by Ruth Snowden
One of the techniques that Jung developed for exploring the psyche was what he called ‘active imagination’. This was a process that he used both with his own inner exploration and with his patients’. It is a process a bit like a waking dream, where the patient is encouraged to enter a day-dream state and see where their fantasies lead. Jung then encouraged people to work further with their fantasies, for example by painting or drawing. He was the first analyst to extend verbal interaction with patients in this way – nowadays a whole host of therapies exist that are based on this method, such as art therapy and writing therapy.
It is now widely recognized that the unconscious mind affects the way people think and behave, as well as their general health and well-being. Throughout his work, Jung stressed the importance of the unconscious, as Freud had done. In Jung’s day this idea was still relatively new – Freud was a pioneer in putting it forward as a scientific theory. But where Freud had seen the unconscious as a shadowy dumping ground for all that is primitive, childish and animal (such as repressed sexual urges), Jung saw it in a far more positive and expansive way. For him, it was a fascinating area to study and a rich source of creativity. Sadly, even today it is still common to dismiss ideas that spring from intuition and imagination. Jung saw this attitude as extremely limiting, calling it a ‘nothing-but’ attitude, because people tend to say that something is ‘nothing but imagination’, or ‘just a coincidence’. Jung was fascinated by coincidences, dreams and intuitions – he paid close attention to them and learned from them all his life. For him, the inner world of the psyche with its dreams and visions was just as important as the outer world. Many people found his ideas hard to understand and saw him as a highly eccentric, even dangerous thinker.
Jung tended to use the word ‘psyche’, meaning the mind, soul or spirit – a term that covered both conscious and unconscious processes. ‘Mind’, on the other hand, was often used to imply concern only with conscious processes. When I was a psychology student we were discouraged from using the word ‘mind’, because ‘mind’ and ‘psyche’ are abstract concepts and therefore, the argument went, they could not be studied scientifically. Jung, on the other hand, insists that the psyche is real – no less so than the physical world. He points out that everything that we are aware of is perceived and interpreted by the brain, so that in this sense all that we experience is actually ‘psychic’ in nature, and we can never actually know for certain the truth about the outside world. We can only make assumptions about the world based on our sensory impressions, and this means that each of us has our own unique way of looking at the world. We are so swamped all the time with the constant flow of sensory impressions that we cannot possibly have much idea of the true essence of things that exist outside ourselves. In effect, the psyche is actually the only reality. This is one of the main reasons that Jung emphasized the importance of inner exploration.
Towards the end of his life, Jung finally agreed to make an attempt to put some of his main ideas together in a way that was more understandable to ordinary people. The result was a book called Man and his Symbols, which makes a good starting point for studying Jung’s ideas. The book emphasizes Jung’s lifelong conviction that the inner world of the human psyche is of paramount importance and needs to be studied seriously.
Jung pointed out that analytical psychology can never be totally objective since the individual psyche always affects that which it is observing. Many people have criticized Jung for taking this stance, but perhaps he was just too far ahead of his time: advances in quantum physics have led scientists towards a startlingly similar conclusion (see Chapter 8). Recently there has been a big upsurge of interest in Jung’s ideas, as people are becoming more willing to accept the idea that there is no clear division between the inner world of the psyche and the outer world of ‘reality’.
Since Jung’s death in 1961, his analysis of the human psyche has been widely recognized as an important framework for studying psychological problems. But he himself remarked that he could not claim to have reached any definite theory and that his work consisted of a series of different approaches. However, he did not apologize for this – he said that it was not possible to make up a simple formula to describe human nature because the psyche is so complex. By his own admission, his ideas are not always easy to follow and so wading through the 20-volume collection of his work is not an easy task. This book provides a general introduction to both Jung and his work, and the section at the end, Taking it further, suggests ways in which you can continue your study of this fascinating and great thinker. I hope that you will be inspired by this introduction to his ideas, and that maybe you will embark on some inner exploration of your own. I have kept a dream diary and journal myself for many years and find that the inner world is an endless source of interest, creativity and insight.
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Key facts
Carl Jung (1875–1961) was a Swiss psychologist and psychiatrist.
Jung is famous because he founded a new system of psychology that he called analytical psychology.
He regarded the spiritual and the numinous to be the most important aspects of his work and maintained that the psyche was as real as the external world.
He used dreams and ‘active imagination’ to explore the world of the psyche.
Jung always encouraged people to think for themselves and develop their own insights.
For Jung there was no clear division between the inner world of the psyche and the outer world of ‘reality’.
Jung coined the phrase ‘analytical psychology’ around 1913 in order to describe his work and to distinguish it from the system of psychoanalysis, developed by Freud.
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1
Jung’s life and career
In this chapter you will learn:
about Jung’s family and social background
key facts about his career
details about his personal life and character.
