Carl Gustav Jung
Carl Gustav Jung (IPA: ˈkarl ˈgʊstaf ˈjʊŋ) (Kesswil, Thurgau canton, Switzerland, July 26, 1875-Küsnacht, Zurich canton, ibidem, June 6, 1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist, psychologist and essayist, a key figure in the initial stage of the psychoanalysis; later, founder of the school of analytical psychology, also called psychology of complexes and depth psychology.
He is often associated with Sigmund Freud, with whom he was a collaborator in his early days. Jung was a pioneer of depth psychology and one of the most widely read scholars of depth psychology in the 20th century. His theoretical and clinical approach emphasized the functional connection between the structure of the psyche and that of its products, that is, its cultural manifestations. This prompted him to incorporate into his methodology notions from anthropology, alchemy, the interpretation of dreams, art, mythology, religion and philosophy.
Jung was not the first to study dream activity. Nevertheless, his contributions to dream analysis were extensive and highly influential. He wrote a prolific work. Although for most of his life he focused his work on the formulation of psychological theories and clinical practice, he also ventured into other fields of the humanities, from the comparative study of religions, philosophy and sociology to art criticism. and literature.
Biography
Childhood
Carl Gustav Jung was born in 1875 in Kesswil, Switzerland, a town on Lake Constance in the Swiss canton of Thurgau. Six months after his birth, the family moved to Laufen (on the Rhine), finally arriving in Kleinhüningen, near Basel, in 1879.
He will be part of a family of German descent and religious tradition. Her father was a Lutheran pastor within the Swiss Reformed Church, and her parents belonged to two prominent Basel families of the 19th century .
Jung's paternal grandfather, Karl Gustav Jung (1794-1864), an exiled physician from Heidelberg, organized the medical faculty of the University of Basel, where he taught anatomy and internal medicine, and the expansion of its general hospital. All this thanks to his friendship with Alexander von Humboldt. He would also be the rector of said university, a well-known playwright and Grand Master of the Swiss Freemasons. He also directed a psychological institution for children with mental deficits.
The maternal grandfather, Samuel Preiswerk (1799-1871), was archpriest of the Church of Basel, philologist, author of a Hebrew grammar, and precursor and promoter of Zionism. Romanticism was continuously present in the home, with the appearance of ghosts and other parapsychological phenomena.
Jung's father, Paul Achilles (1842-1896), abandoned his career as a philologist in Semitic languages to become a clergyman in a Swiss Reformed church. He would extend his work at the Friedmatt psychiatric clinic in Basel from 1888. He would pass away months after Jung began his medical career at the University of Basel.
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His mother, Emilie Preiswerk (1848-1923), was characterized by having a markedly dissociative personality that greatly determined Jung's intuitive trait.
A first brother of Jung, Paul, born in 1873, would die shortly after. In 1884, and nine years apart, his only sister, Johanna Gertrud, would be born, who would die in 1935.
As a child he was introverted and very lonely. Although his relationship with his parents was very close and affectionate, from early on he would feel somewhat disappointed by the way his father approached the issue of faith, which he considered sadly precarious.
The "theological religion" could not serve me at all, for it did not correspond to my experience of God. Without hope of knowing, I demanded to believe. This had been tried by my father with great difficulties and had failed. Mal could my father defend himself against the ridiculous materialism of the psychiatrist. This was also something that should be believed exactly as theology! I was more sure than ever that both lacked both the criticism of knowledge and experience.Carl Gustav Jung. Memories, dreams, thoughts.
Jung was not, however, hostile to religion, but instead would declare that human beings are religious "by nature" and in his career he would emphasize the value of religious experience for the understanding of the human mind, rescuing symbolisms from the Christian tradition and reinterpreting them from his psychological perspective. For this reason, religiosity was one of the main objects of his study, and later he would show interest in mysticism.
School and university period
During his adolescence and youth he was an enthusiastic reader, especially captivated by the literary works of Goethe. His interest in the essays of philosophers such as von Hartmann and Nietzsche was also deep. In his autobiography, he describes his approach to the latter's work Thus Spoke Zarathustra as a moving experience, comparable only to that inspired by Goethe's Faust .
Jung longed to study archeology at university, but his family lacked the resources to send him farther away from Basel, where that course was not taught, so (against the wishes of those around him) he decided to study medicine at the University of Basel, between 1894 and 1900, and was able to enter a student association, Zofingia, to which his father had already belonged. The previously introverted student became much more vivid in the new academic context. In 1898 he began to reconcile himself to his future profession as a doctor with the conviction that he should specialize. He had two options: surgery or internal medicine.
I leaned first because of my special training in anatomy and my predilection in pathological anatomy, and it was most likely that I would have opted for it if I had prepared the necessary economic means.Carl Gustav Jung. Memories, dreams, thoughts.
She would finally settle for the modest possibility of working as an assistant in a local hospital in order to avoid incurring debts in order to study.
During the summer vacation, two events occurred which would shape Jung's destiny and professional evolution. The breaking in half of a seventy-year-old round walnut table in the presence of his mother, sister, and maid, and fourteen days later, a sideboard, a piece of original 19th-century furniture XIX. Inside was the rectangular bread basket, arranged in such a way that in one corner was the handle of the knife and in the other three, the three pieces into which the utensil had been divided. Ruling out the usual causalities, they learned of certain relatives immersed in spiritualist practices, and of a medium of little more than fifteen years old, who said they wanted to get in touch with him.
All this attracted the interest of Jung, generating over two years the elaboration of his own doctoral thesis About the psychology and pathology of the so-called occult phenomena (Zur Psychologie und Pathologie sogenannter okkulter Phänomene), performed with Professor Eugen Bleuler at the medical faculty of the University of Zurich in 1902. Although one "Miss S.W." actually it was her cousin Hélène Preiswerk.
Towards the end of his studies, Professor Friedrich von Müller asked Jung to be his assistant in Munich. Everything seemed to lean towards the practice of internal medicine, if it were not for the fact that the hand of fate combined with curiosity made him look through the Manual of Psychiatry of the German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing.
I found myself in the most vivid excitement, for it was for me as a glowing revelation that there was no other goal for me than psychiatry. Only here could the two currents of my interest converge and find their way through a common decline. Here was the common field of the experiences of biological and spiritual facts, which everywhere I had sought without finding it. Here, at last, the place where the cross between my nature and spirit was already a fact.Carl Gustav Jung. Memories, dreams, thoughts.
On December 10, 1900, he would occupy his position as assistant in the Burghölzli psychiatric clinic for three years, leaving Basel behind and going to Zurich with pleasure. As he will comment, "for half a year I locked myself up to get used to the life and spirit of an asylum and I read the fifty volumes of the General Journal of Psychiatry from its origins, to learn about the psychiatric mentality". "In such conditions began my career as a psychiatrist, my subjective experiment from which my objective life was born."
Activity in the field of psychiatry
When faced with the question «what happens in mental illness?», Jung will find himself then, given the state of progress of the discipline at the beginning of the century XX, with a work of abstraction of the sick personality and a reductionism aimed at diagnoses, description of symptoms and statistics.
The psychology of the mentally ill and its corresponding implicit individuality were non-existent.
That is why his subsequent encounter with Sigmund Freud helped him reverse this trend, especially through the psychology of hysteria and dreams. Freud inserted into psychiatry questions of psychology, even though he was really a neurologist. The symptom for Freud was somewhat different than for traditional psychiatry.
It will be in this context that he begins to develop and apply his famous association test or word association experiment that bears his name, recalling the case of a melancholic and infanticidal young woman, diagnosed with schizophrenia or dementia praecox severe. The result obtained fourteen days later was that she was discharged from the hospital and that she was never hospitalized again.
Jung sums up by saying that true therapy begins with the investigation of the «secret personal history» of the person afflicted by his illness; the investigation of it should refer the professional to the conscious, but also, and above all, to the unconscious, with which the association test, the interpretation of dreams and human contact with the patient are of vital importance. Any diagnosis must therefore be accompanied by said personal history before seeking the corresponding psychotherapeutic solution.
In 1905 he received his doctorate in psychiatry, simultaneously becoming chief physician of the psychiatric clinic at the University of Zurich for four years, until his resignation in 1909 due to overwork. He would, however, retain his position as assistant professor until 1913. By then he was focusing his interest on psychopathology, psychoanalysis, and the psychology of primitive peoples.
He became interested in hypnosis, as well as the figures of Pierre Janet and Théodore Flournoy.
The case of the fifty-eight-year-old lady apparently miraculously cured of her painful paralysis in her left leg and back convinced Jung of the real ineffectiveness of hypnosis when he discovered that hypnosis could be explained to a large extent by transfer theory. And it is that the mother projected on the figure of the psychotherapist the "ideal" of a mentally afflicted son and who was also located in the clinic itself.
The fact of acting blindly, and its consequent uncertainty, in addition to including an unwanted "directive" posture, made Jung, like Freud, discard hypnosis as a therapeutic method and turn towards the interpretation of dreams and other manifestations of the unconscious.
From 1904 to 1905 he founded an experimental psychopathology laboratory in the psychiatric clinic, from which both the association test and the psychogalvanic experiments arose, to be later invited, in 1909, by Clark University to present his work. Freud would also be invited independently, both receiving the degree of doctor honoris causa.
At that time, his suspicions regarding the "psychic" origin of schizophrenia would begin. Various cases, especially that of Babett S., would even lead him to understand for the first time the language of people suffering from dementia praecox.
I realized more than once that in such patients a "person" must be defined as normal and to some extent a witness is hidden in the background. (...) In the mentally ill it is visible only externally the tragic destruction and only exceptionally the life of that aspect of the soul that is hidden from us.Carl Gustav Jung. Memories, dreams, thoughts.
About the method
Jung will emphasize the impossibility of giving a definitive answer about the ideal analytical or psychotherapeutic method. The therapy in each case is different and the cure must arise from the patient himself in a natural way.
Psychotherapy and analysis are as different as individuals themselves. I treat every patient as individually as possible, as the solution of the problem is always personal. The rules valid in general can only be formulated cum grain salis. A psychological truth is only valid when you can change. A solution that I can't think of can be for another precisely the right one. Naturally a doctor should know the so-called “methods”. But you must avoid ankylosing in the routine. Theoretical premises should only be applied very carefully. Today they may be valid, tomorrow may be others. They don't play any part in my analysis. I'm intentionally not systematic. In front of the individual there is no more to me than individual understanding. For each patient a different language is required.Carl Gustav Jung. Memories, dreams, thoughts.
It would definitely be a vis a vis, a dialogue between two people who interrelate and influence each other. In this way, a hypothetical imbalance in favor of the "healthy" doctor compared to the "sick" doctor, to whom a certain methodology is going to be applied, would be eliminated. This would require, on the part of the therapist, reaching sufficient maturity to face a psychotherapy, as well as an openness to all cultural expression that includes the diversity of the human: symbolism, mythology, etc.
