The Adult Development of C.G. Jung (RLE: Jung)

John-Raphael Staude

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138798601
• eBook ISBN: 9781317654155
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Originally published in 1981, this study presents Jung's theory of adult personality development, and analyses and interprets in its biographical and historical context the genesis and development of Jung's theory of the individuation process. Dr Staude argues that an in-depth study of Jung's life offers insights into the patterns and processes of adult development, and he focuses particularly on Jung's writings during and immediately after his mid-life transition. He shows how Jung articulated his hard-won insights into adult development in his books and essays and into his analytic practice, and considers how Jung's developmental theory relates to the changes he experienced in his own life and in his socio-historical environment. Dr Staude concludes that Jung's emphasis on impersonal universals of human psychic development complements and supplements the personal emphasis of ego development theory and provides the foundations for a more holistic understanding of adult developmental psychology.

Chapter 1 The emergence of adult developmental psychology

DOI: 10.4324/9781315764399-1

There was no explicit developmental psychology of personality through the life-span before the middle of the twentieth century. There was not even any systematic set of psychological data concerning the first half of anyone's life span. There were biographies, and, of course, there were works of fiction, but until quite recently there were no tested theories or models of psychological development covering the human life cycle. Even today the field of ‘adult development’ is in its infancy.

Before 1930 the psychology of personality development had scarcely moved beyond Shakespeare. His portrait of the seven ages of man expressed succinctly the image of the stages of life that prevails among most educated men to this day.

All the world's a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances,

And one man in his time plays many parts,

His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,

Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.

Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel,

And shining morning face, creeping like a snail,

Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,

Sighing like a furnace, with a woeful ballad

Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,

Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,

Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,

Seeking the bubble reputation

Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,

In fair round belly with good capon lin'd,

With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,

Full of wise saws and modern instances;

And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts,

Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon,

With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;

His youthful hose, well sav'd, a world too wide

For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,

Turning again toward childish treble, pipes

And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,

That ends this strange eventful history,

Is second childishness and mere oblivion,

Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

(As You Like It, II vii)

The foundations for a developmental psychology of the personality were laid in the second quarter of the twentieth century by Carl Gustav Jung,¹ Charlotte Bühler and Fred Massarik (1968), Robert Havinghurst (1948), and Erik Erikson (1950). In contrast to most other psychologists they recognized that human development continues throughout the life cycle, and they argued that every person's life has a basic developmental structure because all lives are governed by common developmental principles. These early developmental psychologists sought to discover and analyze the developmental tasks every adult faces as he or she moves from one developmental phase to another through the life course. Their schemata of life stages and the developmental tasks related to them differed, but these psychologists shared the basic assumption that while each individual life has its own unique character, normal adult development follows a predictable patterned sequence of stages. Hence, this approach to personality development is called stage theory.

The period from 1850 to 1920 saw a good deal of empirical study of child and adolescent development. However, there was little attention to adulthood and later life. Psychologists assumed that personality was controlled by inheritance, therefore research focused on the description of the unfolding of inborn patterns. To the extent that the later periods of life were studied at all, this research was done under the rubrics of gerontology and geriatrics. The model employed was one of pathology not one of normal adult development. Until quite recently most persons calling themselves developmental psychologists were primarily interested in children and not really interested in life-span developmental psychology.

The serious study of normal adult development in American psychology was inaugurated by G. Stanley Hall early in the twentieth century. His book, Adolescence, published in 1904, became a standard text on the subject for many years. In this work he viewed the strains of the pre-adult years both in terms of physiological changes and in terms of adaptation to changing norms and expectations of the adult social world. Towards the end of his long career, Hall began to investigate the aging process. Finally in 1922 he published his book Senescence: The Last Half of Life, in which he presented an interpretation of the life course in terms of a theory of life stages.

