I've always considered Carl Jung more or less a reactionary and banal fool especially when you put him beside Freud and Marx and his other contemporaries.

Here are some examples of Jung's morally and logically bankrupt ideology. Most of it is subversive, insidious and downright creepy.

"Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes." (Makes no sense whatsoever)

Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health. (Huh?)

In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order. (Kant actually refuted this line of thaught.)

The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely. (Especially if you're a mass murderer, a Nazi, a boor. )

I have treated many hundreds of patients. Among those in the second half of life - that is to say, over 35 - there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. (Reactionary bullshit.)

and found them self-evident, obviously true in my own experience. I find Jung's insight much deeper than Freud's.

It's interesting how two such intelligent people as you and I can have such polar opposite views of life, isn't it?

N/T

He was speaking of lived human experience rather than metaphysics. And he is using "Religion" in a different way most people use it today.

You need a little background in Eastern thought systems before Jung's deeper meanings make any sense. He seems to have foreseen some of our postmodern avenues of scientific research, such as chaos theory and quantum mechanics, which were also informed by Eastern thought. I'm not keen on synchronicity, but that may be because I don't understand quantum physics as well as I'd like.

Physicists hate it when we say things like that.

I've read only the autobiography and bits from here and there. His influence spreads to many directions. A local public shaman tells that reading Jung during his most difficult time helped him a lot not to feel so alone with his experiences. Pauli, one of the fathers of Quantum theory, shared Jung's interest in what Jung called synchronicity: http://www.metanexus.net/essay/wolfgang-pauli-carl-jung-and-acausal-connecting-principle-case-study-transdisciplinarity

That's all.

and it is fantastic. I want to get my hands on The Red Book and read it.

I've been a fan of Jung since I was a teen and read Memories, Dreams, Reflections. He inspired me to go to school and become a psychologist. And those quotes that the earlier poster was disparaging? They all make sense to me. And it's pretty easy to take a single sentence out of context and mock it.