Individual understanding is more of a priority than theoretical confirmation, and as a conditio sine qua non, «the psychotherapist's own individual analysis», or «theoretical analysis», fleeing again from a learned methodological application. This would tend towards the assimilation of human knowledge immersed in a horizon where the soul includes the world and its collective conceptions dispersed in space and time. Otherwise, the analyzed person would lose a fragment of his soul, just as the analyst would lose a fragment of his soul that he did not learn to know. In short, the analyst must let his analysis affect him personally, discarding methodologies and increasing his own authenticity.
This authenticity must be added to the fact that many cases can be cured only if there is an absolute dedication or renunciation of oneself, "giving oneself with all one's being"; the psychotherapist will have to decide whether to implicate or lock himself in his own authority.
Given his unavoidable implication, he must not only attend to the patient's transference, but also his corresponding countertransference, that is, how he himself reacts to the joint process with the patient, and all this from two aspects: at a conscious level and at an unconscious level, observing himself, his own dreams, etc. The success or failure of the treatment depends on all this, which is why each therapist should have at their disposal the control exercised by a third person, in order to obtain another point of view. Jung himself instructs to have “a confessing father or mother”, preferably a woman due to her “greater capacity for it, her excellent intuition and opportune criticism. They see aspects that man does not see.
The relationship between analyst and patient can generate parapsychological phenomena on certain occasions, especially in the presence of transference on the part of the patient, or an unconscious identification between the two.
The «cooperation» of the psychotherapist with the patient and their affections is not always correct, sometimes an «active intervention» is necessary.
Regarding the cases in which there is no improvement, any judgment is difficult since many times the effect occurs after years. "A judgment on 'success' is difficult to make."
For many patients of our days who have been described as neurotics, such a denomination would be unnecessary if we lived in times where the human being was linked through myth with the world of mystery, and through this with nature alive, the one that was not contemplated merely from the outside. Such "facultative neurotics" are victims of contemporary psychic splitting, they cannot bear "the loss of myth", nor the consequent replacement of the experience of nature by an external worldview defined in the name of science, as well as the confusion between wisdom and discourse. intellectual. Its "cure" lies in closing the gap between the self and the unconscious.
Those who have deeply experienced in themselves this unfolding is more able to achieve a better understanding of these unconscious animic processes and to prevent that typical danger of disorbitation that threatens the psychologist. The one who does not know by his own experience the negative influence of archetypes will be difficult to get away from such negative influence when confronting it in practice with his experience. It will overestimate or underestimate all this, because it has only an intellectual notion, but not an empirical norm. Here begin the dangerous diversions, the first of which is the attempt of intellectual usurpation. Its secret objective is to subtract to the archetypal influence and to benefit from the authentic experience of a conceptual world apparently artificially insured, but merely two-dimensional, which aspires to conceal the reality of life with the so-called clear ideas. The deviation into the abstract strips the experience of its substance and lends it the mere name, which from then on supplants reality. No one is bound to a concept and such is precisely the sought-after convenience that promises protection against experience. But the spirit does not live from concepts, but from facts. The mere words do not serve at all, the only thing that is accomplished is to repeat this process to the infinite.Carl Gustav Jung. Memories, dreams, thoughts.
Sigmund Freud
Freud, Jung and psychoanalysis
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From the beginning of his psychiatric career, he was interested in the studies of Eugen Bleuler, Pierre Janet, and above all, Sigmund Freud. The creation of a dream analysis method and the interpretation of it were very valuable in the understanding of psychotic symptomatology.
At the age of twenty-five, Jung began reading The Interpretation of Dreams (Traumdeutung, 1900), confessing insufficient experience to be able to corroborate by then all Freud's theories. Three years later he resumed reading about it and was already able to thread the relationship with his own ideas. Especially two:
- What most interested Jung was the application of the concept of repression as a defense mechanism, moved from the field of neurosis to dreams. And it is that in his own experiments of word association, also Jung found Repressions when responding to the suggestion of certain terms: or not produced or the reaction time was comparatively broad. The experimenter was in this case in the face of a patient complex, which only made it clear the same conclusions that Freud came to from the outlying.
- However, since its inception, Jung maintained his opposition to the cause of repression being found in sexual trauma. He could constantly corroborate in his own consultation how many cases did not come to sexuality as etiology.
In the academic context of that time, Freud was considered persona no grata, so Jung found himself in a difficult situation if he wanted to make his coincidences explicit and thus support Freudian theorizing. He could get on with his own work and his promising career without Freud. Despite everything, "I publicly declared myself in favor of Freud and fought for him."
He did so before a conference in Munich on forced neuroses, since Freud's name was deliberately silenced. Jung would write in response in 1906 an article for the Münchner Medizinische Wochenschrift (Munich Medical Weekly ) extolling Freud's theory of neurosis given its contribution to "forced neuroses"., receiving in response warning letters that his academic future would be in danger proportionally to his persistence. Jung continued to be in favor, although maintaining the sexual etiology of the neuroses in disagreement.
It was around this time that the exchange of correspondence between the two authors began, and Jung began sending his work Diagnostische Assoziationsstudien (Diagnostic Studies of the Association, 1906). In 1907 he would also send her Die Psychologie der Dementia Praecox ( On the psychology of early dementia ). The epistolary exchange would continue until the date of their separation, 1913.
It was thanks to this last work from 1907, also misunderstood among his own colleagues, that he would lead to the first meeting between Freud and Jung, at the expense of an invitation from the former in Vienna. It is at this moment that the surprising but explicit circumstance that on February 1907, at one in the afternoon, "we talked for thirteen hours without interruption, so to speak" is usually recalled.
Jung was deeply impressed that for Freud sexuality meant a numinosum, an impression confirmed three years later (1910) in a conversation again in Vienna.
My dear Jung, promise me you'll never discard sex theory. It's the most important thing. See you, we must make it a dogma, an unexpugnable bastion against the avalanche black of occultism.Sigmund Freud, 1910.
A trait of his character was of particular concern to me: Freud's bitterness. I've already got my attention at our first meeting. For a long time I couldn't understand it until I could relate it to his attitude towards sexuality. For Freud sexuality certainly meant a numinous, but in his theory it is expressed exclusively as a biological function. Only the concern he was talking about allowed to deduce that he resonated more deeply. Ultimately I wanted to teach—so at least it seemed to me—that, seen from within, sexuality also implied spirituality or made sense. His specific terminology was, however, too limited to express this idea. Thus, it gave me the impression that he worked against his own objective and against himself; and there is no bitterness worse than that of a man who became the most incarnated enemy of himself. According to his own expression, he was threatened by the "avalanche black", he, who had proposed mainly to empty the dark depths.Carl Gustav Jung. Memories, dreams, thoughts.
And Jung continues,
Freud never wondered why he should constantly speak about sex, because this thought possessed him. He would never be aware that the "monotony of meaning" expressed the flight of himself, or of that other part of his that might be defined as "mystical". Without acknowledging this part you couldn't feel fit with yourself. He was blind in the face of the paradox and ambiguity of the meanings of the unconscious, and did not know that everything that emerges from the unconscious has something superior and inferior, something internal and external. When talking about the outside—and this did Freud—it is considered only half of it and, consequently, an antagonistic force arises in the unconscious.Carl Gustav Jung. Memories, dreams, thoughts.
Jung would go so far as to say of Freud that he was a prisoner of one point of view, "a tragic figure, but a great man."
Returning to Alfred Adler's hypothesis of Power, Jung establishes a relationship between Freud and Nietzsche, in such a way that if in Freud a deification of Eros occurs, in Nietzsche the same will occur with respect to the will to power, since Eros and Power will be two antagonistic but complementary principles that the ruse of the history of the spirit had wanted to be extolled.
But all numinosity carries implicit in its claim its own destruction, all numinosity is true in a certain aspect and uncertain in another. «The luminous experience rises and sinks at the same time».
In this way, if Freud had realized the numinous nature of sexuality, he would not have generated a biological reductionism, and Nietzsche, by delving into the numinous implicit in the Will to power, would have given more importance to the foundations of human existence, without the need for a Superman.
Whenever the soul, due to a numinous experience, is subjected to a sudden oscillation, there is a danger that the threads by which it hangs will break. One man falls into an "absolute yes" and another into an "absolute no." It tends to extremes as truth. Hence the need for the concept of nirvana, says the East: "free from the two." "We haven't always realized what it means for nothing at all to exist, if a little consciousness—oh, so ephemeral!—hasn't observed something of it."
On precognition and parapsychology
When Jung visited Freud in Vienna in 1909, he asked him what he thought about it. He would receive a more than predictable rejection from a materialistic prejudice that he referred to the absurd, all from the most superficial positivism. However, "...it was still some years before Freud recognized the importance of parapsychology and the authenticity of "occult" phenomena".
While Freud laid out his arguments, I felt an extraordinary feeling. It seemed to me as if my diaphragm was iron and became incandescent—an incandescent diaphragmatic cavity. And at this moment there sounded such a crispy in the library, which was immediately next to us, that we both were frightened. We thought the closet fell on us. So strong was the crunch. I told Freud: "This has been a phenomenon of externalization of the so-called catalytics."“Bah,” he said, “this is an absurd!” “Not at all,” I replied, “You are wrong, Mr. Professor. And to prove that I am right, I now predict that another crunchy will be heard immediately." And indeed: I had just spoken these words, the same crunchy was heard in the library!
Freud looked at me horrified.Carl Gustav Jung. Memories, dreams, thoughts.
Trip to the United States
On April 27, 1908, Jung participated in the First Congress of Psychoanalysis, held in Salzburg, also called the First Congress of Freudian Psychology or the First International Congress of Psychoanalysis. Jung presents there the "Freudian theory of hysteria".
The same year he bought some land in Küsnacht, facing Lake Zurich, and proposed the construction of a three-story house. On November 28 of that year, his only son, Franz, was born.
In March 1909, the first issue of the Yearbook of Psychoanalytic and Psychopathological Research (Jahrbuch für psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen) was published, with Jung as its editor. He resigns from the Burghölzli clinic and moves into his new house in Küsnacht, where he will reside for the rest of his days.
And the same year, from September 6 to 11, Jung is invited to Clark University, in Worcester, Massachusetts, to give a lecture on association essays. Freud would also be invited independently, accompanied by Sándor Ferenczi. There they received the doctor honoris causa on the 11th. They would start their trip from Bremen, the meeting place where another famous anecdote would take place, referring to Freud fainting at Jung's punctual interest in the "swamp mummies". Freud believed that Jung gave him he wished for death unconsciously.
A second blackout occurred at the Munich Psychoanalytic Congress in 1912, when Amenhotep IV was being discussed. He again fluttered the fantasy about the murder of the father , within the transference relationship between Freud and Jung.
If we add to all this that Freud had previously alluded to his desire for Jung to be his "successor and crown prince", and that he was not in a position to satisfy such a demand, both due to theoretical discrepancies As for the disinterest that the consequent personal prestige produced in him, it is not difficult to find an explanation for such "hysterical" fainting spells.
