Jung, Carl Gustav

Jung, Carl Gustav

(b. Kesswil, Switzerland, 26 July 1875; d. Küsnacht, Switzerland, 6 June 1961)

analytical psychology.

Jung’s father was a pastor of the Basel Reformed Church; eight of his uncles, as well as his maternal grandfather, were also pastors; and the atmosphere of religious tradition and practice in which he grew up had an all-pervading influence on his life. It is also significant, in view of his choice of career, that his paternal grandfather, an imposing figure, had indential Christian names and was a physician.

Jung’s mother, who suffered from ill health during his childhood, was warm and down-to-earth. Although not an intellectual, she was well enough read to introduce her son to Goethe. She was superstitious and communicated with her son, in whom she confided extensively, on two levels: one was conventional; the other, primitive, superstitious and very direct. These two levels of communication became important to Jung—especially a “Voice” that the truth“told”. Jung’s father had had a successful university career, studying philology and linguistics. A kind, generous man who evoked his son’s affection, he developed intellectual doubts about religion but overinsisted on the need for belief—an attitude that Jung could not accept—and a rift was created between father and son. He gradually became hypochondriacal, irritable, and ill-tempered, and family quarrels occurred. Before he died, Jung’s father started reading a book on psychology, perhaps in an attempt to solve his doubts.

Jung was an only child until he was nine years old. Secretive and highly imaginative, he spent considerable time with the peasants, among whom his family lived, and assimilated much of their folklore and easy acceptance of nature.

In his third or fourth year, Jung suffered intense anxieties focusing on the Jesuits, of whom he heard his parents talking, and came to distrust Jesus although he was presented as gentle and mild. His rich imagination began to focus on religious themes and led him to experience God. Together with a strong feeling for dreams this imagination was to develop into a lifelong sense of purpose. The need to understand unconventional and even shocking religious experiences during childhood—especially a vision of God defecating on a cathedral—was a powerful element in Jung’s drive to study relevant and often abstruse topics. This inner life was revealed only in his autobiography, written in his last years.

Jung”s education was typical for a child of his circumstances. At the age of six he entered the village school, which made a considerable impression on him. Forced to adapt in a way that was out of keeping with his home and inner life, he became aware of the need for living as if he were two persons, “personalities number one and two”, as he called them. An intellectually precocious boy, Jung soon read fluently, and his father started teaching him Latin when he was six. He also prepared his son for confirmation, but in an unsatisfying way, because he did not answer his son”s questioning mind. His father’s emphasis on belief became suspect and was a contributing factor in Jung’s turning away from formal religion.

At the age of thirteen he entered the Gymnasium in Basel, where he met the sons of well-to-do-families; his acute awareness of his poverty eventually had significant bearing on his choice of a career.

While still at school, Jung read extensively in religion and philosophy, including Goethe’s Faust, the Scholastic theologians, and to his great fascination the mystical writings of Meister Eckhart. He also studied the Greek philosophers, Hegel, and Schopenhauer, whose relation to Kant drew his attention; later, at the University of Basel, he became fascinated by Nietzsche. In all this he was working and exploring on his own; indeed, there was nobody with whom he could discuss his ideas freely. Jung used to go weekly to an uncle whose family would discourse on theology; he enjoyed the intellectual ingenuity but did not find satisfaction in it.

Jung’s entry in to university life was thus enormously liberating. To his excitement and delight he found others with similar interests and comparable intellectual gifts, with whom he could enjoy a free and broad exchange of ideas. He had difficulty in deciding which subject to take when he won a place and a bursary. Although attracted to the humanities, he had developed a strong interest in science, especially Zoology, paleontology, and geology. Since none of these subjects would enable him to earn the good living that he desired, Jung chose medicine, for which subject he showed considerable aptitude. After graduation, he was offered the post of assistant to his chief, Frederick Müller. A successful career as physician lay before him, but this was not to be.

While still a student Jung had become interested in spiritualism. One day a wood table in his home suddenly split with a bang. After the shock of surprise and incredulity had subsided, his mother remarked, “That means something”. Soon afterward a steel knife broke into several pieces in a way that he could not rationally explain; his mother looked meaningfully at him. It then appeared that some relatives had been engaged in table turning and the group had been thinking of asking Jung to join them. The possibility that the Séances and broken objects were related began Jung’s serious interest in parapsychology and seems to have been the prototype for his theory of synchronicity. But apart from these considerations, noting irrational events and following them up was characteristic of Jung, who always struggled to use his powerful intellectual drive to try to understand them instead of explaining them away.

