Carl Gustav Jung:   (1875-1961)

The Swiss psychiatrist born the fourth but only surviving child into a family in northern Switzerland wherein his father was a poor rural pastor (shortly after the birth of Carl, he was appointed to a more prosperous parish) and his mother had come from a wealthy Swiss family, but was unstable, given to depression and visions.  His mother was hospitalized when he was young and eventually the father transferred to another parish to be near her.  As a child, Jung developed a theory that he had two distinct personalities, one of a modern Swiss citizen, another of an 18th c. man.  He was drawn to elaborate self-made rituals and reputedly developed and overcame his own neurosis of fainting to get out of having to go to school or do homework.  He went on to study medicine at the University of Basel, worked in a psychiatric hospital in Zurich, completed a dissertation on psychology and pathology of occult phenomena, and wrote a book, Studies in Word Association (1906), which he sent to Freud, beginning their roughly six-year friendship that deeply influenced Jung’s development, although the friendship was broken on their eventual theoretical disagreements, specifically over the unconscious and spirituality.  During WWI, despite Swiss neutrality, he was drafted as an army doctor and commandant of an internment camp for British soldiers.  In 1903, he married and thereafter had five children, although had fairly open relationships with other women, as well.  Beginning in 1909 and continuing into the late 1930’s, Jung travelled widely and was greatly responsible for bringing psychoanalysis to America (despite most of his own works not being translated into English until after his death), and his travels to England, Africa, and India introduced and widely increased its popularity (as well as his own variant).

While having a grounding in and similarities to Freudian psychoanalysis, Jung’s theoretical orientation, which he called Analytical Psychology (and was the school’s founder), was that the human psyche is religious by nature and must be the primary object of study.  He believed that life had a spiritual purpose beyond mere material measures and goals and that each must discover and fulfill one’s innate potential in order to achieve general well-being.  His study, then, focused on archetypes in Eastern and Western philosophy, alchemy, astrology, the arts, and sociology and how these archetypes manifested in and influenced the human, especially through dream analysis.  The study of these revealed archetypes reveal the human psyche and unconscious and must be examined in order to continue on one’s path of transformation, which he called the process of Individuation: necessary for the person to become whole; a process of integrating opposites while maintaining their distinctness. 

His writings are very diverse and extensive, his collected works filling 19 volumes.  Psychology of the Unconscious (1912) and Psychological Types (1921) are his most popular works, although the work that has received the most attention most recently has been his text only recently translated and released the Red Book—this was a 16-year long compilation that he made, in a large red leather book, of notes from his journals that chronicled his “confrontations with the unconscious.”  The text is intricately illustrated and written in the style of medieval illuminated manuscripts and records things akin to medieval mystical experiences—visions/hallucinations, reflections on alchemical symbols, etc.  After his death, his family put the Red Book in a bank vault and forbid its release (as of mid 2009, less than two dozen people had seen the work).  Finally, Jung’s grandson decided to publish it in Oct. 2009.  {See some pages here}

Important Theories He Founded or Expanded:

Individuation, Introversion and Extroversion, the Complex, the Collective Unconscious, Synchronicity (a non-causal relationship).

Reputedly, Jung was indirectly responsible for development of AA/NA and art therapy.

Much more verifiably, Jung or Jungian ideas have appeared in and/or influenced: Joseph Campbell (study of myth), Federico Fellini (the Italian film director), Stanley Kubrick (Full Metal Jacket includes dialogue citing Jung and explaining the duality of human, that of persona and shadow), Francis Ford Coppola (Apocalypse Now has repeated references to Jungian concepts), Hermann Hesse (author of Siddhartha, Steppenwolf, etc., treated by a student of Jung’s), James Joyce (his Portrait said to be parody of Jung and Finnegans Wake ridicules both Jungian and Freudian psychoanalysis; was said Jung failed to ‘cure’ his daughter Lucia, who was eventually institutionalized for schizophrenia), Alice Walker (Jung as character in Possessing the Secret of Joy), Jackson Pollack (painted as Jungian therapy), Peter Gabriel (song “Rhythm of the Heat” chronicles Jung’s trip to Africa), The Police (album “Synchronicity” named after the Jungian theory), Beatles (Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover features Jung sitting in the back row next to Edgar Allan Poe), Jim Morrison (across his works there are numerous references to alchemy, individuation, collective unconscious, etc.).

“Anyone who wants to know the human psyche will learn next to nothing from experimental psychology.  He would be better advised to abandon exact science, put away his scholar's gown, bid farewell to his study, and wander with human heart throughout the world.  There in the horrors of prisons, lunatic asylums and hospitals, in drab suburban pubs, in brothels and gambling-hells, in the salons of the elegant, the Stock Exchanges, socialist meetings, churches, revivalist gatherings and ecstatic sects, through love and hate, through the experience of passion in every form in his own body, he would reap richer stores of knowledge than text-books a foot thick could give him, and he will know how to doctor the sick with a real knowledge of the human soul”

(Carl Gustav Jung, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Vol. 7), Second Edition, trans. Gerhard Adler and R.F.C. Hull (London: Routledge, Psychology Press, 1992), 246-7.

