Jung’s psychology. Introduction
Carl Gustav Jung, Swiss psychiatrist, along with Freud and Adler was one of the founders of what is described today as the depth psychology. Jung’s psychology is called analytical psychology to distinguish it from Freud’s psychoanalysis.
A comprehensive account of Jung and his monumental work compressed in few pages is a challenging task. Drawn by destiny to swim against the tide, Jung’s intriguing character demanded acknowledgment in any text on Jungian psychology.
Jung was an excellently educated man and productive writer. His interests went beyond his scholarly education which was medicine, psychiatry, and psychology. He had vast knowledge of mythology, religion, and philosophy he deepened throughout his long life. His native language was German, but he also was fluent in French, English, Latin, and ancient Greek.
Though a rational scientist, he embraced the irrational and esoteric, deeming a solely rational approach to psychology inadequate in historical context. He had to keep it with the truth as he saw it. His understanding of human psychology stemmed from his individual experiences, dreams, and understanding of himself.
Throughout his life, Jung remained deeply introverted, delving into the inner world of dreams and images over the outer world of people and events. Since childhood, he possessed a genius for introspection, attentively observing experiences beneath the conscious threshold—experiences of which the great majority of us remain completely unaware. This gift was derived, at least in part, from the peculiar circumstances of his birth and upbringing.
Freud and Jung. Friendship and collaboration
Freud shocked the society at the turn of 19th and early 20th century introducing psychoanalytic sexual theory and the treatment method he called psychoanalysis. It was an act of courage presenting sexuality as the main source of life energy (libido) in the Victorian era.
In 1906 Jung published his book “Studies in Word-Association”. In his word association experiment Jung demonstrated the existence of unconscious autonomous complexes found by Freud trough observation of his patients. Realizing that his experimental findings provided objective support for Freud’s theory of repression, Jung sent him a copy of the book. Freud’s recognized that this was the first evidenced based, scientific proof of his theory. He invited Jung to go to Vienna to meet him in March 1907.
There is no doubt that the men were intellectually infatuated with one another. No wonder, as they were two brilliant minds of the past century who laid the foundation for today’s depth psychology. By the initial meeting they talked without interruption for thirteen hours. From that time onward, they established a close friendship and a fruitful collaboration. For six years Jung dedicated time and effort to support the psychoanalysis. At that time Jung worked at the prestigious Burghölzli Psychiatric Hospital in Zurich as a psychiatrist and the assistant of Eugen Bleuler. Jung and Bleuler joined the psychoanalytical movement helping Freud’s heavily attacked psychoanalytical theory to gain international recognition within the psychiatric circle. Jung became the president of “The International Psychoanalytic Association”.
In contrary to Freud Jung saw more sources influencing libido than only the sex drive. The book manifested the developing theoretical divergence between the two. Consequently, their personal and professional relationship went to pieces. After the culminating break in 1913, Jung went through a difficult and pivotal psychological transformation resembling a psychosis.
The psychology of Dementia Praecox
Jung’s burning question was: what actually takes place inside the mentally ill? Unlike the majority of psychiatrists before or since, he gave serious attention to what his schizophrenic patients actually said and did, and was able to demonstrate that their delusions, hallucinations, and gestures were not simply ‘mad’ but full of psychological meaning. For example, he discovered that one old lady, who had spent the fifty years of her incarceration in the Burghölzli making stitching movements as if she were sewing shoes, had been jilted by her lover just before she became ill: as Jung was able to discover, he was a cobbler.
Although Jung believed psychotic phenomena were associated with the presence of a biochemical toxin circulating in the patient’s bloodstream, he nevertheless argued that schizophrenia could be understood in psychoanalytic terms as ‘an introversion of libido’ – the libido being withdrawn from the outer world of reality and invested in the inner world of myth-creation, fantasy, and dreams. The schizophrenic, he maintained, was a dreamer in a world awake. He published his observations in The Psychology of Dementia Praecox in 1907, which added to his already considerable reputation as a research psychiatrist.
Departure from Freud
As time passed, Jung’s differences with Freud became harder to conceal. Two of Freud’s basic assumptions were unacceptable to him: 1.) that human motivation is exclusively sexual and (2) that the unconscious mind is entirely personal and peculiar to the individual. Jung found these and other aspects of Freud’s thinking reductionist and too narrow. Instead of conceiving psychic energy (or libido as Freud called it) as wholly sexual, Jung preferred to think of it as a more generalized ‘life’ force’, of which sexuality was but one mode of expression.
