Jung

by Phil Goss

  5 On what did the young Carl Jung disagree with his father?

  a That God exists

  b That God is purely good

  c That God is the Father of Jesus Christ

  d That God is omniscient

  6 When Jung said ‘I happened to myself’, what did he mean?

  a He saw a mirror image of himself

  b He started talking to himself all the time

  c He suddenly became aware he was a separate human being

  d His second personality dialogued with his first

  7 What, respectively, are the ego and the self?

  a The underlying centre of the psyche and the centre of the conscious mind

  b The persona and the ‘deep ego’

  c The personal unconscious and the collective unconscious

  d The centre of the conscious mind and the underlying centre of the psyche

  8 Why did Jung agree with Bleuler’s use of the term ‘schizophrenia’?

  a He thought ‘dementia praecox’ an outdated phrase

  b He agreed that some patients could experience limited or full remission

  c He fell out with Freud who preferred the old term

  d He hoped this would help him gain Bleuler’s approval

  9 What was Jung’s interest in the occult stimulated by, at least in part?

  a Some unexplained experiences at home and his cousin’s spiritualism

  b A wish to prove something contrary to his father’s religious beliefs

  c A ghost in the attic

  d A teacher who was enthusiastic about the occult

  10 Why do some people think Jung may have suffered from schizophrenia?

  a Because he talked to himself

  b Because he had two personalities and became overwhelmed by his unconscious

  c Because he was preoccupied with his schizophrenic patients

  d Because he had hallucinations and thought these were absolutely real

  3

  Jung’s early career and key influences

  How was Carl Jung drawn towards psychiatry? How did his innovative word-association experiments help him formulate his ideas on complexes and the unconscious (which would later draw Freud’s interest towards his work)? These questions will help us explore key aspects of Jung’s approach to understanding the workings of the unconscious and the development of his analytical approach in therapy. This practical side of his explorations was complemented by an extensive reading of philosophy, which had begun as he became more dissatisfied with what he felt were the outdated Christian strictures of his father. We will consider how key philosophers such as Kant, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche influenced his thinking.

  Jung’s turn towards psychiatry

  We have already observed how Jung noticed, from quite early on in his life, the tension between two different kinds of knowledge. On the one hand, there was what could be established through the scientific study of concrete information via empirical research; and, on the other, there were personal encounters with and subjective reflections on lived experience that could not be so easily measured or explained. Some philosophers, such as Kant, spoke to this distinction, and Jung would draw on their ideas to help develop a philosophical framework for his thinking.

  More pressing for Jung, while he was a medical student at the University of Basle (1895–1900), was the question of how to reconcile these competing influences and find a successful career at the same time. As he came nearer to completing his studies, he had to make a choice, and for a time it appeared that the best option was to remain firmly encamped in orthodox medicine. He had the opportunity to accompany Friedrich Von Muller, the director of the medical clinic, to Munich. Had he taken up this option, he would almost certainly have devoted himself to the field of internal medicine (i.e. the workings and surgical treatment of the body).

  Spotlight: The world in 1895–1900

  While Jung studied in Basle, events in the wider world included the Boer Wars in South Africa, the opening of the first underground railway in the US, the publication of Studies in Hysteria by Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer, and the invention of the paperclip.

  Instead, he had recently come across a book by Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1880), Text-Book of Insanity, Based on Clinical Observations. In this book, Krafft-Ebing posed the question of whether it is truly possible for psychiatry to be an objective science, considering the inescapable element of subjectivity involved in trying to assess patient symptoms and personality. This question struck a chord with Jung, as he struggled to reconcile the tensions between empirical science and phenomenological experience.

  It also reflected his efforts to identify powerful influences in his own psyche, and those affecting the behaviour of others. These influences often seemed to have a life of their own. This question about objectivity and subjectivity remained a live one for Jung throughout his career. As Shamdasani (2003, p. 45) notes: ‘When Jung came to designate his work as psychology, it was this question that he repeatedly posed…’ This helps to explain Jung’s career choice as a psychiatrist and why Jung found himself looking beyond the intellectual or cognitive to understand what guided the behaviour of patients in the Burgholzi. When he began working there in 1900, he followed the trend of the time to rely on hypnotism to try to ‘cure’ symptoms of mental ill health, for example low mood or physical symptoms of this, such as recurring headaches.

  This approach paled for Jung after a while. Hypnotism can be used to diminish or remove symptoms via, for example, auto-suggestion (where the patient under hypnosis is given a prompt to forget the symptom when they come out of the hypnotized state). However, it does not in itself explain the meaning of a symptom – why it was there in the first place. Like Freud, Jung thought it crucial to understand what might be the causes of, or influences on, a disturbance in the psychological health of an individual, in order to get to the root of the problem.

  Key idea: Neuroses and complexes

  Freud’s term for a psychological disturbance, which may manifest itself through physical or other symptoms, was ‘neurosis’ (Freud, 1920). Jung would later pick up this term and expand its meaning beyond Freud’s identification of it as indicative of a deep unconscious problem, which the patient needed to identify and recognize before the symptom disappeared (‘the talking cure’). Jung went further and came to describe neurosis as: ‘the avoidance of legitimate suffering’ (Jung, 1969). This perspective on neurosis reflected Jung’s ideas about the individuation process; in his view, psychological disturbance can reflect our psyche trying to point out something in ourselves that we are avoiding or refusing to address, such as relying too much on others to solve our problems, or addictive behaviours.

