Lewis Mumford Quotes

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

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.

I've never been interested in philosophy, but some of Jung's ideas seem useful in helping people understand pictures and so forth.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I like dreams. I think there's a lot of information in them. I spent a lot of time on Jungian analysis and dreams are an elemental part of that process. Carl Jung believed very much in the power archetypes in dreams, what dream imagery means, and how you can tie it into deeper self examination. It's a big part of the therapeutic process.

Sigmund Freud was the apostle of disbelief. He was the one who made psychoanalysis a part of our culture, and in so doing he kicked out a flying buttress that had been essential for holding up our cathedral of faith.

Freud was one of the greatest influences on me. He made myth into psychiatry, and I've been trying to turn it back into myth again.

I'd love to go back to Europe in the '20s and '30s, for the beginning of the Psychoanalytic Movement, and Freud and Jung, and all that was going on with discoveries in quantum physics. The whole nature of reality was changing and being challenged.

I think Freud is about contamination, but I think that is something he learned from Shakespeare, because Shakespeare is about nothing but contamination, you might say.

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.

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.

The 'squaring of the circle' is one of the many archetypal motifs which form the basic patterns of our dreams and fantasies. But it is distinguished by the fact that it is one of the most important of them from the functional point of view. Indeed, it could even be called the archetype of wholeness.

Not only Freud but artists and writers were also interested in the unconscious. It was medicine that made the first steps toward modernity.

I think that in general it is a good plan occasionally to bear in mind the fact that people were in the habit of dreaming before there was such a thing as psychoanalysis.

All elongated objects, such as sticks, tree-trunks and umbrellas(the opening of these last being comparable to an erection) may stand for the male organ...Boxes, cases, chests, cupboards, and ovens represent the uterus...Rooms in dreams are usually women...Many landscapes in dreams, especially any containing breidges or wooded hills, may clearly be recognized as descriptions of the genitals.

Religion can only dream to do what science and art does every day.

I can still recall vividly how Freud said to me, "My dear Jung, promise me never to abandon the sexual theory. That is the most essential thing of all. You see, we must make a dogma of it, an unshakable bulwark" ... In some astonishment I asked him, "A bulwark-against what?" To which he replied, "Against the black tide of mud"-and here he hesitated for a moment, then added of occultism.

[Sigmund ] Freud did not under-stand that the dream is a highly creative act, written in the universal language of symbolism, and only secondarily does censorship distort those parts that the subject refuses to accept even in sleep.

The psyche is the inward experience of the human body, which is essentially the same in all human beings, with the same organs, the same instincts, the same impulses, the same conflicts, the same fears. Out of this common ground have come what Jung has called the archetypes, which are the common ideas of myths.

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