Carl Jung
1) His Biography:
Carl Jung was a strong believer in “complex” or emotionally charged associations. He worked with Sigmund Freud, although they disagreed on the sexual origin of neuroses. Jung established analytical psychology by promoting the concepts of introvert and extrovert personalities, archetypes, and the unconscious power. During his career, Jung wrote countless publications, and his theories have reverberated well beyond the realm of psychiatry, extending into art, literature, and religion.
Carl Gustav Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist, was born in Kesswil, Switzerland, on July 26, 1875. Jung, the only son of a Protestant minister, was a quiet, observant youngster who felt lonely because he was the only child. However, he spent hours observing the responsibilities of the adults around him, which no doubt affected his eventual career and profession.
The difficulties of Jung’s parents influenced his childhood even more. As he grew older, his father, Paul, began to lose faith in religion’s efficacy. Emilie Jung, Jung’s mother, was plagued by mental illness and left the family when her son was just three years old to reside in a psychiatric facility.
It was believed that Jung, like his father and many other male relatives, would enter the clergy. Jung, who began reading philosophy in his teens, defied convention and enrolled at the University of Basel. He was exposed to a wide range of subjects there, including biology, palaeontology, religion, and archaeology, before deciding on medicine. Jung earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Basel in 1900 and his medical degree from the University of Zurich two years later.
Jung worked in Burgholzli Asylum while attending the University of Zurich, where he was mentored by Eugene Bleuler, a pioneering psychologist who established the groundwork for what are now regarded classic studies of mental diseases. Jung observed how different phrases produced emotional responses from patients in the hospital, which he thought represented subconscious associations with immoral or sexual content. These observations inspired Jung to coin the term “complex” to describe the circumstances. Jung’s developing reputation as a psychologist and his work with the subconscious led him to Freud’s ideas and, finally, to the man himself.
The two men collaborated for five years, beginning in 1907, and Jung was largely regarded as the one who would carry on the work of the elder Freud. However, their partnership and, finally, their relationship came to an end due to differences in opinions and temperament. Jung, in particular, questioned Freud’s views on sexuality as the source of neurosis. He also criticised Freud’s techniques, claiming that the elder psychologist’s research was too one sided.
In 1912, Jung released Psychology of the Unconscious, which gave him the final break. It was in this book that Jung investigated the unconscious mind and attempted to decipher the symbolic meaning of its contents. Several of Sigmund Freud’s notions were confronted in the process.
Jung spent most of his later years studying other cultures around the world. He wrote over 200 books on his views, including Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933) and The Undiscovered Self (1957).He was also a lecturer at the Zurich Federal Polytechnic and the University of Basel. In subjects as diverse as archaeology, theology, literature, and even pop culture, Jung’s concepts continue to reverberate today. In 1903, Jung married Emma Rauschenbach. They had five children together and were married until Emma’s death in 1955. On June 6, 1961, Jung died at his home in Zurich.
2) Main Works:
Psychology of the Unconscious (1912):
The book demonstrates a theoretical split between Jung and Freud on the nature of the libido, and its release resulted in a break in their friendship, with both men claiming that the other could not accept he was incorrect.
Psychological Types (1921):
In this work, Jung believes that consciousness is characterised by the dominant function, as well as the prevailing attitude, whereas the unconscious is characterised by the repressed function. Extraverted sensation / Introverted sensation; Extraverted intuition / Introverted intuition; Extraverted thinking / Introverted thinking; and Extraverted emotion / Introverted feeling are the eight prominent psychological kinds based on this. As a result, in highly and even excessively one-sided types, Jung discusses in detail the impact of tensions between the complexes connected with the dominant and inferior distinguishing functions.
Essays on Contemporary Events (1947):
This is a discussion of the psychological and philosophical consequences of events in Germany during and after the Nazi era. The pieces are taken from Volumes 10 and 16 and include “The Fight with the Shadow,” “Wotan,” “Psychotherapy Today,” “Psychotherapy as a Philosophy of Life,” “After the Catastrophe,” and an Epilogue.
Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle (1952):
Synchronicity, according to Jung, is a meaningful coincidence in time, a psychic component that exists beyond space and time. The groundbreaking concept of synchronicity both contradicts and complements the traditional view of causation held by physicists. It also necessitates a fundamental rethinking of what chance, probability, coincidence, and singular events in our lives imply.
The Undiscovered Self (1957):
Many of Jung’s longstanding social and psychological concerns are addressed in The Undiscovered Self, which also explores the uneasy relationship between the individual and mass society. He believes that individual awareness of both the conscious and unconscious components of the human mind is essential for civilization’s survival.
3) The Red Book:
Jung kept track of his “visions,” “fantasies,” and “imaginations” in a series of six journals that are now known as the “Black Books.” This journal entry begins on November 12, 1913, and continues with vigour through the summer of 1914; further entries were added up until the 1930s.
