Churchill's Black Dog and Other Phenomena of the Human Mind

by Anthony Storr

  To begin with, it was the word knife that caused four disturbed reactions. The next disturbance was lance (or spear) and then to beat, then the word pointed and then bottle. That was in a short series of fifty stimulus words, which was enough for me to tell the man point-blank what the matter was. So I said: “I did not know you had such a disagreeable experience.” He stared at me and said: “I do not know what you are talking about.” I said: “You know you were drunk and had a disagreeable affair with sticking your knife into somebody.” He said: “How do you know?” Then he confessed the whole thing. He came of a respectable family, simple but quite nice people. He had been abroad and one day got into a drunken quarrel, drew a knife and stuck it into somebody and got a year in prison. That is a great secret which he does not mention because it would cast a shadow on his life.2

  The group of words connected with the incident constitutes a complex, which Jung defined as

  the image of a certain psychic situation which is strongly accentuated emotionally and is, moreover, incompatible with the habitual attitude of consciousness. This image has a powerful inner coherence, it has its own wholeness and, in addition, a relatively high degree of autonomy, so that it is subject to the control of the conscious mind to only a limited extent, and therefore behaves like an animated foreign body in the sphere of consciousness.3

  Jung referred to complexes as being fragmentary personalities. Often, they interfere with what the person consciously wants to do. They are responsible for those slips of the tongue which Freud described in his book The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Jung wrote:

  They slip just the wrong word into one’s mouth, they make one forget the name of the person one is about to introduce, they cause a tickle in the throat just when the softest passage is being played on the piano at a concert, they make the tiptoeing latecomer trip over a chair with a resounding crash.4

  Jung goes on to say that complexes appear in personified form in dreams, and also as hallucinatory “voices” in schizophrenia. The extremes of dissociation and splitting were found in the psychotic; but even normal people suffered from “complexes,” and in this way demonstrated some degree of dissociation within the psyche.

  Jung was deeply influenced by his clinical experience within the Burghölzli mental hospital. Although he gave up his hospital post in 1909, and from that time onward was chiefly concerned with the treatment of ambulant neurotics, he remained fascinated by schizophrenia. His last paper on the subject appeared in 1957, only four years before his death. Many of the disagreements which led to the rift between Jung and Freud can be traced to the difference in their clinical experience. Freud worked in a mental hospital for only three weeks, as a locum tenens. His experience with psychotic patients was minimal. Although he wrote a long study of Schreber, the judge with paranoia, this was based upon the patient’s own writings, not upon any actual encounter with him. Jung was the first psychiatrist to apply psychoanalytic ideas to the study of delusions and hallucinations, and to demonstrate that such phenomena, hitherto dismissed as incomprehensible, could be shown to have a psychological origin and meaning. He believed that many cases of obsessional neurosis and hysteria were really cases of latent schizophrenia, and warned against the danger of precipitating psychotic breakdown by unwise psychotherapeutic intervention. On the other hand, Jung considered that psychotherapy did have a limited part to play in the treatment of schizophrenia, and gives examples of cases which he treated with partial success.

  It was Jung’s experience with psychotic patients which led him to postulate a “collective” unconscious. He found that delusions and hallucinations could seldom be explained in terms of the patient’s personal history. Jung’s extensive knowledge of comparative religion and mythology led him to detect parallels with psychotic material which argued a common source: a myth-producing level of mind which was common to all men. Jung described the collective unconscious as consisting of mythological motifs or primordial images to which he gave the name “archetypes.” Archetypes are not inborn ideas, but “typical forms of behaviour which, once they become conscious, naturally present themselves as ideas and images, like everything else that becomes a content of consciousness.”5

  The kind of observation which led Jung to this conclusion is illustrated by the case of a man in his thirties who was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. Jung encountered him in the corridor of the hospital:

  One day I came across him there, blinking through the window up at the sun, and moving his head from side to side in a curious manner. He took me by the arm and said he wanted to show me something. He said I must look at the sun with my eyes half shut, and then I could see the sun’s phallus. If I moved my head from side to side the sun-phallus would move too, and that was the origin of the wind.

  Four years later, Jung came across a Greek text, thought to be a liturgy of the Mithraic cult, in which a vision is described.

  “And likewise the so-called tube the origin of the ministering wind. For you will see hanging down from the disc of the sun something that looks like a tube. And towards the regions westward it is as though there were an infinite east wind. But if the other wind should prevail towards the regions of the east, you will in like manner see the vision veering in that direction.”6

  Jung goes on to point out that certain medieval paintings depict the Virgin as being impregnated from Heaven by means of a tube down which the Holy Ghost descends. The Holy Ghost was originally thought of as a rushing, mighty wind: the pneuma.