The trip to the United States lasted seven weeks, during which they stayed together every day and analyzed their dreams. Before some of Jung's most important, Freud did not know what interpretation to give them, even one of them seemed to constitute a kind of introduction to the work Wandlungen und Symbole Der Libido (Transformations and Symbols of the Libido), as well as Jung's first opportunity to formulate his concept of the collective unconscious. An a priori unconscious concept of the personal unconscious, in which, contrary to Freud, there was no room for anything arbitrary or any deceptive intention.
However, Jung knew how to complete the analysis of Freud's dream, for which he required his sincerity and the communication of some detail of his private life. Freud replied: "The point is that I cannot risk my authority." Jung understood by this that Freud put personal authority before the truth. The end of the relationship was already consolidated in the middle of the waters of the Atlantic.
From Jung's dream emerged his long-standing interest in archaeology, drifting into the study of the symbolism and mythology of ancient peoples. In fact, in October 1909 Jung wrote to Freud: "Archaeology, or rather mythology, has trapped me", a palpable interest until the end of the First World War. During this study he will find the work of a young American, mss. Miller, being impressed by the mythological character of her fantasies. Along with his knowledge of myths will emerge Transformations and symbols of the libido .
From March 30 to 31, 1910, the second International Congress of Psychoanalysis would take place in Nuremberg, with Jung being appointed permanent president of the recently founded International Psychoanalytic Association (API) (he would resign in 1914).
In August 1911, the first part of Transformations and symbols of the libido was published, a content that in itself would not yet entail any disagreement with Freudian orthodoxy, but Jung is already hinting in his memories the following: «Now I saw it clearly. He (Freud) himself had a neurosis and it was particularly easy to diagnose because of his rather unpleasant symptoms, as I found out on our trip to America. (...) He had seen that neither Freud nor his disciples could understand what psychoanalysis meant in theory and in practice, since not even the teacher had managed to resolve his own neurosis. When he announced his intention to identify and dogmatize theory and method, I could no longer cooperate with him, and he had no choice but to go back to me."
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Around 1912, Jung finished «The Sacrifice», the last section of the second part of Transformations and symbols of the libido, knowing in advance that what was exposed would cost him his friendship with Freud. "I had to present my own notion of incest there, the decisive transformation of the concept of libido, as well as other ideas that differentiated me from Freud. " He commented on it to his wife, he spent two months worried and without touching a pen. He finally decided to write and it cost him his friendship with Freud.
Freud felt disgusted with the discoveries that Jung was transmitting to him, and thus their correspondent correspondence began to reflect the growing tension between them.
On February 25, 1912, Jung founded the Society of Psychoanalytic Interests, heading towards his own version of psychoanalysis. In September he gave a lecture at Fordham University in New York. The subject will be psychoanalysis and its differences with Freud, fundamentally that repression does not account for all states, unconscious images can have a teleological meaning and libido, or psychic energy, is not exclusively sexual.
In turn, and during the same month, the second part of Transformations and symbols of the libido is published, where Jung proposes that incest alludes more to symbolism than to literality.
Breakup
In 1913 the definitive break with Freud took place. The separation affects Freud deeply; Jung is devastated. A direct consequence of this stress was the contribution to a nervous breakdown that had been threatening since 1912. He therefore resigned from his post at the University of Zurich, apparently because his private practice had increased a lot, but it is more likely that it was due to his state of health. During this time, Edith and Harold McCormick, two American philanthropists, settled in Zurich, being analyzed by Jung, and becoming the first of several rich and very generous patrons.
The following is an excerpt from the letter Freud sent to Jung on January 3, 1913, in the midst of the crisis affecting their relationship:
Your claim that I treat my followers as patients is obviously false.... It is a convention among analysts that none of us should feel ashamed of their own neurosis.... But one [referring to Jung] who, while acting abnormally, continues to shout that it is normal gives sustenance to the suspicion that he lacks to assume his illness. Consequently, I propose that we abandon our personal relationships entirely.Sigmund Freud, 1913.
Three days later Jung will sentence:
Dear Master Professor. I will resign myself to your desire to renounce our personal relationships, for I never impose my friendship on anyone. Otherwise, think about what this moment means to you. "The rest is silence." (...) Slowly, Jung.
As of this year, Jung will begin his second stage of life and development, both personal and professional.
Analysis of the unconscious
Subsequently, in 1914, the Swiss psychiatrist resigned from his position at the API and organized, together with Alphonse Maeder, the foundations of the so-called Zurich School. After parting ways with Freud, a time of inner insecurity and disorientation began for Jung, a period of emotional turbulence, exacerbated by the emerging news of World War I, which had a devastating effect on him, even while living in neutral Switzerland. Henri Ellenberger called Jung's experience a "creative illness" and compared it to the same period for Freud, which he defined in terms of neurasthenia and hysteria.
Then I had a moment of extraordinary lucidity, in which I looked down the road followed there. I thought: Now you have the key to mythology and you have the possibility to open all the doors that give the unconscious human psyche. But then someone whispered in me: "Why open all the doors?" Then the question arose of what I had accomplished until then. He had explained the myths of the primitive peoples, he had written a book about the heroes, about the myth in which man always lives. “But what is the man’s myth of today?” "In the Christian myth, it could be said." «Vives ♪ in it?" I wondered. If I must be honest, no. It's not the myth I live in. "So we don't have a myth anymore?" "No, apparently we have no myth anymore." "But what is your myth, the myth in which you live?" Then I felt upset and stopped thinking. He had reached the limit.Carl Gustav Jung. Memories, dreams, thoughts.
An initial analysis of her dreams, daytime fantasies, and contents of the past was followed by the acceptance of not knowing what was happening to her. Thus, he decided to "consciously abandon himself to the impulses of the unconscious." From this he derived the need for children's play, construction and edification as preliminary elements in the discovery of his own myth.
Around the autumn of 1913, Jung alludes to a relocation of his internal symptomatology of a psychic nature. It is then that he has several hallucinations that will repeat themselves over time. The diagnostic deduction that he would arrive at after all the series of episodes of an apparent psychopathological nature would be that of the onset of a psychosis, a direct consequence of the break with Freud and especially taking into account the existing family history that ventured into the dissociative. During the spring and early summer of 1914, similar episodes of a catastrophic nature would occur again, but this time in the form of three successive dreams. On August 1, the First World War would break out and with it the confirmation of the premonitory nature of his symptoms.
It would be December 12, 1913 when «I decided to take the first step». Therefore, he decided to confront the contents of the unconscious and with this to illuminate a concomitant initiation process where he would come to discover the existence of something higher than the will of the self and to which he had to submit. Jung had to sacrifice his ideal and his conscious attitude. Little by little, various archetypal representations would emerge: the hero (Sigfried, the black serpent), the shadow, the self as a complex, the wise old man (Elias, Philemon, the Egyptian ka) or the soul (Salome).
After a gradual transformation, in 1916 Jung would feel the inescapable need to write, feeling "driven from within to formulate and express what Philemon could have said." It will therefore be from said archetype that the imperative obligation to transcribe the manuscript of the Seven sermons to the dead will arise.
Philemon and other figures of fantasy led me to the conviction that there are other things in the soul that I do not do, but they happen by themselves and have their own life.Carl Gustav Jung. Memories, dreams, thoughts.
Philemon will be the image desired by Jung in those moments of disturbance and disorder, «a supreme wisdom and power that would unravel the spontaneous creations of my fantasy». Whoever, on the one hand, represented the way of expression of the «seven sermons», and who, on the other, gave rise to a theoretical recapitulation and a validation of the autonomous existence of the archetypes, beyond the complexes, extending to what «collective» the «personal» adjective of the Freudian unconscious.
In short, all of this constituted a “prologue” to what he had to communicate to the world about the unconscious. In addition to the Seven Sermons to the Dead written in 1916, Jung transcribed his experiences between 1913 and 1932 in a series of seven manuscripts called Black Books, from which between 1914 and 1930 he produced the Liber Novus or Red Book.
About the origin of the work
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For Jung, the analysis of the unconscious had already been implanted at the beginning of the second half of his life. He adds that it took him twenty more years to understand the contents of his imagination, but that the main thing in his work was to find "proof of the historical prefiguration of internal experiences." That is to say, to confirm his ideas, he had to look for his premises in history. His discovery of alchemy played a fundamental role in this.
From 1918 until 1926 I was seriously concerned with the gnostics, for they also ran over the primitive world of the unconscious. They captured their contents and images, which were manifestly contaminated by the world of impulses. It is difficult, however, to say to what extent the images were understood, because of the scarcity of later news, that we should also thank their adversaries, the parents of the Church. But it is not likely, in any case, that they had a psychological conception. Regarding my questions, the gnostics were far away in time so I could relate to them. The tradition between gnosis and currentity seemed broken and for a long time it was not possible for me to find the bridge between gnosticism—or neoplatonism— and today. Only when I began to understand alchemy I recognized that through it the historical link with Gnosticism, which by alchemy constitutes the continuity of the past to the present. As a philosophy of the middle age, alchemy had the same bridge with the past, specifically with gnosticism, than with the future, with the psychology of the unconscious.Carl Gustav Jung. Memories, dreams, thoughts.
The establishment of the psychology of the unconscious was carried out by Freud from two classic motives belonging to Gnosticism: sexuality and harmful paternal authority: he would go from Yahveh and God the creator, to the Freudian myth of the superegoic primitive father.
However, it will be precisely the evolution towards materialism, already anticipated by alchemy by delving into the structure of matter, that prevents Freud from seeing the full spectrum of Gnosticism: «the pre-image of the spirit as another God supreme", (...) "who sent the krater, the vessel of spiritual transformations, to the aid of men". The krater was a spirit-filled vessel sent by the Creator God to earth to baptize those who wished to achieve a higher consciousness, a symbolic womb of spiritual renewal and rebirth.
In short, it would be the existence of a fundamental deficiency in the patriarchal and phallocentric Freudian myth, and it is the absence of the feminine that is glimpsed as a principle in the Gnostic figure of the krater, but also in Catholicism, by sustaining a one-sidedness of the masculine until the papal bull of Pius XII, which proclaimed the dogma of the Assumption of Mary in 1950.
In the same way that in the Protestant and Jewish world the paternal figure remains unchanged, in alchemy however, a feminine principle comparable to the masculine one was maintained, hence one of the main feminine alchemical symbols was the glass in which transformations of matter, or retort, were produced.
Jung began to understand the essence of alchemy through the Chinese alchemical text that Richard Wilhelm sent him in 1928, Goldene Blüte or The Secret of the Golden Flower.
It was followed by commission from a Munich bookseller by the Artis Auriferae Volumina Duno (1593). However, access to the complicated alchemical language and imagery resisted him and he left it as impossible. He went so far as to say: «My God!, how absurd! No one understands that."
