by Ruth Snowden
* * *
Insight
Subjective means to do with, or coming from, the self. Objective means to do with, or coming from, the external world.
* * *
Jung realized with a flash of insight that here, at last, was a way in which he could integrate the two currents of his internal world. This was where science and the spiritual met. His decision to study psychiatry was met with disbelief and dismay by fellow students and tutors alike. Once again the age-old feeling of being an outsider returned, but this time he had more confidence and he knew that his chosen path was the right one for him.
Burghölzli
In 1900, Jung was appointed as an assistant at Burghölzli, a psychiatric clinic at the University of Zurich, run by Eugen Bleuler, who was one of the most eminent psychiatrists of the day. Jung was rapidly promoted to deputy director and also took a post as lecturer in psychiatry and psychotherapy at Zürich University. The patients at Burghölzli were mainly psychotic – that is, they suffered from the more severe mental disorders. Jung worked here for nine years, studying the group of illnesses then known as dementia praecox, now called schizophrenia. The mechanistic outlook said that such illnesses were caused by neurological damage or organic disease. Jung was not satisfied by this attitude, however, because all it really enabled the doctor to do was make rather meaningless diagnoses, describe symptoms, or compile statistics.
The personality of the patient and his or her individuality did not seem to matter. But Jung was not interested in labelling people and he was quick to recognize that paranoid ideas and hallucinations actually contained hidden symbolic meaning, connected to the individual’s life story.
Jung was especially interested in experimental psychology and did extensive work using word-association tests. This kind of test was originally devised by Sir Francis Galton, (1822–1911) and further developed by Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920). Although it was considered somewhat old-fashioned, it was still being used, particularly with criminal cases. The idea was simple enough: the doctor gave the patient a list of a hundred or so words and the patient responded to each with whatever came first into his or her head. Response times were measured with a stop-watch and each response was noted down, then the whole list was repeated and the person had to give the same responses as the first time. Mistakes or noticeable delays suggested that unconscious emotions were probably at work. Jung found that he could identify what he called ‘complexes’ of related responses. These represented related groups of emotionally charged unconscious ideas, thoughts and images. For example, someone with a complex about money might show a disturbance in response to words such as ‘buy’, ‘pay’ or ‘money’. When an old professor of criminology announced that he did not believe in the validity of the tests, Jung challenged him to try one himself. To his astonishment Jung was soon able to tell him that he had financial worries, was afraid of dying of heart disease and had long ago studied in France, where he had had a love affair! Jung had gathered all this information from the professor’s responses to the words ‘heart’, ‘death’, ‘to pay’ and ‘kiss’.
* * *
Insight
A complex is a related group of ideas that are usually repressed and may cause emotional problems and conflicts. A complex tends to be unconsciously associated with a particular subject or connected by certain themes. Our attitudes and behaviour are greatly influenced by our personal complexes.
* * *
Jung also worked with a galvanometer, an electrical instrument that measures the electrical conductivity of the skin. This varies according to how damp the skin is – when a person is stressed it tends to be damper and the skin conducts electricity more easily. The galvanometer was therefore used as a sort of lie detector, and Jung actually managed to use this method to catch a nurse who had been stealing money. He later abandoned the idea of using a galvanometer because he realized that the stress level was more related to a person’s feelings of guilt than to actual guilt.
Jung was interested in the psychogenic causes of mental illness. Psychogenic disorders are those that originate with mental conditions – physical symptoms are seen as secondary and not causative.
* * *
Insight
Nowadays we tend to talk about psychosomatic disorders rather than ‘psychogenic’ ones. It is gradually becoming more widely understood that the mind and emotions have a huge influence in many illnesses and that mind, body and spirit interact at many levels.
* * *
For Jung, each patient has a story that needs to be told and this is where therapy should begin. A person’s symptoms will often make perfect sense in the light of their individual story, and the problem must be seen in relation to the whole person, never to the symptom alone. Jung began to explore the unconscious minds of his patients, using word association, dream analysis, or simply by endlessly and patiently talking. Jung believed that psychotic symptoms were linked with toxic substances circulating in the blood, but he also suggested that the patient’s energy was being withdrawn from the outer world and concentrated on the inner world where dreams, myths and fantasies held sway. In 1907, he wrote about his ideas and observations in The Psychology of Dementia Praecox, a study that added to his growing reputation as an up-and-coming figure in psychiatric research.
Meanwhile, Freud’s new ideas about the unconscious were beginning to be heard by the scientific community. These suggested that Jung might be right in his suggestion that there were more factors at work in causing mental illness than the mechanistic approach had assumed. Freud had a theory that unwanted and uncomfortable ideas were banished from the conscious mind by a process he called repression. This idea seemed to Jung to be supported by what he had discovered in his word-association experiments. In 1906, Jung sent Freud a copy of his book Studies in Word Association as soon as it was published. Freud was most enthusiastic about it and invited Jung to go to Vienna to meet him. This was to be the beginning of a very important relationship between the two great men.
