What is Jungian psychology?

Introduction

Jungian psychology, also termed analytical psychology, is based on the concept of the collective unconscious and the need for individuals to achieve healthy psychological growth by balancing opposing forces within the personality. This school of psychology stems from the ideas of the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, who early in his career was a close associate of Sigmund Freud. It was termed analytical psychology by Jung to distinguish it from psychoanalysis, a school of psychology founded by Sigmund Freud.

While agreeing with Freud that each individual had a personal unconscious filled with traumas and emotional drives derived from that person’s life experiences, Jung introduced a deeper and much more universal consciousness, which he called the collective
unconscious. The collective unconscious was derived from experiences dating back to even prehuman evolutionary forms and filled with archetypes (primordial images) that steered human behavior. Such symbols and images could be found throughout history in mythology, art, religion, and dreams. These images cut across time and cultures and were a sort of genetic inheritance for all humans.

Neurosis resulted from blockage of an individual’s consciousness from the greater archetypal world. Such disharmony could have negative consequences such as the development of depression or phobias. Jung’s basic premise was that the personal unconscious was a vital part of the human psyche and that communication between the conscious and unconscious parts of the psyche was necessary for wholeness. In addition, Jung believed that dreams were one of the main places where the unconscious could find expression.

According to Jung, during the first half of life, individuals establish their own separate identities, often at odds with the larger society. They seek material things, are sexually driven, and are most concerned about benefitting their own children. During this phase, individuals are normally extroverted. They tend to be outgoing and socially oriented. A gradual shift, however, emerges as an individual approaches the age of forty. In this second phase, individuals feel a greater identity with humanity and are more open to collective unconscious. They can experience thoughts and feelings beyond their own individual life, seek answers to the larger questions of life, and attain a higher spiritual plane. In this phase, individuals are introverted. They seek ideas instead of people and withdraw to reflect.

The two distinct phases of life were part of the process of self-realization. To achieve this self-realization, men and women had two separate guides. Jung defined the anima as the unconscious feminine component of men, an inner voice that leads them to their irrational self. Housed in the irrational self are the two basic psychic functions of sensing and intuition. Its counterpart, the animus, was the masculine component in women that led to the rational part of their nature. Residing in the rational part are the other two basic psychic functions of thinking and feeling.

Jung viewed this journey to know the greater self as being at the heart of all major religions and as part of a spiritual development necessary for individual mental wellness. The problem was that these opposite tendencies working within an individual were often difficult to reconcile. He viewed dreams as a compensating factor aiding the reconciliation process to balance opposing forces within the personality. A complicating factor was that Jung viewed all individuals as having shadows. A shadow was an unconscious complex containing repressed aspects of the conscious self. Often a shadow contained the aspects that the individual repressed because they were opposite to the identifications made by the conscious self. Therefore, a kind and gentle person might have harsh and violent aspects of the self repressed in the shadow. Often an individual’s shadow appeared in dreams. Meanwhile, the type of person presented to the outside world, termed by Jung to be the persona, is merely the mask a person wears to make a particular impression on others. It is superficial and artificial, conforming to particular demands made by society. It is made up of things such as professional titles and job roles, which have little to do with individual psychological development.

To intervene in the process of normal psychological growth when problems arose, Jung developed techniques to be used by the therapist. Jungian (analytical) psychoanalysis placed the patient in a chair beside an analyst so that they could interact and maintain a dialogue. The aim was to connect patients with their unconscious minds as a source of healing as well as a springboard toward continued psychological growth. In short, by stimulating communication between the conscious and unconscious parts of the human mind, the therapist could stimulate within the individual self-realization and a sense of wholeness.