The data Jung collected from the séances was the subject of his doctoral thesis, delivered at the faculty of medicine of the University of Zurich, in which the influence of Pierre Janet, from whom he took a number of ideas, is first recorded. His thesis “Zur Psychologie und Pathologie sogenannter occulter Phaänomene” was published in 1902. The data from the Séances also marked a turning point in his scientific and professional life, for he discovered that Psychiatry held the best hope of understanding what he had observed. In Krafft-Ebing’s Lehrbuch der Psychiatrie he read that the psychoses could be considered as diseases of the personality rather than of the central nervous system and that a subjective factor was a significant part of psychiatry. These two notions led Jung to a concept of science based upon the interaction of two psychical systems. He was so powerfully affected by this idea that it “wiped out philosophy” as a method of explaining his religious and parapsychological experiences ; they could now be replaced by the psychological point of view. His subsequent decision to become a psychiatrist was the first of two decisive steps (the second was his break with Freud).Each threw into relief his wholehearted way of pursuing his interests regardless of the consequences. Psychiatry was then very much a backwater in the medical profession, and Jung seemed to be sacrificing his career altogether. His contemporaries were astounded that he should be willing to do so.

Fortunately, Eugen Bleuler was conducting research into schizophrenia at the Burghölzli Asylum. Jung found in him support for applying association tests to the Psychology of normal persons and the mentally diseased. The technique had been initiated by Francis Galton and developed in Emil Kraepelin’s laboratory by Gustav Aschaffenburg. By ingeniouosly studying the irregularity in responses to stimulus words, Jung developed a theory of complexes and grasped that they could be explained by Freud’s theory of repression. He started corresponding with Freud, to whom he sent a small volume on schizophrenia in which he unraveled the meaning of a patient’s delusions, hallucinations, and stereotypes. Freud was much interested, and in 1907 a close but complex relationship began which lasted for seven years.

From the outset Jung was greatly impressed by Freud, although he increasingly came to have doubts about the sexual theory to which Freud attached such importance. Jung began to think of it as a concealed religion but kept this view private, as he had kept his religious convictions secret from his father. There were also differences over parapsychology, and the positive importance that Jung gave to religion was unacceptable to Freud. Jung’s doubts increased especially in 1909, when he and Freud lectured at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts.

In 1909 Jung resigned his lectureship at the University of Zurich, which he had held since 1905, thus sacrificing his academic prospects. He claimed that this act was due to the pressure of work, but a contributing factor may have been the attacks and threats made because of his promotion of psychoanalysis. At this time Jung was active in the psychoanalytic movement: he became editor of the Jahrbuch fiir Psychoanalytische und Psychopathologische Forschungen, the main psychoanalytic journal, and later the first President of the International Psychoanalytical Association.

With the publication of his large and erudite Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (1912), in which he applied psychoanalytic theory to the study of myths, Jung’s relations with Freud and psychoanalysis had become very strained and the work was heavily attacked by Sandor Ferenczi. In 1913 Karl Abraham issued a parallel and devastating criticism of Jung’s lectures entitled “Theory of Psychoanalysis” at Fordham University, New York. He was also criticized for his handling of the International Congress for Psychoanalysis in 1913 when he delivered a short paper on psychological types. At that time the serious conflicts among schools of psychoanalysis evoked intense and even personal animosities; in particular a group differing with Freud on scientific issues began to center on Alfred Adler, who eventually formed his own school.

Jung’s attempt to resolve the conflict by introducing his theory of types was not appreciated, and in 1914 he formally severed all connections with psychoanalysis to from his own school of analytical psychology. The break was the second essential, seemingly catastrophic step Jung took in his personal development and in his scientific and professional career. He was left virtually isolated, a few colleagues remained interested in the development of his concepts and practices.

This period was characterized by profound disorientation. From his own dreams Jung had already derived the idea of a substratum of historical structures in the psyche, which he thought existed in the unconscious beneath the personal level that Freud had investigated. It was as if the personal psyche of man was founded in archaic and historical roots which, expressed in myths, both determined the course of, and gave meaning to, his life. Having developed this concept in The Psychology of the Unconscious, in 1913 Jung began to explore its personal implications; he wanted to discover his own myth. The decision was not entirely voluntary; he experienced a horrifying vision of Europe covered with a sea of blood which lost its spell only at the outbreak of World War I. He came to think of it as an intimation of what was to come, but it also seemed that he had perceived the unconscious processes latent in European man. At this time his dreams became especially significant.

