Carl Jung
Carl Jung (born July 26, 1875, Kesswil, Switzerland—died June 6, 1961, Küsnacht) was a 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
Carl 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).
Carl jung 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.
Carl Jung in India (originally published in 2013) is the first publication to trace the history of Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung’s history with India in depth. Based on original archival research, it describes Jung’s unknown links with India, his journey to India in 1937-38, the places he visited, the events he participated in and the people he met as he toured the subcontinent. It locates the early history of analytical psychology in India, through Jung’s lectures, interviews, talks, and the impressions of India that he gathered during his journey.
the only western psychoanalyst who engaged with India in depth, Carl Jung’s links with India signify an important cross-cultural history of early 1900s. The critical introduction integrates contemporary ideas in analytical psychology, retaining the essence of the original work while offering new perspectives. The revised edition presents Jung’s pioneering interface with India in refreshing new format and writing.
As a boy Carl 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
Carl 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.
Carl Jung 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 carl jung 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);
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
In 2009 a manuscript that carl Jung wrote during the years 1914–30 was published in the original German with English translation as The Red Book = Liber Novus. It was, by Jung’s own description, a record of his “confrontation with the unconscious.” The work contains an account of his imaginings, fantasies, and induced hallucinations and his own colour illustrations.
Life’s Work
By the time that carl Jung first met Sigmund Freud in Vienna (1907), he was well acquainted with Freud’s writings. As a result of their meeting, the two men formed a close association that lasted until 1912. In the early years of their collaboration, Jung defended Freudian theories and Freud responded to this support with enthusiasm and encouragement.
In 1910, carl Jung left his position at the Burghölzli to focus on his growing private practice. It was during this time that he began his investigations into myths, legends, and fairy tales. His first writings on this subject, published in 1911, manifested both an area of interest that was to be sustained for the rest of his life and a declaration of independence from Freud in their criticism of the latter’s classification of instincts as either self-preservative or sexual. Although Jung’s objections to conceiving the libido in primarily sexual terms was already apparent at this early stage, the significance of these objections became clear only much later in his studies of the individuation process.
It was not only intellectual disagreements, however, that led to the rupture between Freud and carl Jung. Carl Jung objected to Freud’s dogmatic attitude toward psychoanalysis, his treating its tenets as articles of faith, immune from attack. This attitude diminished Jung’s respect for Freud (although Jung’s writings reveal that he, too, was prone to dogmatic assertions).
Thus, while Freud worked to establish causal links extending back to childhood, and in so doing posited a mechanistic account of human behavior, Carl Jung attempted to place human beings in a historical context that gave their lives meaning and dignity and that ultimately implied a place in a purposeful universe. In their later writings, both men became increasingly concerned with social questions and expressed their ideas in more metaphysical terms. Hence, Freud weighed the life-instinct against the death-wish, and Jung discussed the split in the individual between the ego and the shadow (animal side of the psyche).
After breaking with Freud, carl Jung underwent a prolonged period of inner turmoil and uncertainty about his theories. Like Freud, he used self-analysis (dream interpretations, specifically) to resolve his emotional crisis. Yet this was also a time of creativity and growth, leading to Jung’s unique approach to personality theory. Both a milestone in Jung’s career and the signal of his break with Freudian psychology, Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (1912; Psychology of the Unconscious , 1916) was the book in which his own point of view began to take definite shape. In this work, Jung interprets the thought processes of the schizophrenic in terms of mythological and religious symbolism.
The theme that unifies most of carl Jung’s subsequent writings is individuation, a process that he viewed as taking place in certain gifted individuals in midlife. While he believed that Freud and Alfred Adler had many valuable insights on the problems encountered during the maturation process, he considered their investigations limited. Jung’s particular concern was with those people who had achieved separation from their parents, an adult sexual identity, and independence through work, people who nevertheless underwent a crisis in midlife.
viewed individuation as a process directed toward the achievement of psychic wholeness or integration. In characterizing this developmental journey, he used illustrations from alchemy, mythology, literature, and Western and Eastern religions, as well as from his own clinical investigations. Particular signposts on the journey are provided by the archetypal (universal) images and symbols that are experienced, often with great emotion, in dreams and “visions,” and that as well as connecting the individual with the rest of humankind signify his or her unique destiny.
In his writings on the “collective unconscious” and the archetypal images that are its manifestation, Jung maintained that cultural differences cannot wholly account for the distribution of mythological themes in dreams and visions. He writes of many patients who, while completely unsophisticated in such matters, describe dreams that exhibit striking parallels with myths from many different cultures.
It has been pointed out, however, that there appears to be a basic ambiguity in carl Jung’s various descriptions of the collective unconscious. At times, he seems to regard the predisposition to experience certain images as comprehensible in terms of some genetic model. At other times, he emphasizes the numinous quality of these experiences, maintaining that archetypes demonstrate communion with some divine or world consciousness.
