Jung's Psychology and its Social Meaning

An introductory statement of C G Jung's psychological theories and a first interpretation of their significance for the social sciences

Ira Progoff

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136302367
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery

Routledge is now re-issuing this prestigious series of 204 volumes originally published between 1910 and 1965. The titles include works by key figures such asC.G. Jung, Sigmund Freud, Jean Piaget, Otto Rank, James Hillman, Erich Fromm, Karen Horney and Susan Isaacs. Each volume is available on its own, as part of a themed mini-set, or as part of a specially-priced 204-volume set. A brochure listing each title in the "International Library of Psychology" series is available upon request.

Part I

THE BASIC CORE OF JUNG’S PSYCHOLOGY

I

THE HISTORICAL SITUATION

THE HISTORICAL SITUATION AND THE FOCUS OF STUDY

In his work on the declining days of Rome,¹ the great Swiss historian, Jacob Burckhardt, describes how the people surrendered themselves to every exotic doctrine and foreign religious sect that they could find. They were searching everywhere because their traditional beliefs no longer seemed sacred and true to them and they needed to find a new meaning for their lives.

The similarity between our own time and that old Roman situation is all too easy to see. Ours also is a restless age in which old values have fallen into disuse while new values have yet to be found. Well aware that our old traditions are no longer strong, we live in a time of searching, eager for new insights that will have the power of guiding and inspiring. But a very practical problem besets us. Where are the tools of thought that can be adequate for our task? Where shall we find principles of knowledge capable of interpreting to us all the aspects and implications of our situation, our past, our present, our potentialities? Many thoughtful and sensitive men have seen this to be the problem, and most are agreed that the conceptions of life which we inherited from the nineteenth century lack the breadth and depth to meet a need as large as ours. New doctrines, new wisdom, a point of view with larger vistas, are necessary to overcome the spiritual malaise so reminiscent of declining Rome. Certainly these are difficult to find, and we can be sure that the answer will not come from just one field alone. It is a vast search and must ultimately involve every school of thought that is alert to the responsibilities of our critical age. It calls for a far-reaching discussion, and to this the following pages are offered as one small contribution with the special purpose of bringing the work of C. G. Jung into sharper focus in relation to the problems of our time.

Jung’s subject of study is the psychic life of man. As a psychiatrist, his main interest is in the development of personality, but he realized at an early point in his work that he would not be able to understand his material unless he studied man on a canvas large enough to include the history of the human race as a whole, particularly its varieties of mythology, religion and culture. He therefore made it his principle to consider all forms of psychic phenomena as belonging within a single context. As a result, we find in Jung’s writings that the problems of individual psychology, society, history and philosophy are treated not separately but in close inter-relation. They are all focused around his central problem, which is to study the infinite varieties of psychic phenomena in the life of man. Without stressing the question of methodology, but simply by following a procedure that expresses his special insight into his subject matter, Jung has developed an inherently unitary approach. His work is one of the leading instances of a holistic point of view applied to the study of man, and it is by virtue of this unifying aspect of his thought that Jung’s psychology makes its contribution to the social sciences.

The first step in introducing Jung’s ideas into the larger discussions of our time is, necessarily, to explain what they mean and what they imply, and to formulate them plainly so that they will be easier to examine. This is essentially our intention in the present volume: to give a clear understanding of the fundamental concepts in Jung’s psychological studies and to indicate their significance for the interpretation of society and history. Because of a variety of factors which we shall discuss a little later on, a very large area of misunderstanding has clouded Jung’s work practically since the publication of his Psychology of the Unconscious in 1912. The main reason for this is probably to be found in the fact that it is exceedingly easy to misinterpret Jung’s individual theories unless their position in the larger context and structure of his thought is thoroughly understood. It is very important to grasp Jung’s work as a whole and to keep in mind the way in which each of his specific doctrines and researches expresses his fundamental orientation to psychic phenomena.