Until he realized that symbolism prevailed throughout the discipline, and remembering the famous dream he got trapped in in the century XVII, concluded: «Yes, that's right! Now I am doomed to study all alchemy from the beginning.
He continued with the Rosarium philosophorum (1550), and decided to find an explanatory dictionary with cross-references given the use of different expressions with a meaning that he did not quite understand. Little by little he came to understand the meaning of alchemical expressions, which took him more than a decade. He ended up realizing, ultimately, that analytical psychology was consistent with alchemy, considering his discovery the historical equivalent to the psychology of the unconscious.
From this we can extract the existence of an archetypal transmutation process that evolves over the centuries, hence Goethe's Faust, or the same process of individuation in Jung. It is a suprapersonal process, a «mundus arquetipus». It is precisely through alchemy that Jung realized that the unconscious is a dynamic, reciprocal, and bidirectional process between the self and the contents of the unconscious, verifiable at the individual level, through dreams and fantasies, and at the collective level, in the diverse religious systems and in the transmutation of their symbols.
In his work Psychology and alchemy (1944) he corroborates that his period from 1913 to 1917 corresponded to the «transmutation process of alchemy», and that the relationship between unconscious symbolism and religion Christianity was exemplified by the alchemical concept of Lapis, the stone, as a figure parallel to Christ, as well as by the aurum non vulgi and by the viriditas of the alchemists. With this, Jung verified the existence of an «alchemical Christ», anima mundi or filius macrocosmi, the immanence of the living anthropos throughout the world, "Christ as a unification of spiritually living and physically dead matter."
In Aion (1951), he poses the historical figure, the man Jesus. The collective mentality of the time or archetypal constellation, the prefiguration of the "anthropos", fell upon him; the son of man, or son of God, faced the lord of this world. The fact that Jesus became the "world savior" had to do with the sum of a collective projection from a historical archetypal constellation on "a personality of outstanding stature ».
The individual and collective dispossession of all autonomy and spiritual independence in the time of Caesar finds its parallelism in the contemporary massification, which also yearns for the return of a savior, in this case in the form of «a son of the technique”, finding its manifestations under the guise of the global expansion of the UFO phenomenon, as detailed in his 1958 work A modern myth. Of things that are seen in the sky.
Jung also observed in alchemy the «coniunctio», or «unification», a concept parallel to that of transference, a central axis both in psychoanalysis and in analytical psychology.
His work Answer to Job is already implicitly contained in «Aion», Job being a prefiguration of Christ, united by the idea of suffering. The antagonism of God, his ambivalence, the dark and numinous side of the image of God, bases the work, as a result of the questioning of the public and patients, and without any claim to proclaim any metaphysical truth, unlike what he came to think theology. Jung would go so far as to say: "Something persists in me and does not want to be the mute fish." There is (...) "the idea of the creature that surpasses the creator by a small but decisive margin."
Finally, his work Mysterium coniunctionis (1955-1956) constitutes the culmination of the confrontation between alchemy and analytical psychology. He returns to expose the theme of transference, but above all he makes a final synthesis between alchemy and depth psychology.
Just with Mysterium coniunctionis My psychology was definitely in reality and historically founded as a whole. With this my task was finished, my work done and finished. At the moment when I achieved my goal I agreed to the most extreme limits of what is scientifically conceived for me, to the transcendent, the essence of the archetype itself, beyond which it is no longer possible to express anything else in the scientific aspect.Carl Gustav Jung. Memories, dreams, thoughts.
Bollingen
During the 1920s, at the age of forty-five, once he had overcome an existential crisis "in the middle of his life" and increased his international reputation in addition, he spent five years traveling regularly, mostly interested in primitive cultures.
In 1921 his work Psychological Types was published, where he developed his ideas of the existence of two attitudes of the psyche: introversion and extraversion, as well as four functions: thinking, feeling, sensation and intuition. Also included in this work is the first allusion to his central concept of the self as an objective of psychological development.
Simultaneously it would be during this time that he began to retire to Bollingen, his second home or residence.
In 1922, he acquired property on the shores of Lake Zurich, an isolated location that was located about forty kilometers from his main home in Küsnacht and two from a village called Bollingen. It is a small town near Rapperswil, in the canton of St. Gallen, Switzerland. It is located on the northern shore of Lake Zurich and is part of the municipality of Jona.
In 1923 his mother died. Jung learns to carve stone and, with little professional help, begins construction on his second house, featuring a solid keep. Later he will complement it with a lobby, another tower and an annex. He rules out the installation of electricity and telephone. He will call the building simply "Bollingen ". It will be for the rest of his life his place of retirement, tranquility, renewal, meditation and personal experimentation.
Travel
In the course of the first post-war period, Jung became a world traveler, thanks to the copious funds he obtained from the sales of his books, fees and money received for having achieved senior status in the medical institutions for which he worked. The places he visited were the following:
North Africa
In the early 1920s, Jung was invited by a friend to travel to Tunis. He would start the trip in March, going first to Algeria, from there to Tunis and finally collecting in Susa, letting his friend go since he had to attend to business matters.
Later, it would head south to Sfax and from there to Tozeur, the oasis city, in the Sahara. His next destination would be the oasis of Nefta, where he would ride out with his interpreter. He would end his itinerary by returning to Tunis and embarking for Marseilles. It would be during that night that he would have the famous Kasbat dream.
He will relate that his encounter with Arab culture will come to impress him powerfully. From this encounter he will extract his confrontation with the archetype of the shadow, not the individual , but the collective , the one that is repressed in the unconscious psyche by the European and the presumed civilized consciousness of him.
The emotional essence of those cultures that live on affection revives in the "civilized" a part of us that should not be denied, but conserved and confronted, since everything has an objective and a meaning, and our entire psyche is energized in relation to the economy of a Whole. Consciousness is always “partial”.
Jung will belong to those who «left them the most vivid desire to return to Africa». He would do it five years later.
Pueblo Indians
In his eagerness to detach himself from the prejudice and idiosyncrasies contained in the consciousness of the white man's culture, he continued in his historical comparison descending to a deeper cultural level.
Thanks to some friends, this time Americans, in January 1925 he visited the city-building Pueblo Indians in New Mexico, engaging in conversation for the first time with a non-European man, chieftain of a town called Tao, and named Ochwiä white. Jung also had the opportunity to experience the powerful impression that the Grand Canyon of Colorado causes and to visit the Indians who live in small tents in Bean Canyon, also in New Mexico.
Once again, he will confront the historical cruelty of the white man, our true human nature, with his decompensation favoring the "head" and not the "heart", as it was expressed, of colonization in the name of greed.
Jung found himself with a people whose religion and the exercise of their cult were inaccessible and a mystery to the foreign white man, precisely as an instrument of resistance and persistence over time against him. However, he gradually discovered a divine identification with the sun, as well as a symbolism of the mountain and the water. They considered themselves as "sons of the father sun ", whose religion helped their father to cross the sky every day; if not, there would be an eternal night. His cult therefore involved all of humanity.
Then Jung compares the European rationalism that distances us from the mystical world and the consequent loss that this entails.
Kenya and Uganda
Kenya
In the autumn of 1925, he headed with two friends, an Englishman and an American, to Mombasa, Kenya, on a Woerman steamer, since he had long wanted to travel to tropical Africa. After staying at their destination for two days, they headed for Nairobi. It would be at sunset when, on a narrow-gauge train, they would travel to the interior of the country. During the journey, Jung recounted a very vivid «sentiment du déjà vu» when he saw a thin, black figure on a rocky peak, motionless, looking at the train and leaning on a long spear.
(...) his world was mine for countless millennia.Carl Gustav Jung. Memories, dreams, thoughts.
From Nairobi, and this time in a small Ford, they visited a large hunting ground: the Athi Plains, a wide savannah teeming with animal life. Separating from his companions until he was left alone, and seeing that immensity, he came to the following conviction:
(...) When, being in Athi Plains, in East Africa, I watched from a small hill those flocks of thousands of deer pasting in silent calm, as they had been doing for some immeasurable periods of time, I had the feeling of being the first man, the first being who knew that all that “That's it.». Everyone around me was still in the initial silence and I didn't know it was. And just at that moment when I knew, the world had arisen and without that moment would never have existed. All nature seeks that purpose and finds it, already fulfilled, in man, and always only in the most conscious man. Every small step forward on the path leading to consciousness creates world.Carl Gustav Jung. Complete work. Volume 9/I. Archaetypes and the collective unconscious.
Uganda
Next, they took the Uganda train, stopping at a provisional end of the route, Sigistifour, as the entire route was under construction. While the luggage was being unloaded, an Englishman who had been in Africa for forty years approached him and made the following recommendation: “This country is not of man, but of God. So if something happens to you, sit back and don't worry." God stood over man, the inscrutable design over all will or purpose.
The route resumed, this time in two cars, to Kakamengas, the next town, and from there to Mount Elgon, whose crater wall, at 4,000 meters, could be seen on the horizon. It was a march made up of porters and a military escort of three men. After an incident where they were attacked by hyenas, the three whites received their corresponding nicknames: the English "Rothals", or "the one with the red neck"; the American "bwana maredi", or "the dapper gentleman"; and Jung "mzee", or "the old man", due to his gray hair, since despite his fifty years it was not often to reach old age.
Then Jung relates the description of the way in which an archetype manifested itself, in this case that of the quaternity:
I received a letter from the governor of Uganda requesting me to accept with us an Englishman who was returning to Egypt through the Sudan. It was known that we had the same travel plan and since we had met the lady in Nairobi, there was no reason to deny us. We also felt very obliged to the governor for his generous help.I mention this episode to show why subtle ways our actions were influenced by an archetype. We were three men and it was purely casual. I had begged a third friend to accompany us, but adverse circumstances prevented him from coming. This was enough to configure the unconscious or fate. It emerged as a archetype of the triad, which asks the room, as has happened again and again in the history of this archetype.
Since I am always ready to accept how casual I am, I admitted satisfied the lady in our group of three men. He was sporty and brave and manifested himself as useful compensation to our exclusive masculinity. When my younger friend later became sick of a dangerous attack on tropical malaria, we were grateful for his experience as a nurse, which he had acquired during World War I.Carl Gustav Jung, Memories, dreams, thoughts. Autumn of 1925.
Continuing the safari, they reached Nandi, and from that region came to a lodge at the foot of Mount Elgon. At the beginning of the ascent they ran into the local cacique, related to the Maasai. At a higher altitude they decided to camp in a clearing in the vicinity of which was a town of Hottentots. Jung was able to communicate in Swahili with the cacique, who appointed a woman with her two semi-adult daughters as water carriers.
Jung also alludes to their visit to the Bugishus, although they would spend most of their time with the Elgonyi. He comments that he did not engage in any conversation with any indigenous woman, since communication between members belonging to the same gender was customary in those latitudes, qualifying the opposite as a search for sexual relations, before which all Westerners lost both their authority and their own autonomy. aware.
