Consciousness and the Unconscious

Lectures Delivered at ETH Zurich, Volume II, 1934

C. G. Jung, Ernst Falzeder, Ernst Falzeder

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780691228587
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Jungianische Psychologie

Jung's lectures on consciousness and the unconscious—in English for the first time Between 1933 and 1941, C. G. Jung delivered a series of public lectures at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich. Intended for a general audience, these lectures addressed a broad range of topics, from dream analysis and yoga to the history of psychology. They are at the center of Jung's intellectual activity in this period and provide the basis of his later work. Here for the first time in English is Jung's introduction to his core psychological theories and methods, delivered in the summer of 1934.With candor and wit, Jung shares with his audience the path he himself took to understanding the nature of consciousness and the unconscious. He describes their respective characteristics using examples from his clinical experience as well as from literature, his travels, and everyday life. For Jung, consciousness is like a small island in the ocean of the unconscious, while the unconscious is part of the primordial condition of humankind. Jung explains various methods for uncovering the contents of the unconscious, in particular talk therapy and dream analysis.Complete with explanations of Jungian concepts and terminology, Consciousness and the Unconscious painstakingly reconstructs and translates these talks from detailed shorthand notes by attendees, making a critical part of Jung's work available to today's readers.

Lecture 1

20 APRIL 1934

IN MY EXPERIENCE,²⁴ it was in general the basic terms that caused difficulty. I have therefore decided to discuss simpler matters this semester—namely basic terms and methods—with the help of which I hope to explain to you how the notions with which I work came into being.

In psychology, we enter an incredibly vast and controversial field. It thus differs from other sciences, whose boundaries are more or less sharply delineated. The field known as psychology is completely unbounded, and one might even call it vague and nebulous. One very significant fact in this respect is that each year an American university publishes a thick volume entitled Psychologies of the Year so-and-so, for instance of 1932 or of 1933. Each year there is an array of “psychologies.”²⁵ If one has traveled about the world a bit, and has seen various people, nations, and universities, one gains the impression that psychology consists of the sum of individual declarations of faith rather than of a system. Now each such declaration wants to exclude the others and to be the only one to tell the universally valid truth. As understandable as such a wish is, sometimes, however, such convictions are exaggerated.

In psychology, after all, very many personal views exist, precisely because there is an infinite number of aspects. For instance, people usually tend to consider psychology a personal matter. One has a certain psychology, a certain disposition, that is to say one loves this or hates that, and so on. Psychology is, however, first of all about what is valid in general. It deals with what is known as the psyche or soul. Everything that is made and done by man ultimately goes back to this. Everything was once psychic, there is nothing that had not been psychic before, such as the fantasy of an artist or an engineer. Take a railway bridge, or a work of art—or indeed this lectern.

Everything that we learn and experience is at first psychic. The only thing that is immediately given and perceptible is something psychic, that is, a psychic image. This is the first and only basis of experience. “I sense [empfinde]” is the first truth. Reality—that is, what we call real—is the reality of our sensation. In the very first instance, sensation is what is real and what conveys to us the character of reality in the first place.

There is, of course, an outer world, that is to say, things that exist beyond the psyche. I would obviously not go so far as to claim a solipsism that looks upon everything as psychic.²⁶ And yet everything we experience is psychic. If, for instance, you see light, then this is something psychic, for there is no light “in itself,” nor is there sound. They exist merely in the brain, and what they look like there we do not know. We only have knowledge of a complicated process of which we are unconscious. In fact, we need complex apparatuses to determine what that thing is which has sounded in our head or blinded our eyes.

Psychology is thus the science of that which occurs directly. Everything else is given to us only indirectly. When you burn yourself, for instance, by touching a hot iron, this process is by no means simple but highly complicated. Our nerves must be affected, etc., for an impression to register in our brain that we call pain. What this pain looks like one level further down, that is, when it is still located in the nerve, eludes us completely. Little wonder, then, that psychology touches upon a range of other sciences: pedagogics, medicine, philosophy, history, ethnology, mysticism, art, the philosophy of religion, and so on, and also parapsychology.

Consequently, misunderstandings and prejudices are not only possible but happen all the time. Since the psyche is an immediate given, we all believe that it is the given per se. We must work a great deal on ourselves to realize that our own experience of the psyche is not the general experience.

