Carl Jung

Swiss psychiatrist

• Born: July 26, 1875
• Birthplace: Kesswil, Switzerland
• Died: June 6, 1961
• Place of death: Küsnacht, Switzerland

Jung, the founder of analytic psychology, is probably best known for his descriptions of “extroversion” and “introversion,” the orientations of the personality. His theories of universal symbolic representations have had a far-reaching impact on such diverse disciplines as art, literature, filmmaking, religion, anthropology, and history.

Early Life

Carl Jung (yuhng) was descended from a long line of physicians and theologians. His father, Johann Paul Achilles Jung, was a pastor of the Swiss Reformed church, as were eight of his uncles. His mother, Emilie Preiswerk, suffered from a nervous disorder that often made her remote and uncommunicative; his father was reportedly irritable and argumentative. Since his parents were of little comfort or support to him as a child, and since his sister, Johanna Gertrud, was born nine years after he was, Jung spent much of his childhood alone. Jung’s adolescence was a time of confusion and probing, especially about religious matters. His religious conflicts, however, were eventually supplanted by other intellectual interests. Before concentrating on the study of medicine at the University of Basel in 1895, he explored biology, archaeology, philosophy, mythology, and mysticism, subjects that laid the foundation for the wide-ranging inquiries he undertook throughout his life.

After receiving his degree in medicine, Jung decided to specialize in psychiatry. Consequently, in 1900 he went to the Burghölzli, the mental hospital and university psychiatry clinic in Zurich, where he studied under the famous psychiatristEugen Bleuler. While working at the Burghölzli, Jung published his first papers on clinical topics, as well as several papers on his first experimental project the use of word-association tests (free association). This was a project that he pioneered and that later gained for him worldwide recognition. Jung concluded that the word-association process could uncover groups of emotionally charged ideas that often generated morbid symptoms. The test evaluated the patient’s delay time between introduction of the stimulus and the response, the appropriateness of the response word, and the patient’s behavior. A significant deviation from normal denoted the presence of unconscious affect-laden ideas. Jung coined the term “complex” to describe this combination of the idea with the strong emotion it aroused.

In 1906, Jung published a study on dementia praecox that was to influence Bleuler when the latter designated the term “schizophrenia” for the illness five years later. In this work, Jung hypothesized that a complex produced a toxin that impaired mental functioning and caused the contents of the complex to be released into consciousness. Thus, the delusional ideas, hallucinatory experiences, and affective changes of the psychosis were to be viewed as more or less distorted manifestations of the originally repressed complex. Jung, in essence, was venturing the first psychosomatic theory of schizophrenia; although he subsequently abandoned the toxin hypothesis in favor of disturbed neurochemical processes, he never relinquished his belief in the primacy of psychogenic factors in the origin of schizophrenia.

Life’s Work

By the time that 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, 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 Jung. 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, 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, 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 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. Jung 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 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 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. Nevertheless, his 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, 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, The Red Book was published. The completed work chronicles 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 Jung’s theories have widened the scope of thinking about the human mind, his effect on therapeutic practice has been relatively minimal. 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. He is 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, 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. His 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.