The only exception he made was the sister of a thoughtful member of the elgonyi, who invited him to meet her. Jung would gladly accept to gain insight into family life in that culture.
Every morning, Jung engaged in conversation with the curious who approached him with interest, sitting on a small four-legged chair, and following the customs that were established for this purpose on these occasions. To do this, he followed the instructions that his guide, Ibrahim, had given him: sit on the floor and start the conversation through the "shauri", or what was going to be discussed in that session. The language that was mostly spoken was a passable Swahili and the "seminar" rarely lasted more than an hour, due to the exhaustion of those present.
Dreams
Naturally, Jung tried with tenacious persistence to access the dream world that developed in the individuals of these cultures, but an inexplicable fear and mistrust was the only thing that was obtained when telling him about his dreams. Perhaps it was the same fear of "soul loss" that the photograph generated.
In contrast, among the porters, mostly Somalis and Swahilis, this was not the case, since they had and consulted an "Arabic dream book", referring to Jung when in doubt, due to his knowledge of the Koran. Hence they called him "the man of the book."
On one occasion they talked with a laibon, doctor of the cacique, who was also questioned about his dreams, responding with frank melancholy that since the English inhabited Africa the laibon had stopped dreaming, and that before it was frequent that These made known dreams of a premonitory type. But now it was unnecessary. The English knew everything. Decadence was present before the exchange made between God and destiny, on the one hand, and Anglo-Saxon rationalism, on the other.
Rites and ceremonies
He also made his attempts on the numinous: especially rites and ceremonies, achieving a single observation in what appeared to be the funeral of a woman that apparently took place in the square of a small town, before the empty cabin of the deceased. In the center were a kauri belt, bracelets, earrings, pot shards, and a burial staff. Despite being informed of the death, nothing indicated that it was a funeral.
In turn, he found out what the funeral ritual was for his neighbors to the west, whom they described as "bad people." When the death occurred, he informed the neighboring town of the fact, and at sunset the corpse was located and offered at the midpoint between the two towns. The next morning the deceased had disappeared, presumably eaten by "bad people." Among the elgonyi the corpse was transferred to the interior of the jungle, where the hyenas were the real responsible for its burial. In fact, they never found remains of a burial.
When a person died, the corpse was placed on the central floor of the cabin. The laibon transformed it, then spreading milk throughout the room and reciting in a low voice: «ayîk adhîsta, adhîk ayîk!». Jung associated the ceremonial with a certain allusion where it was said that at dawn they left the cabin, spit or blew into their hands and turned them towards the rising sun, without knowing how to explain why they did so. What his interlocutor would confirm is that this was the true religion shared by all the peoples: Kevirondos, Buyandas, all of them practiced the cult of the sun "in its rise at dawn", or "Adhîsta"; only at that moment was he God, or "mungu." Three aspects stood out in said ritual offering: the offering to the sun, its birth was divine; saliva, associated with personal mana, healing, magical and vital force; and the breath, or "roho", which meant wind and spirit. The gestural therefore formed a summation of archetypal meanings that could be assembled and expressed through the following sentence: «I offer my living soul to God», a linguistic allusion very close to: «Lord, into your hands I commend my spirit». Thus, an archetypal pre-existence was rediscovered regardless of time and place, in this case between Christianity and the African solar cult of the Elgonyi, and related peoples.
They also worshiped the "ayik", a "sheitan" or earthly devil, the foundation of fear and evil. Finally, there was the conviction that the Creator was a concept integrated by good and evil, it was "m'zuri", implicit beauty both in his being and in his creation. It is then that Jung understood that "m'zuri" was dissociated during the day into an expression of benevolence, the "adhîsta", the solar reign, while at night it manifested itself as "ayîk", the dark, the reign of evil.. In fact, a concordance with Egyptian mythology was glimpsed: Horus was Adhîsta, the sun, the light, and Seth was Ayîk, the darkness. And in the same way that the laibon integrated both opposites with its ritual, the only moment in which the Creator could be visualized, as a unit beyond the sun and darkness, was said dawn in which the first ray unexpectedly emerged from the night. Sun. God was contemplated, mungu; adhîsta and ayîk momentarily united their respective kingdoms in their original source. Jung ends with a final comparison between day, night and dawn of the macrocosm, with the primitive psychic night of millions of years ago and the yearning for light as the yearning of consciousness, at the level of the microcosm.
At the end of their stay, they skirted the southern slopes of Mount Elgon until they reached the Bugishu region, stopping momentarily at the Bunambale Inn. They continued to Mbale, reaching Jinja, next to Lake Victoria, in separate Ford trucks. They would then travel by train to Lake Kyoga, and by steamer to Port Masindi. Again a truck would bring them closer to the city of Masindi, halfway between Lake Kyoga and Lake Alberto, ascending from the latter to Rejaf, in the Sudan, where a steamer awaited them next to the Nile, and with it the end of the journey.. They sailed peacefully north, ending up in Khartoum, where Egypt began.
Indian
Jung traveled to India in 1938 at the invitation of the Indo-British government for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the University of Calcutta.
With the preamble of already having a vast background in oriental wisdom, and as an intermediate to his interest in alchemical philosophy (during the trip he studied the entire volume I of the Theatrum chemicum of 1602, by Gerhard Dorn), engaged in extensive conversation with S. Subramanya Iyer, guru of the Mysore majarash, and many others. Not so with the classic "saints", before whom he would vindicate his own truth, and the fact that his experiential context was Western, not Eastern. Without underestimating them, he hesitated to situate his wisdom as an expression of his own manifestation or as the result of the repetition of an ancient proverb.
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But what interested Jung the most on his trip to India was the position of that culture against the concept of "evil". While for Western culture the goal is good, trying to get rid of evil or avoiding being at its mercy, for India and various Eastern conceptions, the goal would be in a state beyond good and evil, to which it could be accessed via meditation or yoga. The Western unilateral position where evil is subordinated to good, or where it would even be defined as "absence of good" ("privatio boni"), would give way to a conception where both concepts would cease to have their own entity and would become part of a dynamic and polarized expression belonging to a "whole" that transcends them, said entity surpassing all attempts at a conceptual denomination. Even so, and for the purposes of being able to allude to it, it has been named as nirvana, tao, etc.
The ultimate goal would therefore not be of a moral nature, that is, to do good while avoiding evil, but rather to be on the margin and achieve liberation from opposites. And it is at this point where we find a discrepancy in Jung, when he shows his disagreement in liberation as the ultimate goal and existential objective. Good and evil would thus lose their delimitation, gaining at most the possibility of being defined from the subjective, giving rise to a conception either lacking in ethics or so saturated with subjectivity that the only escape route would be nirvana.
On the contrary, I want to persevere in the living conception of nature and psychic images. I do not wish to free myself from men, nor from me, nor from nature, for all this constitutes unto me undescribable prodigies. Nature, soul and life are shown to me as the divinity manifesting itself. What else could I imagine? The supreme sense of being cannot consist of me but that "That's it.» and not that it is not or ceases to be.Carl Gustav Jung. Memories, dreams, thoughts.
On the other hand, Jung will also deny a conception of liberation “at any price”. The only feasible liberation will be one that previously presupposes a dedication and total involvement, a liberation is impossible without prior experimentation or realization. Said absence of participation due to difficulty, impossibility or refusal, censors a part of the soul and consequently prevents a total liberation.
A man who has not gone through hell of his passions will not have mastered them yet. Passions are then found in the next house and, without him warning, a flame may arise and pass to his own house. As soon as you leave too much, you are deferred or almost forgotten, there is the possibility and danger that the abandoned or postponed returns with redouble force.Carl Gustav Jung. Memories, dreams, thoughts.
Jung will visit Konarak, Odisha, where accompanied by a pundit, he will see a pagoda. Later he will be fascinated by the largest stupa of Sanchi. In these buildings Jung will come to the conviction of the Buddha as unus mundus , which would include both the aspect of being itself, and in turn that of being known to him. Human consciousness as a cosmogonic category.
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Jung came to establish a comparison between Buddha and Christ, both victors of the world and incarnation of the individual, however glimpsing the following differences:
Buddha is, so to speak, rational understanding, Christ becomes a victim of destiny. In Christianity he suffers more, Buddhism is seen and done. Both are correct, but in the Indian sense Buddha is the most perfect man. It is a historical personality and therefore more easily understandable for men. Christ is a historical man and God and therefore more difficultly conceivable. At the bottom, He did not understand himself either; he only knew that he should sacrifice himself as he was ordained from within. His sacrifice was imposed on him as a destiny. Buddha acted by conviction. He lived his life and died old. Christ probably only acted very little time as such.
According to his autobiographer Aniela Jaffé, in later observations Jung confronted Buddha and Christ in their attitude towards suffering, expressing that Christ recognized a positive value in it, and that as a victim he was more human and real than Buddha. Buddha was opposed to suffering, but also to joy. Being cut off from emotions and feelings he wasn't really human. In the gospels, Christ is described as God-man, despite not ceasing to be a man, while Buddha, already alive, rose above the human being.
It will finally delve into the identity of the historical evolution of both Buddhism and Christianity:
Buddha became an imago of becoming himself, which is taken by model, while he himself announced that by overcoming the Nidana chain every man in particular can become the enlightened, Buddha. Similar to Christianity: Christ is the prototype that in every Christian lives as a total personality. Historical evolution, however, led to imitatio Christiin which the individual does not follow his own and fatal path to the whole, but seeks to imitate the way that Christ followed. In the same way, in the east it came to a imitation of Buddha. It became imitated prototype and thus the weakness of his thought manifested itself, just as in the imitatio Christi the fatal inactivity is presuppose in the evolution of the Christian idea.
Jung was appointed a doctor in Prayagraj (Islam), Benares (Hinduism) and Calcutta (Anglo-Indian medicine and science).
After recovering from dysentery, he had a compensatory dream of a European nature centered on the figure of the Grail, in which he found, on the one hand, the coincidence between the poetic myth of the Holy Grail, still persistent in England, and alchemical concepts of the «unum Vas», the «One Medicine» and the «Unus Lapis». On the other hand, he was a warning that his objective was Europe, the search for the «sacred cup», the « salvator mundi », India meaning an important stop on his long journey.
Towards the end of his visit he arrived in Ceylon, in the Indian Ocean, and after leaving Colombo, an international port, behind, he will enter the "country of the hills", reaching the old city of Kandy. There he will access the small temple of Sri Dalada Maligawa, which houses the sacred tooth of the Buddha, as well as the Canon texts on silver scrolls. After spending a long time contemplating them in the library, he ended his stay with an evening ceremony in the Mandapa, or waiting room of the temple.
The beginning of spring marked the return trip, not arriving in Bombay, due to the overwhelmed state it was in, and plunging back into alchemy.
