[a characterization of Jung's writing style] ...so densely written and so packed with mythological exegesis as to make it virtually impenetrable to any but the most determined reader .

' Thank God I'm Jung and not a Jungian, '

[an early] powerful vision, which he struggled unsuccessfully to resist, of the Almighty seated on a golden throne defecating on the roof of Basel Cathedral

' I feel it is the duty of one who goes his own way to inform society of what he finds on his voyage of discovery, '

Jung remained a deeply introverted man, more interested in the inner world of dreams and images than in the outer world of people and events . From childhood he possessed a genius for introspection which enabled him to attend closely to experiences proceeding on or below the threshold of consciousness

[Jung identified in himself] two personalities [which] were not unique to himself but present in everyone ... he was to rename these two personalities the ego and the Self and to maintain that the play and counter - play between them constitutes the central dynamic of personality development .

a lifelong gnostic ( Greek, gnostikos, one who knows ) – one dedicated to knowing the reality of the psyche through direct experience and personal revelation . It was this quest for gnosis which led him to grant fundamental importance to his dreams, fantasies, and visions, to attempt to understand them through the study of literature, philosophy, and religion, and, ultimately, to adopt psychiatry as a career .

the origins of two ideas which were to become central to the practice of analytical psychology : ( 1 ) that part - personalities or ' complexes ' existing in the unconscious psyche can ' personate ' in trances, dreams, and hallucinations, and ( 2 ) that the real work of personality development proceeds at the unconscious level . These ideas, in turn, gave rise to ( 1 ) a therapeutic technique ( active imagination ) and ( 2 ) a teleological concept ( individuation ) : the notion that the goal of personal development is wholeness, i.e . to become as complete a human being as personal circumstances allow .

He was one of the few psychologists in the twentieth century to maintain that development extends beyond childhood and adolescence through mid - life and into old age . It was this lifelong developmental process that he called individuation, and he believed that it could be brought to its highest fruition if one worked with and confronted the unconscious

He experienced the unconscious as a living, numinous presence, the constant companion of every waking ( and sleeping ) moment . For him, the secret of life's meaning lay in relating to this daemonic power in such a way as to know it .

Confronted by a field of ignorance, we project into it our own psychic activity and fill it up with meaning .

even in old age we are growing towards realization of our full potential ... ageing was not a process of inexorable decline but a time for the progressive refinement of what is essential .

' 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 '

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 .

[of Archetypes] ...he conceived them to be innate neuropsychic centres possessing the capacity to initiate, control, and mediate the common behavioural characteristics and typical experiences of all human beings . Thus, on appropriate occasions, archetypes give rise to similar thoughts, images, mythologems, feelings, and ideas in people, irrespective of their class, creed, race, geographical location, or historical epoch . An individual's entire archetypal endowment makes up the collective unconscious, whose authority and power is vested in a central nucleus, responsible for integrating the whole personality, which Jung termed the Self .

for Jung, the role of personal experience was to develop what is already there – to activate the archetypal potential already present in the Self .

We bring with us an innate psychic structure enabling us to have the experiences typical of our kind .

Jung's contrary view that the infant comes into the world with an intact blueprint for life, which it then proceeds to implement through interaction with the environment,

Jung conceived the programme for human life to be encoded in the collective unconscious as a series of archetypal determinants which are actualized in response to inner and outer events in the course of the life cycle .

every personality has a persona ( literally a mask, as worn by actors in ancient Greece ) . Through the persona we codify ourselves in a form which we hope will prove acceptable to others . It has sometimes been referred to as the social archetype or the conformity archetype, for on it depends the success or failure of one's adaptation to society ... the persona is that which in reality one is not, but which oneself as well as others think one is '

The tendency is to build acceptable traits into the persona and to keep unacceptable traits hidden or repressed . These socially undesirable aspects of the maturing personality are usually relegated to the personal unconscious, where they coalesce to form another complex, or part personality, that Jung called the shadow .

To defend ourselves from this threat, and to sustain our peace of mind, we make use of a variety of ego - defence mechanisms, particularly repression, denial, and projection . Not only do we repress the shadow in the personal unconscious, but we deny its existence in ourselves, and project it out on to others .

The most demanding part of a Jungian analysis occurs when the analysand ( the person undergoing analysis ) begins to confront his own shadow . That this should be difficult is not surprising since the whole shadow complex is tinged with feelings of guilt and unworthiness, and with fears of rejection should its true nature be discovered or exposed . However painful the process may be, it is necessary to persevere because much Self potential and instinctive energy is locked away in the shadow and therefore unavailable to the total personality .

The experience of ' falling in love ' occurs, as we have seen, when one meets a woman or man who, rightly or wrongly, appears to be the living embodiment of one's anima or animus . This profoundly moving experience is an example of what it means to be ' taken over ' by the power of an autonomous complex .

[Jung] argues that a marriage can only be a true relationship if it transcends blind mutual animus / anima projections and if both partners become conscious of each other's psychic reality .

To use these years to become as complete a human being as we can within the limitations of our culture is to contribute to the well - being of society as much as to the personal fulfilment of our lives . Well individuated older people are, and always have been, the repositories of wisdom, for they have had time to reflect, to integrate all they have learned with a lifetime of experience .

four psychological functions, which he named sensation, thinking, feeling, and intuition,

Jung's typology is open to the same objection as all other typologies, namely, that it seeks to constrain the apparently infinite variety of human psychological traits within narrow, arbitrarily imposed categories .

the Jungian encourages the patient to participate in his suffering so as to confront its meaning and mobilize the healing powers of the unconscious ... Treatment consists of helping him to recognize and find ways of correcting his archetypal frustration, abandoning his one - sidedness, and bringing about a new equilibrium between the opposing forces in his personality as a whole .

' I can only gaze with wonder and awe at the depths and heights of our psychic nature . Its non - spatial universe conceals an untold abundance of images which have accumulated over millions of years of development . ' It is comparable in magnificence to the starry heavens at night, ' for the only equivalent of the universe within is the universe without ' ... This cosmic perspective gave him his reverence for the unconscious and the unknown, for the numinosity of symbols, for the magical power of the imagination and the reconciling genius of the transcendent function, for the meaning we attribute to everything about us, for the primacy of the individual psyche as the link between our own lives and the inscrutable intentions of the great universe itself .

Though aware that our species and our planet are in grave peril from our own unconsciousness, he remained cautiously optimistic to the end . He believed that nothing essential is ever lost because its matrix is ever present among us and can always be recovered by those ' who have learned the art of averting their eyes from the blinding light of current opinions and close their ears to the noise of ephemeral slogans ' .