, that he is unable to fight his laziness, and therefore it is useless to treat him as a rascal for whom everything would go right if he were not so lazy. That is an argument which I have heard I don’t know how many times! It is to a certain extent true, for the puer cannot make up his mind to work, so you can say that it is the defective Self, that something is wrong in the whole structure and cannot be saved.

page 24:

• Remark: But Jung says that there is no sickness in the collective unconscious and so, as the Self is an archetype, it does not seem to me that there can be anything defective.

• I quite agree. I think that if it appears defective, it is because of the wrong ego attitude. Objectively, in itself, it cannot be defective, which is why I cannot accept the idea of the defective Self. If the ego is able to change, something else changes; if the ego-attitude changes, then the symbols of the Self become more positive. That is something we experience again and again. If the person can achieve a certain amount of insight, then the whole unconscious constellation changes.

page 25:

• The greatest difficulty we drag along with us from our childhood is the sack of illusions which we carry on our backs into adult life. The subtle problem consists in giving up certain illusions without becoming cynical. There are people who become disillusioned early in life; you see it if you have to analyze orphans from either very low or very high layers of society, those who are nowadays called neglected children, which means either that they are just poor children who have grown up in slums and had a terrible family life and fate, or very rich children who had all the same miseries except lack of money—divorced parents, a bad atmosphere at home and so on— that is, where the feeling atmosphere has been neglected, which is so important for children. Such people very often grow up quicker than others because at a very early stage they become very realistic and disillusioned and self-contained, and independent—the hardships of life have forced them to this—but you can generally tell from a rather bitter and falsely mature expression that something went wrong. They were pushed out of the childhood world too soon and crashed into reality.

• If you analyze such people you find that they have not worked out the problem of childish illusions but have just cut it off, having assured themselves that their desire for love and their ideals simply hamper them like a sack of stones carried on their backs, so they must all be done away with. But that is an ego decision which does not help at all, and a deeper analysis shows that they are completely caught up in childhood illusions. Their longing for a loving mother or for happiness is still there, but in a repressed state, so that they are really much less grown-up than other people, the problem having simply been pushed into a corner.

page 28:

• You see he identifies with God. He is the Godhead who accepts mankind under his cloak, the religious megalomania of the puer aeternus.

page 30:

• However, all that he praises he himself does not stand by, for he assimilates the whole thing intellectually and takes it back into his imaginary world. It is a trick which many pueri aeterni perform; the realization that they should adapt to reality is an intellectual idea to them which they fulfill in fantasy but not in reality. The idea is executed only in reflection and on a philosophical level, but not on the level of action. It looks as though they have quite understood, as if they have the right attitude, as if they know what is important and right. But they don’t do it.

page 31:

• That, I think, is one of the trickiest problems in that specific neurotic constellation, that the puer aeternus always tends to grasp at everything which would be the right thing to do and then to draw it back into his fantasy- theory world. He cannot cross the very simple border from fantasy to action.

• It is also the dangerous curve in the analysis of such people, for unless the analyst constantly watches this problem like an alert fox, the analysis will progress marvelously, the puer aeternus will understand everything, will integrate the shadow and the fact that he has to work and come down to earth. But, unless you are like a devil’s watchdog behind it, it is all a sham. The whole integration takes place up in the sky and not on the earth, not in reality, so that it comes down to having to play the governess and ask what time he gets up in the morning, how many hours have been worked in the day, and so on.

page 32:

• The puer aeternus has to learn to carry on with work he does not like, not only with the work where he is carried away by great enthusiasm, which is something that everybody can do. Primitive people who are said to be lazy can do that, for as soon as they are gripped by something they work, even to the point of exhaustion. I would not evaluate that as work but as being carried away by a festival of work. The work which is the cure for the puer aeternus is where he has to kick himself out of bed on a dreary morning and again and again take up the boring job—through sheer will power.

• Remark: Perhaps that throws light on Rousseau’s statement that the greatest fault in his character was his laziness, but it is well known that he worked from morning to night and read a great many books.