Jung and Freud
Jung was very heavily influenced by Freud and worked closely with him between 1907 and 1913. Freud’s ground-breaking psychoanalytic therapy was aimed at treating mental and nervous disorders. It was new and different from accepted methods of dealing with mental illness, because it worked with theories about the unconscious and the ways in which it interacts with the conscious mind. The therapy was based partly on a free-association process very similar to Jung’s work with word association. The patient was helped by this method to recall repressed experiences and so begin to come to terms with any underlying neurosis. Freud also worked a great deal with dreams, and this aspect of his work also greatly interested Jung.
Freud extended psychoanalysis to include a system of developmental psychology in which he described certain biologically determined phases that he believed everyone goes through during childhood. According to Freud, people can get stuck at any stage in the process and this causes problems later on in life, which often emerge in the form of neuroses. People tend to get stuck as a result of conflicts that arise between basic biological urges and the norms for correct behaviour imposed by society. For a long time, Freud insisted that these basic urges were fundamentally sexual in nature. He used the term libido to describe the sexual drive that gave rise to the urges.
* * *
Insight
Libido for Freud was the sexual drive that gave rise to basic biological urges. Jung thought that this was a very limited idea and extended the word to include a much wider motivating psychic energy. He later clarified this stance by simply tending to refer to ‘psychic energy’ instead.
* * *
Freud and Jung got on especially well at first, and a kind of father–son relationship developed between them, Freud being nearly 20 years older than Jung. Freud wanted Jung to be his successor and in 1910 he appointed him as the President of the newly formed International Psychoanalytic Association. However, problems soon began to arise in their relationship.
Freud found out that Jung had been having an illicit affair with one of his patients and he confronted Jung disapprovingly. Jung retaliated by being rather hostile towards Freud, who then claimed that Jung taunted him by talking incessantly about some mummified peat bog men that were being dug up in northern Germany. Jung connected these with other mummified remains that had been found in cellars at Bremen, where they were staying at the time. Perhaps he was implying that Freud’s ideas were ‘mummified’. Freud certainly seems to have felt that he was being taunted, because he became very upset and eventually fainted. Later, he explained that this was because he had felt that Jung had a death wish against him. He had hinted at this notion previously, when he had tried to analyse a dream of Jung’s involving skeletons in a cellar (you can read more about this dream in Chapter 6).
Jung had always felt that Freud tended to put him on a pedestal. His own feelings were very intense too – he said that it was almost as if he had a teenage crush on Freud. Freud had also recognized that this intensity of feeling might end up in some sort of ‘teenage rebellion’. Gradually this began to happen, as Jung began to formulate new theories of his own. He said that he had had reservations about Freud’s ideas from the beginning, and this was in fact true – as early as 1906 he had stated that just because he acknowledged some of Freud’s ideas, that did not mean that he placed sexuality prominently in the foreground as Freud did. He added that Freud’s method of therapy was not the only one available, and that perhaps it did not always prove as effective in practice as it appeared to be in theory. Neither was Jung convinced that positive results could be explained in quite the way that Freud suggested. Freud had a theory that the most important part of therapy was a process he called ‘abreaction’, when repressed emotions stemming from childhood sexual traumas were released from the unconscious. For Jung, things were not as cut and dried as this. He believed that people’s neuroses were more to do with problems in their current life, albeit often linked to earlier traumas. He also suggested that the efficacy of Freud’s methods could be partly to do with developing a personal rapport with the patient. One of the most important differences between Freud’s and Jung’s thinking was that Freud always tended to concentrate on a person’s past, whereas Jung looked more to the present and the possible future.
Jung also disagreed with Freud about the problem of incest. Freud insisted that neurotic problems in adulthood were caused by repressed infantile desires of an incestuous nature, where the child desired a relationship with the parent of the opposite sex. This was what he called the Oedipus complex. For Jung this was far too simplistic. He did not believe that sexual fantasies of this sort were the cause of neurosis; rather, they arose from time to time as a result of a person’s inability to adapt to present circumstances. He said that it was relatively rare for incest to cause personal complications, and insisted that in fact incest has a highly religious aspect which appears in many myths.
