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Carl Jung

born July 26, 1875, Kesswil, Switz.
died June 6, 1961, Küsnacht
Swiss psychologist and psychiatrist who founded analytic
psychology, in some aspects a response to Sigmund Freud’s
psychoanalysis. Jung proposed and developed the concepts of the
extraverted and the introverted personality, archetypes, and the
collective unconscious. His work has been influential in
psychiatry and in the study of religion, literature, and related
fields.
Early life and career
Jung was the son of a philologist and pastor. His childhood was
lonely, although enriched by a vivid imagination, and from an
early age he observed the behaviour of his parents and teachers,
which he tried to resolve. Especially concerned with his
father’s failing belief in religion, he tried to communicate to
him his own experience of God. In many ways, the elder Jung was
a kind and tolerant man, but neither he nor his son succeeded in
understanding each other. Jung seemed destined to become a
minister, for there were a number of clergymen on both sides of
his family. In his teens he discovered philosophy and read
widely, and this, together with the disappointments of his
boyhood, led him to forsake the strong family tradition and to
study medicine and become a psychiatrist. He was a student at
the universities of Basel (1895–1900) and Zürich (M.D., 1902).
He was fortunate in joining the staff of the Burghölzli
Asylum of the University of Zürich at a time (1900) when it was
under the direction of Eugen Bleuler, whose psychological
interests had initiated what are now considered classical
studies of mental illness. At Burghölzli, Jung began, with
outstanding success, to apply association tests initiated by
earlier researchers. He studied, especially, patients’ peculiar
and illogical responses to stimulus words and found that they
were caused by emotionally charged clusters of associations
withheld from consciousness because of their disagreeable,
immoral (to them), and frequently sexual content. He used the
now famous term complex to describe such conditions.
Association with Freud
These researches, which established him as a psychiatrist of
international repute, led him to understand Freud’s
investigations; his findings confirmed many of Freud’s ideas,
and, for a period of five years (between 1907 and 1912), he was
Freud’s close collaborator. He held important positions in the
psychoanalytic movement and was widely thought of as the most
likely successor to the founder of psychoanalysis. But this was
not to be the outcome of their relationship. Partly for
temperamental reasons and partly because of differences of
viewpoint, the collaboration ended. At this stage Jung differed
with Freud largely over the latter’s insistence on the sexual
bases of neurosis. A serious disagreement came in 1912, with the
publication of Jung’s Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido
(Psychology of the Unconscious, 1916), which ran counter to many
of Freud’s ideas. Although Jung had been elected president of
the International Psychoanalytic Society in 1911, he resigned
from the society in 1914.
His first achievement was to differentiate two classes of
people according to attitude types: extraverted
(outward-looking) and introverted (inward-looking). Later he
differentiated four functions of the mind—thinking, feeling,
sensation, and intuition—one or more of which predominate in any
given person. Results of this study were embodied in
Psychologische Typen (1921; Psychological Types, 1923). Jung’s
wide scholarship was well manifested here, as it also had been
in The Psychology of the Unconscious.
As a boy Jung had remarkably striking dreams and powerful
fantasies that had developed with unusual intensity. After his
break with Freud, he deliberately allowed this aspect of himself
to function again and gave the irrational side of his nature
free expression. At the same time, he studied it scientifically
by keeping detailed notes of his strange experiences. He later
developed the theory that these experiences came from an area of
the mind that he called the collective unconscious, which he
held was shared by everyone. This much-contested conception was
combined with a theory of archetypes that Jung held as
fundamental to the study of the psychology of religion. In
Jung’s terms, archetypes are instinctive patterns, have a
universal character, and are expressed in behaviour and images.
Character of his psychotherapy
Jung devoted the rest of his life to developing his ideas,
especially those on the relation between psychology and
religion. In his view, obscure and often neglected texts of
writers in the past shed unexpected light not only on Jung’s own
dreams and fantasies but also on those of his patients; he
thought it necessary for the successful practice of their art
that psychotherapists become familiar with writings of the old
masters.
Besides the development of new psychotherapeutic methods that
derived from his own experience and the theories developed from
them, Jung gave fresh importance to the so-called Hermetic
tradition. He conceived that the Christian religion was part of
a historic process necessary for the development of
consciousness, and he also thought that the heretical movements,
starting with Gnosticism and ending in alchemy, were
manifestations of unconscious archetypal elements not adequately
expressed in the mainstream forms of Christianity. He was
particularly impressed with his finding that alchemical-like
symbols could be found frequently in modern dreams and
fantasies, and he thought that alchemists had constructed a kind
of textbook of the collective unconscious. He expounded on this
in 4 out of the 18 volumes that make up his Collected Works.
