JUNG, CARL GUSTAV

JUNG, CARL GUSTAV (1875–1961), Swiss psychiatrist and founder of analytic psychology.

Carl Gustav Jung was born in Kesswil on Lake Constance, in 1875. His family moved to Laufen by the Rhine falls when he was six months old. He was the oldest child and had one sister, Gertrud. His father, Paul Jung, was a pastor in the Swiss Reformed Church. His youth was marked by vivid dreams, intense religious questioning, and extensive reading. He was particularly struck with the works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860), Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844–1900), Meister Johannes Eckhart (c. 1260–?1327), and Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772). From 1895 he studied medicine at the University of Basel and participated in a student debating society, the Zofingia society. Spiritualism, which spread across Europe in the latter half of the nineteenth century, particularly interested him, as the spiritualists appeared to be attempting to use scientific means to explore the supernatural, and prove the immortality of the soul. In 1896 Jung and his fellow students engaged in a long series of seances with his cousin Héléne Preiswerk, who appeared to have mediumistic abilities. These sittings were discontinued when she was caught cheating.

psychiatry

On reading Richard von Krafft-Ebing's Text-Book of Psychiatry in 1899, Jung realized that his vocation lay in psychiatry. After his medical studies, he took up a post as an assistant physician at Burghölzli Hospital at the end of 1900. The Burghölzli was a progressive university clinic, under the directorship of Eugen Bleuler. At the end of the nineteenth century, numerous figures attempted to found a new scientific psychology. It was held that by turning psychology into a science through introducing scientific methods, all prior forms of human understanding would be revolutionized. Thanks to Bleuler and his predecessor Auguste Henri Forel (1848–1931), psychological research and hypnosis played prominent roles at the Burghölzli. It was hoped that the new psychology would transform psychiatry.

In 1902 Jung presented his medical dissertation, which focused on the psychogenesis of spiritualistic phenomena, in the form of an analysis of his seances with Héléne Preiswerk. This work was strongly marked by the impact of the psychological approach to mediumship developed by Frederic William Henry Myers (1843–1901), William James (1842–1910), and in particular Théodore Flournoy (1854–1921). In the same year, Jung became engaged to Emma Rauschenbach, whom he married and with whom he had five children. In 1902 and 1903, he went to Paris to study with the leading French psychologist, Pierre-Marie-Félix Janet, who was lecturing at the Collège de France. On his return, he devoted his work to the analysis of linguistic associations, in collaboration with Franz Riklin.

The conceptual basis of Jung's early work lay in the dynamic psychologies of the subconscious developed by Flournoy and Janet; he attempted to fuse these psychologies with the research methodology of Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920) and Emil Kraepelin (1856–1926). Jung and Riklin attempted to utilize the associations experiment, in which a subject was read a list of words and asked to respond with the first word that came to mind, as a quick and reliable means for differential diagnosis. They failed in this regard, but were struck by the significance of disturbances of reaction and prolonged response times. They argued that these disturbed reactions were due to the presence of emotionally stressed complexes, and used their experiments to develop a general psychology of complexes.

This work established Jung's reputation as one of the rising stars of European psychiatry. In 1906, he applied his new theory of complexes to study the psychogenesis of dementia praecox (later called schizophrenia), and to demonstrate the intelligibility of delusional formations. For Jung, along with a number of other psychiatrists and psychologists at this time, such as Adolf Meyer and Pierre Janet, insanity was not regarded as something completely set apart from sanity, but rather, as lying on the extreme end of a spectrum.

psychoanalysis

By 1907 Jung became increasingly disenchanted by the limitations of experimental and statistical methods in psychiatry and psychology. In the outpatient clinic that Forel had established at the Burghölzli, he presented hypnotic demonstrations. This led to his interest in therapeutics and to the use of the clinical encounter as a method of research. Bleuler had introduced psychoanalysis into the Burghölzli and initiated a correspondence with Sigmund Freud (1856–1939). In 1906 Jung entered into communication with Freud. Their relationship has been much mythologized. A Freudocentric legend arose, which viewed Freud and psychoanalysis as the principal source for Jung's work. This has led to the complete mislocation of Jung's work in the intellectual history of the twentieth century. On numerous occasions, Jung protested against this, and insisted that his real teachers were Eugen Bleuler, Théodore Flournoy, and Pierre Janet. It is clear that Freud and Jung came from quite different intellectual traditions and were drawn together by shared interests in the psychogenesis of mental disorders and psychotherapy. Their intention was to form a scientific psychotherapy based on the new psychology, and, in turn, to ground psychology on the in-depth clinical investigation of individual lives.