  Freud thought of the unconscious as chiefly derived from repression; a kind of dungheap of the personally unacceptable. Jung thought that, while the unconscious certainly contained elements of personality which the individual might repudiate, it also contained the germs of new possibilities, the seeds of future, and possibly better, adaptation. Freud believed that neurosis originated in early childhood; that it derived from the patient having become fixated at certain stages of childhood emotional development. Jung agreed that material from childhood was often evident in neurosis, but considered that the appearance of such material was secondary to a failure of adaptation in the present. Jung wrote:

  The psychological determination of a neurosis is only partly due to an early infantile predisposition; it must be due to some cause in the present as well.…

  The moment of the outbreak of neurosis is not just a matter of chance; as a rule it is most critical. It is usually the moment when a new psychological adjustment, that is, a new adaptation, is demanded.…

  I no longer seek the cause of neurosis in the past, but in the present. I ask, what is the necessary task which the patient will not accomplish?7

  In Jung’s view, therefore, the development of neurotic symptoms was not to be regarded as merely the onset of illness, but was also to be taken as a signal for the person to reexamine himself and his values in order to attain a new and better adaptation. This was particularly true of certain transitional periods of life, as, for example, the passage from adolescence to adulthood. Jung was fond of saying, “Thank God he became neurotic!,” meaning by this that depression or whatever symptom the person had developed had had the positive function of compelling him to look inward.

  Freud and his followers were primarily concerned with the childhood determinants of neurosis. The task of psychoanalysis was to facilitate the recall of the patient’s earliest memories. The older the patient, the harder this task became. Therefore, in the early days of psychoanalysis, analysts were reluctant to take on middle-aged patients. Jung, on the other hand, came to specialize in the treatment of the middle-aged. Jung’s major contribution to psychology is in the field of adult development. His interest in this period of life undoubtedly originated from the years of psychological stress which he experienced after his break with Freud. This upheaval was so intense that Jung feared for his own sanity. In 1912, Jung published the first edition of what became known, in English, as The Psychology of the Unconscious. In his autobiography, he describes how he was unable to wr
ite the end of this book for two months because he knew that it would cost him his friendship with Freud. He was right. The sad story of the estrangement between the two men can be traced in The Freud/Jung Letters.8

  In July 1913, Jung reached the age of thirty-eight; a time of life in which so-called mid-life crises often occur. Jung was the first psychiatrist to draw attention to this phenomenon, which sprang directly from his own experience. By this time, Jung had married, fathered a family, and had achieved professional recognition and a position in the world. His conscious aspiration had been that, together with Freud, he could develop a new science of the mind. But something within him forced him, against his conscious inclination, to assert his own individual point of view, even though he knew that this would be treated by Freud as a betrayal. During the years of the First World War, Jung went through a personal crisis which was extremely disturbing but which, in the end, proved to be highly rewarding. He conducted a self-analysis in which he recorded his own visions and dreams, many of which were alarming. For example, he thrice dreamt that “in the middle of summer an Arctic cold wave descended and froze the land to ice. I saw, for example, the whole of Lorraine and its canals frozen and the entire region totally deserted by human beings. All living green things were killed by frost.” In a later dream this scene of desolation was relieved by the appearance of “a leaf-bearing tree, but without fruit (my tree of life, I thought), whose leaves had been transformed by the effects of the frost into sweet grapes full of healing juices.9

  Jung wrote, “The years when I was pursuing my inner images were the most important in my life—in them everything essential was decided.”10 It was certainly out of the experience of those years that Jung’s view of the development of personality originated. His self-analysis convinced him that the most important thing in life was to discern and make manifest one’s own, individual point of view. Men became neurotic when they were in some sense false to themselves; when they strayed from the path which Nature (or God) intended them to follow. By listening to the inner voice, which manifested itself in dreams, fantasies, and other spontaneous derivatives of the unconscious, the lost soul could rediscover its proper path. This is, of course, a “religious” point of view, but one which does not necessarily postulate a God “out there.”

  The end of Jung’s mid-life crisis was signaled by his writing one of the books by which he is best known to the general public, Psychological Types. Jung’s concepts of “extravert” and “introvert,” terms which he introduced, took origin from his observation that Freud and Adler could each confront the same psychopathological material and make quite different interpretations of it. Jung wrote:

  Since both theories are in a large measure correct—that is to say, since they both appear to explain their material—it follows that a neurosis must have two opposite aspects, one of which is grasped by the Freudian, the other by the Adlerian theory. But how comes it that each investigator sees only one side, and why does each maintain that he has the only valid view?11

  Jung points out that Adler’s psychology emphasizes the importance of the subject at the expense of the object; whereas Freud’s psychology sees the subject in perpetual dependence upon significant objects.

