Psychological Archetypes Quotes

When we're good, we're very, very good, and when we're bad, we're horrid. This is not news, because we're so much more inventive and we have two hands, the left and the right. That is how we think. It's all over our literature, and it's all over the way we arrange archetypes, the good version, the bad version, the god, the devil, the Abel, the Cain, you name it. We arrange things in pairs like that because we know about ourselves.

The darkness which clings to every personality is the door into the unconscious and the gateway of dreams, from which those two twilight figures, the shadow and the anima, step into our nightly visions or, remaining invisible, take possession of our ego-consciousness.

Considering the way evolution works, it should not be surprising if every man has got a Don Giovanni somewhere inside him.

As I travel through life, I gather experiences that lie imprinted on the deepest strata of memory, and there they ferment, are transformed, and sometimes rise to the surface and sprout like strange plants from other worlds. What is the fertile humus of the subconscious composed of? Why are certain images converted into recurrent themes in nightmares or writing?

I don't have a general archetypal platonic shadow, 'acting' concept about it.

The whole film is about people being convinced that they can reduce themselves to their archetypes.

A thing I do with all my characters is I break them down into one of three things: mind, heart, and groin. I figure out where they come from and what they utilize most.

Our culture is so inundated with Freudian prototypes, and I think that 'Twin Peaks' came up with a whole new Pandora's Box of outlandishly mental, out of balance people that have never been described or have been noted by the psychiatric community.

The collective unconscious contains the whole spiritual heritage of mankind's evolution born anew in the brain structure of every individual.

Literature has become too psychological.

In the absence of an effective general mythology, each of us has his private, unrecognized, rudimentary, yet secretly potent pantheon of dreams.

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.

I've been reading a bunch of stuff lately - like Joseph Campbell - that has made me realize that people in our cultural, especially in the liberal community, often go in search of a foe. It's like we always need a hill to climb up or something to push against, or we feel as if we're not working constructively in the world.