“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.”
“ We must be able to let things happen in the psyche. For us, this is an art of which most people know nothing.”
“The archetype is, so to speak, an ‘eternal’ presence, and it is only a question of whether it is perceived by the conscious mind or not.”
“Life wants to create new forms, and therefore, when a dogma loses its vitality, it must perforce activate the archetype that has always helped man to express the mystery of the soul.”
Vlado Šolc