  Jung argues that neuroses can be effectively tackled and dissolved if we face and take ownership of them, bearing the pain of what the underlying difficulty is rather than avoiding it. This necessitates some suffering as the problem is finally acknowledged, with the discomfort, work and required adjustments to one’s way of life involved.

  Word association and Jung’s ‘complex’ theory

  As we have seen, Jung was influenced by Bleuler’s innovative approach to what we would now term schizophrenia (Dementia praecox). Bleuler thought he had discovered an important aspect of what made schizophrenia treatable. He noted how those suffering from schizophrenia lacked insight into what was happening to them, and instead concretize delusional states they believe are real – for example, seeming to completely identify with a belief they are Jesus Christ. This is a psychotic tendency as distinct from a neurotic one, and it describes a state of mind over which the ego has little or no influence. Unconscious contents (as manifested, for example, by delusions, florid language and ideas or hallucinatory voices) flood the mind, pouring over the lowered perimeter of ego–consciousness, like water crashing through a dam wall and flooding the valley below.

  Bleuler speculated that, if the association between an ego state and a delusional belief or thought could be loosened, there
might be some room for manoeuvre in helping the affected individual gain insight. They could be helped in this sense to distinguish between what was ‘me’ and what was ‘not me’. On the basis of this idea, Bleuler asked Jung to experiment with word-association tests to see whether these could be used to identify patterns of ‘over-association’ that might feed psychotic influences in the psyche.

  Word-association tests were not new: Francis Galton (1822–1911) came up with the original model in psychology and others refined this, although the fundamental procedure remained the same. The experimenter reads out a series of words, and the subject of the experiment provides a word in response to each word given. These are all recorded in sequence. Then the experimenter looks at any patterns arising, related, for example, to similarities, opposites, or sequences in time and space. This approach was used to build up a picture of how mental contents are linked, as part of attempts to understand the workings of the brain, rather than as a tool for trying to penetrate into unconscious influences on the subject of the experiment.

  THE POWER OF ASSOCIATION

  In getting to grips with the psychology of word association, it can help to think about how advertisements work. Think of how catchphrases and jingles for supermarkets, fizzy drinks and cars stay in your head, uninvited. The idea is to get us to automatically see the product in our mind’s eye when we hear the jingle or see the words on the screen. In the same way, unconscious links to emotion and memory can be activated by the presentation of a word or a list of words.

  Spotlight: Word-association test

  Here is a simplified version of a word-association test for you to try. Don’t look at the words before you begin – place a piece of paper over them now!

  Here is how to do the test:

  1 Pull the piece of paper down until you can see the first word. What is the first association that springs to mind when you see it? (Do not think about it, just allow an association, image or word, to come to mind.)

  2 Write on the left side of the paper the first word from the list, and then a word that represents what you associated with it, next to it on the right.

  3 Do the same thing with each of the other nine words remaining.

  SEA

  HEART

  WINDOW

  PARENT

  WAIT

  ANGER

  DRIVE

  BIRD

  UNDER

  CHILD

  Now spend a bit of time with each of the associative words you have come up with, based on the following questions:

  1 What are your reactions to each pair of words as you look at them now?

  2 Are the associations you made expected, or were any a surprise?

  3 Is there any kind of connection on the list between individual words you came up with?

  4 Is there any kind of pattern or connection between all, or most, of the words you came up with?*

  5 What reflections are you left with (if at all) about any possible meanings behind the words spontaneously recorded?

  6 What do you make of the value of such a test?

  Note: This test is just a ‘taster’, not a formal word-association test. (For an overview of how these tests have evolved alongside new models of testing, see Flanagan and Harris, Contemporary Intellectual Assessment: Theories, Tests, and Issues (New York: Guilford Press, 2012)

  ____________________________

  (*If you wish, try this: Draw a circle on a piece of paper and write the words you came up with (in no particular order) around the perimeter. Then try making links between the words, e.g. by drawing lines between them with a word that expresses the link on that line. You may end up with a portrayal of some useful themes in the circle.)

  When Jung took up Bleuler’s directive, he soon realized the potential of this approach, recognizing that it was not just the words patients responded with during the test that was important. After repeated use of the test (often made up of 100 words in order to enable fuller patterns to emerge), Jung came to the view that it could make useful and legitimate hypotheses about important unspoken factors at work underneath the surface. One of the most valuable indicators of the influence of these factors was the length of time taken by the individual to come up with an association to a given word. The longer they took, the more likely was the presence of a disturbance in feeling activated by that word. Jung also listed other types of factor, such as slips in the reproduction of words, reactions to the directions given by the experimenter, and exaggerated facial and bodily responses.