• Yes, but he must have escaped some other kind of work. People can cheat themselves by working themselves to death in order to avoid doing the work they should do.

· Lecture 03

page 34:

• hat is typical for many pueri aeterni. Much more strength would be required to have the thing out patiently with someone than just first to give in, and then walk out.

page 39:

• That is why we always say that a neurosis is in a way a positive symptom. It shows that something wants to grow; it shows that that person is not right in his or her present state and if the growth is not accepted then it grows against you, at your expense, and produces what might be called a negative individuation.

• In actuality, for instance, he gets up at 10:30 a.m., hangs around till lunch time with a cigarette in his mouth, giving way to his emotions and fantasies. In the afternoon he means to do some work but first goes out with friends and then with a girl, and the evening is spent in long discussion about the meaning of life. He then goes to bed at one, and the next day is a repetition of the one before, and in that way the capacity for life and the inner riches are wasted.

page 40:

• There you see that when the wrong inner overgrowth of fantasy is pulled down and recognized as being simply the mother complex, then another dimension of consciousness appears—the sky is seen again, the clouds can sail far, and the sun and the moon can shine. It is not a narrowing of the horizon, for pulling down that wrong growth of fantasy means a widening of the human horizon. I think that it is an infinitely important text because one of the objections which the puer aeternus always brings up when you want to encourage him to fell the tree is that he does not want such a narrowing of the horizon. What would be left if he had to give up his wishful fantasies, his masturbating, and such stuff? He would be just a petty little bourgeois who goes to his office, and so on. He could not stand such narrowing! But it is not true! If one has the courage to cut down this wrong kind of inner greatness, it comes again, but in a better form—the horizon and life are widened and not narrowed.

page 49:

• t could be expressed even more simply by saying that if someone is infantile then he will suffer from terrific emotional moods—ups and downs

• One should keep close to it and not lose contact with it for that would be losing contact with one’s genuine personality. But one cannot let it out either. In my experience, it has simply to be tortured and suffer on and on until suddenly it grows up. If a man has an infantile anima, he has to go through a tremendous amount of feeling trouble and disappointments. When he has gone through them enough he begins to know women and himself and then he is really emotionally grown up. But if he pretends to be reasonable and represses his childish feelings, then there is no development. So it is even better to expose one’s childishness so that it may be tortured than to be too reasonable and hide it away, because then it only gets stuck. It is better to behave like a child and be hit over the head by one’s surroundings and those people with whom one is in touch all the time, because then one suffers and the prima materia slowly transforms.

· Lecture 04

page 53:

• One could thus understand the king, the vain man, the drunkard, and the businessman, I think, in a parallel way and call them all different possibilities of the future grown man. He describes them all in a rather mocking way, again making fun of adult life. He says that one prays to money, another to nonexistent power, and a third indulges in a quixotic activity, maintaining old values which are no longer valid. The king could be said to represent something which he could have lived, also the vain man, for Saint-Exupéry was very vain, as has been confirmed by several reporters who met him and who said he was a bit of a poseur—he had a certain amount of self-reflecting vanity. He could also have taken to drink. The businessman I cannot quite imagine, but perhaps that was possible too. So, with the exception of the lamp-lighter, the different planet dwellers represent ordinary possibilities of becoming grown-up in a wrong way, or an endeavor to find a pseudo-style of grown-up existence.

page 56:

• You can see that the snake in our story has the same double role. It offers to kill the little prince and free him from the weight of the earth, which can be understood in two ways—as suicide, or the good fortune of getting rid of life. It is this ultimate philosophical attitude which says that death is not a catastrophe or a misfortune but an escape at last from an intolerable reality, which may be looked upon as something unimportant that yet hampers one’s innermost being.

page 57:

• Before he has even touched it the snake comes in and says, “If you don’t like it, you know a way out.” So before he has gone down to earth, he has already had the offer of death. I have met many people with a similar difficult constellation who do that: they live only “on condition,” which means that secretly they constantly flirt with the idea of suicide. At every step of their lives they think they will try something or other and that if it does not work they will kill themselves. The puer aeternus always keeps his revolver in his pocket and constantly plays with the idea of getting out of life if things get too hard.

