“I am only too conscious that synchronicity is a highly abstract and ‘irrepresentable’ quantity. It ascribes to the moving body a certain psychoid property which, like space, time, and causality, forms a criterion of its behaviour. We must completely give up the idea of the psyche’s being somehow connected with the brain, and remember instead the ‘meaningful’ or ‘intelligent’ behaviour of the lower organisms, which are without a brain. Here we find ourselves much closer to the formal factor which, as I have said, has nothing to do with brain activity.”
“When emotion is withheld it tends to isolate and disturb us quite as much as an unconscious secret, and is equally guilt-laden. Just as nature bears us ill- will, as it were, if we possess a secret to which man¬kind has not attained, so also has she a grudge against us if we withhold our emotions from our fellow-men. Nature decidedly abhors a vacuum in this respect, in the long run nothing is more unbearable than a tepid harmony in personal relations brought about by with¬holding emotion. The repressed emotions are often of a kind we wish to keep secret. But more often there is no secret worthy of the name; there are merely quite avowable emotions which, from being withheld at some important juncture, have become unconscious.”
“The decisive question for man is: Is he related to something infinite or not? That is the telling question of his life. Only if we know that the thing which truly matters is the infinite can we avoid fixing our interests upon futilities, and upon all kinds of goals which are not of real importance. Thus we demand that the world grant us recognition for qualities which we regard as personal possessions: our talent or our beauty. The more a man lays stress on false possessions, and the less sensitivity he has for what is essential, the less satisfying is his life. He feels limited because he has limited aims, and the result is envy and jealousy. If we understand and feel that here in this life we already have a link with the infinite, desires and attitudes change.”
“There is another way in which loneliness attracts evil: if you live alone and away from a human community for a very long time, then the tribe, the other people, project their shadow onto you and there is no correcting factor. For instance, after very long holidays in which I do not see my analysands, I often find that when I come back they have slowly spun a web of the most amazing negative ideas about me. That is why the French say, “Les absents ont toujours tort” (the absent ones are always wrong). They think I do this or that, but when they see me again they say, “Why on earth did I believe that? Now that we are together again I cannot even imagine that I could think such things about you.” The actual warm human contact dissipates those clouds of projection, but if one is away for a long time and the tie of affection and feeling loosens, people begin to project.”
“To the extent that I managed to translate the emotions into images—that is to say, to find the images which were concealed in the emotions—I was inwardly calmed and reassured. Had I left those images hidden in the emotions, I might have been torn to pieces by them. There is a chance that I might have succeeded in splitting them off; but in that case I would inexorably have fallen into a neurosis and so been ultimately destroyed by them anyhow. As a result of my experiment I learned how helpful it can be, from the therapeutic point of view, to find the particular images which lie behind emotions.”
Vlado Šolc