Early History

Jung was born the only son of a Protestant minister. Many other relatives on both his maternal and paternal side were clergymen, and it was intended that Carl follow a similar path. He attended the University of Basel from 1894 to 1900, and while fascinated by early Christian literature and religion as well as archaeology, he ultimately decided to study medicine. It was during this time that Sigmund Freud’s influential work Die Traumdeutung (1900; The Interpretation of Dreams, 1913) was published. Toward the end of his studies, Jung decided to specialize in the new field of psychiatric medicine. On graduation, Jung interned at the Burghölzli Asylum, which was a psychiatric hospital in Zurich directed by Eugen Bleuler, a leading proponent of the new field of psychoanalysis.

At the hospital, Jung was intrigued by the irrational responses of inmates to simple word stimuli. Awarded his doctor of medicine degree in 1902, Jung continued his research. The results were published in Studien zur Wort-Association (1906; Studies in Word-Association, 1918), in which he tried to show how words could open repressed psychic groupings in individuals. He termed these groupings “complexes.”

A copy of his book was sent to Freud, the leading psychiatrist of the day. This resulted in the two psychiatrists forming a collegial relationship characterized by voluminous correspondence and close collaboration. They worked together and even traveled together in 1911 to the United States to popularize the techniques used in psychoanalysis. The tight relationship ended shortly after Jung published his major work, Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (1912; The Psychology of the Unconscious, 1915).

The Psychology of the Unconscious made it clear that Jung had a markedly different view than Freud on the nature of the unconscious. In particular, Jung believed that Freud overestimated the role of childhood sexual conflicts in causing neurosis. Instead, Jung downplayed childhood and stressed lifelong psychological development. Jung’s paper, presented at the Fourth International Psychoanalytical Congress, held in September, 1913, at Munich, introduced his new concepts of introverted and extroverted personality types and allied concepts, which horrified Freud. It was the last time the two would meet.

In 1911, before the publication of his work, Jung was elected president of the International Psychoanalytical Society and was viewed as a possible successor to Freud. By 1914, after a two-year break with Freud, Jung resigned from the society. Freud had steered psychiatry toward being established as an empirical science. Jung wanted to integrate into psychiatry an understanding of unconscious realms beyond direct individual experience and an appreciation for the role played by spirituality. His split with Freud did not diminish Jung’s stature in the growing field of psychoanalysis. He attracted many students from Europe and the United States, who returned home to popularize what was now termed analytical psychology.

Maturation of Ideas

The break with Freud and the trauma of World War I caused Jung to undergo a nonproductive period of introspection and reflection in the midst of a nervous breakdown. In 1921, he published Psychologische Typen (Psychological Types, 1923), a highly developed version of concepts introduced in his 1913 paper. The landmark study defined two personality types (extrovert and introvert) and two sets of functions (sensing versus intuitive and thinking versus feeling). Because all took place in either a rational or irrational framework, the end result was Jung’s identification of sixteen different types of people. Jung’s categories ultimately became the basis for the famous Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, a test that categorized people according to personality type.

During the 1920’s, Jung became a world traveler. He journeyed to North Africa, the mountains of Kenya, and New Mexico to study the Pueblo Indians. Jung was seeking not tourist sites but rather archetypes common to primitive peoples that had commonalities with belief systems of more advanced societies. His travels, which were part anthropological and part spiritual in nature, culminated in 1937 with a long visit to India.

Jung’s observations were translated first into a collection of essays entitled Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933), then into a lecture series at Yale University on psychology and religion. A major theme of the lectures was that the systematic scrutiny of dreams, art, mythology, and religious beliefs led to a more in-depth understanding of the human psyche. Jung reasoned that it was from archetypes instilled in individuals through the process of evolution that individuals interpreted their own life experiences and developed their own behavior patterns. Jung used archetypal figures such as mother, father, God, hero, wise old man, trickster, and outcast; these became complexes containing both good and bad characteristics and were firmly established in the individual’s unconscious since early childhood. Therefore, the mother complex would set off positive symbols such as the earth and goddesses or negatives ones such as witches and dragons. Animals such as the snake and lion, plants such as the lotus and rose, and even objects such as the philosopher’s stone and Holy Grail also formed archetypes, as did major events such as birth, marriage, initiation, and death. Jung found that ultimately the self is the major archetype and that the definition of self was always incomplete. However, full development in life necessitated the establishment of psychic harmony and finding a balance between opposing forces. Life’s journey for Jung was to meet the self and meet the divine.

