Introducing Jung

A Graphic Guide

Maggie Hyde, Michael McGuinness, Oliver Pugh

• Publisher: Icon Books
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781848318564
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Jungian Psychology
• Index: Psychology

'Clever and witty.' Susie Orbach, Guardian
Carl Gustav Jung was the enigmatic and controversial father of analytical psychology.This updated edition of Introducing Jung brilliantly explains the theories that underpin Jung's work, delves into the controversies that led him to break away from Freud and describes his near psychotic breakdown, from which he emerged with radical new insights into the nature of the unconscious mind – and which were published for the first time in 2009 in The Red Book.Step by step, Maggie Hyde demonstrates how it was entirely logical for him to explore the psychology of religion, alchemy, astrology, the I Ching and other phenomena rejected by science in his investigation of his patients' dreams, fantasies and psychic disturbances.

Boyhood Soul-Searching

Carl Gustav Jung was a strange melancholic child who had no brothers or sisters until he was nine, so he played his own imaginary games.

Am I the one sitting on the stone? Or am I the stone on which he is sitting?

This was his secret stone with a life of its own.

He was born 26 July 1875 in Kesswil, Switzerland, the only son of a Swiss Reformed Church Evangelical minister.

The family were steeped in religion. Jung had eight uncles in the clergy, as well as his maternal grandfather. His earliest playgrounds were churches and graveyards. Men in black would bring a black box and talk of “Jesus”.

He even heard his father talk of a “Je-suit” (sounds like Je-sus), and that was “something specially dangerous”.

This Jesus can’t be trusted. He “takes” people to himself and they’re put in a hole!

Jung says that his intellectual life began with a dream at the age of three. In his dream, he descended into a hole in the ground.

It leads him into a large chamber, a red carpet and a golden throne on which a strange being sits.

Huge like a tree trunk but fleshy…
Then I heard my mother…
“That’s the man-eater!”
And I awoke in terror.

Decades later, Jung came across a reference to the motif of cannibalism in the symbolism of the Mass. And only then did the image of the “man-eater” make sense to him. He realized that the “dark Lord Jesus, the Jesuit and the phallus were identical”. They represented a dark creative force in nature, the investigation of which he pursued throughout his life.

But it was God who really interested Jung. God tested him out by tempting him to think unutterable sinful thoughts.

“I gathered all my courage, as though I were about to leap forthwith into hell-fire, and let the thought come. I saw before me the cathedral, the blue sky. God sits on His golden throne, high above the world – and from under the throne an enormous turd falls upon the sparkling new roof, shatters it, and breaks the walls of the cathedral asunder”

What a relief! Instead of damnation, Jung felt this vision was an act of grace. He had been shown another side of God altogether, different to the one his father and uncles spoke of in their sermons.

But what about the secret? None of you know anything about that. You don’t know that god wants to force me to do wrong, to think abominations in order to experience his grace!

Those around him seemed hypocritical and empty. He brooded on the secret, searching in vain in his father’s library for more information.

Then he would sit on his stone and it would free him from his turmoils. Jung had a strong suspicion there was something eternal in himself too, some “Other” in him which was like the stone.

It knows the secret. It is the secret, because it’s thousands of years old.

There were other religious influences on Jung, stemming from his mother and maternal grandfather, Samuel Preiswerk, a respected pastor in Basel, who had contact with a different world altogether – the spirit world. Every week he had conversed with his deceased first wife, while his second wife (Jung’s grandmother) and his daughter (Jung’s mother), listened in.

While your grandpa wrote his sermons, I had to stand behind him to keep the bad spirits away.

Contact with the spirits was not unusual amongst Swiss rural folk. Jung experienced his mother as dark and unpredictable, “rooted in deep, invisible ground”. She knew the world of the uncanny and she could be frightening and erratic.

These dual religious influences of Swiss Protestantism and pagan spirituality reflected a dualism in Jung himself. He believed he had two different personalities which he named “Number 1” and “Number 2”.

Number 1 was involved in the ordinary, everyday world. He could burst into emotions and seemed childish and undisciplined. Yet he was also ambitious for academic success, studying science and aiming to achieve a civilized, prestigious life style.
The Number 2 personality was much more troublesome, the “Other”, identified with the stone and the secret of God’s grace. Number 2 carried meaning and seemed to stretch back into history in a mysterious manner.

Jung associated his Number 2 dimension with the uncanny world of his mother. He carved a little man wear...