CARL JUNG

Carl Jung was born in 1875, which is 20 years after Freud so he is kind of the new generation. By the time Jung came along, the theory of evolution was more widely accepted than was true for Freud. He was the son of a protestant clergyman, the grandson of a clergyman and lots of his family worked in the church in various ways. He also had a great uncle and an aunt who made their living as psychics. So he grew up in a family atmosphere that was dominated by religion and psychic experience.

As a young man he was a loner. He was very bright and he did not mix well with the other kids. Through his later grade school years he got picked on by bullies because he was the odd one. He was picked on until one day when he was twelve, the two school bullies started picking on him and he just could not take it anymore. He flew into a rage, knocked one of them down, grabbed him by the feet and swung him around knocking the other one down. After that nobody ever picked on him.

He was a big guy, 6’2” 210 pounds, and very strong. He spent lots of time walking. By the time he was in his early teen, he would often spend whole weekends walking in the hills by himself. If it was the weekend and the weather was nice, he would often walk up into the hills after school and come back and go to school on Monday and not go home until after that.

His mother was chronically ill and rather negative. She used to talk to herself a lot, especially when she was doing homework. He said that if he listened to her talking to herself, it was the only time that she really made any sense. She was kind of free-associating. He was a brilliant student and that was part of the reason that he did not fit in. When the other kids were worried about different aspects of school, he had already finished studying or learning that particular thing years before except in the case of mathematics.

He was not good at mathematics. He was not good at mathematics up until he was in high school. He became ill in high school and was very glad when he was ill because he missed the mathematics test. Then when the next mathematics test came along he was behind and so he pretended to be ill. Then he overheard his parents talking to his uncle who was a doctor. The doctor said something like, “we should not expect too much of the boy”. Jung said that this was a changing point in his life because he did not want to have the kind of life in which one is pitied. He went back to school, concentrated on mathematics and ended up getting A’s from then on, despite the fact that it was not his strong subject. He had a sense of not wanting to be the one about whom not much was expected.

He was tortured by many religious questions when he was a young boy, in particular the question of how could a good God create evil in the world. Probably, although he never said this, this is the age at which he began masturbating and he was worried about sex. Then at age twelve he had a dream about God on his throne. From the throne, a turd falls on the Cathedral and breaks down the walls. Jung said he felt an “enormous and indescribable relief. Instead of the expected damnation, grace had come upon me and with it an unutterable bliss like I had ever known. I wept for happiness and gratitude”. Jung said that he finally understood that people like his father and the great cathedrals are a kind of phoniness, in which religion and God is portrayed as somehow different and separate from the real world. So the turd broke the cathedral because God encompasses everything and probably, personally, that included sexuality.

Most of Jung’s early life, he held his father in great contempt because, in speaking with his father and trying to talk with him about religious questions, he discovered that his father really did not know anything about God and that he was simply repeating platitudes. He held contempt for his father up until when he was in medical school and his father died. As the oldest son in his family, he then had to support the family. He ended up working as well as going to medical school after his first year and he said that for the first time he came to appreciate both his father and the male role in society in general and to appreciate the contribution and the sacrifice that his father had made.

Freud was a brilliant student and devoted to religious questions when he was young, and then he had dreams which led him to decide that he should study science. So he began to study science and was a brilliant student as he had been in other things. Then he had another dream that made him decide that he should study medicine. He began to study medicine as his particular area of science. He had other dreams that led him to study schizophrenia much against the advice of all of his advisors and faculty, because studying mental problems was considered the low end of things. They told him he would never make a career if he studied things like this and why didn’t he go into surgery or some other branch of medicine, but Freud followed his dreams.

Freud’s first job was working with schizophrenics in a famous clinic in Switzerland, and he was very innovative in his treatment, he developed the word association test. He used it with schizophrenics and he was the first person in western science to point out the orderliness and intelligence of the productions of the psychosis of schizophrenics. He wrote a paper and he sent it to Sigmund Freud who thought it was the most brilliant paper on schizophrenia that he had ever read. The two men began a correspondence. After a few years they met. They quickly became very close friends. Freud began introducing Jung as his intellectual heir. He arranged for him to become the first president of the International Psychoanalytic Association. Freud and Jung were invited to the United States together to give lectures at Clark University. Very quickly the two men began to have some conflict.

