Robert A. Johnson
Robert Alex Johnson (May 26, 1921 – September 12, 2018) was an American Jungian analyst and author. His books have sold more than 3 million copies.
Quotes
- “If i can stay with my conflicting impulses long enough, the two opposing forces will teach each other something and produce an insight that serves them both. This is not a compromise but a depth of understanding that puts my life in perspective and allows me to know with certainty what I should do. That certainty is one of the most precious qualities known to human kind.” ― Robert A. Johnson, Owning Your Own Shadow: Understanding the Dark Side of the Psyche
- “I had a dream which both frightened and encouraged me. It was night in some unknown place, and I was making slow and painful headway against a mighty wind. Dense fog was flying along everywhere. I had my hands cupped around a tiny light which threatened to go out at any moment. Everything depended on my keeping this little light alive. Suddenly I had the feeling that something was coming up behind me. I looked back, and saw a gigantic black figure following me. But at the same moment I was conscious in spite of my terror, that I must keep my little light going through night and wind, regardless of all dangers. When I awoke I realized at once that the figure was my own shadow on the swirling mists, brought into being by the little light I was carrying. I knew too that this little light was my consciousness, the only light I have. Though infinitely small and fragile in comparison with the powers of darkness, it is still a light, my only light.*” ― Robert A. Johnson, Owning Your Own Shadow: Understanding the Dark Side of the Psyche
- “To reconcile so great a span as heaven and earth is beyond our ordinary way of seeing; generally, two irreconcilable opposites (guilty and need) make neurotic structure in us. It takes a poet ― or the poet in us ― to overlap such a pair and make a sublime whole of them.” ― Robert A. Johnson, Owning Your Own Shadow: Understanding the Dark Side of the Psyche
- “If you want to affect your environment, don’t get lost in your activism. Stop for a moment and make a mandorla. Don’t just do ― be something.” ― Robert A. Johnson, Owning Your Own Shadow: Understanding the Dark Side of the Psyche
- “If a wise man abides in his room his thoughts are heard for more than a thousand miles.” if one makes a mandorla in the privacy of his interior life, it is heard for more than a thousand miles ― I Ching, hexagram #61” ― Robert A. Johnson, Owning Your Own Shadow: Understanding the Dark Side of the Psyche
- “The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche explored the burden of the unlived that is not reclaimed: Zarathustra goes to the grave with the unfulfilled dreams of his youth. He speaks to them as if they were ghosts who have betrayed him bitterly. They struck up a dance and then spoiled the music. Did the past make his path so weighty? Did his unlived life impede him and consign him to a life that seems not to pass?” ― Robert A. Johnson, Living Your Unlived Life: Coping with Unrealized Dreams and Fulfilling Your Purpose in the Second Half of Life
- “Guilt creates nothing; conscious work constructs a mandorla and is healing. The mandorla has no place for remorse. it asks conscious work of us, not self-indulgence. Guilt is also a cheap substitute for paradox. The energy consumed by guilty would be far better invested in the courage act of looking at two sets of truths that have collided in our personality. Guilty is also arrogant because it means we have taken sides in an issue and are sure that we are right.” ― Robert A. Johnson, Owning Your Own Shadow: Understanding the Dark Side of the Psyche
- “Dr. Jung once said that any patient who comes to a therapist is either 21 or 45 years old, no matter what his chronological age may be. The entry into life—the 21 year old’s dragon battle—occupies the first part of a male life. The relinquishing of material life and the preparation for the life of the spirit is the task of the 45 year old and occupies him for his later years. These two passages are the most important of a man’s psychological development, but we are poorly educated in their accomplishment.” ― Robert A. Johnson
- “Our human situation divides us over and over again into ego-shadow opposition, not matter where we start. This is probably why St. Augustine said, “To act is to sin.” As long as we take our place in society, we will pay for it by bearing a shadow. And society will pay a general price with collective phenomena such as war, violence, racism. This is why the religious life speaks of another realm, heaven, and of the millennium, as the culmination of the inner life. Culture and religion have different aims.” ― Robert A. Johnson, Owning Your Own Shadow: Understanding the Dark Side of the Psyche
- “The inner self is not only plural: Jung found that the psyche manifests itself as an androgyny, containing both feminine and masculine energies.” ― Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth
- “The persona is what we would like to be and how we wish to be seen by the world it is our psychological clothing and it mediates between our true selves and our environment just as our physical clothing presents an image to those we meet. The ego is what we are and know about consciously. The shadow is that part of us we fail to see or know.” ― Robert A. Johnson, Owning Your Own Shadow: Understanding the Dark Side of the Psyche
- “Since he has grasped the white-hot stuff of freedom, modern man must have an equally powerful grasp of consciousness if he is to avoid the pitfalls that are so common in our relationships today.” ― Robert A. Johnson
- “It is this awareness, this conscious participation in the imaginal event, that transforms it from mere passive fantasy to Active Imagination. The coming together of conscious mind and unconscious mind on the common ground of the imaginal plane gives us an opportunity to break down some of the barriers that separate the ego from the unconscious, to set up a genuine flow of communication between the two levels of the psyche, to resolve some of our neurotic conflicts with the unconscious, and thus to learn more about who we are as individuals.” ― Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth
- “Only awareness of your shadow qualities can help you to find an appropriate place for your unredeemed darkness and thereby create a more satisfying experience. To not do this work is to remain trapped in the tedium, loneliness, agitations, and disappointments of a circumscribed life rather than awakening to your higher calling.” ― Robert A. Johnson, Living Your Unlived Life: Coping with Unrealized Dreams and Fulfilling Your Purpose in the Second Half of Life
- “mythology describes the hero’s battle with his internal self as the encounter with the dragon, and modern man has no fewer dragon battles than did his medieval counterpart” ― Robert A. Johnson, He: Understanding Masculine Psychology
- “Being overwhelmed by something other than one’s true self. This is weakness and incompetence in a man.” ― Robert A. Johnson, He: Understanding Masculine Psychology
- “Feeling is the ability to value: mood is being overtaken or possessed by the inner feminine. To feel is the sublime art of having a value structure and a sense of meaning—where one belongs, where one’s allegiance is, where one’s roots are. To mood (we are already in difficulty since there is no adequate term for being caught up in a mood) is to be in the grips of the feminine part of our nature, to be overwhelmed by an irrational element that plays havoc with a man’s outer life. The feminine side of a man is to connect him within the depths of his inner being and to make a bridge to his deepest self.” ― Robert A. Johnson, He: Understanding Masculine Psychology