Unconscious Quotes
More Unconscious Quotes
Can the high level of violence in patriarchal cultures be attributed to people's chronic, if largely unconscious, rage over the denial of their freedom and pleasure? To what extent is sanctioned or officially condoned violence from war and capital punishment to lynching, wife-beating and the rape of "bad" women to harsh penalties for "immoral" activities like drug-taking and nonmarital sex to the religious and ideological persecution of totalitarian states in effect a socially approved outlet for expressing that rage, as well as a way of relieving guilt by projecting one's own unacceptable desires onto scapegoats?
ellen willis— "The Mass Psychology of Terrorism" from Implicating Empire, edited by Stanley Aronowitz, Heather Gautney and Clyde W. Barrow (2003)
The "through-and-through" universe seems to suffocate me with its infallible impeccable all-pervasiveness. Its necessity , with no possibilities; its relations, with no subjects, make me feel as if I had entered into a contract with no reserved rights ... It seems too buttoned-up and white-chokered and clean-shaven a thing to speak for the vast slow-breathing unconscious Kosmos with its dread abysses and its unknown tides.
william james— Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912), Ch. 12 : Absolutism and Empiricism
The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.
james nicoll— Usenet article <1990May15.155309.8892@watdragon.waterloo.edu>
— (Often misattributed, in part or in whole, to Booker T. Washington, Ambrose Bierce, Terry Pratchett, and the painter James Nicoll (1846–1918).)
…Jung even asserted that he would have no objection to regarding the psyche as a quality of matter and matter as a concrete aspect of the psyche, provided that the psyche was understood to be the collective unconscious.
marie-louise von franz— p. 40 (Creation Renewed & Reversed)
What after all, has maintained the human race on this old globe despite all the calamities of nature and all the tragic failings of mankind, if not faith in new possibilities, and courage to advocate them. Doubtless many times these new possibilities were declared by a man who, quite unconscious of courage, bore the "sense of being an exile, a condemned criminal, a fugitive from mankind." Did every one so feel who, in order to travel on his own proper path had been obliged to leave the traditional highway?
jane addams— Peace and Bread in Time of War, Chapter 7: Personal Reactions During War (1922)
[Robinson Crusoe] is the true prototype of the British colonist. The whole Anglo-Saxon spirit is in Crusoe: the manly independence, the unconscious cruelty, the persistence, the slow yet efficient intelligence, the sexual apathy, the calculating taciturnity.
james joyce— James Joyce, “Daniel Defoe,” translated from Italian manuscript and edited by Joseph Prescott, Buffalo Studies 1 (1964): 24-25
We are living in what the Greeks called the right time for a "metamorphosis of the gods," i.e. of the fundamental principles and symbols. This peculiarity of our time, which is certainly not of our conscious choosing, is the expression of the unconscious man within us who is changing. Coming generations will have to take account of this momentous transformation if humanity is not to destroy itself through the might of its own technology and science.
carl jung— p 110
Surely it is a matter of joy, that your faith in Jesus has been preserved; the Comforter that should relieve you is not far from you. But as you are a Christian, in the name of that Saviour, who was filled with bitterness and made druken with wormwood, I conjre you to have recourse in frequent prayer to 'his God and your God,' the God of mercies, and father of all comfort. Your poor father is, I hope, almost senseless of the calamity; the unconscious instrument of Divine Providence knows it not, and your mother is in heaven.
Charles Lamb— Letter from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Lamb, after the family tragedy.
Our patients are the ones who express and live out the subconscious and unconscious tendencies in the culture. The neurotic, or person suffering from what we now call character disorder, is characterized by the fact that the usual defenses of the culture do not work for him a generally painful situation of which he is more or less aware...
rollo may— Ch. 1 : Introduction : Our Schizoid World,p. 20
unconscious assumptions or opinions are the worst enemy of woman; they can even grow into a positively demonic passion that exasperates and disgusts men, and does the woman herself the greatest injury by gradually smothering the charm and meaning of her femininity and driving it into the background. Such a development naturally ends in profound psychological disunion, in short, in a neurosis.
carl jung— "Woman in Europe" (1927) In CW 10: Civilization in Transition. P.245
Allm a« hlich hat sich mir herausgestellt, was jede groÞe Philosophie bisher war: n a« mlich das Selbstbekenntnis ihres Urhebers und eineArt ungewollter und unvermerkter me moires. It has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy has hitherto been: a confession on the part of its author and a kind of involuntaryand unconscious memoir.
— 1886 Jenseits von Gut und Bo« se (Beyond Good and Evil), section 6 (translated by R J Hollingdale).
In the extraordinary ancestral compost heap of your unconscious mind, I have burrowed too long.
brian aldiss— Hothouse, Chapter 23 (1962)
You assume we are all sexually stable; while on the other hand, as I have become acquainted with people, I find that they are all perverted sinners, one way or another, that the whole society is corrupt and rotten and repressed and unconscious that it exhibits its repression in various forms of social sadism.