Ravenna and Rome
Ravenna
Jung was in Ravenna twice: in 1913 and some twenty years later, being impressed on each visit by the Galla Placidia mausoleum. He then moved with a friend to the Orthodox baptistery, where the famous "vision of the mosaics" would take place.
In an atmosphere inundated by a faint bluish light without a source, Jung and his companion saw four large mosaic frescoes where there should have been windows: the painting in the south wing depicted the baptism in the Jordan; that of the north wing, the passage of the children of Israel through the Red Sea; the third in the eastern part, the bath that cleansed Naaman from his leprosy in the Jordan; and the fourth mosaic, in the western wing of the baptistery, represented Christ reaching out to Peter as he sank. It was the latter that was given the most importance, the most remembered, before which they stopped for twenty minutes, and which they associated with the initiation rite of baptism, which included the archetype of death and resurrection.
When leaving the room, Jung went to Alinari to acquire allusive photographs, his effort being in vain. From Zurich he would order an acquaintance, who also could not do anything to verify that these mosaics did not exist.
Jung would observe the following linked aspects as a plausible explanation: the historical event of Galla Placidia, Empress who died in 450, who in a stormy and wintery boat trip from Byzantium to Ravenna would promise to build what would be the Basilica of Saint Giovanni, decorated with mosaics and destroyed in a fire in the early Middle Ages; the emotion aroused in Jung by the figure of Gala, and the reciprocal relationship of the latter with the archetype of the soul, as the cause of her objectification; and vision as a momentary creation of the unconscious, related to the initiation archetype. Jung concludes that since then he is aware that something internal can be represented externally, and vice versa, asking himself: "What was real at that moment?"
Rome
Jung would not travel to Rome, but to Pompeii (1910-1912). In 1912 he would embark from Genoa to Naples, catching a glimpse of Rome in the distance. A final attempt in 1949 was hampered by a faint while buying the tickets.
Nazi regime and final years
Phase of National Socialism
Due to the programs of National Socialism in the early 1930s, the incipient discipline of depth psychology, still young and divided into schools, is in serious danger, limiting its survival in Europe, especially in Germany and Austria. Psychotherapists have a double task: developing an activity that mediates between schools and divergent orientations, and working to achieve international collaboration.
At that decisive moment, that difficult task falls especially to Jung. Since 1930 he has been vice-president of the "General Medical Society for Psychotherapy", as well as three years later professor of medical psychology at the Federal Polytechnic School in Zurich, where he would give his ETH Lectures for eight years. In March 1933, the then professor of psychiatry and neurology at the University of Marburg, Ernst Kretschmer, known for his theory of the constitution Körperbau und Charakter (Body Constitution and Character), had resigned from his functions as president of that company. In this way, Jung takes over the presidency and the related task of editing the Zentralblatt für Psychotherapie und ihrer Grenzgebiete (Central journal for psychotherapy and related disciplines).
The psychiatrist Matthias Heinrich Göring, cousin of the future Reich Marshal Hermann Göring, works on the side of National Socialism. Jung assumes his task practically as an interim, since the revolutionary changes in Germany demand coordination without compromises, introducing the principle of leadership and the foundation of the ideology of National Socialism. Thus, the so-called "Aryan paragraph" excludes Jewish or non-Aryan officials and doctors.
Relying on his neutral nationality, Jung evades this compulsory coordination, sponsoring and officially organizing the new «International Medical Society for Psychotherapy». Professional groups are formed in each country, but only Göring's German group is subject to coordination. The members of the remaining groups that do not want to join that of any country have the possibility of entering as members in the new supra-state society. Thus Jung facilitates the entry of Jewish colleagues and helps science, isolated at that time in Germany. The statutes of the new society were ratified in May 1934, with Jung also being president. In the face of vigorous German attempts to nazify the international body, he later resigned as its presidency in 1939, the year World War II began.
Given the misunderstandings that are still occasionally in force today, it should be clarified that Jung was totally detached from Göring's local German group. For the Swiss psychiatrist, the supra-state society was politically and confessionally neutral. However, and despite the viability of the survival of medical psychotherapy carried out by the International Society, a whole chain of incidents occurred that gradually fanned the fire of the mistaken. In the issue number 6.3 of December 1933 of the Zentralblatt für Psychotherapie appeared two publications for which Jung was the target of violent attacks and objections:
- on the one hand, a manifesto of Göring, where it is established for the German psychotherapists the obligation to submit to the principles of National Socialism,
- and on the other hand, in the preface of the same copy, statements by Jung himself expressing the differences between German and Jewish psychology.
In the first case, it had been agreed with Jung that said manifesto would appear exclusively in the German supplement, given the "vote of fidelity" of said local group, and not in the international publication, taking charge of all the writing of the new one. number to a "coordinated" representative without him, as editor, being informed of the decision. In the second, the simultaneity of his statements establishing a comparison between both cultures, even really framing from the psychological analysis approach, transformed what was apparently harmless in disastrous misunderstandings.
The criticisms based on a double misrepresentation, only revealed when the aforementioned context was known, did not prevent Jung from expressing his own negligence and haste. As his biographer Gerhard Wehr points out:
At the same time, Jung recognizes that he was frankly reckless, as a psychologist, of the Jewish question, drawing attention to the "difference between Jewish psychology and "arian, German, Christian and European" psychology. Naturally, his words do not allude to psychology or psychotherapy as a scientific discipline, but to the fact that whoever acts in the domain of psychoanalysis or psychotherapy introduces, in the interrelation between the analyst and the analysis, the "subjective budget" that he carries in his person and which forms the essence of any relationship between human beings, especially the psychotherapeutic process, with the phenomena of transfer and countertransference. He would like to point out that, from that point of view, the existing "anamic differences" between all nations and all races could not be dismissed, even among the inhabitants of Zurich, Basel and Bern. Obviously, he's not making a value judgment. Jung points out this fact repeatedly expressis verbis. First of all, according to him, no psychology, not even the Jew, can claim to possess a general validity. The desire to confirm and investigate this subject should not be regarded as a manifestation of anti-Semitism.
Jung's contribution to science is indisputable, he was neither sympathetic to National Socialism nor was he anti-Semitic, as evidenced by his actions as president of the International Society, as well as helping certain Jews in particular in many ways.
Now Freud accused me of anti-Semite because I felt unable to experience his soulless materialism. With this propensity to sniff around anti-Semitism, the Jews end up arousing anti-Semitism. I do not understand why the Jew cannot admit, as much as the alleged Christian, that when he has an opinion on him he is not being criticized. Why should we always assume that we want to condemn the Jewish people as a whole? (...) I believe it is an inadmissible way of closing the beak to the adversary. I have understood very well with my Jewish patients and colleagues in most cases (...) More than once for criticizing a German this has reproached me to hate the Germans. It is too easy to want to conceal one's own inferiority after a political prejudice (...) You should know me enough to believe me... capable of such little individual nonsense as anti-Semitism. He knows that I consider man as a person and how much I always try to tear him from his collective determinants to make him an individual (...) Nationalism, however unhealthy, is a conditio sine qua non: simply the individual should not sink into it (...) The next slander to invent will be that I suffer from a total absence of conviction because I am neither anti-Semite nor Nazi. We live a time of madness.
His other biographer, Aniela Jaffé, of Jewish descent, makes the following explanatory judgment:
But it must be considered a serious mistake that [with its distinction between a Jewish psychology and a non-Jewish psychology] was presented in the public sphere at a time when the fact of being a Jew carried in itself a death threat, and that included distinctions in the field of breed psychology in the scientific program of the International Society. Even though the abysmal consequences of hatred of the Jews were only met later, at that time any reference to the differential character of the Jews was the detonator who awakened more fanaticism. The silence that the doctor is familiar and often imposed should have been his duty at that time.
At the beginning of 1934 Jung expressed his opinions and ideas clearly and critically, beginning with his classic seminar on Nietzsche's Zarathustra given until 1939, the year the war broke out, and in which he argued that the philosopher had become the great prophet of what was happening in Germany at that time.
He was followed in 1936 by his work Wotan, whose title alludes to the irruption of the ancient Germanic god into the German collective consciousness, «god of storms and effervescence, a trigger of passions avid for fighter, and, moreover, a powerful sorcerer and magician, who has been closely linked to the mysteries of hidden nature. Manifestation of an archetype as an autonomous factor, representative of the nature of National Socialism, with collective repercussions and that confuses the men belonging to the mass, even one so allegedly cultured and rational as the German.
Nor did he hide from the international press his position regarding dictators and the Third Reich. In October 1938, American journalist Hubert Renfro Knickerbocker visits Jung at his Küsnacht home for the purpose of conducting an interview to be published in the January 1939 issue of Hearst's International Cosmopolitan. Jung describes Hitler as a man really without political representation but magic, a kind of sorcerer or shaman, insignificant in himself, but who reflects and vociferates the unconscious of the Germans. The projection of the collective unconscious of the German people, constellated in Wotan, is conveyed through an idealized man and turned into a kind of messiah.
Evaluating all the facts, consequences, and explanations regarding Jung's attitude toward National Socialism is not easy. After the catastrophe of the war and the Holocaust, the controversy aroused among critics shows how difficult it is to reach a definitive conclusion: some declare him totally innocent, others characterize him insultingly. Referring again to his biographer, the psychological factor of the personal shadow applied to the founder of analytical psychology himself. Where there is a lot of light, there are also a lot of shadows:
Jung gave too many things to the world and to human beings so that his shadow can put into question his spiritual importance and his human stature.
Jung and the CIA
A series of declassified US documents and Swiss material revealed in the magazine L'Hebdo reported a supposed collaboration between Jung and Allen Dulles, who would come to the head of the postwar INC. Dulles would have been in Bern at the end of 1942, his mission being to prepare a report on the secret anti-Nazi movement in Germany. In this way, he would have come into contact with Jung, a great connoisseur of the Germanic soul of the moment. The American spy would have convinced Jung to collect useful information, making him, according to this magazine, agent no. 488 of the American Central Intelligence Agency.
Last years
In 1938 Jung gave the Terry Lectures at Yale University, presenting his work Psychology and Religion. A few months later, World War II would break out. It was around this time that he visited India, where he renewed his agenda of priorities, guided by the conviction that he should pay more attention to the spirituality of the East. His late works do show a deep interest in the occult tradition of this hemisphere and in esoteric Christianity and, especially, in alchemy.
In 1903 Jung had already married Emma Rauschenbach, daughter of a wealthy industrialist who owned the well-known watchmaking firm IWC, with whom he would have five children. The marriage lasted until the death of his wife in 1955, but it was not exempt from moments of crisis, especially because of the extramarital affairs that Jung had with Sabina Spielrein and Toni Wolff.
Jung continued to publish books until the end of his life, including a work showing his interest in UFOs as a mass psychological phenomenon, A Modern Myth. Of things that are seen in the sky (1958). He also enjoyed the brief but fruitful friendship of Father Victor White, an English Catholic priest with whom he corresponded after the publication of Answer to Job.