• “I will go into this, but I reserve my right as a human being to kill myself if I can’t stand it any more. I shall not go through the whole experience to the bitter end if it becomes too insufferable, for if it does I shall walk out of it.” And therefore the person does not become whole.

page 60:

• His flower had told him that she was the only one of her kind in all the universe. And here were five thousand of them, all alike, in one single garden! “She would be very much annoyed,” he said to himself, “if she could see that. . . She would cough most dreadfully, and she would pretend that she was dying, to avoid being laughed at. And I should be obliged to pretend that I was nursing her back to life—for if I did not do that, to humble myself also, she would really allow herself to die . . .”

page 61:

• Jung says that Communism is less dangerous than the fact that we are all more and more penetrated by our habit of thinking statistically about ourselves. We believe in scientific statistics which say that in Switzerland so and so many couples marry per year and find no flat, or that there are so and so many in each town, etc. You do not realize what it does to you when you read statistics. It is completely destructive poison, and what is worse is that it is not true; it is a falsified image of reality. If we begin to think statistically, we begin to think against our own uniqueness.

page 62:

• When the statistical way of thinking gets people, it means they have no feeling, or weak feeling, or that they tend to betray their own feeling. You can say that the man who does not stand for his feelings is weak on the eros side, for he cannot take his own feelings and stand by them: “That is how I intend to live, for that is the way I feel.”

· Lecture 05

page 78:

• the natives in the circumpolar regions, for instance, say that the difference between an ordinary person who suffers and the healer is that the healer finds a way to overcome and get out of his trouble without technical help. He can overcome his own suffering; he finds the creative way out, and that means he finds his own cure, which is unique.

page 79:

• The ego, however, is wounded because something greater breaks into its life. We generally think of that part, which is why Jung says that it means tremendous suffering to get in touch with the process of individuation. It causes a great wound because, put simply, we are robbed of the capacity for arranging our own lives according to our own wishes.

page 82:

• Yes, that is exactly the lack of intensity of feeling. Constant awareness of the transitoriness of life, and a sense of always preparing for an end before you get there, is typical of the puer aeternus. For instance, when he makes friends with a girl he knows that the end will be a disappointment and a parting, so he does not give himself wholeheartedly to the experience. Instead, he is always getting ready to say good-bye. As far as reason is concerned, he is right, but then he does not live; reason has too much say in his life. He does not allow for the unreasonable human side which does not always prepare for the retreat because there will be a disappointment.

page 83:

• A double attitude is required: that of knowing how things are likely to turn out, and that of giving oneself completely to the experience all the same. Otherwise there is no life. Reason organizes it ahead of time so that one may be protected against suffering—in order that one shall not get the full experience, naively—just when one does not expect it.

· Lecture 06

page 87:

• The valleys in which people live, jammed together, but also rooted, held problems about which he knew nothing. For example, he had never dealt with the money problem. He got some money from his mother and lived on that somehow, I must say very modestly, saving money by living in a tent and so on, but he never thought of earning any himself, in spite of the fact that he was thirty-one.

page 89:

• Another case where the shadow produced a sudden crash was also of a motherbound boy who hitherto, having been kept completely away from life under a plastic cover, got away from his home for the first time in his life. He went to a big town and, having never had any kind of freedom, sexual or otherwise, and having always had to be so overcivilized at home, ran completely wild for a time. He went to the Friends-of-Nature huts (Natur Freunde)—a communistically inclined group of young people who live a very free life in the huts—and there he drank too much and ran completely wild and had a different girl every night. He switched right over to the shadow side. There would have been nothing wrong in it, except that he overdid it in a kind of nervous, hectic way. I only met him once in my life and then saw that he was absolutely worn out, and his health completely run down. I warned him, saying that I did not mind what he did, but that he should not overdo it to such an extent, that he would ruin his health and was running a great risk. He looked at me mockingly as if I were a kind of clucking aunt, and that was all the response I got. Three weeks later he rang me up. He had caught polio and was lame for the rest of his life. I am sure that the fact that he was in such a poor state of health had added to the bad outcome of his illness.

