Understanding Jung Understanding Yourself (RLE: Jung)

Peter O'Connor

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138798588
• eBook ISBN: 9781317654278
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

First published in 1985 this was the first introduction to Jung which related his theories to our everyday lives.

Discover through this highly readable book that Jung's views provide a full understanding of the concerns and anxieties of today. Sigmund Freud spoke to the generations who experienced the anxiety of sexual guilt and repression. Carl Jung speaks to our generation, who seek self-knowledge and a deeper understanding of life. This book outlines Jung's theories and how we experience them in our personal relationships, marriages and dreams. It describes Jung's eight psychological types and his thinking on the Self, alchemy, archetypes and the collective unconscious.

Imperative for those who wish to gain insight into Jung and their own psyche.

1. Carl Gustav Jung and the Jungian Perspective

DOI: 10.4324/9781315764436-1

Contemporary psychology seems to have become increasingly occupied with what is broadly termed the scientific model As a direct consequence of this, a considerable amount of its focus has been on issues of proof and evidence for its assertions. In this sense psychology can be seen as reflecting the Western obsession with rationality and the denigration of the non-rational aspects of mind and being. This has inevitably altered the face and direction of psychology and, driven by the myth of logical positivism and quantification, it has moved away and out from psyche towards overt behaviour. At this manifest, observable level, the canons of scientific method can be met, variables operationalised, measured and – above all else – the fantasy of predictability and control can be achieved. Thus the increasing use of the term ‘behavioural science’ with its attendant passion for technology and measurement would seem to be a far more accurate description of much that passes as psychology today. That the inner world of man is complex and unpredictable is not a sufficient reason for psychologists to turn their backs on it in the defensive pursuit of certitude. Indeed, one can ask the question: what is psychology without a focus on the psyche itself?

Depth psychology, of which I regard Jung’s theories as the most valuable and useful, is concerned with the inner world, and in this sense it is occupied with making objective or knowable to consciousness the subjective or inner world. It is its very occupation with the inner subjective world as opposed to the objective outer world that means the psychology depends very much on the psyche of the psychologist. In other words, as Jung himself said, the closer psychology reflects its subject-matter, the psyche, the more it merges with the psychologist himself. In so doing, it becomes like music or painting, an art form and always a subjective state.

Nowhere is this merging of psychology and psychologist more clearly seen than in the person of Carl Gustav Jung. In fact, his immense theoretical edifice can in the most basic of terms be seen as an attempt to reconcile and integrate the subjective and objective within himself. It seems to me ludicrous, particularly in this area of inner subjective-orientated or dynamic psychology, to separate the ideas out from the personality of the man to whom the ideas occurred. Hence the bulk of this first chapter will be concerned with Jung’s personal background, followed by an attempt to distil from this the personal images and myths that may have been moving Carl Gustav Jung and propelling him to make sense of this inner experience. Finally, I will attempt to give a brief synopsis of the Jungian perspective that emerged from this complex fabric of Jung’s personal life.

Personal Background

Carl Gustav Jung was born on 26 July 1875 in the small Swiss village of Kesswil on Lake Constance. He was the only surviving son of a Swiss Reformed Church pastor. Two brothers died in infancy, before Jung was born, and his only sister was born nine years later. His father, from Jung’s own account in his autobiography, Memories, Dreams and Reflections, was kind, tolerant and liberal. However, he was also somewhat conventional and seemingly content to accept the religious belief systems in which he had been reared; unable, it seems, to answer the doubts and queries of his very gifted son. Jung actually describes his father as ‘weak’, and indeed goes so far as to say that, in childhood, he associated the word father with reliability, but also with powerlessness. (By way of contrast, Freud’s father was described as strict and the undoubted authority in the home. It ought, therefore, not come as any surprise that Freudian psychology is a paternally-based psychology, or in Jungian terms a logos-based psychology, a masculine psychology, with persistent and consistent references to conscience, duty and fear of punishment as personified, for example, in castration anxieties.)

Jung, as Anthony Storr points out, belongs to that ‘not inconsiderable group of creative people springing from families in which the mother is the more powerful and dynamic figure’.¹ Yet it appears that Jung’s mother was, to say the least, a problematical figure for Jung. Sometimes she appeared to express conventional opinions, which another part of her then proceeded to contradict. When Jung was three years old, his mother is reported as having developed ‘a nervous disorder’, which required her to be hospitalised for several months. Jung later attributes this so-called ‘nervous disorder’ to difficulties in the marriage. Jung’s parents had marriage problems for as long as Jung could remember, and they slept in separate bedrooms. Jung shared a bedroom with his father, whom he described as being often irritable and difficult to get along with. Phillip Rieff, in fact, asserts that Jung’s father ‘had become a psychiatric case, complete with stays in an aslyum’.² Jung attributed his father’s misery to the collapse of the Christian myth, and the inability of his father’s belief system to sustain his being and give purpose to his life. However, Pastor Jung, being a conventional man, was caught by his own conventionality or conforming nature and was unable, or unwilling, either to reject his traditional Christian beliefs or to accept them – a classical bind that can be seen as producing neuroses.

