Carl Jung - Crystalinks

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Carl Jung - Crystalinks
3/29/10 1:08 PM
Carl Jung
July 26, 1875 - June 6, 1961
Carl Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist and founder of a neopsychoanalytic school of psychology, which he
named
.
Jung's unique and broadly influential approach to psychology has emphasized understanding the psyche
through exploring the worlds of dreams, art, mythology, world religion and philosophy. Although he was
a theoretical psychologist and practicing clinician for most of his life, much of his life's work was spent
exploring other realms, including Eastern and Western philosophy, alchemy, astrology, sociology, as
well as literature and the arts.
His most notable contributions include his concept of the psychological
his theory of
and the
- also known as "a reservoir of the experiences of our
species."
Jung emphasized the importance of balance and harmony. He cautioned that modern humans rely too
heavily on science and logic and would benefit from integrating spirituality and appreciation of the
unconscious realm. Jungian ideas are not typically included in curriculum of most major universities'
psychology departments, but are occasionally explored in humanities departments.
Early Life
Jung was the son of a philologist and paster. His childhood was lonely, though enriched by a vivid
imagination. From an early age he observed the behavior of his parents and teachers, which he tired to
understand and resolve. Especially concerned with his father's failing belief in religion, he tried to
communicate to him his own experience of God. Though the elder Jung was in many ways a kind and
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tolerant man, neither he nor his son succeeded in understanding each other.
A very solitary and introverted child, Jung was convinced from childhood that he had two personalities, a
modern Swiss citizen, and a personality more at home in the eighteenth century. "Personality No. 1," as
he termed it, was a typical schoolboy living in the era of the time, while No. 2 was a dignified,
authoritative, and influential man from the past. Although Jung was close to both parents, he was rather
disappointed in his father's academic approach to faith.
A number of childhood memories inspired many of his later theories. As a boy he carved a tiny
mannequin into the end of the wooden ruler from his pupil's pencil case and placed it inside the case. He
then added a stone which he had painted into upper and lower halves of, and hid the case in the attic.
Periodically he would come back to the manikin, often bringing tiny sheets of paper with messages
inscribed on them in his own secret language. This ceremonial act, he later reflected, brought him a
feeling of inner peace and security. In later years, he discovered that similarities existed in this memory
and the totems of native peoples like the collection of soul-stones near Arlesheim, or the tjurungas of
Australia. This, he concluded, was an unconscious ritual that he did not question or understand at the
time, but was practiced in a strikingly similar way in faraway locations that he as a young boy had no
way of consciously knowing about. His theories of psychological archetypes and the collective
unconscious were inspired in part by this experience.
Shortly before the end of his first year at the
in Basel, at age 12, he was
pushed unexpectedly by another boy, which knocked him to the ground so hard that he was for a
moment unconscious. The thought then came to him that "now you won't have to go to school any
more.". From then on, whenever he started off to school or began homework, he fainted. He remained at
home for the next six months until he overheard his father speaking worriedly to a visitor of his future
ability to support himself, as they suspected he had epilepsy. With little money in the family, this
brought the boy to reality and he realized the need for academic excellence. He immediately went into
his father's study and began poring over Latin grammar. He fainted three times, but eventually he
overcame the urge and did not faint again. This event, Jung later recalled, "was when I learned what a
neurosis is.
Adolescence and Early Adulthood
Jung wanted to study archaeology at university, but his family was not wealthy enough to send him
further afield than Basel, where they did not teach this subject, so instead Jung studied medicine at the
University of Basel from 1894 to 1900. The formerly introverted student became much more lively here.
In 1903, Jung married Emma Rauschenbach, from one of the richest families in Switzerland.
Towards the end of studies, his reading of Krafft-Ebing persuaded him to specialize in psychiatric
medicine. He later worked in the Burghölzli, a psychiatric hospital in Zürich. In 1906, he published
Studies in Word Association, and later sent a copy of this book to famed psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud,
after which a close friendship between these two men followed for some 6 years.
In 1913 Jung published
Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido
(known in English as
The Psychology of
the Unconscious
) resulting in a theoretical divergence between Jung and Freud and result in a break in
their friendship, both stating that the other was unable to admit he could possibly be wrong. After this
falling-out, Jung went through a pivotal and difficult psychological transformation, which was
exacerbated by news of the First World War. Henri Ellenberger called Jung's experience a "creative
illness" and compared it to Freud's period of what he called neurasthenia and hysteria.
