CARL JUNG

INTRODUCTION: A FORMIDABLE TASK

 It is not easy to provide a clear exposition of Jung’s
analytical psychology because he changed his mind as he
went along.
 In the foreword of Frieda Fordham’s book on Jung, he
wrote: “As I cannot claim to have reached any definite
theory my work consists of a series of different
approaches, or one might call it, a circumambulation of
unknown factors. This makes it rather difficult to give a
clear-cut and simple account of my ideas.”
 It is even harder to do it in 45 minutes as Freud also
needs to make a guest appearance.
 So, without any further delay, here goes.
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
 Carl Jung was born in 1875 in Switzerland and brought
up in or near the historic city of Basel.
 His father was a pastor in the Swiss Reformed Church.
He was continually racked by doubts about his beliefs.
 His mother was a highly intuitive woman, possibly with
psychic abilities and sensitivities.
 Jung’s childhood experiences and memories of religion
were quite negative: crowds of dark-clothed men and
weeping women; a hole in the ground into which a box
was put; told Jesus had taken someone to himself.
DOCTOR JUNG AND DOCTOR FREUD
 Jung trained as a doctor and began working in the
famous Burghoelzli psychiatric hospital linked to
University of Zurich.
 Jung was Freud’s junior by 19 years and was one of first
psychiatrists to support Freud’s controversial theories,
but he was also one of the first to break away from
Freud.
 To understand why Jung broke away from Freud it is
necessary to review a few relevant concepts and theories
of Freud first.
SIGMUND FREUD
 Freud went to a medical school in Vienna and initially
did research for many years in neuropsychology.
 He then went to Paris to study with the great psychiatrist,
Charcot.
 He returned to Vienna and set up a practice in
neuropsychiatry with the help of his mentor and friend,
Joseph Breuer.
 They treated young women suffering from hysterical
symptoms.
 Freud was struck by how many of them were related to
repressed traumatic sexual experiences in childhood.
JUNG’S SEPARATION FROM FREUD
 Jung met Freud for the first time in Vienna in February
1907. They talked virtually non-stop for 13 hours and
Jung vividly describes in Memories, Dreams, Reflections
how the foundations were laid for their eventual
separation.
 Jung subsequently proposes that sexuality is not the sole
source of psychic energy, but that ‘libido’ is a general
psychic energy which may flow in channels serving a
range of instincts.
 For Jung the ego is the centre of consciousness and, as
such, does not encompass or understand the whole
person or self.
THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS
 From treating psychotic patients at Burghoelzli and wide
reading Jung came to the conclusion that the
unconscious material that emerged could not have come
from the subject’s personal learning or experience. He
postulated that it came from a collective unconscious
derived through aeons of repetition of human experience.
 Jung wrote: ‘there exists a second psychic system of a
collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is
identical in all individuals. The collective unconscious
does not develop individually but is inherited.’
ARCHETYPES
 In addition, Jung said that the collective unconscious is
not just ‘a dead deposit, a sort of abandoned rubbish
heap, but a living system of reactions and aptitudes that
determine the individual’s life in invisible ways.’
 It also consists of pre-existent forms that Jung called
archetypes. He first called them primordial images in
that he considered them to be archaic or primordial types
of universal images that date back to humankind’s
remotest beginnings.
 Everyday realities like mother, father, husband and wife
create the mightiest archetypes.
THE ANIMA
 The three most important archetypes Jung called the
anima, animus and shadow.
 The anima is the unconscious image of the feminine that
every man has within himself.
 Jung wrote: ‘Every man carries with him the eternal
image of woman. This image is fundamentally
unconscious, an imprint of all the ancestral experiences
of the female, a deposit of all the impressions ever made
by woman.’
 To explain the existence of the anima Jung invoked the
persona by which he means ‘the formation of the mask
behind which most people live.’
PERSONA
 Jung maintained that ‘a compensatory relationship exists
between persona and anima.’ He explained:
 ‘The persona is a complicated system of relations
between individual consciousness and society, a kind of
mask, designed on the one hand to make a definite
impression upon others, and, on the other, to conceal the
true nature of the individual.’
 ‘Society expects every individual to play the part
assigned to him, so that a man who is a parson must not
only carry out his official functions, but at all times and
in all circumstances play the role of parson in a flawless
manner.’
THE COMPENSATORY RELATIONSHIP
BETWEEN PERSONA AND ANIMA
 Jung explained: ‘The persona, the ideal picture of a man
as he should be, is inwardly compensated by feminine
weakness, and as the individual outwardly plays the
strong man, so he becomes inwardly a woman, i.e., the
anima, for it is the anima that reacts to the persona.’
 Jung considered the anima to be a personality which is
easily projected upon a woman.
 This projection means that a man can transfer to his wife
the protective role that his mother played in his early
life. This places the marriage ‘permanently on the brink
of explosion’ .
ANIMUS
 Similar to a man, every woman carries within her the
eternal image of a man.
 In the same way that man has an unconscious anima,
woman has an unconscious animus which consists of
“masculine” characteristics. The animus is also an active
force on the woman who is unconscious of its presence.
 The way to remove the negativity of the animus and to
live in harmony with him is for woman to differentiate
between her ego and the animus instead of assuming
them to be one as she unconsciously does. Similarly, the
man has to differentiate between his ego and the anima.
This is achieved by individuation dealt with later.
SHADOW
 The inferior being in ourselves is what Jung calls the
shadow. It consists of all that we are ashamed of and that
we do not want to know about ourselves.
 It constitutes part of our personal unconscious, but we
also have an archetypal shadow in the realm of our
collective unconscious. It represents an encounter with
evil and facing it can be a shattering experience.
 The shadow of every person has to be firmly grasped and
acknowledged for a person to achieve a state of
wholeness.
