Two Essays on Analytical Psychology by Carl Jung

First published: 1928

Type of work: Psychology

The Work:

Two Essays on Analytical Psychology has often been called the best student introduction to Carl Jung’s work. “The Unconscious in the Normal and Pathological Mind” and “The Relation of the Ego to the Unconscious” are 1928 revisions of essays that Jung wrote earlier. Almost all of Jung’s early work was revised extensively before its appearance in the collected edition to which he devoted his last years.

The work begins, as do so many of Jung’s writings, 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 ideas different from Freud’s and Adler’s that led to personal differences between them, and these differences have been continued with rancor by their followers. One of the crucial points of disagreement is Jung’s opinion that Freud’s concept of the libido is too narrowly concerned with sexual energy and that Adler’s definition of libido as a will to power is also too simplistic. Jung calls the libido, the basic reservoir of human drives, “psychic energy.” Jung, however, endorses the cornerstone of Freud’s theory, dream analysis, calling this technique “the royal road to the unconscious.” Jung advises rising above too exclusive a concern with sexuality or the will to power. These drives are more important to young men than they are to the complete person over a long life span. Jung sees them as partial truths, and he proposes a theory of the psyche that can transcend them.

Undoubtedly there is much to be said for Jung’s criticism of Freud and Adler as being concerned too reductively with elective forces in the analysis of human motivation. As time passed, Jung turned more to mythology and folklore for keys to understanding the unconscious, while Freud always stayed within the confines of a patient’s personal experience from childhood on. Moreover, no matter how positively one reacts to Jungian theory, one must acknowledge an unrelenting tendency in the Swiss psychologist to schematize. During Freud’s productive career, his ideas about the unconscious and its significance changed because of the material presented to him by his patients. In Jung’s analysis, however, a few details from dreams led him to set up categories of psychological behavior drawn from his extensive research into primitive religions and the mysticism of Europe and the Near East. This tendency to set up formal patterns of meaning from dream, myth, and legend has led many of Jung’s critics to refuse him the name of scientist; they insist that he is a philosopher, and a medieval one at that.

Like many makers of mystical systems, Jung insists that everything within the mind is doubled or paired. Conflict may be destructive to mental health, but it is also necessary to spiritual development. His belief is that energy results from the tension of opposites. According to Jung, for the young the conflicts are outside—with parents, with society—and here, as noted, the analysis of Freud and Adler is most valuable. The conflicts of mature people, however, are within. Many are unable to form significant selves 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 calls primordial images, figures containing those qualities dramatized in the great myths of past cultures. These images of demoniac power are not inherited in themselves, but the thought patterns that produce them are. For Jung there is a personal unconsciousness such as Freud described, containing one’s repressed personal emotions. The collective consciousness, however, is, according to Jung, much more obscure and more powerful, charged with potential for good and evil.

Jung also formulates 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. He contrasts that view with his own subjective interpretation, which brings the dreamer back to the self and is synthetic rather than analytic. This is the point at which the vast store of myth and legend material comes 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 Jung 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 the hero can win is life, in the sense of mental balance, a process Jung calls 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 (the approach taken by Freud). To analyze dreams, people need to draw parallels from primitive material, because dreams come from the unconsciousness, which contains remnants of human 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, aside from the hero, are figures Jung calls the shadows: the wise old man, the mother, the child, and the anima and the animus (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 shadows or destructive charges. 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 may appear as dark chaos, the chaotic emotion into which the self can sink without a trace.

The all-important process of individuation is achieved, says Jung, through analysis of and compensation for these demoniac 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 terms mandalas.

Much of this analysis is like philosophy, Jung admits, but he adds that such must be, for the psyche seeks expression that involves its whole nature, not that merely corrects the minor, irritating obstacles that cause neurosis. One of the essential needs of human, irrational nature is the idea of God, Jung insists. It is necessary for a person’s health that the image of the ideal be charged with power and projected outside him- or herself into religious myth. The individual needs a religious figure whose actions may be imitated and whose standards may be upheld.

Jung also describes the function of the persona, that mask the psyche creates to mediate between the desire of the unconscious and the outside 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. People must use this dark power, which Jung calls mana, and not be used by it.

It is interesting to observe that many literary people and humanists have become champions of Jung, but few scientists. Although Jung seems so often in his analysis merely to substitute one system of metaphor for another rather than offering any new understanding of mental processes, there can be no denying that, by joining comparative mythology to psychology, Jung has had extraordinary influence on both the reading and the writing of literary works.

Bibliography

Barnaby, Karin, and Pellegrino D’Acierno, eds. C. G. Jung and the Humanities: Toward a Hermeneutics of Culture. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990. Collection of essays from an international conference on the significance of Jung’s ideas includes discussions of archetypes and creativity.

Jung, C. G. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Translated by Richard Winston and Clara Winston, edited by Aniela Jaffé. 1963. Reprint. London: Fontana, 1993. Presents Jung’s life story as he related it to his secretary. Includes an informative glossary of Jungian terms.

Kerr, John. A Most Dangerous Method: The Story of Jung, Freud, and Sabina Spielrein. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993. Study of Jung’s intellectual development places emphasis on his relationships with Sigmund Freud and Spielrein, one of the world’s first female psychoanalysts. Discusses the early versions of Two Essays on Analytical Psychology.

Noll, Richard. The Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994. Controversial work suggests that Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious, first announced in Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, marked a departure from science and a turn to religion.

Stevens, Anthony. On Jung. New York: Penguin Books, 1991. Excellent introduction to Jung by a practicing Jungian analyst provides an overview of Jung’s theories of the unconscious and personality, followed by an account of Jung’s life. Offers a Jungian perspective on the different stages of development.

Tacey, David. How to Read Jung. London: Granta, 2006. Presents an accessible explanation of Jung’s psychological concepts, including the language of symbols and dreams, the second self, myth consciousness, and the stages of life.

Young-Eisendrath, Polly, and Terence Dawson, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Jung. 2d ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Collection of essays covers topics such as Jung’s ideas and their context, the historical context of analytical psychology, and analytical psychology in practice and in society.