The latter part of carl Jung’s life was relatively uneventful. He lived in Zurich, where he pursued private practice, studied, and wrote. Unfortunately, he left no detailed accounts of his clinical activities, although throughout his works there are scattered anecdotes from his professional experience as a psychotherapist. His great interest in religious questions is often treated as an embarrassment by practicing psychotherapists, and the problems with which he struggled are viewed as esoteric.
Carl Jung popularity as a thinker derives from precisely this subject matter and from his belief that life is a meaningful journey. He studied Eastern religions and philosophy but saw himself as inescapably belonging to the Judeo-Christian tradition, although he was in no sense an orthodox believer. In a late work, Antwort auf Hiob (1952; Answer to Job , 1954), he pictures Job appealing to God against God and concludes that any split in the moral nature of humans must be referred back to a split in the Godhead. The book is often obscure, but Jung asserts that in contemplating the future he became more inclined to view the division in humans as an expression of divine conflict.
In his memoirs, written shortly before his death, Carl Jung appears more detached and agnostic and denies having any definite convictions. He concludes the book with a statement about his own feelings of uncertainty, maintaining that the more uncertain he felt about himself, the more he felt a kinship with all things. It seemed to him as though the alienation that separated him from the world was transferred to his own inner world and revealed an “unexpected unfamiliarity” with himself. In 2009 another autobiographical work,
Red Book was published. The completed work chronicles carl Jung's adventures into his own subconscious, and is a detailed account and analysis of what he experienced over several years of self-induced hallucinations. Jung finished the work long before his death, but kept it hidden, unwilling to subject himself to the ridicule of the scientific community that he felt was certain if it was published. When it was finally published, nearly fifty years after Jung's death, it received wide acclaim.
Significance
Although carl Jung’s theories have widened the scope of thinking about the human mind, his effect on therapeutic practice has been relatively minimal. carl Jung has been ardently attacked on a number of grounds, especially by Freudian analysts. They claim that archetypes are metaphysical constructs whose existence cannot be proved and that the idea of the collective unconscious violates accepted principles of psychology and evolution. Carl jung also criticized for his failure to offer any coherent model of personality development and for resurrecting an outdated concept of the unconscious. Others simply dismiss him as a mystic or ignore his work because he does not offer experimental evidence for his observations.
Whatever the opinion about his theories, however, Carl Jung’s impact on the field of modern psychology has been extensive. For example, the word-association test has become a standard instrument of clinical psychology; a number of rating scales have been devised for testing the introversion-extroversion dimension of personality, such as the well-known Myers-Briggs Type Indicator; his concept of individuation has been incorporated into some of the most renowned theories of personality development; and finally, the comparative studies of mythology, religion, and the occult that he undertook in his search for archetypes have shed new light on the universal aspects and dynamics of human experience and have influenced psychological thinking about humans as symbol-using beings.
Carl Jung work in archetypes and mythology has also had significant influence on many different kinds of art the twentieth century. His ideas on primal symbols influenced abstract expressions artists, such as Jackson Pollock. Jung's collective unconscious influenced the work of dancer Martha Graham and the emergence of New Age philosophy. American scholar Joseph Campbell popularized Jung's work with archetypes, the collective unconscious and comparative mythology through televised interviews and his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, in which he discussed hero archetype in mythology. Campbell's work in turn had a significant influence on Star Wars.
Bibliography
Bair, Deirdre. Jung: A Biography. Boston: Little, Brown, 2003. Print.
Bilsker, Richard. On Jung. Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth/Thomson Learning, 2002. Print.
Corbett, Sara. "The Holy Grail of the Unconscious." New York Times Magazine. New York Times, 16 Sept. 2009. Web. 4 Dec. 2015.
Hall, Calvin S., and Vernon J. Nordby. A Primer of Jungian Psychology. New York: New American Lib., 1973. Print.
Jacobi, Jolande. The Psychology of C. G. Jung. 8th ed. Trans. by Ralph Manheim. New Haven.: Yale UP, 1973.Print.
Mattoon, Mary Ann. Jungian Psychology in Perspective. New York: Free, 1981. Print.
Progoff, Ira. Jung’s Psychology and Its Social Meaning. New York: Dialogue, 1981. Print.
Shamdasani, Sonu. Jung and the Making of Modern Psychology: The Dream of a Science. New York: Cambridge UP, 2003. Print.
"The Red Book of Carl G. Jung: Its Origins and Influence." Library of Congress. Lib. of Congress, n.d. Web. 4 Dec. 2015.
The decisive question for man is: Is he related to something infinite or not? That is the telling question of his life.
Only if we know that the thing which truly matters is the infinite can we avoid fixing our interests upon futilities, and upon all kinds of goals which are not of real importance. Thus we demand that the world grant us recognition for qualities which we regard as personal possessions: our talent or our beauty. The more a man lays stress on false possessions, and the less sensitivity he has for what is essential, the less satisfying is his life. He feels limited because he has limited aims, and the result is envy and jealousy. If we understand and feel that here in this life we already have a link with the infinite, desires and attitudes change.
- Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections
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