Later Life
Following World War I, Jung became a worldwide traveler, facilitated by his wife's inherited fortune as
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well as the funds he realized through psychiatric fees, book sales, and honoraria. He visited Northern
Africa shortly after, and New Mexico and Kenya in the mid-1920s.
In 1938, he delivered the Terry Lectures, Psychology and Religion, at Yale University. It was at about
this stage in his life that Jung visited India. His experience in India led him to become fascinated and
deeply involved with Eastern philosophies and religions, helping him come up with key concepts of his
ideology, including integrating spirituality into everyday life and appreciation of the unconscious.
Jung's marriage with Emma produced five children and lasted until Emma's death in 1955, but she
certainly experienced emotional trauma, brought about by Jung's relationships with other women. The
most well-known women with whom Jung is believed to have had extramarital affairs are patient and
friend Sabina Spielrein and Toni Wolff. Jung continued to publish books until the end of his life,
including a work showing his late interest in flying saucers. He also enjoyed a friendship with an English
Catholic priest, Father Victor White, who corresponded with Jung after he had published his
controversial Answer to Job.
Jung's work on himself and his patients convinced him that life has a spiritual purpose beyond material
goals. Our main task, he believed, is to discover and fulfill our deep-innate potential, much as the acorn
contains the potential to become the oak, or the caterpillar to become the butterfly. Based on his study of
Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Gnosticism, Taoism, and other traditions, Jung perceived that this
journey of transformation is at the mystical heart of all religions. It is a journey to meet the self and at
the same time to meet the Divine. Unlike Sigmund Freud, Jung thought spiritual experience was essential
to our well-being. When asked during a 1959 BBC interview if he believed in the existence of God,
Jung replied, "I don't believe-I know".
Jung and Freud
Jung was thirty when he sent his work Studies in Word Association to
in Vienna. It is
notable that the first conversation between Jung and Freud lasted over 13 hours. Half a year later, the
then 50 year old Freud reciprocated by sending a collection of his latest published essays to Jung in
Zürich, which marked the beginning of an intense correspondence and collaboration that lasted more
than six years and ended shortly before World War I in May 1914, when Jung resigned as the chairman
of the International Psychoanalytical Association.
Today Jung and Freud rule two very different empires of the mind, so to speak, which the respective
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proponents of these empires like to stress, downplaying the influence these men had on each other in the
formative years of their lives. But in 1906
as an institution was still in its early
developmental stages. Jung, who had become interested in psychiatry as a student by reading
Psychopathia Sexualis by Richard Krafft-Ebing, professor in Vienna, now worked as a doctor under the
psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler in the Burghölzli and became familiar with Freud's idea of the unconscious
through Freud's The
(1900) and was a proponent of the new "psycho-analysis".
At the time, Freud needed collaborators and pupils to validate and spread his ideas. The Burghölzli was a
renowned psychiatric clinic in Zürich at which Jung was an up-and-coming young doctor.
In 1908, Jung became editor of the newly founded Yearbook for Psychoanalytical and
Psychopathological Research. The following year, Jung traveled with Freud and Sandor Ferenczi to the
U.S. to spread the news of psychoanalysis and in 1910, Jung became chairman for life of the
International Psychoanalytical Association. While Jung worked on his Wandlungen und Symbole der
Libido (Symbols of Transformation), tensions grew between Freud and himself, due in a large part to
their disagreements over the nature of libido and religion.
In 1912 these tensions came to a peak because Jung felt severely slighted after Freud visited his
colleague Ludwig Binswanger in Kreuzlingen without paying him a visit in nearby Zürich, an incident
Jung referred to as the Kreuzlingen gesture. Shortly thereafter, Jung again traveled to the U.S.A. and
gave the Fordham lectures, which were published as The Theory of Psychoanalysis, and while they
contain some remarks on Jung's dissenting view on the nature of libido, they represent largely a
"psychoanalytical Jung" and not the theory Jung became famous for in the following decades.
In November 1912, Jung and Freud met in Munich for a meeting among prominent colleagues to discuss
psychoanalytical journals. At a talk about a new psychoanalytic essay on Amenhotep IV, Jung expressed
his views on how it related to actual conflicts in the psychoanalytic movement. While Jung spoke, Freud
suddenly fainted and Jung carried him to a couch.