  Introversion and extraversion have become familiar ideas to most people, and have been taken over by experimental psychologists like Eysenck. The importance of the dichotomy in Jung’s view of personality takes us back to his days as a medical student. Since the time of the physiologist Claude Bernard, scientists have accepted the idea that the body is a self-regulating entity. Human physiology is a system of checks and balances which ensure that any tendency to go too far in one direction is compensated by an opposing swing in the other. These so-called “homeostatic mechanisms” are dependent upon negative feedback; that is, upon fluctuations in some property like blood sugar being reported to a central control, whence compensatory changes are set in motion to restore the normal balance.

  Jung’s delineation of extraversion and introversion made it possible for him to advance the notion of personality being distorted by what he called “one-sided development.” A man could be so extraverted, so totally involved in the external world, that he lost touch with the inner world of his own psyche. On the other hand, an introverted eccentric could be so preoccupied with the workings of his own mind that he failed to adapt himself to reality. Jung postulated that the mind was self-regulating in the same way as the body. The outbreak of neurotic symptoms should be taken as a signal indicating that a compensatory process was beginning in the unconscious. When a new patient turned to Jung asking what he should do, Jung would reply: “I have no idea; but let us see what the unconscious has to say. Let us examine your dreams and fantasies.”

  An illustration of this procedure is given by Jung in his paper, The Practical Use of Dream-Analysis. He was consulted by a man in a prominent position who complained of anxiety, insecurity, and dizziness which sometimes caused nausea, heaviness in the head, and constriction of breath: symptoms which, as Jung points out, are not unlike those of mountain sickness. The patient had risen from humble origins to a leading position. His first dream was: “I am back again in the small village where I was born. Some peasant lads who went to school with me are standing together in the street. I walk past, pretending not to know them. Then I hear one of them say, pointing at me: ‘He doesn’t often come back to our village.’” The patient’s second dream was concerned with his being in a frantic hurry to go on a journey; with his just missing a train; and with his realization that the engine driver is going too fast, with the result that the rear coaches of the train are thrown off the rails.l2

  Jung interpreted these dreams as indicating that, for the time being, the patient had reached the pinnacle of his career: that he had strayed too far from his humble origins, and that he should rest upon his laurels rather than strive after the further achievements which he was set upon pursuing. This interpretation did not convince the patient; Jung was unable to continue his treatment; and, within a short time, the patient did indeed “run off the rails” into disaster.

  These dreams are simple illustrations of what Jung meant by compensation and self-regulation. If the patient had only had the sense and insight to take seriously what his unconscious was indicating, he might have been spared the disaster which finally overtook him.

  The analysis of dreams became one of the most important techniques of treatment used by Jung and his pupils. The interpretation of dreams was one of the main areas in which Jung diverged from Freud. Freud, it will be recalled, treated virtually all dreams as disguised wish fulfillments. He considered that dreams represented indirect ways of expressing repressed, infantile desires which were incompatible with, or distasteful to, the dreamer’s ego. Jung believed that this was far too narrow a conception of dreams. Dreams might be expressed in a symbolic language which was hard to understand; but there was no reason to suppose that dreams were invariably concealing the unacceptable. Jung wrote:

  The fundamental mistake regarding the nature of the unconscious is probably this: it is commonly supposed that its contents have only one meaning and are marked with an unalterable plus or minus sign. In my humble opinion, this view is too naive. The psyche is a self-regulating system that maintains its equilibrium just as the body does. Every process that goes too far immediately and inevitably calls forth compensations, and without these there would be neither a normal metabolism nor a normal psyche. In this sense we can take the theory of compensation as a basic law of psychic behaviour. Too little on one side results in too much on the other. Similarly, the relation between conscious and unconscious is compensatory. This is one of the best-proven rules of dream-interpretation. When we set out to interpret a dream, it is always helpful to ask: What conscious attitude does it compensate?13

  Jung’s view of personality was, in the first place, largely derived from his experience with psychotic and neurotic patients. However, as his reputation grew, he came to be consulted by a variety of peopl
e who did not necessarily present obvious neurotic symptoms, but who were dissatisfied and unhappy because they could no longer find meaning and purpose in their lives. Many of these patients were conventionally successful, highly intelligent, and well adapted socially. The majority were middle-aged, perhaps passing through the kind of mid-life crisis which Jung himself had experienced.

  These were the people who most interested Jung; exceptional individuals whose natures compelled them to reject convention and discover their own path. Jung said that, as an investigator rather than as a therapist, he was concerned with quality rather than with quantity: “Nature is aristocratic, and one person of value outweighs ten lesser ones.”14 Since Jung considered that such individuals were the carriers of culture, aiding them to fulfill themselves became a task of vital importance.

  Jung defined personality as an achievement rather than as a datum of genetics. He called it “the supreme realization of the innate idiosyncrasy of a living being.”15 It is essentially an adult ideal, which is why I earlier made the point that Jung’s main contribution was in the field of adult development: “It is not the child, but only the adult, who can achieve personality as the fruit of a full life directed to this end. The achievement of personality means nothing less than the optimum development of the whole individual human being.”16