On the voyage over to the United States to give their lectures, the first lectures on psychoanalysis ever in the United States, they interpreted each others dreams. Jung reports that Freud refused to acknowledge the accuracy of some of his interpretations because he said, that Freud said, it would damage his authority if he were to acknowledge the interpretations were true. Which basically this means that Jung was saying part of Freud’s theory was due to Freud’s neurosis rather than reality.

The two men began to have personal conflicts with one another. Freud felt that Jung was betraying him. Jung felt the Freud wanted a son and an heir rather than a colleague which is what Jung wanted. Jung thought that Freud was overly narrow in his dogmatism about his own point of view. Jung ended up resigning his presidency in the International Psychoanalytic Association, and Freud thereafter forbade anyone in the association from communicating with Jung. He publicly said that Jung had gone around the bend and decided to study religion instead of psychology.

Jung had a very thriving private practice as well as being appointed to faculty in various places in Switzerland. He was a very unconventional therapist. He said about his own therapy, “Sometimes I am a Freudian, sometimes I am a Jungian, sometimes I don’t know what I am, the main thing is to simply encounter the other person as a human being.”

Jung took patients sailing sometimes. He sang to some of his patients. He had a 35 or 40 year affair with one of his patients whom he brought home to live with him and his wife and his 5 children. When his wife was asked if she minded this she said, “Of course but what can you do with such a man?”

Jung had an emotional turmoil in middle age, just as Freud did, which roughly corresponded with WWI. From the ages of 38-41 he withdrew partially from some of his teaching responsibilities and instead said that he needed to concentrate on his own mind. If you ever listen to yourself you have an internal voice that comments and talks to yourself, and Jung said that he discovered that it was not one voice, it was several. Rather than suppressing this difference and trying to make it one, he decided it was his duty as a psychologist to investigate it. He discovered that there was not only the regular voice of himself, there was another voice that was a disembodied consciousness that we might call a spirit, there were some long dead relatives, there were a couple of women as well as several men. He carried on dialogues among these including sometimes he would speak all of their voices aloud as he was walking along. He would be walking along the street near his house and speaking several parts of a conversation. Neighbors would say, “There goes mad Dr. Jung”.

This ended at about the same time WWI ended. Jung’s critics said that he could not stand the real consequences or the reality of the war and he withdrew. What he said was that there is a similarity in the timing of things between people and the events around them that he called Synchronicity. He said that the world went mad at the same time that he went mad.

One patient wrote a remembrance of being analyzed by Jung and she said that one day she went up and knocked on his door. He came to the door and said, “Oh no! I cannot stand the sight of another one! Go home and analyze yourself today”. Then he shut the door and locked it.

Jung traveled widely. He spent time in the American Southwest with the Pueblo Indians. He also went to Tunis, Kenya, Uganda and India. At one point he traveled cross country throughout Africa right after WWI in the 20’s, from the west coast of Africa to the headwaters of the Nile and then up the Nile, at which time he said he understood for the first time non-western or primitive mind.
Jung lived until 1961.

What did he say about the mind in general? He said we have a Collective Unconscious. We obviously inherit a very structured mind and life is a process of bringing these structures to fruition. He called these structures:

Archetypes: the structural components of the Collective Unconscious. There are hundreds of them. There are behavioral patterns, primordial images what he called dominance or tendencies. Basically they are inherited potentials which we all have. What we are trying to do in life is to develop those potentials to bring them to fruition. Jung wrote, “Man’s task is to become conscious of the contents that press upwards from the unconscious. Neither should he persist in his unconscious nor remain identical with the unconscious elements of his being thus evading his destiny which is to create more and more consciousness. As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of their being”. In other words our purpose in life is to create more consciousness and we do this by discovering elements within ourselves and not really in the unconscious structures, but perceiving the world with the structures which lead us to seeing the world in a broader and deeper way.

Jung never gave a complete catalogue of the archetypes, but there are several very important ones that you ought to know.