Jung and Freud personally met for the last time in September 1913 for the Fourth International
Psychoanalytical Congress, also in Munich. Jung gave a talk on psychological types, the introverted and
the extroverted type, in analytical psychology. This constituted the introduction of some of the key
concepts which came to distinguish Jung's work from Freud's in the next half century.
In the following years Jung experienced considerable isolation in his professional life, exacerbated
through World War I. His
Seven Sermons to the Dead
(1917) reprinted in his autobiography
Memories,
Dreams, Reflections
can also be read as expression of the psychological conflicts which beset Jung
around the age of forty after the break with Freud.
Jung's primary disagreement with Freud stemmed from their differing concepts of the unconscious. Jung
saw Freud's theory of the unconscious as incomplete and unnecessarily negative. According to Jung
(though not according to Freud), Freud conceived the unconscious solely as a repository of repressed
emotions and desires. Jung believed that the unconscious also had a creative capacity, that the collective
unconscious of archetypes and images which made up the human psyche was processed and renewed
within the unconscious (one might find similarity with the ideas of French philosopher Felix Guattari,
who wrote several books with Gilles Deleuze and once stated 'The unconscious is a factory, not a
theatre.')
Jungian Interpretation of Religion
The Jungian interpretation of religion views all religious experience as a psychological phenomenon, and
regards the personal experience of God as indistinguishable, for scientific purposes, as a communication
with one's own unconscious mind.
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Carl Jung established a school of psychology called
, which emphasizes understanding
the psyche through
Other workers in depth psychology have used other methods with
some success, but dream analysis remains the core of depth psychology. Works of art and mythology are
interpreted similarly to dreams: a myth is "a dream being experienced by a whole culture."
Inevitably archetypal figures appear in personal dreams which closely resemble mythic figures, which
leads to a natural interest in experience of religion as a psychological phenomenon.
Jung emphasized the importance of balance in a healthy mind. He wrote that modern humans rely too
heavily on science and logic and would benefit from integrating spirituality and appreciation of the
unconscious. Jungian psychology is typically missing from the curriculum of most major universities'
psychology departments. Jung's ideas are occasionally explored in humanities departments, particularly
in the study of
Jung's parents were fervent Christian missionaries, and part of Jung's early life was occupied with
resolving his personal conflict between his stern upbringing and his his own feelings about religion. This
settled in on the "scientific" interpretation of religion, which treats religion as a psychological
phenomenon only, and neither affirms nor denies a greater reality.
Although Carl Jung was a theoretical psychologist and practicing clinician, he searched through other
subjects, attempting to find a pre-existing myth or mythic system which aptly illustrated his ideas about
the human psychology of religion. He began with Gnosticism, but abandoned it early on. Later he studied
astrology and then speculative alchemy as a symbolic system. It is not clear from his writings if he ever
settled on any one of these systems of symbols.
Carl Jung and his associate
worked on trying to understand and explain the Gnostic faith
from a psychological standpoint. Jung's analytical psychology in many ways schematically mirrors
ancient Gnostic mythology, particularly those of Valentinus and the 'classic' Gnostic doctrine described
in most detail in the Apocryphon of John (see gnostic schools).
Jung understands the emergence of the Demiurge out of the original, unified monadic source of the
spiritual universe by gradual stages to be analogous to (and a symbolic depiction of) the emergence of
the ego from the unconscious.
However, it is uncertain as to whether the similarities between Jung's psychological teachings and those
of the gnostics are due to their sharing a "perennial philosophy", or whether Jung was unwittingly
influenced by the Gnostics in the formation of his theories.
Jung's own 'gnostic hymn', the
Septem Sermones ad Mortuos
(Latin: "The Seven Sermons to the Dead"),
would tend to imply the latter, but after circulating the manuscript, Jung declined to publish it during his
lifetime. Since it is not clear whether Jung was ultimately displeased with the book or whether he merely
suppressed it as too controversial, the issue remains contested.
Uncertain too are Jung's belief that the gnostics were aware of and intended psychological meaning or
significance within their myths.
On the other hand, it is clear from a comparison of Jung's writings and that of ancient Gnostics, that Jung
disagreed with them on the ultimate goal of the individual. Gnostics in ancient times clearly sought a
return to a supreme, other-worldly Godhead. In a study of Jung, Robert Segal claimed that the eminent
psychologist would have found the psychological interpretation of the goal of ancient Gnosticism (that is,
re-unification with the Pleroma, or the unknown God) to be psychically 'dangerous', as being a total
identification with the unconscious.
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