#aniela jaffe

"If a man knows more than others, he becomes lonely." pg 356

"It is important to have a secret, a premonition of things unknown. It fills life with something impersonal." pg 356

"The unexpected and the incredible belong in this world. Only then is life whole. For me the world has from the beginning been infinite and ungraspable." pg 356

"I have much more trouble getting along with my ideas. There was a daimon in me, and in the end its presence proved decisive. It overpowered me, and if I was at times ruthless it was because I was in the grip of the daimon. I could never stop at anything once attained. I had to hasten on, to catch up with my vision." pg 356

"I had to obey an inner law which was imposed on me and left me no freedom of choice. Of course I did not always obey it. How can anyone live without inconsistency?" pg 357

"I was able to become intensely interested in many people; but as soon as I had seen through them, the magic was gone. In this way I made many enemies. A creative person has little power over his own life. He is not free. He is captive and driven by daimon." pg 357

"The older I have become, the less I have understood or had insight into or known about myself." 358

"I am astonished, disappointed, pleased with myself. I am all these things at once, and cannot add up the sum. I am incapable of determining ultimate worth or worthlessness; I have no judgment about myself and my life. There is nothing I am quite sure about. I have no definite convictions--not about anything, really. I know only that I was born and exist, and it seems to me that I have been carried along. I exist on the foundation of something I do not know. In spite of all uncertainties, I feel a solidity underlying all existence and a continuity in my mode of being." pg 358

"The world into which we are born is brutal and cruel, and at the same time, of divine beauty. Which element we think outweighs the other, whether meaninglessness or meaning, is a matter of temperament." pg 358-359

"Life is--or has--meaning and meaninglessness." pg 359

"My own inner contradictions appeared here in a dramatized form; Goethe had written virtually a basic outline and patterns of my own conflicts and solutions. The dichotomy of Faust-Mephistopheles came together within myself into a single person, and I was that person." pg 235

"Our souls as well as our bodies are composed of individual elements which were all already present in the ranks of our ancestors. The "newness" in the individual psyche is an endlessly varied recombination of age-old components." pg 235

"It is precisely the loss of connection with the past, our uprootedness, which has given rise to the "discontents" of civilization and to such a flurry and haste that we live more in the future and its chimerical promises of a golden age than in the present, with which our whole evolutionary background has not yet caught up. We rush impetuously into novelty, driven by a mounting sense of insufficiency, dissatisfaction, and restlessness. We no longer live on what we have, but on promises, no longer in the light of the present day, but in the darkness of the future, which, we expect, will at last bring the proper sunrise. We refuse to recognize that everything better is purchased at the price of something worse." pg 236

"All haste is of the devil, as the old masters used to say." pg 236

"Inner peace and contentment depend in large measure upon whether or not the historical family which is inherent in the individual can be harmonized with the ephemeral conditions of the present." pg 237

"I saw that once again I had obviously got myself into a side alley where no one could or would follow me. But I knew--and nothing and nobody could have deflected me from my purpose--that my decision stood, and that it was fate." pg 109

"I wanted to know how the human mind reacted to the sight of its own destruction, for psychiatry seemed to me an articulate expression of that biological reaction which seizes upon the so-called healthy mind in the presence of mental illness." pg 112

"At that time my interest in therapy had not awakened, but the pathological variants of so-called normality fascinated me, because they offered me the longed-for opportunity to obtain a deeper insight into the psyche in general." pg 113

"I have neither the desire nor the capacity to stand outside myself and observe my fate in a truly objective way." pg 113

"In the end, man is an event which cannot judge itself, but, for better or worse, is left to the judgement of others." pg 113

"Dominating my interests and research was the burning question: "What actually takes place inside the mentally ill?" pg 114

"Psychiatry teachers were not interested in what the patient had to say, but rather in how to make a diagnosis or how to describe symptoms and to compile statistics." pg 114

"I had a difficult question of conscience to answer, and to settle the matter myself alone." pg 116

"The European is, to be sure, convinced that he is no longer what he was ages ago; but he does not know what he has since become. " pg 240

"What we lack is intensity of life." pg 242

"I had accustomed myself to living always on two planes simultaneously, one conscious, which attempted to understand and could not, and one unconscious, which wanted to express something and could not formulate it any better than by a dream." pg 242

"In travelling to Africa to find a psychic observation post outside the sphere of the European, I unconsciously wanted to find that part of my personality which had become invisible under the influence and the pressure of being European." pg 244

"Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves." pg 247

"One never knows which is more enjoyable: catching sight of new shores, or discovering new approaches to age-old knowledge that has been almost forgotten." pg 247

"Knowledge does not enrich us; it removes us more and more from the mythic world in which we were once at home by right of birth." pg 252

"Man is indispensable for the completion of creation... He himself is the second creator of the world, who alone has given the world its objective existence--without which, unheard, unseen, silently eating, giving birth, dying, heads nodding through hundreds of millions of years, it would have gone on in the profoundest night of non-being down to its unknown end. Human consciousness created objective existence and meaning, and man found his indispensable place in the great process of being." pg 256