Only in the 1920s and 1930s did psychologists begin to take seriously the influence of culture and the environment in shaping behavior. Some of these psychologists, the behaviorists, saw the personality as a tabula rasa on which the social environment could stamp almost any pattern of behavior. Others saw the personality as a pattern of behavior that emerged from the interaction of the human organism with its social environment. In this view the organism was considered to possess an active force that made demands on the social environment and was at the same time, at least to some extent, shaped by adaptation to its environment. Some members of this group, notably Charlotte Bühler, Robert Havinghurst, and Erik Erikson became interested in the life-span development of personality. Since then, the new field of life-span developmental psychology has emerged from the foundations laid by these pioneers.

Charlotte Bühler and self-realization theory

In the 1920s in Berlin, the neo-Freudian psychoanalyst Karen Horney began to elaborate and expand a conception of the personality as teleologically directed towards self-realization. In her view, neurosis resulted from a person's losing the thread of his or her own inner guiding direction, from becoming too concerned to please others and forgetting their own deepest satisfactions and needs (Horney, 1950). Horney rebelled against Freud's model of the personality subdivided into id, ego, and superego. Instead she thought holistically of the whole person as a total Gestalt to be understood as a whole rather than as a system of conflicting parts. Horney's self-realization model had a great influence on a number of other psychologists including Charlotte Bühler, Abraham Maslow, and Fritz Perls.

Whereas most developmental psychologists have emphasized the organizing and guiding role of the ego in human development, Bühler judged that the ego is often only a manifestation of the individual reality interests and does not adequately represent the personality as a whole with its sometimes reality-transcendent orientation and its unconscious depths. She, therefore, spoke of the real self as the center of the personality. Bühler defines the real self as ‘a core system which organizes, selects and integrates the multitude of motivational trends’ (Bühler and Massarik, 1968) in a self-realizing direction. This notion of self-realization underlies her conception of The Course of Human Life (1968), originally published in 1933, her major book on life-span developmental psychology.

In formulating her theory, Bühler did not use the Freudian model because she felt that

Freud's system leaves no room for the fundamental role of creativity, for a primarily positive reality, anticipated and accepted as an opportunity rather than as a hindrance, and for a conscience that is rooted in the self instead of in social roles (Bühler and Massarik, 1968, p. 19).

She was critical of ego-psychology because she felt that the ego may pursue ambitions or false values and may be responsible for a person's defecting from his real self. Any personality guided by considerations solely on the ego level was bound to be ‘lacking in depth because its self-direction does not come from the core of the personality.’

Bühler was convinced from her studies of many biographies as well as clinical cases that at the deepest levels of the personality there is a core self which is oriented to purpose and meaning. Her term for a life that is directed toward fulfillment of an abiding purpose was ‘self-determination’. She evaluated the degree of development of persons in terms of their autonomy, authenticity, and the congruity between their values and their actual lives. Her normative theory of development was quite remarkable in the scientific milieu of her time when most psychologists were still committed to the so-called value-free objectivity of the sciences. In viewing human life as directed toward purposeful, meaningful living, Bühler approached closely to the work of Carl Jung and anticipated the existential psychology of Rollo May and Viktor Frankl.

Robert J. Havinghurst and socialization theory

During the period 1935–50 a group of psychologists worked inter-actively first in New York City and then in Chicago and in Berkeley on studies of child development. The members of this group shared a dynamic or organismic theory of personality development. In their staff discussions they sought to combine awareness of the drive toward growth of the individual with the demands, constraints, and opportunities provided by the social environment – the family, school, peer group, and community. They began to speak of a series of life adjustment tasks to be achieved by the growing person in relation to his environment. Eventually the term developmental task came into use in writings of several members of this group during the 1940s.

Robert J. Havinghurst, one of the members of this group, started to teach courses in child and adolescent development at the University of Chicago in 1941. He published his lecture material in 1948 and this work came into wide use as a standard text in the field. In this work he divided the life cycle into the following periods: (1) early childhood – birth to 5 or 6; (2) middle childhood – 5 or 6 to 12 or 13; (3) adolescence – 12 or 13 to 18; (4) early adulthood – 18 to 35; (5) middle adulthood – 35 to 60; (6) later maturity – 60 and over. Havinghurst's theory is one primarily based on biological development and social expectations which change through the life span and give direction, force, and substance to the development of personality.