His historical studies aided him in pioneering the
psychotherapy of the middle-aged and elderly, especially those
who felt their lives had lost meaning. He helped them to
appreciate the place of their lives in the sequence of history.
Most of these patients had lost their religious belief; Jung
found that if they could discover their own myth as expressed in
dream and imagination they would become more complete
personalities. He called this process individuation.
In later years he became professor of psychology at the
Federal Polytechnical University in Zürich (1933–41) and
professor of medical psychology at the University of Basel
(1943). His personal experience, his continued psychotherapeutic
practice, and his wide knowledge of history placed him in a
unique position to comment on current events. As early as 1918
he had begun to think that Germany held a special position in
Europe; the Nazi revolution was, therefore, highly significant
for him, and he delivered a number of hotly contested views that
led to his being wrongly branded as a Nazi sympathizer. Jung
lived to the age of 85.
The authoritative English collection of all Jung’s published
writings is Herbert Read, Michael Fordham, and Gerhard Adler
(eds.), The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, trans. by R.F.C. Hull,
20 vol., 2nd ed. (1966–79). Jung’s The Psychology of the
Unconscious appears in revised form as Symbols of Transformation
in the Collected Works. His other major individual publications
include Über die Psychologie der Dementia Praecox (1907; The
Psychology of Dementia Praecox); Versuch einer Darstellung der
psychoanalytischen Theorie (1913; The Theory of Psychoanalysis);
Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology (1916); Two Essays on
Analytical Psychology (1928); Das Geheimnis der goldenen Blüte
(1929; The Secret of the Golden Flower); Modern Man in Search of
a Soul (1933), a collection of essays covering topics from dream
analysis and literature to the psychology of religion;
Psychology and Religion (1938); Psychologie und Alchemie (1944;
Psychology and Alchemy); and Aion: Untersuchungen zur
Symbolgeschichte (1951; Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology
of the Self). Jung’s Erinnerungen, Träume, Gedanken (1962;
Memories, Dreams, Reflections) is fascinating
semiautobiographical reading, partly written by Jung himself and
partly recorded by his secretary.
Michael S.M. Fordham
Frieda Fordham
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TWO ESSAYS ON ANALYTICAL PSYCHOLOGY
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Type of work: Psychological monographs
Author: Carl G. Jung (1875-1961)
First published: 1928
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Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, now published in English as
volume of the Collected Works, has often been called the best
introduction to Carl G. Jung's work that the beginning student can find.
Both "On the Psychology of the Unconscious" and "Relations Between the
Ego and the Unconscious" are 1928 revisions of essays that Jung wrote in
1912 and 1916. (Almost all of Jung's early work was revised extensively
before its appearance in the collected edition to which he devoted his
last years.)
"On the Psychology of the Unconscious" begins, as so many of Jung's
monographs do, with a version of his famous criticism of Sigmund Freud
and Alfred Adler. Jung, who was Freud's most famous disciple from 1909
to 1914, held differences in ideas that led to personal differences
which have been continued with more than enough rancor by their
followers even today. One crucial difference was Jung's belief that the
Freudian libido was too narrowly concerned with sexual energy and that
Adler's definition of libido as a will to power was also too simplistic.
Jung called this basic reservoir of human drives "psychic energy." Jung,
however, endorsed the cornerstone of Freud's theory, the dream analysis,
calling this technique "the royal road to the unconscious." But Jung
would have us rise above too exclusive a concern with sexuality or the
will to power. These drives are more important to the young man than
they are to the complete man over a long lifetime. Jung saw them as
partial truths, and he proposed a theory of the psyche that would
transcend both and contain other aspects.
Undoubtedly there is much to be said for Jung's criticism of Freud and
Adler as being concerned too reduc-tively with elective forces in the
analysis of human motivation. But as time passed, Jung turned more to
mythology and folklore for keys to understanding the unconscious of his
patients. While Freud always stayed within the confines of the patient's
personal experience from childhood on. More important, no matter how a
person reacts to Jungian theory, he must acknowledge an unrelenting
tendency in the Swiss psychologist to schematize. Again and again in
Freud's productive career, his ideas about the unconscious and its
significance changed because of the material presented him by his
patients. In Jung's analysis, however, a few details from dreams led him
to set up categories of psychological behavior and charac-terological
type, drawn from his extensive research into primitive religions and the
mysticism of Europe and the Near East. This tendency to formalize
patterns of meaning from universal myths and legends has led many of
Jung's critics to refuse him the name of scientist; they insist that he
is another German philosopher, and a medieval one at that.