The collective unconscious
Moreover, beneath the personal unconscious of repressed wishes and traumatic memories, posited by Freud, Jung believed there lay a deeper and more important layer that he was to call the collective unconscious, which contained in potential the entire psychic heritage of mankind. The existence of this ancient basis of the mind had first been hinted to him as a child when he realized that there were things in his dreams that came from somewhere beyond himself. Its existence was confirmed when he studied the delusions and hallucinations of schizophrenic patients and found them to contain symbols and images which also occurred in myths and fairy-tales all over the world. He concluded that there must exist a dynamic psychic substratum, common to all humanity, on the basis of which each individual builds his or her private experience of life.
Jung’s broader concept of libido
In work, and in a series of lectures given in New York in September 1912, Jung spelt out the heretical view that libido was a much wider concept than Freud allowed and that it could appear in ‘crystallized’ in the universal symbols or ‘primordial images’ apparent in the myths of humanity. Jung drew special attention to the myth of the hero, interpreting the recurrent theme of his fight with a dragon-monster as struggles of the adolescent ego for deliverance from the mother.
Questioning Oedipus concept
This turn to interpretations of the Oedipus complex and the incest taboo h were very different from those proposed by Freud. In Jung’s view, Id became attached to his mother not because she was the object incestuous passion, as Freud maintained, but because she was the source of love and care – a view which anticipated the theoretical revolution wrought some forty years later by the British analyst and psychiatrist John Bowlby.
Furthermore, Jung maintained that the incest tabu was primary: it existed a priori, and was not derived from the prohibition of the boy’s lust for his mother, as Freud insisted. Pal longings, when they occurred, were the consequence of incest prohibition rather than its cause. Jung also argued that the Oedipus complex was not the universal phenomenon that Freud declared it.
The Intuition
Jung observed by some of his patients a particular ability to predict future events, he called “the intuition”. He introduced intuition into his typology as one of the main functions. From the perspective of our Western causally determined science, intuition had little chance to be widely accepted.
Freud and Jung. The current perspective
Sigmund Freud developed psychoanalysis, which was the first effective treatment method of mental disorders and a model of the dynamics of the human psyche. Freud also originated the language used until today in analytical psychology. However, from today’s perspective, Freud’s libido concept and his dream interpretation method proved to be wrong while Jung’s stood the test of time. However, it is Freud’s analytical theory which entered the “pantheon of science”, while Jung and his concept are considered non-scientific, and even esoteric.
The Jungian psychologist James Hillman compared Freudian psychology to the catholic church consolidated by a dogma. He saw the “dogma free” Jungian psychology on the opposite pole comparing it to the protestant church splitting from the common trunk into dozens of branches. This explains the fragmentation of Jungian societies around the world.
Jungian and Freudian psychology. Conclusion
Jung’s work exceeds in its dimension the field of psychology. He brought the multi-dimensional approach to psychodynamic psychology. After his departure from Freud, Jung developed his own psychotherapeutic technique he called “psychoanalytical psychology”. He abandoned the couch and turned psychotherapy into a dual interaction between the therapist and his patient.
Jung introduced the concept of synchronicity and the personality typology. However, his most unique contribution was the concept of archetypes and the collective unconscious proposing, which posits the existence of an inherited layer within the individual psyche. According to Jung this layer embraces the condensed knowledge developed throughout the evolution of the human species.
Crossing the boundaries of psychology
It shouldn’t surprize us that Jung remains even more controversial and confusing today than in the first part of the twentieth century. The current scientific effort in psychiatry and psychology is to explain that the psyche is pure epiphenomenon of brain function. Jung’s approach of crossing the boundaries of psychology into religions and spiritual philosophies is not easy to accept for many psychologists and psychiatrists, especially those rooted in behaviourism and neurophysiology.
Jung rejected the concept of “biologizing” the psyche. He treated the psyche as a creation on its own and independent from the matter.
Jungian cosmology
Thus, Jung’s psychology became also a cosmology, for he saw the journey of personal development towards fuller consciousness as occurring in the context of eternity. The psyche, existing sui generis as objective part of nature, is subject to the same laws that govern the universe and is itself the supreme fulfilment of those laws. Through the miracle of consciousness, the human psyche provides the mirror in which nature sees herself reflected.
Death as a goal in itself
In old age he had many premonitions of approaching death and what pressed him was the lack of fuss the unconscious makes about it. Indeed, death seemed to him to be a goal in itself, something to be welcomed. Thus, in one dream he saw ‘the other Bollingen’ bathed in a w of light, and a voice told him that it was complete and ready to receive him. Looking back on his life he reflected:
“In my case it must ye been a passionate urge to understanding that brought about my birth. For that is the strongest element in my nature” (MDR 297).
This needs to understand and to know kept him creatively alive well into his eighty-sixth year, when he suffered two strokes within a week of one another and died peacefully on 6 June 1961 at Küsnacht.