In order to have a scientifically fruitful and viable area of study known as life-span personality development, Havinghurst suggests that the following conditions should be met:

1. Researchers should work with an organismic theory of personality, assuming the existence of something like a self-actualizing tendency.
2. The personality theory should assume that the biological organism interacts with the social and physical environment, seeking satisfaction of needs and drives.
3. Researchers should look for evidence of change of personality at all age levels.
4. Researchers should concern themselves with live problems – including controversial ones (Havinghurst, 1973).

Havinghurst suggested some of the following problem areas that would enrich life-span personality research: the study of career changes in relation to personality, where the changes take place in middle age; study of the perceptions of aging and of old age by the self, the family, and the wider community; study of personality changes associated with marked change in physical vigor and health; study of the relations between personality and favorite leisure activities; study of the attitudes toward death held by people of various ages and personality types; and study of the correlates of senility (Havinghurst, 1973).

Erik Erikson and psychosocial development theory

In 1950 Erikson published Childhood and Society which was destined to become one of the most influential books of the century on personality development. Erikson presented a theory of personality development through the life span, with a set of eight psychosocial tasks, each of which dominated the individual at a certain stage in his development. Erikson's (1950) psychosocial tasks and their age periods are:

Basic trust vs. mistrust	Birth to 1 year
Autonomy vs. shame, doubt	1–6
Initiative vs. guilt	6–10
Industry vs. inferiority	10–14
Identity vs. role confusion	Adolescence: 14–20
Intimacy vs. isolation	Early adulthood: 20–40
Generativity vs. stagnation	Middle adulthood: 40–65
Ego integrity vs. despair	Later adulthood: 65–

Erikson started with a major interest in development during the first twenty years of life, but found his curiosity and psychological activity carrying him on into the study of adulthood. His studies of Luther (1958) and Gandhi (1969) led him to concentrate his attention on adult development and the developmental tasks of adulthood.

Whereas Freud saw the personality as structured and set in early childhood, Erikson sees the personality in its essence as always developing. This led Erikson to regard the life cycle as a continuing series of steps each presenting possibilities for new growth, in contrast to Freud's view of adulthood as a mere unfolding of events whose direction had already been determined in childhood. In Erikson's view, psychosocial development proceeds by ‘crises’: decisive turning points where a shift one way or another is unavoidable. He underscored this developmental crisis aspect by assigning double terms to each life stage, emphasizing that basic conflicts are never fully resolved but continue to recur in later life.

A new life task presents a crisis whose outcome can be successful graduation, or alternatively, an impairment of the life cycle which will aggravate future crises, … Each crisis prepares the next, as one step leads to another; and each crisis lays one more cornerstone for the adult personality (Erikson, 1958, p. 254).

As we proceed through the life course, development becomes more and more complex. A restructuring of all previous identifications occurs which often means having to fight some earlier battles over again. When a later crisis is severe, earlier crises are likely to be revived. Despite the identity crisis having been resolved in adolescence, later stresses can precipitate its renewal. Furthermore, all eight stages are present throughout the life cycle.

The crisis of young adulthood concerns intimacy vs. isolation. If it is resolved favorably it results in the capacity to love. The crisis of the middle years, which begins around forty, centers on generativity vs. stagnation and if resolved favorably results in the ability to care. ‘Generativity’ applies beyond ones own family to caring for other persons and for ones products and ideas.

Erikson believes that ‘adult man is ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Preface
• Chapter 1 The emergence of adult developmental psychology
• Chapter 2 The making of a scientist
• Chapter 3 Jung's mid-life transition
• Chapter 4 The development of Jung's theory of the individuation process in the second half of life
• Chapter 5 Conclusion
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Name index
• Subject index