Even if you’re not into psychology or the history of the scientific study, you’ve most likely heard of Carl Jung (or sometimes known by his full name, Carl Gustav Jung). He was a Swiss psychologist, psychiatrist and psychotherapist born in 1875 and died in 1961. Jung had an expansive career where he came up with psychological concepts and terms, and whose findings are still used in psychology today. So it’s no surprise that his words are Parade's quote of the day.
He notably founded the concept of analytical psychology, which deviated from his longtime collaborator Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory and placed greater emphasis on immediate conflicts rather than childhood traumas or issues, per Britannica. He developed concepts like extraverted vs. introverted personalities, archetypes, the collective unconscious and much more.
The famous psychologist looked at the different ways humans interacted with each other, how they interacted with their own environment and how dreams and the unconscious impacted people. In fact, he really let himself explore his dreams and where they might have come from, which helped him develop the theory of the collective unconscious, which was the part of the mind that held the ideas and aspects that led to strange or interesting dreams. This led to Jung looking at how the Christian religion impacted the consciousness and how the Hermetic tradition was important to fill in the gaps that Christianity couldn’t.
With that said, Jung’s quote of the day has to do with unconscious bias and projection onto others and understanding what that means about ourselves.
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Quote of the Day by Carl Jung
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“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”
This quote comes from Carl Jung’s semi-autobiographical book, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, which was first published posthumously in 1962 in German and then in English in 1963. Recorded and edited by Aniela Jaffé, an associate of his, the contents of this book include a combination of Jung’s lectures, conversations and writings. It tells his life story while also giving his psychological opinions and thoughts on many important topics.
The section where this quote can be found is in the 9th chapter, called “Travels,” where he has five parts about different places in the world: "North America," "America: The Pueblo Indian," "Kenya and Uganda," "India" and "Ravenna and Rome." This quote is in Part II, “AMERICA: THE PUEBLO INDIANS,” which comes from an unpublished manuscript, the book says.
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Considering a lot of his most popular concepts have to do with the unconscious mind, it’s not a shock that this quote dives into biases, projecting our own experiences and feelings onto others and finding a better way to understand them.
Right before this sentence, Jung writes, “We always require an outside point to stand on, in order to apply the lever of criticism. This is especially so in psychology, where by the nature of the material we are much more subjectively involved than in any other science.”
We always have to have a starting point in terms of where our own opinions come from. Our morals, preconceived notions and knee-jerk reactions all come from what we’ve experienced before in our lives. Our biases—unconscious and otherwise—play such a major role in how we take in the world and other people.
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He goes on to say that to understand how other nations see our own, we have to kind of put ourselves in their shoes. “... We must acquire sufficient knowledge of the foreign collective psyche, and in the course of this process of assimilation we encounter all those incompatibilities which constitute the national bias and the national peculiarity,” he writes.
Then comes the quote: “Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”
Jung then says that he understands England when he sees where he, a Swiss, doesn’t fit in, giving more examples as well. He writes that “there can be nothing more useful for a European than some time or another to look out at Europe from the top of a skyscraper.” You really can't get the full picture without taking a step back and looking at it from that distance, he's saying.
With all of that, Jung is saying that if at first someone annoys you, you probably are seeing them from only your perspective. And maybe this means you're projecting your own issues onto them, or you just aren't looking at why you're irritated from a bigger picture lens. Sure, someone could say something rude and absolutely mean it that way. But maybe that's not their intention, and they come from a place where those words aren’t rude or are common. Or maybe they’re doing something that bugs you, like how they blow their nose or eat their lunch. But just because it’s different than what you’re used to and what you know as “polite” or “normal,” may not be how it is for them.
If we get irritated with someone, it could be because of what we acknowledge as acceptable, with no leeway for difference. But for Jung to say that “everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves,” he means that it can show us what our limits are in accepting others and where our gaps in knowledge are. It might also teach us that we’re not super patient or lack other virtues that we can work on as well.
As the Society of Analytical Psychology (SAP) reported, Jung recognized four different functions—thinking, feeling, sensation and intuition—that people interact with when engaging with the world. Everyone’s primary function is different, and a lot of conflicts and misunderstandings come from differing functions butting heads. They see the world in different ways because of their primary function, and therefore project their inferior functions onto others, who might thrive with that function instead. They give an example of an intellectual looking down on a “sensual, sports-loving, sensation type.”
So, ultimately, we accept what we are comfortable with and don’t like that with which we're not as accustomed, potentially because we unconsciously see it as inferior. Not only can that teach us where our weaknesses are, but it can help us understand others who are different from us, and work on not projecting negative feelings onto them because of said dissimilarities.
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More Quotes from Carl Jung
“It is not I who create myself, rather I happen to myself.”“The world will ask you to become what you are, to fulfill your destiny. If you do not heed this call, you will be compelled to live according to what others see in you.”"You are what you do, not what you say you'll do.""The sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being."“Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.”"Anyone who was purely an introvert, or purely an extrovert, would be fit only for the asylum."“We must remember that the rationalistic attitude of the West is not the only possible one and is not all-embracing, but is in many ways a prejudice and a bias that ought perhaps to be corrected.”“We walk in shoes too small for us.”Up Next:
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