Jung- The Key Ideas

by Ruth Snowden

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  Jung’s lover Toni Wolff also became an analyst, but she published very little, preferring to concentrate on patients.

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  Key aspects of Jungian analysis

  Jung emphasized that every person has a unique story to tell, some aspects of which are hidden in the unconscious. It is the unfolding of this life story that provides the pathway to individuation. The key method that Jung used during the process of analysis was always one of patiently talking with and listening to people. He discovered that this was the only way really to get to know his patients and begin to unravel their unique problems. Jung laid less emphasis on childhood experiences than other psychoanalysts had done – for him, the person’s present life was the most important aspect. He always stressed that the spiritual aspect of human psychic experience was of vital importance and he encouraged people to realize that they are not isolated beings, but part of a great mysterious whole.

  The system of psychology that Jung developed over the years provided him with a useful map of the psyche and gave structure to his therapy sessions. He used various different approaches to finding his way into a person’s inner world, as discussed below.

  SYMBOLS

  Jung encouraged his patients to talk about their dreams and fantasies and to explore their symbolic content. These symbolic messages provided clues as to what was going on in the person’s unconscious. By discussing symbols and a person’s emotional reactions towards them, Jung found that he could often bring unconscious material into conscious awareness and so begin to reach what was really bothering a person. He also saw symbols cropping up in the outer world in a synchronous way.

  ARCHETYPAL MESSAGES

  Many symbolic messages that emerge from the unconscious turn out to be archetypal in nature. Jung often worked with these symbols in a constructive way, using a process of amplification. This meant that he would discuss possible connections with symbolism in myth, folklore and religion, in order to arrive at clarification and enhanced meaning. He was exploring the collective content of dreams and fantasies, rather than just interpreting them from an individual viewpoint.

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  Amplification: exploring symbolic meanings by comparison with myth, folklore and religion.

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  ASSOCIATION

  Given an original image or idea, Jung would encourage the patient to follow a train of spontaneous connected thoughts. He believed that these were always meaningful in one way or another, and might uncover unconscious complexes.

  ACTIVE IMAGINATION

  Jung believed that the flow of images that take place in the form of dreams while we are asleep also carry on during our waking hours as undercurrents of fantasy. He said that these fantasies were real psychic entities and that it was very important to stay in touch with the unconscious by exploring them. To do this you enter a day-dreaming state, halfway between sleep and waking, and observe the images and fantasies that arise. This allows the psyche freedom and space to express itself. Jung emphasized that it was also important to enter into the process fully and interact with the fantasy images: otherwise the fantasies merely flow by you and you remain unaffected by them. He encouraged people to explore the symbolism emerging from the unconscious in creative ways such as drawing, painting, drama, writing or modelling in clay. The whole active imagination process is like play – bringing the person back to a child-like state that allows the unconscious to express itself more freely.

  Barbara Hannah gave Jung credit for rediscovering active imagination rather than inventing it, pointing out that people had used similar processes since the dawn of time. Jung developed the process when he decided that simply analysing dreams was not enough – he wanted to take the process a stage further, and work actively with the symbolism that emerged. Jung never interfered with the active imagination process because he believed that it should be allowed to develop spontaneously and he did not want to influence it in any way. He simply encouraged people to work in this way and tell him about what they had done: this approach helped people to take charge of their own life and individuation process. Jung used active imagination hand in hand with dream analysis.

  CREATIVE VISUALIZATION

  The fact that Jung also intuitively used another technique which is closely related to active imagination, is shown in an anecdote included in Aniela Jaffe’s book Jung’s Last Years. Nowadays, this technique is sometimes known as ‘creative visualization’. Unlike active imagination, during creative visualization it is the therapist who is in charge of the process. While the client is in a relaxed state similar to light hypnosis, the therapist usually takes the client on an inner journey, perhaps describing a vivid scene that may help the person to relax. On the occasion described by Aniela Jaffe, Jung was talking to a young schoolteacher who had been suffering from almost total insomnia. He only had one session in which to help her and time was short as he tried to describe to her how he himself found relaxation by sailing on the lake and letting himself drift with the wind. He could tell by her eyes that she didn’t really understand, but then, as he went on describing the peaceful scene to her, he began to sing a Rhine lullaby that his mother had used when he was a child. As he sang, he could see that she had become fully relaxed and was in a light trance. Two years later, he encountered the doctor who had referred the woman to him, and the man pressed him to explain what kind of therapy he had used, because after the consultation her insomnia had vanished, never to return. Jung, being so far ahead of his time in using such an unorthodox method, was somewhat put on the spot and at a loss to explain.