Some attempt to restrict psychology, because such a broadness of the concept strikes them as uncanny. Sometimes psychology is therefore confined to the theory of attention, volition, consciousness, or affects—serving to explain, for instance, why people love and hate each other, why they are abnormal or normal, or how one might be successful, and so on. Medical psychology, too, is as a rule limited to the psychology of neuroses, and consequently its validity is also limited. But psychology is first and foremost a general phenomenon, because the psyche is first and foremost a general, given fact.

Here, however, I must at once draw your attention to a paradoxical fact. Although the psyche is in the first instance a general phenomenon, it is, on the other hand, a most personal matter. The individual is the living unity, for there is no other life than individual life. So it would of course be possible to also posit: Psychology is what is given individually. This is an antinomy, but in psychology we cannot advance unless we learn the very difficult art of paradoxical thinking.

First and foremost, psychology finds expression in language, in social and religious convictions, and in institutions. We are highly dependent on the language in which we speak. One could almost identify language with the psyche. We thus depend on language as much as on moral or religious preconditions—and not merely on those that we share. There are unspoken preconditions we are not at all conscious of, which we might even oppose, and which nonetheless influence us, above all our milieu and our psychic heredity; in addition, there are social, political, geographical, and ethnological preconditions. Indeed, the soil and the climate influence not only the psyche but even our anatomy, or, to say the least, our behavior.

This can be seen primarily by observing the children of Europeans born on foreign soil, for instance, in the colonies. This is such a universal fact that English children born in the colonies are called “colonials,” meaning that something is “not right” with them. Under some circumstances, these influences can utterly dominate an individual. This, of course, is an imponderability.

I remember, for instance, a family with seven children in New York. One of these children was born in Frankfurt am Main,²⁷ a true German girl who could be spotted as such fifty meters off. Four children had been born in New York and were undoubtedly American. Should you ask me, however, how I could detect the difference, I could not tell you what “an American ought to look like.” Another example: a picture published in a German newspaper, depicting American politicians who had been appointed Indian chieftains. “Now who is the Indian?” Or, one evening, I came past a large factory in Buffalo. I had no idea, I said, that there were really so many Indians in this area! No way, I was told by an American doctor, not a drop of native American Indian blood in them, they are all descendants of Czechs, Poles, Germans, Italians, etc. But the habitus has a very distinct character, which is quite unmistakable. If this escapes a psychologist, I would suggest appointing a sales assistant of a large department store as chair of psychology, for such matters are of course those that matter. Imagine treating an Englishman as if he were French! Vice versa, would you greet a Frenchman with “Hello boy”?²⁸

Professor Boas has measured the skulls of immigrants and of their children at Columbia University in New York. He found out that the shapes of their skulls had changed in the direction of the Yankee type.²⁹ Now if even the body changes, you can imagine that naturally the soul does, too, as I observed in the case of colonials.³⁰ All immigrants to the colonies are as a rule in a very strange state, known as “going black,” that is, they have turned black under the skin. When I was in Central Africa, I observed myself and my dreams very closely in order to discover when the first black mark appeared on me, other than those I already had.…³¹ With some experience you can tell when someone has turned black. When you enter the house of such a man you will immediately notice that the tablecloth has marks, the crockery is chipped and broken, pictures are hanging askew, and that he feels quite palpably uncomfortable—like a lion walking to and fro in his cage. Nor will the man be able to look you straight in the eye; he will squint, look around nervously, and he will already have that same strange rolling motion of the eyes as the Negroes. Negroes can’t look you in the face, probably for fear of the evil eye. We are giving them the evil eye because we are able to stare at somebody, and that is why the Europeans are of ill repute, because it is only their medicine men who can do this.

I waited for a long time,³² without noticing a thing, until I was in the bush for the first time, in complete wilderness, “1,000 miles from anywhere.”³³ Two of us Europeans went for a walk. I was carrying a new elephant gun and my companion was armed with a heavy Colt, and thus we went “botanizing.” I soon had a strange feeling that something was amiss with my eyes, so I cleaned the lenses of my spectacles. I observed myself closely and concluded that my eyes were blinking. I could not find any organic cause, but every time my eyes looked around the blinking set in again. I then established the theory that my eyes were evidently looking for something. I somewhat doubted this theory, however, until someone else confirmed it. Another friend, an American, went out ...