Jung’s intensive exploration of his own inner life began, however, from childhood games played with stones. As his games developed his imagination grew more intense and a stream of imagery, sometimes of visionary quality, began to emerge; with the persons of his fantasy he held an inner dialectic that he later called “active imagination.” This period of “creative illness” sometimes threatened to become a mahifest psychosis, but once the process was under way, he succeeded in controlling and confining it so that it did not seriously disrupt his family life and analytic practice with patients.

In 1903 Jung had married Emma Rauschenbach, a comparatively rich, intelligent, and devoted woman who kept his life running smoothly and assured his material security. Related to this turbulent period was his building of a small house at Bollingen, on a remote part of the Lake of Zurich; it was to be a “representation in stone of my inner thoughts and of the knowledge I had acquired.” Started without detailed plan but based on the huts of primitive people, it was enlarged over the years and Jung often retired to it. His simple life there combined cooking and looking after himself with painting and stone carving. Thus Jung made concrete the two personalities that he had discovered when he went to the village school.

The period of Jung’s intense inner life ended in 1917, when the stream of imagery faded. His careful records of his imagery, dreams, and visions were to form the basis of his conceptual framework. In the theory of conscious systems that he developed, the ego was at the center. Its constituents were arranged by types: there were two attitude types, introversion and extroversion. Of the four function types, thinking and feeling were rational; sensation and intuition were irrational. Within the psychic organization there were combinations of types, but the rational and irrational functions were arranged in opposites and so could not combine. Thinking was thus incompatible with feeling, and sensation with intuition. The unconscious was also relatively organized by inherited archetypes, which Jung inferred from the tendency of fantasy images to show regularities around particular personifications, such as the parent images, the hero, and the child. The unconscious forms compensated the ego and interacted with it to produce, under favorable circumstances, increased consciousness of the self or personality as a whole. The process that brought this about Jung termed “individuation.” As this took place in the person so did it occur in society, and he developed a theory of history and social change

Important in Jung’s formulation was a special theory of symbols in which inner imaginative life, having a validity of its own, was expressed. The irrational nature of symbols made possible the combination of opposites; consequently they had an integrative function, forming, in Jung’s view, the basis of religion. This structural theory required a concept of energy to account for the manifestly dynamic relation of the elements he had defined. As an abstract concept, psychic energy is inevitably neutral; but in relation to structures it operates in terms of gradients. Higher and lower energy potentials exist like the positive and negative poles of an electrical system.

Jung found that his techniques of dream analysis and active imagination applied to those—like himself —in the “second half of life,” to near-psychotics, or in selected cases to the clinically insane, especially to those schizophrenics in whose psychotherapy he had pioneered at the Burghölzli Asylum. He also found that a number of normal persons for whom life had lost its meaning could benefit from his findings. In these cases Jung concluded that the solution was “religious” in nature, although his meaning of the term was essentially refined and psychological.

In developing his theories and practices Jung proceeded empirically, using comparative methods. He compared clinical material, carefully obtained first from himself and then gathered from others, with relevant ethnological material. Thus he followed Freud’s method, in that self-analysis was concurrent with the scientific investigation of patients.

After Jung had tested his theories and begun to publish his conclusions, his practice became international; this expansion was important for testing his concepts of archetypes and the collective unconscious. At one time more English and Americans than Swiss and Germans came to study with him—Jung’s proficiency in languages facilitated this interchange. His method of teaching was to combine personal analytic treatment with seminars on dreams, visions, or a long series on Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra. His remarkable capacity for exposition carried his audience with him. Here his extensive knowledge of philosophy, comparative religion, myths, and other ethnological material was impressively displayed. Pupils who gathered round him returned to their own countries to practice what they had learned.

One path that Jung had been following attracted much attention: the idea that a serious disturbance existed in the European unconscious because of the one-sided development of consciousness. He was particularly struck by the threatening archetypal themes in his German patients. In 1918 Jung published a paper in which he stated that World War I would not be the end of the matter and he thought that Germany would again be a danger to western culture. The assumption of power by the Nazis was therefore no surprise to him—indeed, he was fascinated by this confirmation of his prediction. There is reason to think that Jung hoped his ideas would be of use in understanding the events taking place and that they might even influence their course. He published a number of articles and became president of the International General Medical Society for Psychotherapy in 1934, of which the German National Society was a member; it was a stormy period in which he was attacked either for being a Nazi sympathizer or inimical to the Nazi regime: he was put on their blacklist. Although his political influence was insignificant, it gained Jung the reputation of being a commentator on national and international affairs. It was his second and last excursion into the politics of psychotherapy.

