Psychology of Carl Gustav Jung. Introduction
Carl Gustav Jung, Swiss psychiatrist, along with Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler was one of the founders of what is described today as the depth psychology.
Jung called his psychology “analytical psychology” to distinguish it from Freud’s psychoanalysis.
This article on Psychology of Carl Gustav Jung conveys to the reader just a glimpse at his monumental work and the richness of his ideas.
Carl Gustav Jung’s Background and Personality
Drawn by destiny to swim against the tide, Jung’s intriguing personality demands acknowledgment in the context of his psychology.
Carl Gustav 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.
Throughout his life, Jung remained deeply introverted, interested more in the inner world of dreams and images than the outer world of people and events. Since his childhood, he possessed a genius for introspection, attentively observing experiences beneath the conscious threshold, experiences of which the great majority of us remain unaware. This gift was derived, at least in part, from the peculiar circumstances of his 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 recognized that this was the first evidenced based, scientific proof of his theory. He invited Jung to Vienna where both men met 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.
Carl Gustav Jung on 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. He was able to demonstrate that their delusions and hallucinations were not simply “mad” but full of psychological meaning. He observed for instance an old lady, a schizophrenic patient who had spent fifty years in the Burghölzli Psychiatric Hospital. The patient was making a kind of stitching movements as if she were sewing shoes. Later Jung discovered that before she developed schizophrenia, she had been jilted by her lover who was a cobbler. Jung connected the dots and assumed rightly that the emotional shock was the trigger of her illness and the stitching movements were the symbolical remnants of the old tragic romans.
Being a scientist Jung believed that psychotic phenomena were associated with the presence of biochemical neuro toxins circulating in patient’s brain. On the other hand, he also understood schizophrenia in psychoanalytic terms as “an introversion of libido”. He considered the libido as 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.
Jung published his observations in “The Psychology of Dementia Praecox” in 1907, which added to his already considerable reputation as a research psychiatrist.
Jung’s 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’s Concept of Libido
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.
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. He presented series of examples that this “life force” appears “crystallized” as the universal symbols apparent in the myths of humanity.
Jung’s publication of “The Symbols” initiated the final deprture from Freud.
Collective Unconscious in C.G. Jung’s Psychology
Carl Gustav Jung disagreed with the idea that humans are born as “tabula rasa”, a blank slate proposed by the antic philosophers like Aristotle and later in the 17th century by René Descartes and John Locke. Instead, Jung introduced the concept of the “collective unconscious.” Jung described the collective unconscious as an inherited layer of the human psyche equipped with the universal experiences, common to all humans. This layer exists beneath the “personal unconscious” of repressed wishes and traumatic memories, discovered by Freud.
Jung developed the concept of the collective unconscious based on his own experiences. Even as a child possessing a remarkable gift for introspection, he realized that there were things in his dreams that came from somewhere beyond himself. During his research as a psychiatrist, he found in delusions and hallucinations of schizophrenic patients’ symbols and images which also occurred in myths and fairy-tales.
The Archetypes
According to Jung, the collective unconscious contains psychic entities, he called the “archetypes“. He saw archetypes as patterns of behaviour, something similar to “dry river bets.” The archetypes are like a blueprints for human developement. They get activated in particular situations or stages of life. Archetypes are evident in stories, art, myths, and dreams. While archetypes form a common ground for human experiences, individuals interpret them uniquely, shaped by culture and personal history.
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. However, intuition as a noncausal phenomenon seen from the perspective of our Western causally determined science, had little chance to be widely accepted.
C.G. Jung’s Psychological Types
With the publication of “Psychological Types,” and the book’s popularity, Jung became publicly recognized to the broader audience. Freud, disgruntled, dismissed “Psychological Types” as the work of a snob and mystic.
The conflicting views of Freud and Jung mirrored the personalities of both men. Freud being extraverted and Jung introverted, naturally destined them to opposition. This division extends until today to those who either enthusiastically embraced or categorically rejected Jung’s theories.
In an era dominated by reason, this conflict was and still is inevitable. Some suffer from the collective suppression of the irrational, the less utilitarian aspects that didn’t align with progress. This fraction fully identifies with the collective preference for extraverted thinking and feeling, aligning with modernity.
While Freud accused Jung of pseudoscientific mysticism, others saw him as a true mystic in the tradition of Meister Eckehart, the most Ilustre representative of christian mysticism. Figures like Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse fell into the latter camp. Hesse even underwent Jung’s analysis and incorporated typology into works like “Narcissus and Goldmund.”
C.G. Jung’s Writing Style
The complexity of Jung’s ideas but also his writing style is the major entry barier for those interested in his psychology. His nonlinear writing style reflects his thinking approaching the subject repeatedly, each time from a different angle. Jung never settles for a single formulation but continually redevelops the concepts related to a particular context. This approach might infuse the work with richness but demands the reader’s utmost mental flexibility.
Reading Jung’s work requires determination. Apart from the long, and sometimes reciprocal sentences, the reader has to follow Jung from the depths of psychiatric practice to the ivory tower of philosophy and religion.
However, in Jung’s collected works, the reader will find brilliantly formulated, and straight to the point ideas. The author of this article refers the interested reader to Jung’s early book mentioned earlier: “The Psychology of Dementia Praecox” written in 1907, which is still the most sophisticated psychoanalytical interpretation of psychotic phenomena. Also, the transcripts of his lectures provide a good understanding of Jung’s psychology, foremost his lectures from 1936 hold in Tavistock/UK: “Analytical Psychology: Its Theory and Practice ” (Tavistock Lectures).
Psychology of Carl Gustav Jung Turns to Cosmology
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.
Carl Gustav Jung About Death
In old age Jung had many premonitions of approaching death and what pressed him was the lack of fuss the unconscious makes about it. Death for Jung seemed to be a goal in itself, something to be welcomed. Thus, in one dream he saw, an image of his bellowed retreat, Bollingen, bathed in light, and a voice told him that it was complete and ready to receive him.
Psychology of Carl Gustav Jung. Conclusion
The work of Carl Gustav Jung exceeds in its dimension the field of psychology. Jung’s understanding of human psychology stemmed from his individual experiences, dreams, and his introspective, self-analysing abilities.
Jung brought the multi-dimensional approach to psychodynamic psychology. After his departure from Freud, he developed his own psychotherapeutic technique he called “psychoanalytical psychology”. He abandoned the couch and turned psychotherapy into a dual interaction between the therapist and the patient.
Jung introduced to the psychology such terms as “introversion”/”extroversion”, “conflict” and the concepts of the collective unconscious, archetypes, personality typology and synchronicity. However, his most unique contribution was the concept of the collective unconscious and archetypes. The collective unconscious is an ancient, inherited layer within the individual psyche which embraces the condensed knowledge developed throughout the evolution of the human species. It is the psychic heritage of mankind.
It shouldn’t surprize 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 the psyche as a 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.
Looking back on his life Jung reflected:
“In my case it must have 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 Carl Gustav Jung creatively alive well into his eighty-sixth year, when he suffered two strokes and died peacefully on 6 June 1961 at Küsnacht.