Jung- The Key Ideas

by Ruth Snowden

  Heredity – genetic factors will tend to predispose a child to being more introverted or extroverted.

  Parental type – the child may identify with one or other parent and so begin to copy their behaviour. Alternatively, they may deliberately develop an opposite type in order to rebel.

  Social factors – whichever behaviour is encouraged and achieves the best results will also influence the development of a psychological type.

  The family, school, peer group and so on are all important in reinforcing a child’s personality type. Extrovert children soon appear to be more active, talkative, sociable and interested in their surroundings. They play freely and without fear. This type of outlook is favoured in modern Western society and so is often encouraged by parents and teachers, because they tend to see such a child as bright and outgoing. The introverted child, on the other hand, is shy and sometimes fearful, approaching objects and other people with caution and preferring to play alone. These children may cause anxiety among parents and teachers, but they are often creative and reflective, with rich imaginations.

  Problems often arise when parents try to force a child into a mould that goes against the natural type. This sort of pressure can result in neurosis and hampers development in later life.

  If the parents are more flexible, they can help the child towards developing its natural type. Often the unconscious function is projected onto others as the child grows – perhaps onto parents, siblings, peer group members, actors or pop stars. The child will identify with groups or fall in love with people who satisfy this function. Through a process of repeated projection and subsequent withdrawal, the whole psyche gradually becomes more integrated. This is why attachments of this sort are so important to the developing psyche.

  Emotional involvement frequently occurs between patient and analyst during the course of therapy. This process is actually a kind of projection and is called transference. It can work in either direction and may be positive or negative in nature. It can be useful if it is handled sensitively, because once the feelings are being projected onto the other person it becomes possible to draw them out and look at them in the light of day. On the journey towards individuation the psyche is ever growing and changing. Jung’s theory about the complementary pairs of opposites that make up the human personality can be useful in helping a person to see more clearly which energies are not in balance.

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  Insight

  Projection is a process whereby an unconscious characteristic, a fault, or even a talent of one’s own is seen as belonging to another person or object. Transference involves emotional exchange between patient and analyst. For example the analyst may remind a woman patient of her father in some way, and so she projects aspects of this relationship onto her relationship with the analyst. It can work both ways – it is not just a one way exchange.

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  Forming relationships

  It is of course rare, if not impossible, to find a person who represents a pure type. The types are really intended to represent general behavioural tendencies, rather than concrete personality categories. Most people are a mixture of at least two types, and more complex personalities probably incorporate more. Gaining insight into a person’s psychological type can assist progress in therapy or help to understand a relationship. People may gradually change their type as they develop and mature. Integration of the different types within the personality can be seen as the goal of the individuation process. The more mature the psyche becomes, the more a person is consciously aware of different aspects of the Self.

  People are often attracted to their opposite type because their partner expresses the neglected function. There are two dangers here:

  People may avoid achieving their own psychological wholeness because they see their neglected function as belonging to the other person.

  Opposite types don’t understand each other, so many misunderstandings can arise.

  When a person projects their own hidden aspect onto someone else, they ‘fall in love’ with them. As they become more aware of their own unconscious aspect, this projection tends to be withdrawn and they fall out of love again. Some people repeatedly go through this process over and over again without ever realizing why.

  Sometimes people fall for the same type as themselves. This means that the dominant function tends to get over-emphasized and the suppressed one causes all sorts of havoc in the relationship. For example, two introverted intuitive poets might get together and live in a little fantasy world, totally neglecting their surroundings and living in squalor.

  Figure 7.2 Two introverted intuitive poets living together.

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  THINGS TO REMEMBER

  Jung identified two opposite and balanced attitudes that characterize human psychological make-up: introversion, where the psychic energy is turned inwards, towards the inner world;

  extroversion, where the psychic energy is turned outwards, towards the external world.

  He then established four different functions, which he grouped into two opposite and balanced pairs: thinking – this type of person relates to the world via logic and the intellect.

  feeling – this type makes value judgements about the world.

  sensation – this type relies mainly on sensory impressions.

  intuition – this type perceives the world mainly through the unconscious.

  The two attitudes and the four functions were then combined to produce eight different psychological types.

  The psychological type begins to become apparent quite early in childhood. Its development is determined by heredity, parental type and social factors.

  A person’s psychological type will influence their relationships and the way they function in the world. Most people are a mixture of two or more types.

  A person’s psychological type can change and mature throughout their life. More integrated people are more consciously aware of all the different functions within their personality.

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  8

  The esoteric and the paranormal

  In this chapter you will learn:

  the background to Jung’s studies of Gnosticism and alchemy

  how the I-Ching led Jung to new ideas about how the psyche works

  about Jung’s long-standing interest in astrology.