INDIVIDUATION AND THE SELF
 The essence of achieving personal wholeness for Jung
lies in the individuation process.
 The end result of the process in which wholeness is
achieved is to bring an undivided Self into existence.
Jung attached a special meaning to Self. For him the Self
is both the centre and the totality of the psyche. It
consists of both the conscious ego and the unconscious
and is only constituted once there is awareness and
acceptance of the unconscious and its shadowy contents
by the ego.
THE INDIVIDUATION PROCESS
 By individuation Jung means bringing antagonistic
functions of the personality into harmony with each
other.
 Jung wrote: ‘Individuation means becoming a single,
homogeneous being. It also implies becoming one’s own
self. We could therefore translate individuation as
“coming to selfhood” or “self-realization.”’
 Individuation entails a lifelong development of
personality from conception to death. Jung divided a full
lifespan into two stages, a first half of life and a second
half.
THREE STAGES OF INDIVIDUATION
 Erich Neumann has refined and expanded lifelong
development into three stages: containment/nurturance,
i.e. the maternal stage; adapting/adjusting, i.e. the
paternal stage; centring/integrating, i.e. a wholeness
stage.
 Neumann expands the concept of individuation to
include the process of becoming the personality that one
innately is potentially from the beginning of life.
 The containment/nurturance stage lasts a long time in
modern societies, much longer than childhood because it
is preparing the person fully for adulthood.
CONTAINMENT/NURTURANCE (C/N)
STAGE
 For the individuation process to develop to the full it is
necessary for the person to go through primary and
secondary school as well as some form of post-school
training or education in order to acquire a profession. This
period of dependence on parents may last as long as thirty
years!
 The C/N stage is symbolically defined as maternal:
Nurturance is delivered in the form of warm support and
encouragement. The harsh realities of life are screened out.
 Nurturance is provided not only by mothers, but also by
fathers, teachers, or institutions such as schools and
churches.
TRANSITION FROM 1ST TO 2ND STAGE
 During the first stage a relative amount of autonomy,
independence and self-control is introduced along the
way so that by the end of this stage people are able to do
for themselves what others have done for them earlier.
 In the second stage, the adapting/adjusting stage, the
father occupies the symbolic centre in order to instil the
rigour of functioning and performance demanded for
adaptation to the world.
2ND STAGE: ADAPTION/ADJUSTING
 The second stage is governed by the law of
consequences for actions taken (the reality principle).
 The person is exposed to a world in which standards of
performance are paramount and consequences for
behaviour are forcefully and implacably drawn.
 Strict conditions are imposed upon the distribution of all
rewards, including love and positive regard.
 This is not the world as ideal but the world as real.
3RD STAGE: CENTRING/INTEGRATING
 The tasks in this stage of life are:
 to embark upon the journey of becoming a centred and
whole individual; and
 to relate to the transcendent as well as the immediate
concrete realities of human existence.
 The ego now begins to answer to an inner call from the
psyche, rather than to an outer demand derived from
society.
 Working to live and survive is no longer sufficient; one
must now find something worth living for.
CENTRING/INTEGRATING AND THE
SELF
 Jung speaks of the Self integrating the shadow and
relating in a new conscious way to the anima and
animus.
 The aim of the third stage is thus a degree of integration
of the inner opposites inherent in the Self.
 The Self is the goal towards which the process of
individuation strives. It represents psychic wholeness
and the process by which self-division may be healed.
JUNG’S CHILDHOOD EXPERIENCE OF
GOD
 Jung’s impression of institutional religion as a child was
quite negative. He realised that his father, a Swiss
Reformed Church pastor, had lost his faith. As a child he
wanted to help his father, but did not know how. Later in
his life he did.
 At the age of 11 Jung allowed a visionary revelation to
come over him as an act of obedience to God. It revealed
to him that God shared his view of the institutional
church.
 He found the vision completely emancipatory: he
experienced an ‘unutterable bliss’ he had never known
before.
JUNG’S REFLECTION ON HIS
EXPERIENCE
 Years later Jung wrote: “That was what my father had
not understood, I thought; he had failed to experience the
will of God. He did not know the immediate living God
who stands, omnipotent and free, above His Bible and
His Church, who calls upon man to partake of His
freedom.”
 “It was obedience which brought me grace, and after that
experience I knew what God’s grace was. One must be
utterly abandoned to God; nothing matters but fulfilling
His will.”
GOD AS AN ARCHETYPE
 Jung arrived at the view that ‘the soul possesses by
nature a religious function.’
 Because of this natural religious function of the soul
Jung maintained that there is a God archetype in the
collective unconscious of all human beings.
 However, Jung made a distinction between the God-
image archetype and God himself. In the collective
unconscious there is only a God-image.
 Jung’s main concern was with the ways in which the
God-archetype had manifested itself in actual
experiences.
EVALUATION OF JUNG
 Appreciative
 Jung made advances on Freud by broadening the concept
of libido to general psychic energy and introducing the
concept collective unconscious.
 Individuation as a process of ‘the dialectical discussion
between the conscious mind and the unconscious’ in
order to attain wholeness in the Self is one of Jung’s
great contributions to humanity. Individuation
encompasses the integration and reconciliation of the
unconscious dark side of our human nature into the
conscious ego thereby helping us become whole people.
SHORTCOMINGS AND CRITICISMS
 Jung constructed a very complex structure of the human
psyche that is not easy to understand fully and clearly.
He also changed his mind from time to time which
shows how tenuous some of his concepts and theories
were.
 On the other hand, Jung was very dogmatic about some
of his theories. Renos Papadopoulos writes that Jung
stuck to theories he invented and propagated them ‘with
the fervour of a zealot’.
 It was a mistake of Jung to restrict religion to numinous
experiences as many devout believers pursue their
religion without such experiences.