  Jung (1976, para. 101) asserted that ‘All these reactions are beyond the control of the will.’ Instead, he proposed that such responses indicated a complex at work, exerting powerful unconscious influence on the psyche of the person. This became a key tenet of Jungian theory and analytic practice: revealing the emotionally charged complex (or complexes) at work in a person’s psyche with their combination of individual, environmental and archetypal influences – as a baseline for identifying the analytic approach to be taken. Jung’s work with word-association tests enabled him to properly uncover complexes, developing the ideas of Janet (1859–1947) and Ziehen (1862–1950), who had first proposed this important idea.

  Uncovering a complex

  A 65-year-old woman at the Burgholzi reported hearing voices and had vivid delusions (e.g. of having inherited untold wealth). Jung conducted experiments with her to check her responses to the words proffered (Brome, 1978). Alongside relatively quick responses (e.g. 3.4 seconds for ‘butter’ in response to ‘bread’), came some that took longer (e.g. 11.4 seconds for ‘thread’ in response to ‘needle’ and 14.8 for ‘yes, irreplaceable’ to ‘head’) and one (12.4 seconds) for ‘Socrates’, in response to ‘pupil’. This latter response appeared to Jung to be incongruous, thus indicating a complex (not to mention the length of time it took her to respond).

  As Jung continued with these tests, he also encouraged the patient to free-associate. This was a method borrowed from Freud (1895) which encourages the patient to allow whatever thoughts, feelings or images they have to express themselves. Between these two approaches, he uncovered what he thought were a number of complexes that seemed to indicate wish fulfilments generated to compensate for this woman’s tough working life as a dressmaker. Her frustrated dreams and drives he clustered under three headings:

  1 ‘Dreams of Happiness’

  2 ‘Complaints of suffering injustices’

  3 ‘Sexual complexes’ (Ellenberger, 1970)

  Jung found that identifying these complexes did not necessarily enable the individual to break free of them. In this case, the patient, who suffered from severe Dementia praecox, remained, as Ellenberger notes; ‘imprisoned in her delusions’ (op. cit., p. 693). However, the approach used with this patient and others at the Burgholzi helped lay the foundation for Jung’s analytic method for exploring the human psyche.

  Searching for inspiration: Jung’s philosophical framework

  As Jung moved towards defining the direction his career would go, immersing himself in scientific and medical thinking, he was also exploring philosophical thinking. As described in the previous chapter, his relationship with his father was charged with profound differences about religion and the philosophical basis for knowledge and belief. From his mid-teens, and partly to keep away from the continual arguments which seemed to be a feature of his parents’ relationship, Jung spent significant time in his father’s study, reading books. These were predominantly theological in their focus, but also included general philosophical thinking. This helped to open Jung’s perspective on life, feeding his hungry mind in a way the creeds beloved of his father could not.

  His mother did provide him with some openings into important areas that he would come to develop within his later theorizing about the psyche. As well as her interest in spiritualism, mentioned above, she pointed him towards the philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832).

  THE INFLUENCE OF GOETHE

  Probably the most famous of Goet
he’s literary works, Faust, portrays the struggle between good and evil. Mephistopheles makes a bet with God that he can tempt Faust away from doing good. Developments then ensue that allow Goethe to play with various philosophical and religious ideas, including the idea that the ultimate ‘good’ also has a flipside that is dark and malignant. This idea and others seem to have influenced Jung (Bishop, 2014), who explored the idea of God having a shadow, and humanity having a key role in helping to tackle this, in his Answer to Job (see Chapter 17).

  THE INFLUENCE OF PLATO

  Jung was also influenced by Platonic thinking. Plato (427 BCE–347 BCE) established a theory of forms, which proposed that the imperfections of reality and its constantly changing nature stemmed from the fact that all objects are transient and imperfect versions of ideal forms (Howard, 2000). He likewise proposed that the lived principles we wrestle to attain and sustain, such as truth and love, also emanate from ideal forms. These forms are unknowable and cannot be experienced or ‘seen’ in their pure form, but they are pivotal in defining the reality we experience.

  Some of these principles can be found in the nineteenth-century flowering of Romanticism (Ferber, 2010), which also influenced Jung. Likewise, Jung proposed that archetypes were a ubiquitous and fundamental feature of human experience and of nature. As with ‘forms’, so with archetypes: ‘one can only infer their existence from the manifestation of archetypal images’ (Casement, 2001, p. 40). Jung himself acknowledged the influence of Plato’s forms on his concept of archetypes (Jung, 1959), so it is clear that, in this respect, Plato’s thinking had an important influence on Jung’s theoretical framework.

  THE INFLUENCE OF SCHOPENHAUER

  One philosopher that Jung discovered via his father’s books was Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860). Schopenhauer’s weltanschauung (‘world view’) was rather bleak but it offered an insight into the powerful forces at work beneath the surface of human life. In this respect, he seemed to Jung to be naming something familiar, something we might broadly describe today as unconscious process. Schopenhauer proposed, in his most famous book The World as Will and Idea (1883), that there is at work in each of us a will that supersedes all our attempts to define our own path through life. The most obvious way this operates is through the will to procreate, in order for the human race to survive and evolve. This can manifest itself irrespective of our rational, individual plans, and change the course of a life in an instant.