  BALANCING OF OPPOSITES

  Jung frequently emphasized the process of balancing of opposites, which is necessary to achieve a healthy, integrated psyche. Once two conflicting opposite trends are brought into consciousness, the tension between them can be resolved. A third state, representing a new, more healthy attitude can now emerge. Jung called this third state the transcendent function.

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  The transcendent function is a new, healthier attitude that emerges in the psyche when two opposite functions become integrated.

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  TREATING THE PSYCHE AS A REALITY

  Jung always emphasized that for him the contents of the psyche had concrete reality. He sometimes used methods not unlike those used by shamans, where a person is encouraged to visualize aspects of their inner world in this way. One of his patients, Jane Wheelwright, describes how she confessed to him that she felt she was going mad – a common fear when one is close to uncovering collective contents of the unconscious. Jung made a grab in the air towards her, as if he was catching a football, and then hugged it to his chest, telling her that now he had it and she need fear no longer. This evidently worked, because from then on her fear disappeared.

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  Insight

  Jung popularized the idea of unus mundus (Latin for ‘one world’), which was used in alchemy as far back as the sixteenth century. The term refers to an underlying unified reality from which all things emerge and to which they eventually return. For Jung, the world of the psyche and the material world were inseparable manifestations of the same whole.

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  Criticisms of Jung

  Like all great thinkers, Jung has had plenty of critics. Some of them have accused him of being domineering and egotistical, determined to collect devoted admirers in the academic world. Others have suggested he had a selfish side, saying that he lived off his wife’s fortune and was a womanizer – sour grapes perhaps! Many dismissed him as an unscientific, mystical thinker, immersed in a fantasy world. Still others have accused him of anti-Semitism, and debate still occasionally crops up about the nature of his involvement with the Nazis.

  This accusation first arose in the early 1930s, when Jung accepted the vacant presidency of the General Medical Society for Psychotherapy, and took over as editor o
f its magazine the Zentralblatt. Both were located in Germany, just at the time Hitler came into power, and people were being forced to conform to Nazi ideas. As a Swiss citizen, Jung was well aware of the dangers of the ideology of the Society becoming too one-sided. He set to work altering the balance of membership, which had previously been predominantly German, and the Society evolved into the International General Society for Psychotherapy. He saw this new balance as being important not only to allay people’s fears, but also to protect the German people from what he saw as an increasing spiritual isolation.

  Unfortunately, the first issue of the Zentralblatt that saw Jung as editor sparked off a damaging controversy. Without his knowledge, and against his orders, it contained a special supplement that was supposed to be included only in the German edition. This supplement was aimed at German society members, obliging them to adopt Hitler’s ideology. Not only that, but the same edition also carried an editorial by Jung, outlining differences between German and Jewish psychology. This was intended simply as a study in comparative psychology, much like comparing say the English and the Americans. But it was incredibly bad timing in such a period of racial unrest and quite naturally it unleashed a torrent of criticism.

  Jung found himself having to make an agonizing decision – should he stay in the Society and give backing to his friends in the scientific community, at the same time risking further accusations of anti-Semitism and Nazi collaboration? In point of fact, many of his friends in the Society were actually Jews. Later, various documents came to light that showed that Jung had played a major part in advising Jewish friends and helping them to escape to England and America. He also supported the rights of Jewish members of the Society who attempted to speak out against Nazi pressure. Eventually Jung resigned from the Society in 1939, because he totally disagreed with those who encouraged discrimination along non-Aryan lines. By this stage, he was becomingly increasingly and openly hostile to the Nazi regime. His books were banned in Germany and destroyed elsewhere in Europe; at one point, now that he was on the Nazi blacklist, he had to flee from his home in Zurich to safety in the mountains. Accusations of Nazi collaboration still occasionally get levelled at Jung, but one has only to read what he has to say in his books to see that this has more to do with lucrative and sensational journalism than with the truth. Jung was interested in healing people and encouraging them to grow as individuals rather than in dark power and dictatorship.

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  Insight

  Jung himself vehemently denied being a Nazi. In an interview with Carol Baumann in 1948, published in the Bulletin of Analytical Psychology Club of New York, December 1949, he said: ‘It must be clear to anyone who has read any of my books that I have never been a Nazi sympathizer and I never have been anti-Semitic, and no amount of misquotation, mistranslation, or rearrangement of what I have written can alter the record of my true point of view.’

