Sigmar Polke Quotes

It was Jung who first said to explain the symbol as if talking to a man from mars who knew nothing about our life on earth.

For better or for worse, my brother and I both have some Jungian leanings, so we're tempted to think that these bits and bobs of the past are knocking around in everyone's heads somehow to some degree, and they just need to be jiggled into the front of their head in the mind again.

I was in Jungian analysis for 20 years, 1976-96.

There's novel reading, and then there's the other kind of reading. Take somebody like Carl Jung, the psychiatrist - now there's somebody worth getting into. With novels, I'm kind of fly by night. It isn't something I can be really consistent with.

Even as a kid, I read 'Jung - Reflections and Individuation In Fairy Tales'; all the inner circle of Jung was a real huge thing for me.

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.

I'm a big fan of monsters. Number one, they're fun, and two, they're such great ways to access the subconscious fears and beliefs of any group of people.

The collective unconscious consists of the sum of the instincts and their correlates, the archetypes. Just as everybody possesses instincts, so he also possesses a stock of archetypal images.

In fact, the whole of mythology could be taken as a sort of projection of the collective unconscious

I'm attracted to the things that people throw away - the shadow goods, in Jungian terms.

An armchair Jungian would say the whole thing is about my own ongoing spiritual search. My interior life has always been one of trying to find a spiritual link, maybe because I'm from a family of separate religious philosophies: Protestant and Catholic.

Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths.

I trained in psychiatry in the 1970s, and much of our training was about what was then psychoanalytic theory, with a little bit of theory from Jungian psychology and a few other places.

If our titles recall the known myths of antiquity, we have used them again because they are the eternal symbols upon which we must fall back to express basic psychological ideas.

My favorite books are psychology, self-help, and I'm fascinated by Jung, by dream work.

Freud, Jung thought, had been a great discoverer of facts about the mind, but far too inclined to leave the solid ground of "critical reason and common sense." Freud for his part criticized Jung for being gullible about occult phenomena and infatuated with Oriental religions; he viewed with sardonic and unmitigated skepticism Jung's defense of religious feelings as an integral element in mental health. For Freud, religion was a psychological need projected onto culture, the child's feeling of helplessness surviving in adults, to be analyzed rather than admired.

The myth is the public dream and the dream is the private myth.

Jung was absolutely right about one thing. We are occupied by gods. The mistake is to identify with the god occupying you.

What flows into you from myth is not truth but reality (truth is always about something, but reality is that about which truth is), and therefore, every myth becomes the father of innumerable truths on the abstract level.

From the viewpoint of analytic psychology, the theatre, aside from any aesthetic value, may be considered as an institution for the treatment of the mass complex.

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.

I don't think there's a specific science you can put on dream psychology. I think that it's up to the, obviously, the individual.

There was a time when only wise books were read helping us to bear our pain and misery. This, after all, is not quite the same as leafing through a thousand works fresh from psychiatric clinics. And yet the world is different from what it seems to be and we are other than how we see ourselves in our ravings.

I have always said to my pupils: "Learn as much as you can about symbolism; then forget it when you are analyzing a dream."

Both dreams and myths are important communications from ourselves to ourselves.