¹ Anthony Storr, Jung, edited by F. Kermode, Fontana Modern Masters, 1973, p. 7. ² Phillip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic : uses of faith after Freud, Harper & Row, 1966, p. 108.

In addition to Jung’s father being a clergyman, eight of Jung’s uncles were also parsons, so Jung as a boy must have spent a considerable time around black-frocked men. Brought up in such a household it was, it seems to me, inevitable that throughout his life Jung should have been preoccupied with questions of religion. By his own account, Jung was an introverted child who played by himself and in the attic of his house, where he took refuge. He had a mannikin, which he had carved from a piece of wood. This mannikin provided Jung with endless hours of ceremonies and rituals; secret pacts and miniature scrolls were hidden along with it in the attic.

When he was eleven, Jung began his secondary schooling at the gymnasium in Basel and, according to his autobiography, it was the beginning of a difficult period, involving firstly his neurotic fainting spells, following an incident where a fellow student had thrown him to the ground. From then on, for a period of six months, he lost consciousness whenever he wanted to escape going to school or doing his homework. Epilepsy was a rumoured diagnosis and, according to Jung, he overheard his father one day expressing concern about his son’s future. Jung records that he heard his father saying: ‘I have lost what little I had and what will become of the boy if he cannot earn his own living.’³ Jung adds: ‘I was thunderstruck. This was the collision with reality – why then I must get to work.’ From that moment on, he says, he became a serious child and came to the realisation that he was to blame, not his schoolfriend who knocked him over or his parents. It seems that he, by his own account, overcompensated for his sense of ‘rage against himself’, by getting up regularly at 5 a.m. in order to study and sometimes working from 3 a. m. to 7 a. m. before going to school. On the other hand, his ‘self cure’ from the neurotic fainting spells also can be seen as foreshadowing one of the primary principles of Jungian psychotherapy; that is, bringing the patient back to reality and accepting the responsibility for herself or himself and not escaping this responsibility by a projection of blame onto others.

³ C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963, p. 43, hereafter cited as MDR.

It seems that from then on all went fairly well with Jung’s schooling, although he became aware, at an early age, about twelve, of two personalities within himself. The first, which he called his Number One personality, was a schoolboy who could not grasp algebra and was far from sure of himself. Indeed, one could see this as his ego-conscious personality. The other he termed his Number Two personality; ‘a high authority, a man not to be trifled with, an old man who lived in the 18th Century’. In fact one could see this as his unconscious mind or personality. As Number One personality, Jung saw himself as ‘a rather disagreeable and moderately gifted young man with vaulting ambition’. Number Two personality, on the other hand, he saw as ‘having no definable character at all – born, living, dead, everything in one, a total vision of life’. This, in fact, could be seen as his inner self. Jung’s autobiography records two or three other important inner events, either in the form of a vision or a dream, which he considers were powerful, formative experiences. He also records that the religious conflict persisted for him throughout his adolescence, and he says that he searched unsuccessfully through books for answers to his questions, since discussions with his father invariably ended unsatisfactorily. The picture that Jung draws of himself is that of a solitary, bookish, intellectual youth, puzzled by religious and philosophical questions. He says of these adolescent years:

More than ever I wanted someone to talk with, but nowhere did I find a point of contact; on the contrary, I sensed in others an estrangement, a distrust, and apprehension, which robbed me of speech. (MDR 71)

This predilection for the solitary, whether self-imposed or otherwise, can be seen as accounting for the fact that Jungian psychology is principally concerned not with the interpersonal relationships but with processes of growth, life and development within the individual psyche. It was this endeavour that became the focus of his Number Two personality. It is the events of this interior life that Jung mostly discusses about himself in his autobiography, Memories, Dreams and Reflections. In fact the period of his secondary and tertiary education is scarcely spoken of in his autobiography, except for references to interior events. Jung himself speaks strongly about the importance of these inner events when, in the Prologue to Memories, Dreams and Reflections, he says:

Outward circumstances are no substitute for inner experience. Therefore my life has been singularly poor in outward happenings … I cannot tell much about them, for it would strike me as hollow and insubstantial. I can understand myself only in the light of inner happenings … it is these that make up the singularity of my life. (MDR 19)

He further states:

Recollection of the outward events of my life has largely faded or disappeared. But my encounters with the ‘other’ reality, my bouts with the unconscious are indelibly engraved upon my memory. (MDR 18)

Thus it becomes clear why we know little of the facts of Jung’s life from adolescence through to the completion of his medical training. We do know that two or three ‘events’ seem of paramount importance, when placed in the context of Jung’s earlier life, in determining both the choice of career that Jung made and the development of his theories. These events could be seen as encounters with that ‘other reality’, the reality that became indelibly engraved upon Jung’s memory.