  Jung had a huge diversity of interests and he worked very much outside the mainstream thinking of his day. He did not see human beings as purely biological organisms in the way that Freud had attempted to, nor was he interested only in treating neurosis and mental illness as some psychiatrists were. For him, the spiritual aspects of the psyche were both fascinating and vitally important. In fact, he saw the numinous aspects of human psychology as holding the true key to therapy.

  Throughout his long life Jung had a fascination with exploring the esoteric and the paranormal and he wrote an enormous amount about subjects relating to both areas. His range of interest was vast and this approach was quite deliberate, because he was searching for universal truths within human psychology that would link up with his theories about the collective unconscious. He was almost certainly a genius, but people who react in a negative way to his work vary between those who see him as a sort of self-styled guru or mystic and those who slate him as a charlatan. His interest in the occult has made him open to the latter criticism and his ideas have been widely misunderstood.

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  Insight

  Esoteric: secret or mystical knowledge, revealed only to those ‘in the know’. Occult: secret knowledge, concerning the mysterious, paranormal or magical. These are both areas of study that are often regarded with fear, suspicion or contempt by mainstream thinkers, and so Jung was sometimes thought to be sticking his neck out.

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  Gnosticism

  Gnosticism is a religious and philosophical movement, which probably originated around the fourth century BCE. There were many different Gnostic sects, all concerned with knowledge of the occult
and magical. Gnosis is derived from a Greek word, meaning ‘knowledge’.

  Jung studied Gnosticism in depth from about 1918 until 1926. His interest arose in the first place because he was very keen to establish historical and literary links with his ideas about human psychology. He saw his analytical psychology as being fundamentally a natural science, but he was well aware that it was all too easy to introduce personal bias to his findings. He needed some kind of credibility and he thought that this might be achieved if he could demonstrate parallels between his own thinking and that of the Gnostics. In the writings of the Gnostics he saw an uninterrupted intellectual chain that could give substance to his own ideas.

  Jung discovered that mythological ideas within Gnosticism had great relevance to his ideas about the human psyche. It seemed to him that the Gnostics had been confronted with the archetypal world of the unconscious and had tried to understand its contents just as he had. In Gnostic thinking, nature and creation are fundamentally flawed and separated from the original true god. The world is ruled over by its creator, who is not really the original god, but a sort of ‘half-god’ or ‘demi-urge’. He is assisted by seven beings called ‘archons’, who try to enslave people and prevent their return to the original divine realm. Gnosis was supposed to offer a key to the return to the divine.

  Jung saw this myth as being symbolic of the individuation process, where the soul goes on an inner spiritual quest, seeking inner unity with the Self. At the start of the quest, it is as blind to its true nature as the Gnostic soul is to the nature of the true god. Jung was excited about this because it seemed to show that his ideas were not new and had indeed been at large throughout history. Eventually, however, he decided that Gnostic teachings were too remote and obscure to be very helpful – they had been formulated a very long time ago and the fragmented knowledge we have of them was mainly recorded by Christians, who were in fact rivals to the Gnostics. Jung needed something else to give weight to his theories and he stumbled upon the very thing when he began to study alchemy.

  Alchemy

  Alchemy is an esoteric practice combining aspects of mysticism, magic, science and religion. In many ways it was the forerunner of modern chemistry, as well as many of our concepts about the psychology of the unconscious. When Jung first began reading about it, he found it rather far-fetched and difficult to understand. However, in 1928 an oriental scholar called Richard Wilhelm sent him The Secret of the Golden Flower, which was a medieval manuscript of yoga and alchemy; Wilhelm asked Jung to write a psychological commentary on it. As we have already seen in Chapter 3, this book linked up with Jung’s own dreams, and he soon realized that it gave him exciting confirmation of his own ideas. He became seriously interested in alchemy and was eventually to be profoundly affected by its insights: studying alchemical manuscripts from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was to absorb him for the next decade.

  Alchemy was very popular during medieval times, and was practised until the end of the seventeenth century and beyond, but its roots stretch back much further into history, at least as far as ancient Egypt. The best-known aspect of alchemy is the idea of trying to turn base metals into gold, but in fact there was a lot more to it than that. The ultimate goal was an inner transformation of the alchemist’s psyche, and it was this aspect that interested Jung the most. He saw alchemy as bridging the frustrating gap between ancient Gnosticism and modern sciences such as chemistry and the psychology of the unconscious. Alchemical thought coincided in surprising ways with his own ideas about the unconscious – it looked at the problem of matter, as well as the union of opposites such as male and female, God and man. It was also interested in attempting to balance thinking by including the feminine principle – a consideration that interested Jung especially in connection with matters of religion (for more about this see Chapter 9). Because of these parallels, Jung saw alchemy as the historical counterpart of his analytical psychology that he had been looking for. This gave more substance and credibility to his ideas.

