The Origins and History of Consciousness, pg 300

“The tendency of unconscious contents to swamp consciousness corresponds to the danger of being ‘possessed’; it is one of the greatest ‘perils of the soul’ even today. A man whose consciousness is possessed by a particular content has an enormous dynamism in him, namely that of the unconscious content; but this counteracts the centroversion tendency of the ego to work for the whole rather than for the individual content.”

The Origins and History of Consciousness, pg 417

“Humanity as a whole and the single individual have the same task, namely, to realize themselves as a unity.  Both are cast forth into a reality, one half of which confronts them as nature and external world, while the other half approaches them as psyche and the unconscious, spirit and daemonic power.  Both must experience themselves as the center of this total reality.”

The Origins and History of Consciousness, pg 410

“The absence in our culture of rites and institutions designed, like the rites of puberty, to smooth the adolescent’s passage into the world is one reason for the incidence of neuroses in youth, common to all of which is the difficulty of facing up to the demands of life and of adapting to the collective and to one’s partner.  The absence of rites at the climacteric works in the same way.  Common to the climacteric neuroses of the second half of life is the difficulty of freeing oneself from worldly attachments, as is necessary for a mellow old age and its tasks.  The causes of these neuroses are therefore quite different from, indeed the opposite of, those occurring in the first half of life.”

The Origins and History of Consciousness, pg 405

“Progression through the archetypal phases, the patriarchal orientation of consciousness, the formation of the superego as the representative of collective values within the personality, the existence of a collective value-canon, all these things are necessary conditions of normal, ethical development.  If any one of these factors is inhibited, developmental disturbances result.  A disturbance of the first two factors, which are specifically psychic, leads to neuroticism; a disturbance of the other two, which are cultural, expresses itself more in social maladjustment, delinquency, or criminality.”

The Origins and History of Consciousness, pg 404

“The identification of the ego with consciousness robs it of contact with the unconscious and thus of psychic wholeness.  Consciousness can now claim to represent unity, but this unity is only the relative unity of the conscious mind and not that of the personality.  Psychic wholeness is lost and is replaced by the dualistic principle of opposites which governs all conscious and unconscious constellations.”

The Origins and History of Consciousness, pg 403

“The development of the persona is the outcome of a process of adaptation that suppresses all individually significant features and potentialities, disguising and repressing them in favor of collective factors, or  those deemed desirable by the collective.  Here again, wholeness is exchanged for a workable and successful sham personality.  The ‘inner voice’ is stifled by the growth of a superego, of conscience, the representative of collective values.  The voice, the individual experience of the transpersonal, which is particularly strong in childhood, is renounced in favor of conscience.  When paradise is abandoned, the voice of God that spoke in the Garden is abandoned too, and the values of the collective, of the father, of law and conscience, of the current morality, etc., must be accepted as the supreme values in order to make social adaptation possible.

“Whereas the natural disposition of every individual inclines him to be physically and psychically bisexual, the differential development of our culture forces him to thrust the contrasexual element into the unconscious.  As a result, only those elements which accord with the outward characteristics of sex and which conform to the collective valuation are recognized by the conscious mind.  Thus ‘feminine’ or ‘soulful’ characteristics are considered undesirable in a boy, at least in our culture. Such a one-sided accentuation of one’s specific sexuality ends by constellating the contrasexual element in the unconscious, in the form of the anima in men and the animus in women, which, as part souls, remain unconscious and dominate the conscious-unconscious relationship.  This process has the support of the collective, and sexual differentiation, precisely because the repression of the contrasexual element is often difficult, is at first accompanied by typical forms of animosity towards the opposite sex.  This development, too, follows the general principle of differentiation which presupposes the sacrifice of wholeness, here represented by the figure of the hermaphrodite.”

The Origins and History of Consciousness, pg 402

“The child’s fear and feeling of being threatened does not derive from the traumatic character of the world, for no trauma exists under normal human conditions or even under primitive ones; it comes rather from the ‘night space,’ or, to be more precise, it arises when the ego steps forth from this night space.  The germinal ego consciousness then experiences the overwhelming impact of the world-and-body stimulus, either directly or in projection.  The importance of family relationships lies precisely in the fact that the personal figures of the environment who are the first form of society must be able, as soon as the ego emerges from the primary security of the uroboric state, to offer it the secondary security of the human world.”

The Origins and History of Consciousness, pg 400

“Characteristic of the process of differentiation in childhood is the loss and renunciation of all the elements of perfection and wholeness, which are inherent in the psychology of the child so far as this is determined by the pleroma, the uroboros.  The very things which the child has in common with the man of genius, the creative artist, and the primitive, and which constitute the magic and charm of his existence, must be sacrificed.  The aim of all education, and not in our culture alone, is the expel the child from the paradise of his native genius and, through differentiation and the renunciation of wholeness, to constrain the Old Adam in the paths of collective usefulness.

“…The drying up of imagination and of creative ability, which the child naturally possesses in high degree, is one of the typical symptoms of impoverishment that growing up entails.  A steady loss of the vitality of feeling and of spontaneous reactions in the interests of ‘sensibleness’ and ‘good behavior’ is the operative factor in the conduct now demanded of the child in relation to the collective.  Increase in efficiency at the cost of depth and intensity is the hallmark of this process.

“On to the ontogenetic plane there now ensue all the developments which we have described as indispensable for ego formation and the separation of the conscious and unconscious systems.  The child’s primarily transpersonal and mythological apperception of the world becomes limited owing to secondary personalization, and is finally abolished altogether.  This personalization is necessary for the growth of personality now beginning and is effected with the help of ties to the personal environment upon which the archetypes are at first projected.  As the personal ties grow stronger, the archetype is gradually replaced by the imago, in which personal and transpersonal characteristics are visibly blended and active.”

The Origins and History of Consciousness, pg 400

“Development in the first half of life is marked by two decisive crises, each of which corresponds to a fight with the dragon.  The first crisis is characterized by the encounter with the problem of the First Parents and by the formation of the ego.  It is enacted between the ages of three and five, and psychoanalysis has made us familiar with certain aspects and forms of this parental encounter, under the guise of the Oedipus complex.  The second crisis is puberty, when the dragon fight has to be fought out again on a new level.  Here the form of the ego is finally fixed with the support of what we have called ‘heaven.’  That is to say, new archetypal constellations emerge, and with them a new relation of the ego to the self.”

The Origins and History of Consciousness, pg 399

“An important goal of childhood development and education is the utilization of the individual in the sense of making him a useful member of the community.  This usefulness, achieved through differentiation of the separate components and functions of the personality, is necessarily bought at the cost of wholeness.  The need to renounce the unconscious wholeness of the personality is one of the most formidable developmental difficulties for the child, and particularly for the introverted child.”