Jung’s family background
NATURE
Jung was born on 26 July 1875 in Kesswil, a small village in Switzerland on the shores of Lake Constance. He was the second child born to his parents, but their first born had died soon after birth. When he was six months old, Jung’s family moved to another village called Laufen, close to the border with Germany and France and near the great Falls of the Rhine. Then they moved again, this time to Klein-Hüningen, which was at that time just a village, near Basel, also located on the Rhine.
The little villages in which Jung was born and raised had a huge influence on him that was to last throughout his life. It was a peaceful, rural world of mountains and lakes, rocks, rivers and abundant wildlife. His earliest memory is one of lying in a pram, under the shadow of a tree on a warm summer’s day, and feeling a great sense of glorious beauty and indescribable well-being on seeing the sunlight glittering through the leaves and blossoms. Jung developed an intense love of the natural world and a deep spiritual relationship with all living things. He loved the peace and solitude that living in nature can bring, and spent a lot of time alone thinking, writing, contemplating, and finding his own inner peace. His deep connection with the earth element was also expressed in painting pictures and working with wood and stone. Animals were very important to him – he always liked to have dogs as companions, and he frequently wrote of synchronous messages that came to him from the natural world.
When Jung was nine, his sister Gertrude was born, but she played little part in his childhood. The age gap between them was too great and their temperaments were very different. Young Carl was already a solitary child and liked to play alone, lost in his own inner world. Gertrude was delicate and died quite young. Jung said that she was always a stranger to him, and that while he was emotional she was always very composed, although she was very sensitive deep down.
RELIGION
Jung had many relations in the Church – in fact, his father and eight of his uncles were pastors, so religion must have had a huge influence
on his childhood. His paternal grandfather – after whom he was named, Carl Gustav Jung (1794–1864) – was a respected physician and became Rector of Basel University and Grand Master of the Lodge of Freemasons. He was rumoured to have been an illegitimate son of the great writer Goethe. On the other side of the family, Jung’s maternal grandfather, Samuel Preiswerk (1799–1871), was a theologian who had a great interest in the occult. He held conversations with the dead and was given to visions; in her youth, Jung’s mother had often had to sit behind him when he was writing a sermon in order to prevent the devil from peering over his shoulder!
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Insight
Occult knowledge is secret knowledge concerning the mysterious, paranormal or magical. As pointed out earlier, one generation’s occult knowledge is often another generation’s common knowledge. For example, a couple of thousand years ago the ability to read was so unusual that it gave a person occult power and charisma.
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Jung’s father was a pastor in the Swiss Reformed Church, whose teachings were strongly influenced by the sixteenth-century Reformation teachings of leaders such as Calvin and Luther. The Reformed Church taught people to believe in the literal truth of the Bible, or else risk damnation. Its teachings were strongly male dominated and puritanical – sex was regarded as a necessary evil at best, and women were generally despised and treated with suspicion.
These attitudes were strong and entrenched in society. When he was six, young Carl was taken to a museum in Basel and was so fascinated by the stuffed animals he saw, that the museum was being locked up before his aunt could tear him away. They had to go out by a different route from the one they had entered by, through the gallery of antiquities. Here he was mesmerized by beautiful figures, the like of which he had never seen before. His aunt was shocked to the core however, and dragged him away, telling him to close his eyes and not to be so disgusting – it was only then that it dawned on him that the figures were naked apart from fig leaves!
Parsons were very poorly paid at this time, and Jung’s family lived the life of frugal poverty that was expected of loyal servants of God. The house he lived in as a small boy was a sombre eighteenth-century parsonage. The only man-made things of beauty he remembered from these early years were two paintings that hung in a dark room, set apart from everyday life. One was David and Goliath, the other a landscape of Basel dating from the early nineteenth century. Often he would creep into the room and sit for hours gazing at them. One cannot imagine a modern child, living in our busy world of constant over-stimulation, giving them more than a cursory glance, but for the young Carl they were a catalyst for a lifelong appreciation of art.
Jung’s father had strong scholarly interests in Classical and Oriental studies, which probably also influenced Jung as he grew up, because he too studied the teachings of the East with great interest. Despite these interests, however, and despite the fact that he lost his faith in God at an early stage, Jung’s father accepted the teachings of his church and clung to them to the letter without question. Jung said later in life that in childhood he associated the word ‘father’ with reliability, but also with weakness. Perhaps he was already intuitively beginning to understand that such a dogmatic view of life is often used to cover up feelings of inadequacy and self-doubt. He came to see the male-dominated religion of his father as unbalanced, because it lacked the important feminine element, which he later discovered in the teachings of Eastern religions. Jung’s recognition of the danger of this kind of unbalanced view is enormously important and still has a clear message for the modern world.
