Carl Jung was born in 1875 and studied medicine at the University of Basel, where Nietzsche had once taught. Indeed he was profoundly influenced by Nietzsche both in his early years before meeting Freud and throughout his career (Stromberg; 1986, also https://en.wikipedia.org/wi... ). His father was a Swiss parson. Jung also had several uncles in the clergy and his mother was religious, but she drifted toward spiritualism believing herself to be visited by spirits and ghosts. Her interest in the occult both disturbed and fascinated young Carl. Though he was expected to be a minister, he turned to the nascent field of psychiatry believing that it would afford him the opportunity to combine science and spirituality. His estimation of much religion was that it was practiced in a perfunctory and superficial manner, tempered -- as with the example of his father and other Lutherans he grew up around-- by a tendency towards lackluster faith, little devotion and the absence of interest in deep philosophical and theological questions. Later in life he wrote of Christianity, "Christian civilisation has proved hollow to a terrifying degree.
The inner man has remained untouched. His soul is out of key with his external beliefs." (Psycholgy & Alchemy; 1953). Jung lost his faith in orthodox forms of Christianity at a young age. Yet he would often counsel patients who were apostates to return to their Church. For him, though, religions were the folk manifestations of the deepest part of the human being-- the Universal Unconscious that he believed to be at the root of all that we are. He also took occult phenomena (such as spirit-guides that he believed to have visited him in visions) seriously. (Thevathasan: Carl Jung's Journey From God https://www.catholicculture... )
Following Nietzsche as well as his own inclinations, Jung became convinced that rational aspects of modern life in general (not just the Lutheran Church) are relatively superficial ,concealing a great reservoir of energies (emotional, biological, and for, Jung, spiritual) from which modern civilization has severed itself. The result is a kind of splitting off of the self from its own roots. The individual in the modern period is unable to draw on the creative and nurturing powers of a vast interior psychic realm that is in some sense shared and expressed by all of humanity. These unconscious forms of energy -- found in dreams, fantasies, religions,myths, rituals, etc.-- emanate from the depths of the soul (die Seele) and have to be mastered wisely, according to Jung, or they will be released in ways that are destructive both to the self and society. By the time Jung was thinking along such lines, he had worked with a variety of patients at the mental hospital, Berghoelzi, in Zurich. In 1903 he published his dissertation, On The Psychology of So-Called Occult Phenomena, Jung "sought to understand psychologically the rather fantastic behavior and articulations of a 15 ½-year-old female medium (actually, his cousin Helene Preiswerk) whom he had carefully observed during the years 1899 and 1900."( http://www.cgjungpage.org/l... ) This was followed by his 1907 publication, The Psychology of Dementia Praecox which is the book Freud read before they joined forces to promote psychoanalysis.
Famously, Jung and Freud soon had a mutually hostile falling out. Though Freud too was convinced (ala Nietszsche and Schopenhauer) that rationality was just the apparently calm surface level of a seething emotional cauldron that lay beneath the threshold of consciousness, his "unconscious" was not a spiritually enchanted or nurturing 'place.' Rather it was a hurly-burly realm of tyrannical appetites for instant pleasure in which rational thought was subservient to the Id's unending craving for gratification. One function of the ego, then, was finding ways to satisfy these appetites and lusts without suffering too many negative repercussions or experiencing guilt (e.g. finding a way to cheat and get away with it while also convincing yourself that it's nothing to feel very bad about). Both Freud and Jung held that one had to become aware of the operations of the unconscious realm in order to be healthy. But the unconscious realms and described states of health in question were very different for the two psychiatrists.
Freud's view was that health is, at best, the ability to work productively in society, live cooperatively in a family and have mature erotic relationships. Jung became more and more confident about expressing his differing views on the matter. For him, health meant wholeness i i.e. the reunion of the conscious individual self (personal self) with the vast reservoir of archetypes and energies beneath (collective unconscious). The process of reuniting the personality not only with the personal unconscious, but the Collective and Universal Unconscious realms is called Individuation by Jung. For him, the spiritual forces in the collective unconscious are not metaphors but metaphysical reals that can manifest in paranormal, mystical and dream states. Freud saw all of this as irrational and infantile mystical non-sense. For him the unconscious realm is a property of individual organisms. For Jung it is that at the relatively "surface" level of the personal, but more deeply it is an a priori repository of myths, hero-motifs, folklore, considered as archetypes (universal expressions of spirit-energy) and latent psychological abilities without which we are, at best, dissociated and partial human beings. What is needed, according to Jung, is for modern people to live in such a way that there is harmony of the individual personality and the underlying source of creativity which all members of all cultures can potentially access constructively. Indeed, Jung held that prior to the modern period people in all parts of the world, and the ancient West (e.g. Gnostics, mystics, alchemists etc.) had largely accessed and lived in harmony with the unconscious realm via religion, myths, rituals, art et al. Modern western societies unwisely came to reject these in favor of rational and scientific understandings.