page 91:

• The puer aeternus is, in a way, the opposite of a tree, because he is a creature who flies and roams about. He always refuses to be in the present and to fight in the here-and-now for his life, which is why he avoids attempting to relate to a woman. Woman represents the tie to the earth for a man, particularly if she wants to have children, and a family would tie him forever to the earth. For the bird that flies about, the puer, the woman is the tree principle. In accepting this side of life, he accepts the just-so situation of life, which he tries constantly to avoid. The tree shows clearly that being tied inevitably means losing one’s freedom to roam about. The puer aeternus and the tree symbol belong together. The tree fixates him, fastens him to earth, either in a coffin or in life.

· Lecture 07

• There are 2 ends of a spectrum - infrared and ultraviolet - that correspond to the inner and outer worlds of man. The outer is represented by instinct and the inner by archetypes. Jung says he thinks all instincts can map to a corresponding archetype.

page 102:

• Usually, the puer aeternus is too caught up in the realm of archetypal representation.

page 103:

• I once analyzed a professional prostitute who was exactly like an old maid. Her dreams always showed untouched little girls or women who had never had any sexual experience. This was completely true! She shut herself off from what she lived. She just wanted the money, she was not in it—for she admitted to herself neither the pleasure of certain contacts nor her disgust over others. She made a rational decision that she needed the dollars and said to hell with the rest of it. Thus she was, in a way, untouched by life. Though she had rather severe psychic symptoms, she was not miserable. One of the results of the analysis was that she suddenly realized her own miserable condition, which she had not seen before.

• Onlyfans…

page 108:

• I remember him saying once to a puer aeternus type, It does not matter what job you take. The point is that for once you do something thoroughly and conscientiously, whatever it is." This man insisted that if only he could find the right thing, then he would work, but that he could not find it. Jung’s answer was, “Never mind, just take the next bit of earth you can find. Plow it and plant something in it. No matter whether it is business, or teaching, or anything else, give yourself for once to that field which is ahead of you.”

• In your work you come up against your own limitations, both intellectual and physical, for what one produces is always miserable compared with the fantasies one had lying in bed about what one would do, if one could! The fantasy is far more beautiful than the real product!

page 110:

• He identifies with the immortal and does not accept the mortal twin, but by going into life he would assimilate the mortal brother.

page 111:

• Death is the goal of life.

· Lecture 08

page 112:

• After the puer loses the ecstatic, romantic élan of youth, there is danger of an enantiodromia into a completely cynical attitude toward women, life, work in general, and money. Many men suddenly fall into an attitude of disappointed cynicism. They lose all their ideals and romantic impulses and also, naturally, their creativeness, writing it all off as the fantasies of youth.

• enantiodromia - “the emergence of the unconscious opposite in the course of time."

page 114:

• After a psychotic episode, if people go through what one calls the regressive restoration of the persona,17 they then call that which before had meant illumination to them (the source of the too bright insight which one has when one has fallen into the collective unconscious), the dark spots which have to be avoided. This is a very unhealthy state of affairs, but it frequently happens that if you get people out of their psychotic episode by pharmacological means, they then tend simply to push away the whole experience of the collective unconscious, with its excitement and illumination, and call that a dark spot about which they do not want to hear any more. This is the typical compensation in a case where the ego is too weak to stand the opposites and see both sides of the thing, namely, that the archetypes are the source of illumination on the one side but that one must also keep one’s feet firmly on this world at the same time.

page 119:

• kind of strong but sterile intellectualism, a tendency to discuss heaven and earth and God-knows-what in a kind of sharp intellectual way and with complete uncreativeness. It is probably a last attempt on the part of the men to save their masculinity. That simply means that certain young men who are overpowered by their mothers escape into the realm of the intellect because there the mother, especially if she is the earth type and a stupid animus kind of woman, is not up to it. They can slip out from under her skirts into the realm of the intellect, where she cannot follow.