Death
Carl Gustav Jung would die on the afternoon of June 6, 1961, around four o'clock, after a short illness preceded by a stroke and a stroke, at his home by Lake Zurich, in the peaceful town of Küsnacht, Switzerland, at the age of 85. He was reading Teilhard de Chardin's work The Human Phenomenon. At the moment of his death, lightning split the tree where he used to rest. The gardener healed him.
Following funerals in the Küsnacht church, Jung was laid to rest in the local cemetery. The slab bears the Jung family crest, and next to it, the names of his father, mother, his sister, Emma and Carl. In the upper and lower friezes the engraving:
Vocatus adque non vocatus deus aderit ("Call him or not, God will be present").
The right and left sides of the phrase:
Primus homo de terra terrenus. Secundus homo de caelo caelestis ("The first man comes from the earth and is earthly; the second man proceeds from heaven and is heavenly").
Legacy
Jungian Psychology
Jungian psychoanalysis is often referred to, but the correct name to refer to this theory and its methodology is “analytical or complex psychology”. Although Jung was reluctant to found a school of psychology—he is credited with the phrase, “Thank God, I am Jung; not a Jungian »—in fact, he developed a distinctive style in the way he studied human behavior. From his early years, working in a Swiss hospital with psychotic patients, and collaborating with Sigmund Freud and the psychoanalytic community, he had an up-close appreciation of the complexity of mental illness. Fascinated by such experiences (and stimulated by the vicissitudes of his personal life) he devoted his work to exploring these themes.
According to his position, in order to fully grasp the structure and function of the psyche, it was vital for psychology to add to the experimental method (inherited from the natural sciences) the findings provided by the human sciences. Myth, dreams and psychopathology would constitute a spectrum of continuity, manifesting in vivo singular features, which operate systematically in the depths of the unconscious psychic life. However, for Jung, the unconscious per se is, by definition, unknowable. "The unconscious is necessarily unconscious" — he ironized. According to this, he could only be apprehended through his manifestations.
Such manifestations refer, according to his hypothesis, to certain patterns, which he called archetypes. Jung came to compare the archetypes with what in ethology is called a pattern of behavior (or behavior pattern), extrapolating this concept, from the field of instincts to the complexity of finalist human behavior. The archetypes would model the way in which human consciousness can experience the world and self-perceive; In addition, they would implicitly carry the matrix of possible responses that it is possible to observe, at a given moment, in the particular behavior of a subject. In this sense, Jung maintained that archetypes act in all human beings, which allowed him to postulate the existence of the collective unconscious.
Human beings would access this unconscious dynamic by virtue of the subjective experience of these symbols, which is profusely mediated by dreams, art, religion, mythology, the psychological dramas represented in interpersonal relationships and the purposes intimate. Jung maintained the importance of deepening the knowledge of this symbolic language to consolidate the pre-eminence of individual consciousness over unconscious powers. In a poetic tone, he maintained that this process of individuation (principium individuationis) is only viable when an answer has been given to the question: "What is the myth that you live in?" part, that these aspects of mental life are relatively marginalized from the belief system of the modern Western mentality.
No science will ever replace myth, and a myth cannot be created from any science. For it is not that God is a myth, but the myth is the revelation of a divine life in man. It is not we who invent the myth, but it speaks to us as a Word of God.Cited by Aniela Jaffé. The Myth of Meaning (Baltimore, 1975), 373.
Perspective
At a theoretical level, the beginning of Jung's separation from Freud occurred when the former extrapolated the concept of libido beyond purely sexual issues. The notion of libido used by the Swiss psychiatrist alluded rather to an idea of psychic energy in the abstract (Henri Bergson's Élan vital), whose origin and destination were not exclusively sexual. Jung has been prolific in coining terms that are already typical in psychoanalysis, and in psychology in general, such as: complex (and more specifically: Electra complex), introversion and extraversion, collective unconscious, archetype or individuation.
His research often ventured into fields such as religion (Psychology and religion, 1937) or alchemy (Psychology and alchemy, 1944), delving into the study of concepts such as the collective unconscious, archetype (as the basis for the existence of universally repeated myths) or self (entity other than the self, which alludes to the integrity of the subject and encompasses both conscious and unconscious). He also defined the basic types of introvert and extravert. The heterodoxy of this author has earned him contrasting judgments, ranging from indifference to admiration.
In this sense, his work contrasts with Freud's skepticism and rejection of religion. Jung's idea that it serves as a practical path to individuation has been very popular and is still covered in some modern texts on the psychology of religion.
As mentioned, a key concept in his work is the collective unconscious, which Jung considered to be made up of archetypes. Examples of these archetypes are the mask, the shadow, the beast, the witch, the hero, the animus, and the anima. He also identified certain concrete images, such as mandala representations, as archetypal. To elaborate his concept of archetype, Jung was inspired by the reiteration of motifs or themes in various mythologies of the most remote cultures: he believed that he had found unconscious common themes, which humanity reiterated with only slight variations, depending on the circumstances.
Even though we are men of our own personal life we are also, on the other hand, largely representatives, victims and promoters of a collective spirit, whose life is equal to centuries. We can certainly imagine a life tailored to our own desires and never discover that we were in sum chambers of the world's theater. But there are facts that we certainly ignore, but that influence our lives and that are so much more ignored.Carl Gustav Jung. Memories, dreams, thoughts.
Politics and State
Jung expressed the importance of the individual rights of each person in relation to the State and society. He perceived the state being treated as "a living quasi-personality from which everything is expected"; but that "in reality it is nothing more than a camouflage for those individuals who know how to manipulate it", and he referred to the State as a form of slavery. He also thought that "the dictatorial State has, compared to the reason of the citizen, the advantage that he has also absorbed his religious forces. The state has come to take the place of God', making it comparable to a religion in which "state slavery is a form of worship." Jung observed that the "staged acts of status" were comparable to religious demonstrations: "Musical marches, flags, banners, parades and rallies of monstrous proportions are no different in principle from praying processions, cannon shots and fireworks to expel the demons". From Jung's perspective, this substitution of God for the State in a mass society led to the dislocation of religious unity and resulted in the same fanaticism of the church-state of the Middle Ages, in the one that the more "adored" is the State, more freedom and morality are suppressed; this ultimately leaves the individual psychically underdeveloped and with extreme feelings of marginality.
Influence
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Jung has been criticized for his alleged adherence to neo-Lamarckism. He has often been credited with the notion that archetypes have been acquired characters, which could then be inherited, along the lines of theses such as those of Michurin and Lysenko. However, Jung himself emphasized that such interpretations of his postulates were incorrect.
Perhaps the most recognized concepts of Jungian psychology are those of introversion and extraversion, derived from his theory of Psychological Types. It was widely accepted, laying the foundations for the further development of psychometric tests, through which it is sought to assess, in quantitative terms, the psychological characteristics of individuals. The most important are the MBTI (English acronym for Myers-Briggs Type Indicator —"Myers-Briggs Typological Inventory") and socionics; in addition to David Keirsey's battery of tests.
As for mandalas (as well as other symbolizations that can be found in alchemy, gnosticism, yoga, esotericism, and mythology), Jung considered them to be representations of unconscious origin for an individuation process, that is, so that each human being fulfills his self (in German: Selbst). In this field, his works stand out in coordination with other renowned figures, such as those carried out with the sinologist Richard Wilhelm in the Chinese book of Taoist (or ðaoist) yoga The secret of the flower of gold; or with the classical philologist and mythographer Károly Kerényi, in Introduction to the essence of mythology; and even the exchange of ideas in his correspondence with the Japanese Zen Buddhist philosopher Daisetsu T. Suzuki.
Jung's influence extended to important references in various fields of culture, from the painter Wifredo Lam to the philosopher Gaston Bachelard, including the writers Hermann Hesse (it is evident, for example, in the work Demian of the latter), H. G. Wells (whom he called his "friend" and whom his biographer Vincent Brome directly describes as "Jungian", visible in his works Christina Alberta's Father and The World of William Clissold) and J. B. Priestley, the philologist Ernst Robert Curtius, the behavioral psychologist Hans Eysenck, the historian of religions Mircea Eliade and the mythographer and essayist Joseph Campbell, these two last recognized debtors of the Jungian conception.
The many crossovers and parallels with the American philosopher and psychologist William James are noteworthy. On the other hand, according to Chester P. Michael, Jung would have declared that Father Henri Huvelin would be the person who came closest in all history to his methods of spiritual direction. Likewise, he was an inspiration and participant in the colloquiums of the Eranos Circle.
Jung tried to give a scientific basis to several of his postulates, although in many cases he did not find the means to achieve it. This is what he was trying to do when he proposed the principle of synchronicity (a principle by which some claim to explain the supposed efficacy of mancias). Contrary to what many suppose, in the same work in which he presented that hypothesis (Synchronicity as a principle of Acausal Connections, published together with a monograph by Wolfgang Pauli, "The Influence of Archetypal Ideas on Kepler's Scientific Theories," in Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche), Jung it flatly ruled out the methodological solvency of disciplines such as astrology. A large part of the movements that are currently called "Jungians" (particularly those that have assimilated the beliefs of the so-called new age) defend arguments that would be in open contradiction with the author's original ideas.
Alcoholics Anonymous
Jung came to recommend spirituality as a cure for alcoholism and is considered to have played an indirect role in the establishment of Alcoholics Anonymous. Some like Bill Willson, founder of said community, have attributed a key role in its foundation.
Jung once had an American patient named Rowland Hazard III, who suffered from chronic alcoholism. After trying to work with the patient for a while, Jung realized that he had not made any significant progress and told the man that his condition was hopeless, except for the possibility of having a spiritual experience. Jung had considered that occasionally such experiences had served successfully to reform alcoholics in situations where all else had failed.
Hazard took Jung's advice to heart and set out to have a spiritual experience. Upon returning to his native country, he became part of a group of evangelical Christians known as the Oxford Group. He in turn communicated to other alcoholics what Jung had told him. One of them was Ebby Thacher, an old hard-drinking friend of Bill Wilson, who would later be known as the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous. Thacher told Wilson about the Oxford Group and through Wilson himself learned of Hazard's experience with Jung. In this way, the influence of the Swiss was indirectly present in the formation of the group, although the twelve-step program and the movement itself is not Jungian.
Culture
Literature
- Laurens van der Post, author afrikáner who claimed to have had a sixteen-year friendship with Jung and from which a series of books and a film about his own life would emerge.
- Hermann Hesse, author of works like Siddharta and The wolfIt was treated by Dr. Joseph Lang, a student from Jung. This would begin in Hesse a long interest in psychoanalysis, through which he would come to know Jung personally.