  Alchemy is full of weird fantasy images, which Jung soon realized were archetypal in nature. This was important because he realized that understanding historical ideas could be vital in understanding the psychology of the unconscious. The idea of turning base metal into gold was rooted in still earlier ideas about the four elements – earth, air, fire and water. Every physical form was supposed to contain these four elements in different proportions. Alchemists believed that if one could somehow alter the balance between the elements, then one could turn base metal into gold, or indeed any substance into any other substance. Success depended very much upon the alchemist’s state of mind, which naturally had to be pure, so prayer and meditation were part of the practice.

  Jung was intrigued to find alchemical imagery cropping up in the dreams of patients who were going through the individuation process. He studied the alchemical process and found that it went through a series of stages, each one of which could also represent a stage in the development of the maturing psyche:

  Nigredo or ‘blackness’. This is the first stage, where the alchemist heats material up until it goes black. This represents the first stage of individuation, where the person begins to break down the barriers between conscious and unconscious. This stage is often accompanied by depression – the ‘dark night of the soul’ or ‘Nekyia’ (night-sea journey), as the person begins to face the inner darkness of the shadow.

  Albedo or ‘whiteness’. This is the next stage, when white flecks appear in the mixture, which eventually crystallizes as a white stone. This represents the gradual cleansing of the psyche as the inner darkness is faced. People often confront and converse with archetypes at this stage, and interestingly the alchemists reported meeting all kinds of frightening archetypal beings wandering around their labs.

  Rubedo or ‘redness’. This is the final stage, when mercury is added to the white stone, which goes green, then red. This process represents the union of opposites and the result – called elixir vitae (the elixir of life) – can bring long life or even immortality. It is represented symbolically by a winged hermaphrodite figure or a rose. This stage represents the final stage of analysis – the resolution of psychic conflicts and the balancing of opposites. Jung remarked that much of his work was concerned with this type of balancing process.

  Figure 8.1 The Alchemist’s state of mind naturally had to be pure.

  Through studying alchemy, Jung came to realize that the unconscious is not a thing, or a place, but a process. The psyche is transformed and developed by the relationship of the ego to the contents of the unconscious. We can see this process reflected in the individual through dreams and fantasies; in the collective mind it shows in religious systems and their symbols, and also in myths. It was through studying these processes and symbols that Jung arrived at the central concept of his psychology – the process of individuation.

  The I-Ching

  Jung’s early interest in omens and paranormal occurrences led him towards an exploration of various types of divination.

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  Insight

  Divination: insight into the future or the unknown gained by paranormal means. There are many grey areas here – for example, water divining is widely accepted and commonly used nowadays. Other means of divination, such as the Tarot, are still very misunderstood.

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  He developed a special interest in the I-Ching, which is an ancient Chinese method of divination. The I-Ching is also known as the Book of Changes and this gives a clue to the philosophy behind it. From ancient times, the Chinese have seen the whole of creation as being made up of intertwined male and female energies, each carrying the seed of the other. This is represented by the well-known black and white yin and yang symbol.

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  Insight

  Yin and yang are the two balanced and opposite principles that operate in the universe according to Chinese philosophy. Once again, we can see the idea of balance within the psyche that is so central to Jung’
s work.

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  The universe is in a constant state of change as the two primal forces flow in and out of each other. This idea of wholeness and the balancing of two opposite forces fits in very well with Jung’s ideas, and the yin and yang symbol is another example of the archetypal mandala. To consult the I-Ching, yarrow stalks or coins were usually used. Short and long stalks, or the two sides of a coin, represented the two primal forces. The stalks or coins were thrown and the random patterns they made were then interpreted using a special book of wise sayings. Jung, in the peace of his retreat at Bollingen, used reeds in place of yarrow stalks.

  Figure 8.2 The yin and yang symbol.

  Jung was fascinated by the results he obtained from I-Ching readings. He found many meaningful connections with his own thought processes that he could not explain to himself. He began to use the I-Ching with his patients too, and found that a significant number of the answers given were relevant to the patients’ problems. For example, a young client was wondering whether he should marry a certain girl; when the I-Ching was consulted, it gave the reply: ‘The maiden is powerful. One should not marry such a maiden.’ The girl seemed suitable, but deep down the young man was afraid that she would soon become like his dominating mother.

  Jung began to wonder how such meaningful answers could emerge from the I-Ching. How did the connection between the inner, psychic event and the outer, physical event come about? Jung suggested the idea of ‘acausal parallelism’, by which he meant that everything that happens is related to everything else, and everything is actually happening at the same time. He felt that there was an acausal archetypal order of this kind at the root of all phenomena. Thus, two events could be connected in some way without one necessarily having to be the direct cause of the other. He later used the word ‘synchronicity’ to express this idea.