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  Jung was always very popular with women and his discovery of his own anima meant that he was a pioneer figure in promoting the idea that we all have a masculine and a feminine aspect. Theoretically, he supported women and wanted them to have equal rights and make their own way in the world. Nevertheless, he was a man of his times in many ways and his attitude was sometimes rather patriarchal and paternalistic. For example, Jane Wheelwright, one of his clients, found it very irritating when she tried to make an appointment with him and he said that he would discuss the time and date with her husband! She felt that this reflected in him an attitude that saw men as the controllers of the fate of women. This attitude is slow to change and many women in the world are still struggling with it even today. Jane Wheelwright added that it was through working with Jung that she was able to outgrow total dependence on his ideas and develop some of her own. Helping people to maturity in this way was the main point of Jung’s work.

  Jung’s psychology has sometimes been attacked for encouraging people to concentrate mostly upon the self – critics say that he does not give enough attention to relationships with others. However, Jung argues that we cannot hope to relate well to others until we can see ourselves clearly. He says that in fact it is not possible to separate the relationship with the Self from the relationship with others. ‘Relationship to the Self is at once relationship to our fellow man, and no one can be related to the latter until he is related to himself.’

  Into the future

  For Jung, life was a sacred journey with meaning and purpose. His interests were very wide-ranging and he wrote extensively upon many different subjects. But above all, he was a psychologist and analyst and it is this aspect of his work that most people come to first. His analytical method gradually strips away built-up defensive layers of the personality until we are able to see our true selves.

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  Analytical method: a method of studying things by breaking them down into their separate elements.

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  The goal is to achieve a wider, fuller consciousness, less dependent upon ego. This new consciousness is no longer totally egocentric, obsessed with its own petty needs and endlessly using unconscious ploys to cover up its inadequacies.

  Jung’s influence has also extended far beyond his private work as a psychologist, making him one of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century:

  His ideas about the collective unconscious and archetypes have given us new insights into the structure and evolution of the human psyche.

  His lifelong interest in dreams has expanded our understanding of the mysterious world of the unconscious.

  Many of his ideas about personality, such as introversion and extroversion have become part of everyday language and understanding.

  His fascination with mythology, religion and the paranormal has encouraged people to open up new thinking about spiritual psychology.

  Jungian analysts are now trained all over the world and there are many institutions devoted to expanding and building upon his ideas.

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  Insight

  Many analysts have extended and built upon Jung’s ideas. Andrew Samuels identifies three main schools that have emerged: these are the classical, archetypal and developmental schools. (You can find references to some of Samuels’ work in Further reading.) There are also numerous other therapies around today that use similar ideas to those that interested Jung.

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  Jung’s charismatic personality has inspired many people and taught us to look deeply within ourselves and begin to accept ourselves for who we truly are. Ultimately, this is a spiritual journey, one that Jung himself saw as being essential if mankind were to have a future. It is this conscious awareness and fulfilment of one’s own unique being – the individuation process – that is the pathway and the goal of Jungian analysis.

  Jung always emphasized the importance of the individual viewpoint. He said that he did not want anybody to be a ‘Jungian’, but rather to find their own truth and be themselves. In a letter to Freud he said, ‘should I be found one day only to have created another “ism” then I will have failed in all I tried to do.’

  Jung was truly himself right up to the end, when he died peacefully at home on 6 June 1961, surrounded by his family. Shortly before his death, two small strokes left him bedridden, and during this time he had prophetic visions in which he saw enormous stretches of the earth laid waste, but thankfully not the whole planet. Three days before he died, he sent his son Franz to the cellar, uttering the now famous words, ‘let’s have a really good wine tonight.’

  Synchronous events surrounded Jung right up until his death. The day he died, his friend, writer and visionary Laurens van der Post, who was voyaging from Africa to Europe at the time, had a dream of Jung waving goodbye. The same day Barbara Hannah discovered that her car battery had suddenly run down completely. And his death was appropriately followed a few hours later by a violent storm, during which lightning struck his favourite poplar tree by the lake. In the last days he had seemed
peaceful and serene: he remarked that he knew there was only one small piece remaining to complete his knowledge of the truth. In what was probably his last ‘big’ dream, he saw a huge round stone on a high plateau. At its foot were engraved the words ‘And this shall be a sign unto you of Wholeness and Oneness.’ His journey through life was complete.

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  THINGS TO REMEMBER

  Jung travelled extensively and made comparative studies of culture and religion in order to increase his understanding of human psychology.

  He believed that in order to heal, people need to learn to listen to messages from their unconscious minds.

  Jung always encouraged people to follow their own path and think independently.

  He said that it was always important to take feelings into account as well as simply analysing the psyche and its contents.

  In order to access messages from the unconscious, Jung used interactive and creative methods of therapy, especially dreamwork and active imagination.

  Jung’s influence has extended far beyond his private work as a psychologist, making him one of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century.