Jung’s own intellectual journey continued into old age. In 1951, at the age of seventy-six, he developed the important concept of synchronicity, which was defined as the experience of two or more events with unrelated causes occurring together in a meaningful manner. Jung argued in Synchronizität als ein Prinzip akausaler Zusammenhange (1952; Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle, 1955) that because of the existence of archetypes and the collective unconscious, which influence perception, events can be grouped by their meaning because of their coincidence in time. His final work was published in 1963, two years after his death. Erinnerungen, Träume, Gedanken (with Aniela Jaffé, 1962; Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 1963) was autobiographical in nature, relating Jung’s childhood, his personal life, and exploration into the psyche. It related his self-growth and his quest to find himself and God.

Impact

Jung founded the school of analytical psychology. He authored twenty volumes of works and wrote more than two hundred papers. His followers were numerous, first founding clubs devoted to his thoughts in the 1920’s and 1930’s, then training institutes after World War II. The first training institute, the Society of Analytical Psychology, was established in London in 1945 by Gerhard Adler, Michael Fordham, and Edward Bennett. Three years later, the Carl Gustav Jung Institute was established in Zurich. During the 1960s and thereafter, training institutes spread worldwide. In the United States, training institutes can be found in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and other major cities. Training and certification is a lengthy process taking four to eight years. Analytical psychology is the subject of French and German scholarly journals and The Journal of Analytical Psychology, published since 1955.

Many thousands of therapists internationally practice Jungian psychology. The movement has grown to include at least four major schools of thought. The Classical School, headquartered in Zurich, consists of orthodox Jungists. They try to apply the theories and procedures put forth by Jung in his major works and by his close followers such as Marie-Louise von Franz, Carl Meier, and Edward F. Edinger. The Developmental School, headquartered in London, incorporates many ideas from Freudian psychoanalysis and seeks to merge them with Jungian concepts to find a balanced approach. A leading figure in this movement was Michael Fordham. The Process School seeks to develop an increased awareness of the unconscious using a wide variety of individual and group experiences including physical experiences. It is associated with the Zurich-trained Jungian analyst Arnold Mindell.

The fourth and least structured is the Archetypal School. It is mainly interested in myths, how they relate to the self, and in continuing the quest for continued discovery of what constitutes the archetypal makeup of the human psyche. The continued popularity of this search raises a basic paradox about Jung. Although Jung was a psychiatrist trying to use analytical psychology to help his patients by using the unconscious mind as a means of healing, his writings drew interest from a wide variety of people including theologians, mythologists, literary writers and critics, artists, and filmmakers. It is in this area that Jung has had a far greater impact than Freud. Jung heavily influenced the scholar Mircea Eliade, who wrote numerous studies on myths and chaired the history of religion department at the University of Chicago for almost thirty years. He also had a major influence on Joseph Campbell, whose books on myths became best sellers and the basis for the internationally popular 1987 television series about mythology. Other theorists dealing extensively with myth and deeply influenced by Jung are Erich Neumann, Marie-Louise von Franz, and James Hillman.

Critics of Jungian psychology focus on his theory of the collective unconscious, claiming that it is overly general and based on ethnically narrow evidence drawn from a cross-section of Indo-European cultures. They also point to gender bias in drawing symbols from overwhelmingly male experiences. Jungian psychology is also denounced as nonempirical in its linkage of myths to patients’ dreams. However, Jung’s theories of personality, his division of people into extroverts and introverts, and his personality classifications of thinking, feeling, sensing, and intuiting, which are based on empirical observations, are widely accepted. They are widely used by psychologists today particularly in the form of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which, after more than fifty years, continues to be the most trusted and widely used assessment for identifying individual personality differences and uncovering new ways to work and interact with others.

Bibliography

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