Before starting, however, we should like to give the reader a small warning. Jung’s work has to be understood as a unity, but Jung himself is not at all a systematic thinker, at least not in the usual intellectual meaning of the term. Although it is absolutely essential to understand the structure of his thought, it is wrong to think of Jung as a system-maker. As an individual, he is, in fact, just the contrary of a systematic person. He is altogether opposed, as a matter of principle, to the building of closed, logically air-tight, intellectual systems. He has a highly anti-systematic temperament, which has come to the fore not only in the development of his ideas, but even in the way he has presented them in his writings. The non-systematic character of Jung’s books has certainly contributed not a little to hindering the general acceptance of his ideas. In his work he follows his interests and hunches, develops a hypothesis, works with it, changes it, develops another, returns to the first, alters it, and so on, as the play of his mind responds to his empirical evidence. What has emerged from all of this is essentially not a system but a point of view. And yet it is a point of view with an inherent inner unity centering around the solid core of fundamental doctrine that has been basic to all of Jung’s thought since the early 1920’s. Our aim is to present this solid core succinctly and yet clarified as fully as possible, so that the reader can feel the spirit of Jung’s approach and can see the logical relationships between his assumptions and the conclusions, or hypotheses, to which he comes.

The first part of our study is devoted to Jung’s psychological ideas, to presenting them and clarifying them. In the second part, we carry these ideas over from the mainly psychological area to apply them to the study of society and of history. We have to keep in mind that, in doing this, we are taking Jung’s concepts into a field that is different from the one in which they originated. Jung is, fundamentally, not a sociologist and not an historian. His subject matter is primarily psychic phenomena as they occur in the individual personality; but his interpretation of individuality has the very special quality of being constructed directly in terms of an historical perspective. His conception of personality is inherently unitary, drawing together culture, religion and history within the single context of the human psyche. Actually, Jung deals with social questions only because he feels forced to do so. The largeness of the requirements which he sets for real pychological understanding makes it necessary for him to be more than a psychologist. In a sense, Jung’s work is like a river that overflows its regular channel; he cannot contain himself within his own psychological field, but spills over with far-reaching implications for the adjacent areas of the social sciences. “Spills over” is the proper phrase because it is so clear that it is against his natural inclination that Jung goes at all beyond his proper psychological field. He has frequently remarked that he would much prefer not to have to deal with social situations; but his understanding of the historical foundations of individual personality, and especially of the psychological confusions in the present era, forces him to do so. He realized long ago that the man who would understand human beings must “put away his academic gown, say good-bye to the study, and wander with human heart through the world. There, in the horrors of the prison, the asylum and the hospital, in the drinking-shops, brothels and gambling hells, in the salons of the elegant, in the exchanges, socialist meetings, churches, religious revivals and sectarian ecstacies, 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. Then would he know how to doctor the sick with real knowledge of the human soul.”²

To do these things and to visit these places is altogether necessary, but they are not to be the taste of the respectable Swiss burgher mentality which is definitely a part of Jung’s background. It is really despite himself that he developed his insights into history and culture, and this is one reason for our opinion that eventually Jung’s social concepts will be developed further by others than Jung himself has been able, or inclined, to take them. We may well expect that new insights will be brought forth which will develop the larger aspects of Jung’s thought, and ultimately go beyond the range even of Jung’s original perspective. It is indeed our hope—and it would be a lasting testimonial to the value of his work—that independent studies, taking their stimulus from Jung and developing the historical and philosophical side of his work, will in time branch out into wider fields.

In discussing Jung, we must always be aware of the pioneering quality of his mind. Where his concepts are rough or unclear, it is generally because they are not final formulations, but the first statements of a new approach to psychic phenomena. The characteristic of his work is that he opens new areas of thought and investigation not only for himself in the field of his own interests, but, almost inadvertently, for others, with concepts that break ground throughout the social sciences. Several important social thinkers have already taken notice of this quality in Jung’s thought and have begun to explore those of his ideas which are relevant for their work. They now use only bits and pieces of Jung’s concepts, but that in itself is a highly significant step, for it indicates that a process is just beginning which will ultimately integrate Jung’s perspective into the social thought of our time.

JUNG’S SIGNIFICANCE FOR SOCIAL THEORY

There are very fundamental and objective reasons that make it a virtual certainty that Jung’s thought will have an increasing importance in the social discussions of the coming years. The outstanding intellectual need of our time is to get beyond the limitations of the nineteenth-century conception of human nature. It left us too restricted a view of life with its rationalistic economic man and its biological and historical determinisms. In so far as there are developments of thought that can be said to be characteristic of the twentieth century, the most powerful and impelling force behind them is the effort to break free of the nineteenth century and find a larger vision of reality. The signs have, indeed, been apparent for many years. Freud’s conception of the unconscious was one of the first signals that the break was coming. It was the first intellectual tool with strength enough to overthrow the old rationalistic psychology; but Freud himself did not have the final answers. He missed up on two main points: he did not understand history, and he did not understand religion.