page 120:

• The puer aeternus shadow often does the same thing if no mother or analyst plays that role; every time he wants to go into action he will argue that he should not act until he has thought it over very carefully. One could call it neurotic philosophizing, philosophy at the wrong moment just when action is needed.

page 122:

• Among the cichlidae—a certain breed of fish—a male cannot mate with a bigger female. The reason is that these fish do not see very well, and there is no great difference between the two sexes. They swim toward each other, and the first thing the male notices is that the other is bigger, which alarms him slightly in case there may be a fight, and he goes pale; then when he approaches and sees that it is a female he cannot mate. A female meeting a bigger male may also be frightened, but she can still mate. The result, as the zoologists put it, is that, in the male, sex with aggression can be combined, but not sex and fear. In the female, sex and fear can be combined, but not aggression and sex. And there you have the animus- anima problem in a nutshell.

· Lecture 09

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• To them the unconscious was the spirit world, and they tried to contact it by parapsychological and magical means. They fell back onto the Rosicrucian and Freemason and other traditions, from which they tried to obtain some knowledge of the world of the Beyond.

• Recounts a story: The Kingdom Without Space by Bruno Goetz – (Das Reich ohne Raum). Sounds very interesting, but I can not find an English version.

· Lecture 10

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• I hope that we may sometime get to the point where consciousness can function without the pretension of knowing everything and of having said the last word. If consciousness could be reduced to a function, a descriptive function, then people would cease to make final statements. Instead, one would say that from the known facts it appears at the present time as if one could explain it in such and such a way. That would mean giving up the secret power premise that claims to have said all there is to be said, so that now we know all about it and it is so. If that false pretension could be eliminated, that would be a big step.

• Knowledge is one of the greatest means of asserting power. Man has obtained power over nature and other human beings by brute force and also by knowledge and intelligence. It is uncertain which is the stronger, for strength and intelligence are the two aspects of the power-drive. They account for the many primitive animal stories in which the witty, clever one outwits the strong one: the hyena outwits the lion, and in South America the little dwarf stag outwits even the tiger.

· Lecture 11

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• In a way, you find this development very clearly in the writings of Toynbee, who tries, with a kind of extraverted approach, to say that it is quite clear, now that we have come into closer contact with the East and other civilizations, that we shall simply have to adopt a kind of mixed religion. He proposes a new form of prayer which would begin: “Oh Thou, who art Buddha, Christ, Dionysus . . .” We should just pray to a savior figure to whom one would ascribe all those names, and make a nice cocktail of all the essentials of all the religions, slightly blurring the not too important differences, so as to have a kind of generalized world religion where Buddhists and South African Negroes, and everybody, can join in and think what they like about these contents.

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• There is an area where the mushroom now plays a role that is invading our world, namely, in the new drugs, some of which are made from some kind of fungus. This is invading psychiatry, and it is now hoped that a chemical cure for schizophrenia will be found. It is indeed quite possible that this can be done because any kind of overemotional state causes intoxication, and we believe that in schizophrenia there is a certain condition of intoxication, and then, naturally, you can eliminate these results. The snag is, however, that if you analyze people after they have been treated with these drugs, you find that the psychological problem which brought about the schizophrenic episode is not removed. All the morbid emanations of the problem—that people behave in a mad way and rave, and other symptoms—these things you can stop with the drug, but analysis shows that the basic problem remains unchanged. If at this point you do not use psychotherapy, the patient is just headed for another episode and then the drug will have to be given again. This process can continue endlessly. After such a partial cure with drugs a series of dreams will point out the danger of a counter-tendency—of saying that now I can continue with my wrong attitude, and the next time I go off my head I will just ask for another pill. The worst thing about the drugs is that with people of weak character they even have a demoralizing effect. Such people do not want to change their attitude; it is much easier to go on with it, and if a psychotic episode occurs and they fall into the unconscious, they can have a drug to get out of it again—so it is all right! They do not want to return to psychotherapy because the other is the easy way, but it results in constant relapses and more drugs.

· Lecture 12