Al­though we hu­man be­ings have our own per­sonal life, we are yet in large mea­sure the rep­re­sen­ta­tives, the vic­tims and pro­mot­ers of a col­lec­tive spirit whose years are counted in cen­turies.

The col­lec­tive un­con­scious is com­mon to all; it is the foun­da­tion of what the an­cients called the “sym­pa­thy of all things.”

The psy­che is dis­tinctly more com­pli­cated and in­ac­ces­si­ble than the body. It is, so to speak, the half of the world which comes into ex­is­tence only when we be­come con­scious of it. For that rea­son the psy­che is not only a per­sonal but a world prob­lem, and the psy­chi­a­trist has to deal with an en­tire world.
 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 heads nowa­days, a hy­dro­gen bomb will go off.

Ide­al­ism had to be aban­doned, for there are higher things than the ego’s will, and to these one must bow.

I have fre­quently seen peo­ple be­come neu­rotic when they con­tent them­selves with in­ad­e­quate or wrong an­swers to the ques­tions of life. They seek po­si­tion, mar­riage, rep­u­ta­tion, out­ward suc­cess or money, and re­main un­happy and neu­rotic even when they have at­tained what they were seek­ing. Such peo­ple are usu­ally con­fined within too nar­row a spir­i­tual hori­zon. Their life has not suf­fi­cient con­tent, suf­fi­cient mean­ing. If they are en­abled to de­velop into more spa­cious per­son­al­i­ties, the neu­ro­sis gen­er­ally dis­ap­pears. For that rea­son the idea of de­vel­op­ment was al­ways of the high­est im­por­tance to me.

Among the so-called neu­rotics of our day there are a good many who in other ages would not have been neu­rotic — that is, di­vided against them­selves. If they had lived in a pe­riod and in a mi­lieu in which man was still linked by myth with the world of the an­ces­tors, and thus with na­ture truly ex­pe­ri­enced and not merely seen from out­side, they would have been spared this di­vi­sion with them­selves. I am speak­ing of those who can­not tol­er­ate the loss of myth and who can nei­ther find a way to a merely ex­te­rior world, to the world as seen by sci­ence, nor rest sat­is­fied with an in­tel­lec­tual jug­gling with words, which has noth­ing what­so­ever to do with wis­dom.

“The stone has no un­cer­tain­ties, no urge to com­mu­ni­cate, and is eter­nally the same for thou­sands of years,” I would think, “while I am only a pass­ing phe­nom­e­non which bursts into all kinds of emo­tions, like a flame that flares up quickly and then goes out.” I was but the sum of my emo­tions, and the Other in me was the time­less, im­per­ish­able stone.