The Self:

The Ego: conscious mind

The Personal Unconscious: the unconscious, can be brought to mind or drift from attention (does not include the Freudian drives)

The Collective Unconscious: the psychic inheritance, we are born with a knowing (but never directly) of things in this reservoir of human experiences, which influence all our experiences and behaviors (e.g., things that demonstrate the effects of the collective unconscious: love at first sight, déjà vu, immediate recognition/understanding, creative/artistic experience, mystical experience, parallels in dreams, fairy tales, etc., near-death experiences, etc.)

Archetypes:

(arkhetupon: something  molded first as a model, from arkhe: primitive, first principle, and tupos: a model—a frequently recurrent symbol or motif) For Jung, a.k.a. dominants, imagoes, primordial images.  The contents of the collective unconscious; an unlearned (i.e., innate) tendency to experience things in a certain way; has no form of its own, but acts as an organizing principle of the things we see/do/etc.; they work similarly to Freud’s drives (Trieb), as indefinite yearnings that become more specific with gained experiences, but are spiritual demands, not the biological/psychic instincts/drives (and do not come from just the erotic or death drives).  These are shared by all, but their workings are radically personal—they are symbolic keys; understanding their workings help us individuate/develop.

Examples of Archetypes:

The most important concern the personification of the unconscious (self, shadow, anima, animus) and ego (persona):

Self: the regulating center, responsible for individuation;

Shadow: the opposite of the ego image, latent dispositions, dark chaos, the other;

Anima: the feminine image in the man’s psyche (see below);

Animus: the masculine image in the woman’s psyche (see below);

Persona: a mask that we wear to protect the ego.

Every personification of the unconscious has both a light and a dark aspect: life-bringing and petrification, creative and destructive.

Jung never made a set list or schema of archetypes, but the following appear in his writings and in those of his intellectual followers:

Hero: the solar (hero-solar, man-sun: this association is revealed, for Jung, in the etymology of “phallus” (shining, bright); it is that which is ithyphallic (upright)), the champion, undertakes the journey of individuation; masculinity is intimately associated with the process of becoming conscious (seeing one’s existence for what it is).

Mother: indicates our innate ability to recognize the mothering relationship; we project this archetype on people, from actual mothers to substitutes; we also personify the archetype into mythological or literary characters; symbolized by the Primordial Mother (creative, nurturing, and destructive), the Earth Mother, Eve, Mary, Church, Nation, Forest, Ocean, Maiden (purity, desire)—typically, those without this figure in their lives will seek refuge in or identification with its symbol, comfort in the Church, identification with the Motherland, a life at sea, etc.

Magician: mystery, power./Witch/Sorceress: dangerous.

Father: stern, controlling, powerful./God: a perfect image of self.

Goddess: the Great Mother./Sage: wise, old man, knowledge, guidance.

Earth Mother: nature./Trickster: deceiving.

Child: beginnings, salvation./Dog: faithful, loyal.

Horse: enduring, persistent./Cat: devious, self-serving, mysterious.

Beast: the primitive part of self.

Anima and Animus: 

(the Latin for mind, spirit, courage, passion, wrath.)  For Jung, they are the animating principles; these two principles primarily form the archetype of the self (their opposite is the persona); they are the inwardized parts of the psyche that look into the self and are in touch with the unconscious, but consider them less like a matter of “insight,” than an initiatory experience, a mystery to be lived until the meaningfulness for personality development is realized.

Anima: the unconscious feminine potential and qualities in the male; it is characterized as a relatively singular feminine personality characterized, quite literally, as a process of four characters:

Eve: of Genesis; woman as the emergence of the male’s object of desire;

Helen of Troy: woman capable of worldly success, self-reliant, but not primarily virtuous;

Virgin Mary: woman possesses total virtue by perceiving male;

Sophia: Greek word for wisdom; woman is seen as individual with both positive and negative qualities and is capable of mediating the conscious and unconscious parts of the mind.

These characters are projections the man imposes upon women, but are also representative of feminine traits in the man himself that he must process through.  The successful incorporation and processing of these traits in man advance his development past the stage of heroic self-mastery, and into one that is engaged with life with others and as a whole.