Until World War II, Jung traveled widely, mainly in response to the invitations of scientific and other societies. He went several times to the United States; often to Germany, France, and Great Britain; and once to India—in each country he delivered lectures and seminars. Other travels were made to study primitive cultures: one was to meet the Pueblo Indians; the other longer excursion was to Kenya and Uganda, where he especially studied the life of the Elgonyi tribre. Jung’s account of these travels, which he considered more a personal test than a scientific expedition, appeared only in his autobiography.

Jung’s work attracted a number of specialists, including the sinologist Richard Wilhelm, the student of mythology Carl Kerényi, and the physicist Wolfgang Pauli, with each of whom he published the results of combined study. These intellectual interchanges were enhanced by the annual Eranos conferences at Ascona on Lake Maggiore in Switzerland, which he attended between 1932 and 1951. It attracted scholars in a variety of disciplines who discussed a common topic of psychological relevance. Jung was the focal point of these gatherings, and he used this platform to introduce a series of researches on alchemy and on the psychology of religious themes.

After World War II, Jung ceased traveling. He concentrated intensively on organizing and developing his research on alchemy, gnosticism, and early Christianity and its development (in which many heretical movements seemed a logical outcome). In addition Jung developed his theory of the self as a motive force in history and linked the Judaic and Christian traditions in a highly original way. Acutely concerned with the state of humanity, he developed the theme that man himself must mature in selfrealization if he is not to become the victim of his scientific achievements. Finally he developed a theory of parapsychological data that challenged scientific thinking and method by stressing not the causes but the meaningfulness of random occurrences-the essence of his controversial theory of synchronicity, which also postulated the relativization of time and space.

During his productive last years Jung became mythologized as the “Sage of Zurich”; many traveled to consult him and gain illumination. Interviews often became treasured, recorded, and sometimes published. His profound knowledge of people enabled him to help them, but the role cast for him was not one that he liked or fostered.

Jung was averse to becoming a leader of a school or of anything resembling a sect and took active although not entirely successful steps to prevent it. He never founded an organized school of analytical psychology or trained therapists in a formal sense. He was anxious that his ideas and practices be considered part of the general development of psychological science and that they not be taken dogmatically.

Jung’s recognition came first in a long series of honorary foreign degrees; in Switzerland recognition came relatively late. In 1935 he was named professor at the Eidgenéssische Technische Hochschule; not until 1943 did he become professor at his old University of Basel. By then he was too old to take up his duties.

Jung’s life was essentially identified with his work, which had a dual aspect. On the one hand he studied others first as a psychiatrist and later as an analytical therapist; on the other, he worked on himself and his own development. For the rest, his outer life was stable and calm. His marriage gave him a basic security, and he lived a rather typical Swiss family life with his wife and five children. His wife, who died in 1955, was also his collaborator and contributed useful research of her own.

Jung was widely known as a pioneer, with Freud and Adler, in the early stages of dynamic psychology. Outside psychological circles his influence has been significant not only in religion and art, through his rehabilitation of symbolic expression, but also in history, economics, and the philosophy of science. The influence of Jung’s researches has not yet been fully felt, and before his death groups of analysts formed to develop and modify his theory and practice. His theory of types has been subjected to further experimental investigation, with more support for the basic attitude types than for the function types. Jung’s concept of archetypes has been refined, developed, and applied to childhood; his concepts of the self and individuation have been independently developed by Psychoanalysts. In the process of assimilation the mixture of original theorizing and discovery will no doubt influence and change psychological and psychiatric thinking and will itself be changed by it.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Jung’s collected works, Herbert Read, Michael Fordham, and Gerhard Adler, eds., are being published as Bollingen Series no. 20 (Princeton, 1953-); 18 vols. have appeared as of 1973. Other recent publications of his works are Memories, Dreams, Reflections (London-New York, 1963); and Letters. Volume I, 1906-1950, Gerhard Adler and Aniela Jaffé, eds., Bollingen Series no. 95 (Princeton, 1972).

II. Secondary Literature. On Jung and his work see Joseph Campbell, ed., Papers From the Eranos Year Books Bollingen Series no. 30, 3 vols. (Princeton, 1954-1957); Henri F. Ellenberger, “Carl Gustav Jung and Analytical Psychology”, in his The Discovery of the Unconscious (New York, 1970), pp. 657-748; F. Fordham, Introduction to Jung“s Psychology (Harmondsworth, 1953); M. Fordham, Children as Individuals (New YOrk-London, 1969); and W. Pauli, “The Influence of Archetypal Ideas on the Scientific Theories of Kepler,” in C. G. Jung and W. Pauli, The Interpretation and Nature of the Psyche (London-New York, 1955), pp. 151-240.

Michael Fordham