Like many makers of mystical systems, Jung insists that everything
within the mind has a dual purpose. Conflict may be destructive to
mental health, but it also is necessary to spiritual development. He
believes that energy results from the tension of opposites. For the
young, says Jung, the conflicts are outside—with parents, with
society—and here, as noted, the analysis of Freud and Adler are most
valuable. But the conflicts of mature man are within. Many are unable to
form a significant self because they are unable or unwilling to come to
satisfactory terms with the threatening or "shadow" aspects of the
collective unconsciousness.
This last division of the mind is another great distinction between
Jungian theory and Freudian. Jung postulates a racial or collective
unconsciousness, containing what he (and Jacob Burkhardt) called
"primordial images," figures containing those qualities dramatized in
the great myths of past cultures. These images of daemonic power are not
inherited in themselves but the thought patterns that produced them are.
For Jung there is a personal unconsciousness such as Freud described,
containing our repressed personal emotions. But the collective
consciousness is, according to Jung, much more obscure and more
powerful, charged with potential for good and evil. Jung also formulated
a distinctive dream analysis. Every interpretation of a dream that
equates a dream image with a real object he calls interpretation on the
objective level. But he contrasted that view with his own subjective
interpretation that brings the dreamer back to himself and is synthetic
rather than analytic. This is the point at which the vast store of myth
and legend material come in, as Jung examines dreams in terms of the
struggle for mental health and significant life. The archetype of the
hero is one of the most famous he describes, and he relates how both
dreams and legends are parallel in their depiction of the lonely voyage
of the hero, beneath or through the sea, to a cave or castle where he
must battle a monster for the treasure. The hero image is the
health-giving power of the unconscious, Jung says, and the monster is
the shadow side—perhaps the dark mother, the feminine image in its
nihilistic phase. The treasure or boon the hero can win is life itself,
a process labeled by Jung as "individuation." For Jung, dreams are
another form of the old legends; they are what they say and are not to
be translated out of symbolism into psychological motivation, as they
were by Freud. To analyze dreams we need to draw parallels from
primitive material, because dreams come from the unconsciousness that
contains remnants of man's experience in all preceding epochs of
evolution. These images are the dominant powers of laws and principles.
Prominent in this dark reservoir of the past, besides the hero, are
figures Jung called the shadows—the wise old man, the mother, and
child—and the anima and the animus, the images of the feminine and the
masculine ideals respectively. Charged with power that is beyond good or
evil, many of these images carry their own shadow or destructive charge.
The wise old man in his malevolent role would appear as Satan or some
other demon. The mother may be the generous, nurturing aspect of woman,
or she may appear as dark chaos, the shape of devouring emotion into
which the self can sink without a trace.
The all-important process of individuation is achieved, says Jung, by
analyzing and compensating for these demonic powers that threaten
psychic stability. The process, involving suffering and action, is often
depicted in dreams by rectangles and circles—enclosures of perfection
that Jung termed mandalas.
Much of this analysis is like philosophy, Jung admitted, but he added
that it must be, for the psyche seeks expression that will involve its
whole nature, not merely correct minor irritating obstacles that cause
neurosis. One of the essential needs of man's irrational nature is the
idea of God, Jung insisted. It is necessary for man's health that the
image of the ideal be charged with power and projected outside himself
into religious myth whose action he will imitate and whose standards he
will uphold.
In "The Relation Between the Ego and the Unconscious," Jung sketches
many of these concepts again. (Like the dreams of his patients, Jung's
works seem endlessly moving back and forth over much the same ground.)
Here, however, he also describes the function of the persona, the mask
the psyche creates to mediate between the desire of the unconscious
inner world and the conscious outer world. Individuation consists of the
creation of an authentic self, living in dynamic but useful tension
between those two forces. If the unconsciousness rides roughshod over
the persona, psychosis results. If the unconsciousness is not expressed
in some useful way, however, the power from the libido can never be
harnessed and unending psychic paralysis, characterized by unceasing
tension and anxiety, results. Man must use this dark power, which Jung
calls mana, and not be used by it.
It is interesting to observe that although many literary people and
humanists have become champions of Jung, few scientists have. Even
though Jung seems so often in his analysis merely to substitute one
system of metaphor for another, rather than bring us any basically new
understanding of mental process, there can be no denying that, by
joining comparative mythology to psychology, Jung has had extraordinary
influence upon both the reading and the writing of literary works in
this century.
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