Jung knew that Freud would never be able to accept some of his ideas, and for a while he was tormented by a conflict between his urge to express himself and the risk of losing an important friendship. In 1912, he lectured at Fordham University in New York. Outwardly he was still struggling to be supportive of Freud, but in fact he ended up criticizing many of the basic theories of psychoanalysis, saying that:
the ‘libido’ should not be regarded as merely sexual, but more as a universal life force. Later he abandoned this term altogether and tended to refer to ‘psychic energy’
pleasure could come from all sorts of non-sexual sources, not merely from sexual sources as Freud had tended to insist
adult neuroses were caused by current problems that resurrected old conflicts. These were not necessarily infantile conflicts, nor were they always sexual.
Not long after this attack, Freud and Jung met up again at a conference in Munich in 1912. Freud talked to Jung at length and felt that he had won him back into the fold. Freud then proceeded to faint again at lunch, and Jung had to carry him through into another room. Clearly Freud was deeply upset about the whole affair. The next year, Jung lectured in London and talked once again about wanting to move psychoanalysis away from its narrow emphasis on sex. He coined the phrase ‘analytical psychology’ at this time to describe the new ideas that he was evolving and to distinguish them from psychoanalysis.
Letters between Freud and Jung became increasingly bitter and Jung accused Freud of behaving like a controlling father, intolerant towards new ideas. Sadly, in 1913 their friendship ceased altogether and before long Jung resigned his presidency of the International Psychoanalytical Society. In spite of this, there is no doubt that Freud was very important in helping Jung towards formulating his theories. You can read more about their relationship in The Freud/Jung Letters (see Further reading on page 190).
* * *
THINGS TO REMEMBER
Jung was a solitary child and in his imaginative games he began to grapple with some of the ideas that were to fascinate him all his life.
He maintained that his intellectual life had its unconscious beginnings with a dream he had when he was only three or four years old.
School largely bored him and it was not until he discovered psychiatry that he began to find his true path in life.
Jung attacked the materialist conventions of current thinking, even suggesting that the soul could be a subject for scientific investigation.
Jung was by nature a deeply spiritual person and all his life he thought deeply about religious problems.
He also had a lifelong interest in the paranormal, which was to have profound influences upon his work.
His work at Burghölzli brought him into contact with psychotic patients and inspired his interest in the ways in which the human personality develops.
Sigmund Freud was a very important figure in the development of Jung’s ideas.
* * *
3
Jung’s inner world
In this chapter you will learn:
how Jung’s midlife crisis was vital to the development of his work
the importance of listening to messages from the unconscious
about Jung’s retreat at Bollingen.
Jung’s midlife crisis
After Jung had fallen out with Freud, he went into a lengthy period of great uncertainty that nowadays would probably be called a midlife crisis. Interestingly, Freud had also been through a similar inner crisis at about the same age. Such crises are quite common, especially after a prolonged period of intellectual activity, and seem to represent a kind of integration process, where the person stops to listen to what has been stored away in the unconscious and takes stock of everything that has been learned in life so far. The process can be very nurturing to creativity – both Freud and Jung published ground-breaking books soon after they recovered from their crises. Freud’s was one of his best-known books, The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jung’s was to be Psychological Types, published in 1921.
Jung was 39 when his crisis began. He had lost a lot of his former friends, his writing was not being well received, and people were dismissing him as an airy-fairy mystic. Most of the academic world turned its back on him and he gave up his public positions, including his university post and his post with the Psychoanalytical Society. He felt a great sense of disorientation, as if he were suspended in midair and could not find his footing or his true path in life. But this was something he had seen coming for some time – he knew that his way of thinking was different and would eventually lead him to this difficult crossroads. His reaction was to turn away from the world for a while and withdraw into his own inner world. Up until now he had lived most of his adult life according to the characteristics of what he called his personality Number 1, with its worldly concerns of establishing his career, achieving academic success and so on. The Number 2 personality, with its dreams, visions and dark secrets, had been largely suppressed since adolescence, but now it demanded to be heard.
Dreams and fantasies became increasi
ngly interesting to Jung as a huge torrent of them began to pour out of his unconscious, to the extent that he felt as if huge blocks of stone were tumbling down on him. He was not only interested in his own dreams and fantasies, but in those of his patients as well. He couldn’t understand why other doctors were so obsessed with making firm diagnoses and did not seem interested in what their patients actually had to say. It became of paramount importance to him to develop a new attitude to his patients and stop bringing any preconceived theoretical premises to bear on their cases. As a result, he found that his patients would spontaneously tell him about their dreams and fantasies, and he would simply encourage them to explore these further by asking open-ended questions such as, ‘Where does that come from?’ or, ‘What do you think about that?’ He soon decided that he was right to respond in this way, because actually dreams and fantasies are the only material we have to work with when exploring the psyche. Looking back on his life’s journey so far, he realized that this was a very important revelation. In giving dreams and fantasies this kind of importance, he had hit upon a ‘key to mythology’ that would unlock the secrets of the human psyche.