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Anthony Stevens QUOTES

Anthony Stevens QUOTES

41 " Merlin was born of an illicit union between the devil and an innocent virgin and thus emerged as a counterbalance to the figure of Christ. "

― Anthony Stevens , Jung: A Very Short Introduction

42 " How can we enable the unconscious to realize itself? By granting it freedom of expression and then examining what it has expressed. "

― Anthony Stevens , Jung: A Very Short Introduction

43 " Though never losing his taste for seclusion, he developed a talent for getting on with people in all walks of life, and those who came to consult or visit him were impressed as much by his courtesy and humour as by his wisdom and the quality of his mind. "

― Anthony Stevens , Jung: A Very Short Introduction

44 " In alchemy, Jung realized, he had found a precursor of his own Psychology. ‘The experiences of the alchemists were, in a sense, my experiences, and their world my world. This was, of course, a momentous discovery: I had stumbled upon the historical counterpart of my psychology of the unconscious’ (MDR 196). Hitherto, alchemy had been dismissed as no more than a crude anticipation of chemistry, but Jung believed that, in their efforts to turn base metals into gold, the alchemists were symbolically engaged in a process of psychic transformation. In other words, alchemy was a metaphor for individuation. "

― Anthony Stevens , Jung: A Very Short Introduction

45 " Those who toe the party line do not choose their own way but submerge their potential for wholeness in a relatively unconscious existence of collective conformity. "

― Anthony Stevens , Jung: A Very Short Introduction

46 " These researches renewed his commitment to analysis, which he now conceived more as a means to produce personal growth than as a technique for treating mental disorder, and he increasingly devoted his energy to teaching others, whether as pupils or patients, the same methods he had perfected during his own confrontation with the unconscious and which he had excavated in all their bizarre ambiguity from an occult science of the seventeenth century. "

― Anthony Stevens , Jung: A Very Short Introduction

47 " Jung’s gift for transcending the confines of his own consciousness began, as we have seen, in the fantasy games of his childhood. "

― Anthony Stevens , Jung: A Very Short Introduction

48 " By projecting his psyche into the stone he gave the stone life, identity, consciousness, doing what the alchemists did as they gazed into the prima materia in their retorts. He came to see the imagination as the psychic quicksilver out of which everything of value is created; for the material world of objects is devoid of all meaning save that which we grant it in the psyche. "

― Anthony Stevens , Jung: A Very Short Introduction

49 " Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome,’ he wrote. ‘The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away – an ephemeral apparition . . . Yet I have never lost a sense of something that lives and endures underneath the eternal flux. What we see is the blossom that passes. The rhizome remains’ (MDR 18). The great secret is to embody something essential in our lives. Then, undefeated by age, we can proceed with dignity and meaning, and, as the end approaches, be ready ‘to die with life’. For the goal of old age is not senility, but wisdom. "

― Anthony Stevens , Jung: A Very Short Introduction

50 " the more secular, materialistic, and compulsively extraverted our civilization became, the greater the unhappiness, ‘senselessness and aimlessness’ of our lives. "

― Anthony Stevens , Jung: A Very Short Introduction

51 " He understood these dreams as showing that the unconscious is the generator of the empirical personality and that the Self assumes human shape in order to enter three-dimensional reality. "

― Anthony Stevens , Jung: A Very Short Introduction

52 " Had Jung been a Nazi sympathizer, would this provide grounds for rejecting analytical psychology in toto? Some insist that it would, apparently in the belief that a man's views should conform to contemporary notions of political correctness before serious attention can be granted to his work. Their contention could be justified were it proved that analytical psychology, so closely derived from the psychology of its founder, is imbued with a Fascist spirit. Fortunately, its emphasis on the primary importance of the individual psyche and the personal quest for wholeness, combined with its resistance to dogmatism, collectivism, and social conformity, places analytical psychology in an intellectual position as far removed from Fascism as it is possible to be. "

― Anthony Stevens , Jung: A Very Short Introduction

53 " The real therapy only begins when the patient sees that it is no longer father and mother who are standing in his way, but himself . . "

― Anthony Stevens , Jung: A Very Short Introduction

54 " Human consciousness created objective existence and meaning, and man found his indispensable place in the great process of being. "

― Anthony Stevens , Jung: A Very Short Introduction