The major one of these is, I believe, Jung’s encounter with occult phenomena. I think a very substantial case can be built for seeing these encounters as fundamental to Jung’s theories and views. A relatively recent book written by Stefanie Zunstein-Preiswerk entitled C. G. Jung’s Medium has as one of its major themes the psychic or spiritualistic quality of the Jung family through several generations.⁴ It is not only an attempt to capture Helene (Jung’s first cousin, who performed mediumistic feats), but also an attempt to capture the psychological atmosphere that surrounded Jung during his student years. The evidence clearly indicates that Jung’s involvement with occult phenomena coincided with his commencement of medical studies at Basel University in the summer of 1895, when Jung was almost twenty years of age. It also coincided with the death of his father some six months later, in January 1896. It is almost as if from the time his father took ill (according to the evidence, about twelve months prior to his death; that is, January 1895) Jung’s mother began to express the other side of her personality, the side that Jung spoke of in the following terms:

⁴ C. G. Jung’s Medium_ Die Geschichte der Helly Preiswerk, Kindler (Munich) 1975.

I was sure that she consisted of two personalities, one innocuous and human, the other uncanny. This other emerged only now and then, but each time it was unexpected and frightening. She would then speak as if talking to herself, but what she said was aimed at me and usually struck to the core of my being, so that I was stunned into silence. (MDR 58)

Further on he said:

There was an enormous difference between my mother’s two personalities; that was why, as a child, I often had anxiety dreams about her. By day she was a loving mother, but at night she seemed uncanny. Then she was like one of the those seers who is at the same time a strange animal, like a priestess in a bear’s cave. Archaic and ruthless; ruthless as truth and nature. (MDR 59–60)

In short, this ‘other’ and so-called different side of his mother’s personality presumably was her unconscious side, if you like, her Number Two personality. I am suggesting that after years and years of habitually being repressed by her Number One side (that is, conventional personality), following the illness and subsequent death of her husband, the other side, the Number Two, began to assert itself, and this personality was strongly active in occult phenomena. Given a basic theoretical idea of Jung himself, it would seem that throughout his life he was influenced by, knew of and was linked to, his mother’s unconscious mind, and hence his attraction to and fascination by occult phenomena was inevitable.

In the Swiss (1962) edition of Memories, Dreams and Reflections Jung says:

My mother often told me how she used to sit behind her father when he was writing his sermons. He could not bear it that, while he was concentrating, spirits went past behind his back and disturbed him. When a living person sat behind him the spirits were scared off.⁵

⁵ Quoted by James Hillman, ‘Some Early Background to Jung’s Ideas’, Spring: an annual of archetypal psychology and Jungian thought, Spring Publications, 1976.

This small quote reveals the fact, a fact explicated by Frau Zunstein-Preiswerk’s book, that Jung grew up in an atmosphere in which occult phenomena and mediumistic activity were commonplace. Indeed, Jung says as much in his autobiography, when referring to an occult book he read during his student years. According to Jung, the phenomena described were: ‘In principle much the same as the stories I had heard again and again in the country since my earliest childhood’ (MDR 102).

It further seems that table-turning and seances had become the vogue in Basel, as elsewhere in Europe at the end of the last century. Just as Freud’s basic ideas can be placed against sexual repression and attitudes towards children of Victorian Vienna it seems equally plausible to place Jung’s basic ideas against the spiritualism of the 1890s. A most esteemed scholar, Henri Ellenberger, in a book entitled The Discovery of the Unconscious, goes so far as to state:

The germinal cell of Jung’s analytical psychology is to be found in his discussions of the Zofingia Students Association [a Swiss student society] and in his experiments with his young medium cousin Helene Preiswerk.⁶

⁶ Allen Lane, 1970, p. 687.

Jung himself asserts a similar view when he states:

This idea of the independence of the unconscious, which distinguishes my views so radically from those of Freud, came to me as far back as 1902 when I was engaged in studying the psychic history of a ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• About The Author
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• Dedication
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• 1. Carl Gustav Jung and the Jungian Perspective
• 2. The Nature and Structure of the Psyche. Part 1: The archetypes and the collective unconscious
• 3. The Nature and Structure of the Psyche. Part 2: Personal unconscious
• 4. Psychological Types
• 5. Self and the Individuation Process
• 6. Alchemy
• 7. Anima and Animus
• 8. Marriage
• 9. Dreams and Symbols
• 10. Conclusion
• Suggestions for Further Reading
• Index