With the lead of Bleuler and Jung, the Burghölzli became the center of the psychoanalytic movement. Because of their advocacy, psychoanalysis gained a hearing in the German psychiatric world. In 1908 a journal was founded, the Jahrbuch für psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen, with Bleuler and Jung as the editors. In 1909 Jung received an honorary degree from Clark University for his association researches. The following year, an international psychoanalytic association was formed with Jung as the president. During the period of his collaboration with Freud, he was a principal architect of the psychoanalytic movement. From the start, the movement was riven by dissensions and acrimonious disagreements.

mythology, folklore, and religion

In 1908 Jung bought some land by the shore of Lake Zürich in Küsnacht and had a house built, where he resided for the rest of his life. In 1909 he resigned from the Burghölzli to devote himself to his private practice and research. This coincided with a shift in his research interests to the study of mythology, folklore, and religion, and he assembled a vast private library of scholarly works. These researches culminated in Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (1911–1912; Transformations and Symbols of the Libido). Taking his cue from William James, Jung contrasted directed thinking and fantasy thinking. The former was verbal and logical. The latter was passive, associative, and imagistic. The former was exemplified by science and the latter by mythology. Reiterating the anthropological equation between the prehistoric, the primitive, and the child, he held that the elucidation of current-day fantasy thinking in adults would concurrently shed light on the thought of children, savages, and prehistoric peoples.

The end of the nineteenth century saw an explosion of scholarship in the newly founded disciplines of comparative religion and Völkerpsychologie. Primary texts were collected and translated for the first time and subjected to historical scholarship in collections such as Max Müller's Sacred Books of the East (1879–1910). Drawing on this large body of work, Jung synthesized nineteenth-century theories of memory, heredity, and the unconscious and posited a phylogenetic layer to the unconscious that was still present in everyone, consisting of mythological images. For Jung, myths were symbols of the libido and they depicted its typical movements. He used the comparative method of anthropology to assemble a vast panoply of myths, and then subjected them to analytic interpretation. He later termed his use of the comparative method "amplification." One particular myth was given a central role: that of the hero. For Jung, this represented the life of the individual, attempting to become independent and to free himself from the mother. He interpreted the incest motif as an attempt to return to the mother to be reborn. He later heralded this work as marking the discovery of the collective unconscious, though the term itself was of a later date.

In a series of articles from 1912, Jung's colleague Alphonse Maeder, taking his cue from Flournoy, argued that dreams had a function other than that of wish fulfillment, which was a balancing or compensatory function. Dreams were attempts to solve the individual's moral conflicts. As such, they did not merely point to the past, but prepared the way for the future. Jung was working along similar lines and adopted Maeder's positions. For Jung and Maeder, the alteration of the conception of the dream brought with it an alteration of all other phenomena associated with the unconscious.

In 1913 Jung developed his conception of personality types, a subject which had been much debated in individual psychology. He argued that corresponding to the differences between hysteria and schizophrenia, there existed two general classes of person, who could be characterized by whether their libido tended to move toward the world (extraverts) or toward themselves (introverts). Through developing type theory, Jung shifted his concerns from psychopathology to a general psychology of normal functioning.

By the outbreak of war, Jung had made critical interlinked contributions to the development of psychical research, dynamic psychiatry, psychological testing, psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, cultural psychology, and the psychology of personality, hence playing an important role in the rise of modern psychological culture. In the summer of 1914, Jung and the Zurich Psychoanalytic Association ceded from the International Psychoanalytic Association, and formed the Association for Analytical Psychology, citing Freud's attempt to assert absolute authority over theoretical developments in psychoanalysis as the reason for their secession. Jung was now the head of his own school of psychology, which he called analytical psychology, synthesizing his earlier work to form its theoretical underpinnings. As a "popular" psychology and as a psychotherapy, this was to have significant and long-standing ramifications in the twentieth century.

See alsoFreud, Sigmund; Psychoanalysis; Psychology.

bibliography

Bennet, Edward Armstrong. Meetings with Jung: Conversations Recorded by E. A. Bennet during the Years 1946–1961. Einsiedeln, 1982.

Ellenberger, Henri. The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry. New York, 1970.

Hannah, Barbara. Jung: His Life and Work, A Biographical Memoir. New York, 1976.

Heisig, James. Imago Dei: A Study of C. G. Jung's Psychology of Religion. Lewisburg, 1979.

Jung, C. G. Collected Works. Edited by Sir Herbert Read, Michael Fordham, and Gerhard Adler; executive editor, William McGuire; translated by Richard Hull. London and Princeton, N.J., 1944–.

——. Analytical Psychology: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1925. Edited by William McGuire. London and Princeton, N.J., 1989.

McGuire, William, ed. The Freud/Jung Letters: The Correspondence between Sigmund Freud and C. G. Jung. Translated by Ralph Mannheim and R. F. C. Hull. London and Princeton, N.J., 1974.

Shamdasani, Sonu. Jung and the Making of Modern Psychology: The Dream of a Science. Cambridge, U.K., 2003.

Sonu Shamdasani