In this vein, Jung asserts that "reason is the superstition of modern man" ( Modern Man in Search of a Soul; 1933) and that "The dynamism and [mythopoeic] imagery of the instincts together form an a priori which no man can overlook without the gravest risk to himself." (The Undiscovered Self; 1957). He warned that such negligence could lead not only to mental illness but the horrible mania of Nazism, since the latent forces of the universal unconscious burst through in savagely irrational ways if they are not understood and channeled properly. He postulated the existence of a psychic force he called "The Shadow" which is manifested in destructive drives and desires which we try to keep out of mind and out of sight. Nobody is pristine, or devoid of such dark energies. Rather, the wise or individuating human being learns to accept and integrate these aspects of the unconscious into a broader whole such that their expression is not toxic to the self and others in everyday life. The task of properly administering both the creative and destructive archetypes and energies used to be fulfilled by clerics, mystics, sages and seers in the past, but today -- at least in the Modern West-- the role falls largely on the shoulders of the psychiatrist. " Modern man", he says, "lives in a world of made up rational concepts ignoring the underlying emotional determinants...The psychiatrist is one of those who know most about the conditions of the soul's welfare, upon which so infinitely much depends in the social sum." Of course, he has in mind his own version of psychiatry and not Freud's. For Freud, the cost of neglecting the unconscious (via repression mostly in his model) is increased neurosis (mainly anxiety and guilt). For Jung the cost of such neglect is the loss of our shared human psychological structure which is universal, though expressed differently in various cultures. Put simply, the price of such ignore-ance is the loss of contact with the human soul. He considers the clergy as potential healers in the West, but as stated above, his views on mainstream religions were at best ambivalent.
He also expressed the view that *analogical reasoning* is of greater importance than logical thought/rationality. For it is "analogical" or "archaic" thought which enables us to understand and harmonize our personalities with our universally human unconscious selves (soul). For Jung, "thinking in analogies" is what allows us to understand the contents of unconscious life. He regarded analogy formation, then, as "a law which to a large extent governs the life of the psyche"(The Structure & Dynamics of the Psyche; 1969 p. 261) Indeed, Jung's method of inferring the existence and nature of the postulated "Collective Unconscious" was largely comprised of analogies between such elements as dreams, mythic tropes, religious art/images, rituals, folklore, fantasies, etc. He illustrated this approach with a story about an early patient in Zurich whose hallucinatory visions matched images he had seen in a book on Alchemy (Melechi; https://aeon.co/ideas/what-... ). He called the act of collecting such resemblances or analogies an "empirical" method (Malechi; ibid). At other times he called it his "synthetic method" (Fordham; 1961 p. 131). He describes it as a procedure whereby he explored "bizarre fantasies that patients produced...[and then] being convinced that these were meaningful [he] searched for analogies that would provide a key." But it seems somewhat subjective since similar images, signs or stories can mean wildly different things in different contexts-- a commonplace of semiotics or the systematic study of signs. Nevertheless, his trans-disciplinary studies ranged across mythology, archeology, alchemy and comparative religion as he catalogued "invaluable analogies with which I can enrich the [free] associations of my patients."
As suggested above, there are deep "affinities" between Jung's descriptions of his methods and aims and the roles traditionally played by the likes of the Shaman or Priest in older societies. He seems to express strongly anti-modern thoughts and feelings, re-imagining the spiritual healer in the form of a quasi-mystical psychiatrist . Often it has been said that Freud's vision is dark and forbidding while Jung is not only spiritual but also optimistic. If he is optimistic about the "plight of humanity" as some claim (especially when compared to Freud) then his optimism is not invested in modernization, I think, but rather in such tendencies as are expressed in, for example, New Age culture, Theosophy, Occultism, Eastern Religion, and Gnostic Christianity with an emphasis on symbolic functions such as the use of sacred art and associated rituals. But for better and/or worse, these spiritual contexts and practices are often quite marginal to a great many people living today (not only in the West but increasingly the developing world too). Therefore, the question seems to arise: Can Jungian approaches to psychological and social health/wholeness be reconciled with the dominant modes of modern Western culture today?
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Here's a 5 minute video on Jung's Collective Unconscious and Archetypes which features Jung explaining some of his concepts and theories in his own words. It may be helpful in filling out the discussion.
Possible Questions/Issues:
What do you think? Are Jung's views on humanity and the psyche compatible with modern life overall? Is it really possible to undergo the kind of therapeutic adventure he describes in the society we live in today? Is it desirable? Are his conclusions about the relative lameness of rational thought and the value of the "archaic" really justified? Is his method of "thinking in analogies" about myths, religious symbols, alchemy, dreams, fantasies, and the free associations of patients really a sufficiently firm basis on which to place a theory of the nature of the psyche?
Recommended Reading:
Frieda Fordham's 150 page book,( An Introduction to Jung's Psychology, Penguin Books; 1954) provides an excellent overview of Jung's work. It includes a forward written by Jung as well as "Biographical Sketch of Jung" written in the third-person by Jung himself. There is also a glossary followed by an annotated bibliography for those interested in further study.
Modern Man in Search of a Soul was written and published by C.G. Jung in 1933 and covers much of the ground covered here, especially with regard to the question of how Jung's work might fit into a modern society.
In Man & His Symbols, 1964, C.G. Jung and three of his colleagues write chapters intended to provide the interested layperson with a detailed but accessible summary of Jung's theory of Symbolism and its place in the healing journey as he understands it.
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