Allen Ginsberg— Family Business: Selected Letters Between a Father and Son, Allen and Louis Ginsberg (1944-1976), Michael Schumacher (ed.) (2001), Bloomsbury Publishing NY, ISBN 1582341079, p. 21.
The mind is still haunted with its old unconscious ways; it broods on lost authorities; and the yearning, the deep and hollowing yearning for divine volition and service is with us still.
julian jaynes— Book II, Chapter 6, p. 313
My unconscious knows more about the consciousness of the psychologist than his consciousness knows about my unconscious.
Karl Kraus— Die Fackel no. 445/53 (18 January 1917)
How thrilling to discover one had depths, how consoling to find them less polluted than the shallows, how encouraging to identify the enemy not as a fissure in the will but as a dead fetus in the specimen jar of the unconscious. My attention was being paternally led away from the excruciating present to the happy, healthy future that would be enabled by an analysis of the sick past, as though the priest had nothing to do but study old books and make bright forecasts, the present not worthy of notice.
Edmund White— A Boy's Own Story, Chapter Six (p. 170)
On an unconscious level, the demonization of sexuality usually implies the demonization of males and the victimization of females.
warren farrell— p. 97. (Part IV: Where do we go from here)
A major character has to come somehow out of the unconscious.
graham greene— New York Times (October 9, 1985)
The great problems of life sexuality, of course, among others are always related to the primordial images of the collective unconscious. These images are really balancing or compensating factors which correspond with the problems life presents in actuality. This is not to be marvelled at, since these images are deposits representing the accumulated experience of thousands of years of struggle for adaptation and existence.
carl jung— Ch. 5, p. 271
The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases.
carl jung— p. 69 (Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933))
All ages before ours believed in gods in some form or other. Only an unparalleled impoverishment in symbolism could enable us to rediscover the gods as psychic factors, which is to say, as archetypes of the unconscious. No doubt this discovery is hardly credible as yet.
carl jung— p. 72 (The Integration of the Personality (1939))
Whereas Freud was for the most part concerned with the morbid effects of unconscious repression, Jung was more interested in the manifestations of unconscious expression, first in the dream and eventually in all the more orderly products of religion and art and morals.
Lewis Mumford— "Revolt of the Demons", p. 399
I would not want to be a politician... Let me tell you this: If I was campaigning, and I go against my opponent and he started attacking my character, and I leap over the table and choke him unconscious, would that help my campaign?
chuck norris— Chuck Norris' reply when asked if Walker the Texas Ranger could be president, in an interview by YouTube video
The public's continuing ambivalence about cultural matters is all the more striking given that the political conversation on these issues has for 30 years been dominated by an aggressive, radical right-wing insurgency that has achieved an influence far out of proportion to its numbers. Its potent secret weapon has been the guilt and anxiety about desire that inform the character of Americans regardless of ideology; appealing to those largely unconscious emotions, the right has disarmed, intimidated, paralyzed its opposition.
ellen willis— "Escape from Freedom", Situations: Project of the Radical Imagination, Vol 1, No 2 (2006)
Understand then all of you, especially the young, that to want to impose an imaginary state of government on others by violence is not only a vulgar superstition, but even a criminal work . Understand that this work, far from assuring the well-being of humanity is only a lie , a more or less unconscious hypocrisy , camouflaging the lowest passions we posses.
— Leo Tolstoy, passage written for for The Law of Love and the Law of Violence (1908), released in 1917, as quoted in Equality in Liberty and Justice (2001) by Antony Flew, p. 89
If someone talks of subconsciousness, I cannot tell whether he means the term topographically – to indicate something lying in the mind beneath consciousness – or qualitatively – to indicate another consciousness, a subterranean one, as it were. He is probably not clear about any of it. The only trustworthy antithesis is between conscious and unconscious
Sigmund Freud— In: Erik Du Plessis The Branded Mind: What Neuroscience Really Tells Us About the Puzzle of the Brain and the Brand, Kogan Page Publishers, 3 February 2011, p.154
The unconscious is not just evil by nature, it is also the source of the highest good: not only dark but also light, not only bestial, semihuman, and demonic but superhuman, spiritual, and, in the classical sense of the word, "divine."
— Carl Jung The Practice of Psychotherapy, (1953), p. 364
The covert hypnosis techniques I developed needed to work quickly at the unconscious level. And they did. I easily gained control, commanded attention and compelled compliance from anyone.
— Igor Ledochowski, in “Master Hypnotist Reveals Forbidden Secret Of How To Control People's Minds (Without Their Knowledge) And Make Them Obey Covert Commands During Normal Conversation!”
Psychologically speaking, enlightenment always meant an advance in the training of mistrust in the construction of an ego concerned about self-assertion and control of reality. Freud’s methodology can be summarized, in a way, as the attempt to keep the path to the unconscious open without using hypnosis. One may consider whether, in Freud’s procedure, a finesse born of mistrust is not at work.
— Peter Sloterdijk, in Critique of Cynical Reason (1983), as translated by M. Eldred (1987), p. 47