Jung’s mother was also rooted in the faith of the Reformed Church. However, her beliefs were more complex because her own family firmly believed in contact with the spirit world. Old pagan beliefs still held strong in the minds of people in rural Switzerland. Jung saw his mother as a dynamic and powerful person, but also rather unpredictable and mysterious. His parents’ marriage was not an easy one, probably because their characters and beliefs were so very different. His mother was earthy, extrovert and chatty, whereas his father was a scholarly introvert. When Jung was three, his mother was hospitalized for several months with a nervous illness, which he later said was no doubt caused partly by marital problems. During this time, he was taken care of by a spinster aunt who was some 20 years older than his mother. He was deeply disturbed by his mother’s absence and, as a result, for a long time associated the word ‘love’ with feelings of mistrust and the word ‘woman’ with unreliability.
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Insight
The very different influences from Jung’s parents probably played a part in creating a dualism in his personality that he recognized in later life. Character ‘Number 1’ was ambitious and analytical, looking at the world from a scientific point of view. Character ‘Number 2’ was secretive and mysterious, tending to look at things in an intuitive way.
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Jung later revised his early childhood impressions of men and women, finding that he sometimes trusted men who turned out to be unreliable, and conversely found some women to be reliable despite his initial feelings of mistrust. Recognizing and overcoming unhelpful world views formed in early childhood is a part of the life work of the human psyche that is such an important part of Jung’s teaching. (For more about the journey of the psyche, see Chapter 5.)
A brief outline of Jung’s career
SCHOOL
Jung attended a country school where he was intellectually well ahead of his classmates. He welcomed the company of other children, but close friendships were not easy for him because he was so used to playing alone. From the age of 11 he attended a school in Basel, but he was never happy there. The other boys thought him peculiar and tended to make fun of him. Not only that, but he found the lessons boring and felt that they were a waste of his time.
UNIVERSITY
Family poverty meant that Jung could not expect to study at a more distant university, so he was admitted to Basel. He had originally wanted to study archaeology, but it was not taught at Basel, so he did medicine instead. This was in the family already as his paternal grandfather had been Professor of Surgery at the university. After obtaining his degree in medicine with a distinction in 1900, he almost decided to specialize in surgery, but he had developed a strong interest in psychiatry and eventually decided to move in this direction. This was a controversial direction to take, because psychiatry was the least-respected speciality in medicine at the time, but for Jung it was the perfect choice because it enabled him to study both the scientific and spiritual aspects of life.
FIRST APPOINTMENTS
In 1900 Jung became an assistant at the Burghölzli mental hospital, a clinic attached to the University of Zürich. Jung worked under Eugen Bleuler (1857–1939), who was one of the most eminent psychiatrists of the day. In 1902 he was awarded his Ph.D. from the University of Zürich, and by 1905 he had been appointed lecturer in psychiatry and made Senior Staff Physician at Burghölzli.
Jung was especially interested in the disorder then called dementia praecox but later referred to as schizophrenia. He was fascinated by trying to find out what actually goes on in the minds of the mentally ill – for him their associations, dreams, hallucinations and gestures were not just ‘mad’, but full of important symbolic meaning. During this period he did a lot of research into word association. Most of his colleagues disagreed and took the firm reductionist stance that was popular at the time, tending to break everything down, including highly complex ideas, into simple component parts, so that everything was seen as working rather like a machine. This was held to be the scientific way of looking at things, but for Jung this was not a satisfactory method for exploring the human mind – it was too simplistic and did not allow for individuality.
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Insight
Jung was able to accept that there are two very different, but equally valid, ways of looking at the world. The analytical way studies the world by breaking things down into their sepa
rate elements. The intuitive way on the other hand, simply ‘knows’ things, without having to reason them out. Jung clearly thought in both of these two ways – this is true of many very great thinkers.
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In 1907, Jung published some of his observations in The Psychology of Dementia Praecox, thus enhancing his growing reputation as a research psychiatrist. He left the hospital in 1909 to concentrate on his work with private patients, and to give more time to his research into the psychological aspects of behaviour and the inner world of the unconscious.
RECOGNITION OF HIS IMPORTANCE
In 1907, Jung met Sigmund Freud in Vienna. Jung had become interested in Freud’s concept of repression – a process of banishing unpleasant or undesirable feelings into the unconscious – an idea that seemed to corroborate some of Jung’s own findings from his experiments in word association. In particular, Jung was interested in Freud’s work with dreams in relation to the repression process.
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Insight
Repression is the process of banishing unpleasant or undesirable feelings and experiences to the unconscious mind. Resistance is the process that then prevents them from being released.
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Freud’s ideas were unpopular at the time, but Jung risked his own reputation by backing Freud, and for a number of years there was a close friendship between them. Jung became the first president of Freud’s International Psychoanalytic Association and was the editor of its journal, which was the first of its kind. In 1909, Jung travelled with Freud to lecture at Clark University at Worcester, Massachusetts in the USA and received an honorary degree.