Quotation
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“To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge.”
Carl Jung · Thinkers beyond philosophy · Modern · 1951; this English in the Collected Works
What does it mean?
Self-knowledge, on this sentence, has a condition: the dark aspects have to be admitted as present and real, not as a story about other people. The usual reading ties the line to the shadow sentence just before it. A competing reading turns it into a general invitation to introspection, as if any inward glance would do. He says the act meets considerable resistance, and that as a psychotherapeutic measure it often takes a long time. The sentences sit in Aion, paragraph 14, still inside the moral problem of the shadow. Knowing oneself is not a glow. It is that recognition.
Did Carl Jung really say this?
The library’s label is Paraphrase or translation. The next sentences of the same paragraph as the moral-problem line. Hull's English. They are quoted separately because self-knowledge is the claim people lift out and then detach from the shadow.
Where it comes from
Collected Works, volume 9 part ii, Aion, paragraph 14, R. F. C. Hull's translation
Approximate date: 1951; this English in the Collected Works.
How to use it
A journal in a Brighton kitchen that lists only strengths has not started the paragraph. Write one reaction, this week, that you usually explain as someone else's character. The point is the admission, not a performance of honesty.
A mindset reading
He calls the recognition the essential condition, not the whole of a life. Stopping at the confession and calling it wisdom is how the sentence becomes a caption.
Understand the philosophy
This is still paragraph 14 of volume 9 part ii. The key phrase is present and real. The shadow card is the sentence before this one. Paragraph 16 then says why the admission is hard: the cause of the feeling seems, beyond doubt, to lie in the other person.
- self
- knowledge
- mind
FAQ
What does it mean?
Self-knowledge, on this sentence, has a condition: the dark aspects have to be admitted as present and real, not as a story about other people. The usual reading ties the line to the shadow sentence just before it. A competing reading turns it into a general invitation to introspection, as if any inward glance would do. He says the act meets considerable resistance, and that as a psychotherapeutic measure it often takes a long time. The sentences sit in Aion, paragraph 14, still inside the moral problem of the shadow. Knowing oneself is not a glow. It is that recognition.
Did Carl Jung really say this?
Paraphrase or translation. The next sentences of the same paragraph as the moral-problem line. Hull's English. They are quoted separately because self-knowledge is the claim people lift out and then detach from the shadow.
Which work is it in?
Collected Works, volume 9 part ii, Aion, paragraph 14, R. F. C. Hull's translation Approximate date: 1951; this English in the Collected Works.