One of the main weaknesses of rationalistic thought was that it had failed to penetrate to the roots of human motivations in history; it was content to speak of superficial factors, such as “desire” and “self-interest.” Thinkers like Thorstein Veblen, who studied the “social habits of thought,” tried to get beneath consciousness; but they did not have the psychological tools that would enable them to do so. The conception of the unconscious could have brought the answer, but Freud’s biological and essentially anti-social formulation of it prevented him from comprehending history, and so the field has remained open and waiting for someone to throw the light of Depth Psychology on social and historical forces.

The fact that the limitations of Freud’s point of view have become more generally apparent in recent years is fundamentally because his biological conception of man no longer seems adequate. The need is not only to get beyond rationalism and to reach the historical forces underlying consciousness, but to understand the unconscious in terms of its meaningfulness and in terms of its implications for man’s spiritual life. The view of the unconscious in materialistic terms is still rooted in the concepts of the nineteenth century and is limited by their narrowness. The great need is for an understanding of the unconscious that makes all the dimensions of psychic reality available to man and does not limit him to his conscious and rational experiences. Instead of misconceiving of religion as an “illusion,” new vistas could then be opened for spiritual experience. Such a conception might even ultimately bring about a creative synthesis at the point where religious philosophy and depth psychology come together.

Jung’s work is oriented to meet each of these needs. His understanding of the unconscious undercuts and goes far beyond the rationalistic conception of consciousness. His interpretation of the psyche is inherently historical and is based on a social rather than a biological conception of man. Most important, without offering any one-sided metaphysical theories, he avoids a materialistic position and prepares the field psychologically for a deeper penetration of reality while interpreting the meaning of religious experience. In prophesying who are the people for whom Jung’s thought will be important in the future, perhaps we can summarize it this way: if a social thinker is dissatisfied with the rationalistic psychologies that have developed out of nineteenth-century thought; if he feels that a depth psychological perspective is necessary for an adequate insight into history, if he believes that this depth must be conceived in an historical and social rather than a biological sense; and if, further, he feels that the unconscious must be understood as opening on a larger realm of spiritual and psychological meanings, then he must of necessity turn to Jung. It is not, of course, that Jung has the full and final answers. Far from it. What he has done is only to open a field. It is simply that of the original developers of psychoanalytic theory, Jung is the only one who has dealt systematically with both the dark side of man and the integrative spiritual faculties of the human being. Because of this, he stands out as a beacon and rallying point for those who believe that the answer to modern problems must include an understanding of the depth layers of the unconscious from an historical point of view, together with a dynamic conception of the spiritual nature of man.

In the effort to obtain a larger view of reality, and especially of its psychic aspects, Jung has made an effort to place himself outside the gestalt of the Western mind in order to gain access to the insights of other peoples and other world-views. He feels the need of a larger perspective than the occidental philosophies of Christendom have heretofore developed. With this purpose, and just because he is aware of the limitations of his own European personality and of the needs of his Western patients, Jung has gone to the ancient religions and philosophies of the Orient to translate their way of thinking about psychic processes into terms that can fit the Western orientation. One of the most fertile and challenging contributions that Jung has to offer comes from the fact that he constructs his interpretation of psychic phenomena out of the age-old material of cultures that are distant from the modern mind both in time and in place. It is essentially an effort to blend the subtlety of the East with the practicality of the West and to convert the wisdom of the ancient and oriental religions into a form in which they can be used by the modern sciences of man.

Of course, Jung is not alone in his desire to build a universalistic point of view by bridging the psychologies of Orient and Occident. He believes, in fact, that the journeys of Western thought to the ancient East constitute a major...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Contents
• Introduction
• Frontmatter Page
• The Basic Core of Jung's Psychology
• I The Historical Situation
• II The Psyche and the Layers of Consciousness
• III Persons within the Person
• IV Introvert, Extravert and Psychological Types
• V The Function and Meaning of Neurosis
• VI Dreams and the Integration of the Psyche
• Jung's Social Concepts and Their Significance
• VII The Psyche in Society and History
• VIII Historical Implications of Jung's Thought
• Epilogue
• Index