Jung describes one of his patients who masturbated in front of him, while making a boring movement with the other forefinger against her left temple. This, says Jung, is the movement primitive man made when he made fire -- twirling a stick against another piece of wood. The girl is demonstrating the transformation of one form of libido into another: sexual energy into fire-making. But since the girl was already masturbating with the other hand, it is hard to see why she needed to transform one into another. Freud would probably have said that the significant point was that she was boring the finger against her temple, and that woman regards her vagina as a temple: so, in fact, she was masturbating with both hands.

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A teenage girl of good family had fallen into a state of schizophrenia, refusing even to speak. When Jung finally coaxed her into speaking, he discovered that she lived constantly in a fantasy that she was on the moon. It was her task to protect the moon people from a vampire covered in feathers; but when she tried to attack the vampire, he threw off the feathers and revealed himself as a handsome man with whom she fell in love ...

Jung discovered that the girl had been seduced by her brother at the age of fifteen, and had later been sexually assaulted by a schoolmate -- presumably a lesbian. His own explanation was that incest has always been a royal prerogative, and the girl's collective unconscious knew this. So she retreated to the moon -- 'the mythic realm' -- and became alienated from the real world.

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In 1956, his publisher Kurt Wolff persuaded him to work on his autobiography, and he began -- in collaboration with Aniela Jaffe -- in 1957, in his eighty-second year. He had always been curiously reticent about his private life, perhaps anxious that not too much should be known about his relations with women....it also made clear something he had so far been determined to keep hidden: that the scientific psychologist was a public image and, to some extent, a deliberate deception. For many readers, it was almost as startling as discovering, let us say, that an eminent moralist and family man was actually a homosexual or paedophile.

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Neurosis is a damaged will to live. Psychosis is the mind's attempt to compensate for the damaged will to live by providing an 'alternative reality'.

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The method -- of lying totally relaxed, but in a state of wide-awake vigilance -- could be regarded as the simplest and most effective of all mental therapies.