Animus: the unconscious masculine potential and qualities in the female; it is characterized less as a singular masculine personality than as four more distinct types of masculine characters that exist less as a process than as operating on four parallel levels:

Tarzan: mere physical power; wild king of the jungle; capable of rescuing Jane;

Percy Bysshe Shelley or Ernest Hemmingway: initiative and capacity for planned action (be it seduce the woman with love poetry or hunt big game in Africa); the 18th-19th c. stereotype of the romantic man;

[Lloyd George] David Lloyd George, 1st Earl Lloyd-George of Dwyfor: late 19th-early 20th c. British statesman, political orator, and Prime Minister of the UK during the WWI—this figure can also be characterized as a professor or clergy man, a figure of persuasive, powerful, public speech, I’d propose someone like Martin Luther King, Jr., too; male is seen as becoming Word, the bearer of the Word (the Truth);

Hermes: messenger of the gods; the helpful guide who is the incarnation of meaning (from the gods, of the truth), and the mediator of spiritual profundity.

As the Anima is for man, the Animus is likewise the projections woman puts on men, but these are also representative of the masculine characteristics the woman needs to properly incorporate into her being to best develop into a full woman.

As John Beebe, an editor of and scholar on Jung, writes: “… only the anima can deliver a man into a consciousness that is based, not on heroic self-mastery, but rather on empathic participation in life.  Understanding the part of the psyche Jung called the anima is less an insight of the mind than an initiatory experience, a mystery to be lived until its core of meaningfulness for personality development is at last revealed.”

This insight is crucial because of the experiential dimension and is equally relevant in its flip-side of the delivery of the woman by the animus—the anima/animus is a realization that comes as one receives deliverance from the infantile to and through the hero stage; understanding this realization is not done theoretically, but experientially: we must live it to come to grasp it, even while the grasping of it is a movement of our development.  Thus, if the goal is correct development, we want to come to understand the anima; we must understand it through living through it; thus, therapeutically, we must develop the idea of initiation. 

Letting the Anima/Animus guide the person in their development hinges upon the need for initiation—that momentous process and point of transition that is captured in the many historical and current acts of rites of passage.  These can include actual rites, rituals, initiations, ceremonial acts, established procedures, etc.  A rite of passage is an event marking the passage between stages in one’s life—for example, the traditional rites that marked boys becoming men or girls becoming women.

A Mini-Exercise Question:

Brainstorm different rites of passage (e.g., boyhood to manhood) and how they were or could be accrued and celebrated, either factually (e.g., a Bar Mitzvah is earned for living 16 years of age, it is celebrated by a young man being called to read from the Torah) or fictional (e.g., the gang member stole three cars, membership celebrated by a party).

Individuation: 

the process of personal development/growth necessary for one to become whole via the integration of opposites into oneself in harmony that maintains the opposites’ distinctiveness as well.  In the archetypal narrative, the person must undergo this journey—for example, man is characterized as consciousness, he as the Hero, that solar figure, strives to fight to maintain and increase his brightness; woman is characterized as the unconscious, the moon figure, the dark one who threatens to extinguish the rational light of man into a mysterious darkness.  Jung eventually modified the narrative of the Hero Journey into one representative stage of human development (namely, the Hero is in a stage that is the process of becoming conscious) among others.

Freud had used the mythic account of Oedipus to describe the process of becoming conscious; Jung believed that this account too heavily relied upon the ideas of oppression, really, a repression or self-blinding in the face of the intolerable forced by the gods.  Jung wanted to stress the impetus/pressure from within to become conscious (a force more powerful, for Jung, than the sex drive or the will to power).  Thus, he had first chosen the image of the hero.  In opposition to the Freudian model, a guilty person who represses shameful libidinal experience, Jung’s hero was a solar figure who fought the lunar darkness that threatened to extinguish his light, his consciousness.  Here, we see the classic archetypes: the man is consciousness, the solar, the hero who strives and fights to maintain and increase his brightness; the woman is the unconscious, the moon, the dark one who threatens to extinguish the rational light into a mysterious darkness.

Jung importantly modified this theory, however, making the hero archetype into a stage in the process of becoming conscious.  This theoretical development happened predominately because of Jung’s personal life.  His theories, he wrote, were his “personal confession” of his seeking to understand human psychology; no matter the abstraction or universal goal of archetypal thought, they are born from his lived experience and are meant to apply to every individual’s lived experience.  In particular, his development from the hero as the process to a stage in the process of conscious development was due to the marital strife that was dealt with by his taking his former patient and eventual colleague, Toni Wolff, as his mistress, with his wife’s full knowledge.  This personal crisis for Jung and influence of the feminine made him come to see the necessary role and importance of the feminine in the development of consciousness.  The hero must deliver himself from the mother archetype.  Before deliverance, he is mere infant, under bondage to the mother’s authority.  Deliverance makes him aware of the demands of the anima. 

Coming soon ... Reading Notes on:

I. The Hero, “The Origin of the Hero,” pp.3-7, “The Battle for Deliverance from the Mother,” pp.9-23.

III. The Father, “The Personal and Collective Unconscious,” pp.73-84 (counter’s Freud’s repression)

IV. Logos and Eros: Sol and Luna, “The Personification of the Opposites: The Moon Nature,” pp.85-108.

VII. The Spirit, “The Spirit Mercurius,” pp.149-73.