Reclusland

“A pedagogical stunt. Plato has said somewhere that the soul is a circle. I took this idea to suggest on the blackboard the whole sphere of the psyche. Then I drew a horizontal line across the circle to represent the line of separation of the conscious and the unconscious. The dot in the center of the circle, below the horizontal line, represents the center from which all our energy comes… Above the horizontal line is the ego, which I represented as a square: that aspect of our consciousness that we identify as our center. But, you see, it’s very much off center. We think that this is what’s running the show, but it isn’t.”

(found via Parabola magazine’s weekly newsletter)

“The concept of the unconscious posits nothing; it designates only my unknowing.”

(from a letter to Pastor Max Frischkeit dated 8 February 1946.)