- James Joyce wonders in his work Finnegans Wake "Is it the co-education of the animus and the totally desirable soul?" His answer may be contained in his verse "anama anamabapa". The book also ridicules Jung's analytical psychology and Freud's psychoanalysis by referring to the term "psoakoonaloose". Jung had been incapable of helping Joyce's daughter, Lucia, whom Joyce claimed to be a "yung and easily freudened" girl ("young and easily frightened", "yoven and easily impressionable"). Lucia was diagnosed with schizophrenia and was finally permanently institutionalized. The Portrait of the teenage artist by Joyce can be read as an ironic parody of Jung's "four stages of eroticism."
- Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges acknowledged: "I have always been a great reader of Jung... I read it as a kind of mythology, or as a kind of museum or encyclopedia of curious knowledge." Borges contributed significantly to magical realism, a genre of Latin American fiction in which fantastic elements blend into a realistic atmosphere.
- Miguel Serrano had correspondence and interviews with Jung, which he remembers in The Hermetic Circle.
- Philip K. Dick argued that many of his ideas and works were strongly influenced by Jung's writings. During his adolescence, he was treated with a Jewish analyst. In the 1950s, Jung's complete works, published by Bollingen, were acquired with devotion. He was especially impressed by his Seven sermons to the deadGnostic inspiration. The Jewish models and constructions that most affected Dick seem to be the archetypes of the collective unconscious, the projections and collective hallucinations, the experiences of synchronicity and his personality theory. Many of the protagonists of Dick's works analyze reality and their own perceptions in Jewish terms. Other times, the theme refers to Jung so clearly that the connection is obvious. His work Exégesis It also contains many notes about Jung regarding theology and mysticism. Another writer of science fiction with Jewish reminiscences is Ursula K. Le Guin.
- In Spain, Jung influenced, among others, the writer Fernando Sánchez Dragó and the editor Jacobo Siruela.
Art
- The visionary Swiss painter Peter Birkhäuser was treated by a student from Jung, Marie-Louise von Franz, and had correspondence with Jung regarding the translation of the symbolism of dreams into the works of art.
- The American abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock experienced Jewish psychotherapy in 1939 with Joseph L. Henderson. His therapist made the decision to involve him through his art and made Pollock make drawings, which led to the emergence of many Jewish concepts in his paintings.
- Surrealist painters Remedios Varo and Leonora Carrington explored and entered Jung's work.
- Contrary to some sources, Jung did not visit Liverpool, but recorded a dream about the city, asking in his analysis that "Liverpool is the pond of life, makes life." As a result, a statue of Jung was erected on Mathew Street in 1987, but, being made of plaster, it was destroyed and replaced by a more durable version in 1993.
Music
- Jung appears on the cover of the Beatles album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in the upper row, the seventh beginning on the left, between W. C. Fields and Edgar Allan Poe.
- On the cover of the last album of The Police, Synchronicity, so called in reference to Jung's theory, you see Sting reading a book entitled Synchronization. Sting himself states that he has studied Jewish psychology and analyzed it.
- The musician David Bowie described himself as a Julian in his relationship with dreams and the unconscious. Bowie sang about Jung in his album. Aladdin Sane (a word game on the sanity) and attended the exhibition Red Book In New York with the artist Tony Oursler, who described Bowie as "... reading and talking about the psychoanalyst with passion." The 1967 Bowie song "Shadow Man" poetically summarizes a key Jewish concept, while in 1987 Bowie described in a revealing way the crystal spiders Never Let Me Down as Jewish maternal figures around which he not only anchored a world tour, but also created an enormous effigy on stage.
- The Song of Peter Gabriel «Rhythm of the Heat» (Security1982) deals with Jung's visit to Africa during which he joined a group of percussionists and tribal dancers, being overwhelmed by the fear of losing control of himself. At that time Jung was exploring the concept of collective unconsciousness and was afraid that he would become under the control of music. Gabriel learned about Jung's journey to Africa from rehearsal Symbols and the Interpretation of Dreams (ISBN 0-691-09968-5). In the song, Gabriel tries to capture the powerful feelings of African tribal music evoked in Jung through intense use of tribal drums. The title of the original song was "Jung in Africa".
- Argentine musician Luis Alberto Spinetta was influenced by Carl Jung's texts in the development of his conceptual album of 1975 Durazno bleeding, specifically in the songs "Encadenado al ánima" and "On a distant beach of the animus", which deal with the Jewish concepts of anima and animus, respectively.
- The American progressive metal band Tool was influenced by Jewish concepts in the creation of his album Ænima, title of a work on the soul-animus sizigia. In the song "Forty Six" of this album, the singer seeks to become a more evolved being exploring and overcoming his shadow.
- The album of the South Korean band BTS Map of the Soul: Persona is based on the work on Jung Map of the Soul (Map of the soul), of the Jewish analyst Murray Stein, who provides the basic principles of Jung's analytical psychology. The album includes an introductory song entitled Person, raped by the leader of the RM group, who asks the question 'who am I?', facing several versions of himself with terms such as "person", "sombra" and "me", referring to Jung's theories. On February 21, 2020, the band launched Map of the Soul: 7which focuses specifically on "sombra" and "me".
Cinema and television
- The Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini, one of the most renowned filmmakers in art, brought to the screen an exuberant imagery forged thanks to his encounter with Jung's ideas, especially his interpretation of dreams. Fellini preferred Jung instead of Freud because analytical psychology defined the dream not as a symptom of a disease that requires a cure, but rather as a link to archetypal images common to all humanity. Mandatory reference 81⁄2 (1963), where he narrates in autobiographical tone the vicissitudes of a film director blocked behind the camera through a thin line narrative between the real, the fantasy, the dream and the desire.
- Another performer directly influenced by analytical psychology is Ingmar Bergman, which is evident in films such as Manniskoätarna (1966) or Fanny and Alexander (1982).
- Luis Buñuel had a thorough knowledge of Freud and Jung. Law The interpretation of dreams during their student stage, being familiar with many other key texts, including those about paranoia and femininity, as shown by films He, Trial of a crime and Beautiful day.
- Different television programs have been dedicated to Jung; for example, in 1959 John Freeman interviews Jung for the BBC at his home in Zurich, and in 1984, an edition of the BBC documentary Sea of Faith was dedicated to his figure.
- The movie Full Metal Jacket (1987), by Stanley Kubrick, presents an underlying theme on man's duality throughout the action and dialogue of the footage. A scene develops in this way: a colonel asks a soldier: "You write 'born to kill' in your helmet and use a badge of peace in your garment. What's that supposed to be, some kind of sick joke?" To what the soldier responds: "I think he was trying to suggest something about man's duality, sir... the Jewish, sir."
- In 1991, Carlo Lizzani, one of the first representatives of neo-realism, takes for the first time to the screen a case narrated by Jung in his autobiography, from a script by Francesca Archibugi. That movie, Cattiva, describes the story of Emilia Schmidt (Giuliana De Sio), a rich and attractive Swiss lady affected by an alleged schizophrenia, who enters the psychiatric hospital of Burghölzli, where a young doctor Jung (Julian Sands), still under Freud's protection, releases her from a lacerante and unjustified guilt complex born after the death of her daughter.
- In 2002, Roberto Faenza directed the film Prendimi l'anima, in which he reconstructs the history of the relationship between Jung (Iain Glen) and Sabina Spielrein (Emilia Fox), 19-year-old Russian Jew entering the Psychiatric Clinic of Burghölzli in 1904 with a complex neurosis (he will write Jung to Freud in March 1909), and will successfully treat in a few months with novel therapeutic procedures (associative method).
- In 2011, film director David Cronenberg premiered A dangerous method, adaptation to the cinema of a 2002 Christopher Hampton play. Its argument revolves around the professional and affective relationships between Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley), Carl Gustav Jung (Michael Fassbender) and Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen).
- The television series The man in the castle, based on Philip K. Dick's homonymous novel, includes both direct allusions to Jung (quoted for example by "man in the castle", Stephen Root, or referred to by Jeffrey Nordling's interpretation as Dr. Daniel Ryan, a Jewish analyst, who in turn treats Helen Smith, referring to the patient of Théodore Flournoy Hélène Smith, who influenced in Jung) as indirect, through conceptions that permeate the whole work: animus, transfer, synchronicity, I Ching, visions, or the relationship between psyche and matter in some interdimensional travelers: Nobusuke Tagomi (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa) and Juliana Crain (Alexa Davalos).
- Soul, animated film by Pixar of 2020, includes short appearances of Jung as an ethereal cartoon character, "Soul Carl Jung".
- There are multiple cinematic references (Star Wars, The hobbit, The lord of the rings, Matrix, Dune) that allude indirectly to the work of Jung, as well as various interpretations from the perspective of analytical psychology.
Comic
- The comic of science fiction The Incal, made from 1980 to 1988 by the writer Alejandro Jodorowsky and the French historietist and illustrator Moebius, includes among his influences Jewish concepts.
Video game
- The video game series Person is largely based on Jung's theories, just like NiGHTS into Dreams.... Xenogears, original videogame of PlayStation, and its associated works, including its reimagination as trilogy Xenosaga and a graphic novel published by the creator of the game Perfect Works, they also focus on the concepts of Jung.
Works
A. Complete works
- 1. Psychiatric studies
- 2. Pilot research
- 3. Psychogenesis of mental illness
- 4. Freud and psychoanalysis
- 5. Symbols of transformation
- 6. Psychological types
- 7. Two writings on analytical psychology
- 8. The dynamics of the unconscious
- 9.1. Archaetypes and the collective unconscious
- 9.2. Aion
- 10. Civilization in transition
- 11. About the Psychology of Western Religion and Eastern Religion
- 12. Psychology and alchemy
- 13. Studies on alchemical representations
- 14. Mysterium coniunctionis
- 15. About the phenomenon of spirit in art and science
- 16. The practice of psychotherapy
- 17. On personality development
- 18.1. Symbolic life
- 18.2. Symbolic life
B. Seminars
- Conferences at the Club Zofingia
- Dream analysis
- Child dreams
- The Zaratustra of Nietzsche
- Introduction to analytical psychology
- The psychology of kundalini yoga
- Visions
C. Autobiography
- Memories, dreams, thoughts
D. Letters
- Letters
- Sigmund Freud & Carl Gustav Jung
E. Interviews
- Meetings with Jung
Awards
Among his main distinctions are the following honorary doctorates:
- Clark University, 1909.
- Fordham University, 1912.
- Harvard University, 1936.
- University of Allahabad, 1937.
- University of Benarés, 1937.
- Calcutta University, 1938.
- University of Oxford, 1938.
- University of Geneva, 1945.
- Federal Polytechnic School of Zurich, 1955, on its 80th birthday.
In addition:
- He received a literary award from the city of Zurich, 1932.
- He was appointed Professor of the Federal Polytechnic School of Zurich, 1935.
- Honorary Member of the Royal Society of Medicine, 1939.
- He was granted a Festschrift in Eras, 1945.
- Named President of the Society of Analytical Psychology, London, 1946.
- He twisted a Festschrift by students and friends, 1955.
- Named honorary citizen of Küsnacht, 1960, on his 85th birthday.