Jung’s visionary experiences documented in his notebooks were linked to Menelaus’ encounter with Proteus in the Odyssey by biographer Barbara Hannah, who was close to Jung for the last three decades of his life. “It was a rule for Jung to never allow a figure or figures he encountered depart until they had told him why they had appeared to him,” she stated.
Following the commencement of World War I in August 1914, Jung realised that his visionary experience was not merely personal, but also linked to a pivotal cultural moment. He combined the visions from the journals, along with his extra commentary on each imagined experience, into an original manuscript in late 1914 and early 1915. The first draught of Liber Novus was written in this document.
Jung began artistically transcribing this draught material into the illuminated calligraphic volume that became known as the Red Book in 1915. In 1917, he produced a supplementary manuscript of visionary material and commentary, dubbed “Scrutinies,” which he presumably planned to be transcribed into his red folio volume, the “Red Book.”
Jung worked for sixteen years on the meticulous transcription of this corpus of handwritten material into the calligraphic folio of the Red Book, but he never finished it. By 1930, only about two-thirds of Jung’s manuscript text had been transcribed into the Red Book, and he had stopped working on the calligraphic transcription of his draught material. The Red Book: Liber Novus is now available in print, and it includes all of Jung’s original material created for Liber Novus, not just the section of the text transcribed by Jung into the calligraphic red book volume.
4) Jung and Freud:
Because of their mutual interest in the unconscious, Carl Jung was an early admirer of Sigmund Freud. He was a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society (Vienna Psychoanalytic Society) (formerly known as the Wednesday Psychological Society). Jung was elected president of the International Psychoanalytical Association in 1910, at the request of Sigmund Freud.
However, during a lecture tour of America in 1912, Jung publicly challenged Freud’s Oedipus complex theory and emphasis on infantile sexuality. This caused an irreversible breach between them the following year, and Jung went on to establish his own version of psychoanalytic theory.
The majority of Jung’s analytical psychology assumptions reflect his theoretical disagreements with Freud. While Jung agreed with Freud that a person’s history and early experiences impacted their future conduct, he also thought that our future (aspirations) shaped us as well.
Regarding the role of sexuality, Jung (1948) disagreed with Freud. He thought that desire was a generalised psychic force rather than only sexual energy. Psychic energy, according to Jung, was created to stimulate people in a variety of ways, including spiritually, intellectually, and creatively. It was also a source of motivation for people seeking pleasure and avoiding conflict.
Jung, like Freud (and Erikson), saw the psyche as a collection of interconnected but independent systems. The ego, the personal unconscious, and the collective unconscious were the three basic ones. The ego, according to Jung, represents the conscious mind, which includes all of a person’s thoughts, memories, and emotions. Feelings of identity and continuity are generally attributed to the ego.
Jung (1921, 1933), like Freud, emphasised the significance of the unconscious in connection to personality. He did, however, postulate that the unconscious is divided into two layers. The personal unconscious, the first layer, is essentially the same as Freud’s version of the unconscious. Temporally forgotten information as well as suppressed memories are stored in the personal unconscious.
Complexes are a significant aspect of the personal unconscious that Jung (1933) identified. A complex is a collection of ideas, feelings, attitudes, and memories that are all focused on the same thing. The stronger the influence of the complex on the individual, the more elements it has.
Jung also believed that the inner unconscious was considerably closer to the surface than Freud stated, and Jungian treatment is less preoccupied with repressed childhood traumas than Freudian therapy. It was the present and the future, he believed, that held the key to both the diagnosis and therapy of neurosis.
The most significant distinction between Jung and Freud, however, is Jung’s concept of the collective (or transpersonal) unconscious. This is his most groundbreaking and divisive contribution to the field of personality theory. The collective unconscious is a universal version of the individual unconscious, containing mental patterns or memory traces that are shared by all members of the human species (Jung, 1928). These ancestral memories, which Jung referred to as archetypes, are reflected in diverse civilizations by universal themes exhibited in literature, art, and dreams.
5) His Legacy in Psychoanalysis:
Breaking with Sigmund Freud had repercussions for Jung. The younger psychologist was excluded from Freud’s inner group, and others in the psychoanalytic community rejected him as well. He resigned from the International Psychoanalytic Society in 1914, but continued to develop his theories unafraid.
Jung coined the phrase “analytical psychology” to separate his work from that of Sigmund Freud, and he dug deep into it. His conceptualization of introverts and extroverts, and the idea that people can be classified as one of the two based on the amount to which they exhibit particular functions of consciousness, was the most significant advance from this early time. Psychological Types, published in 1921, presented Jung’s work in this area.
He also allowed himself to investigate his own mind during this time, eventually suggesting the idea that there was not only a personal unconscious but also a communal unconscious from which certain universal symbols and patterns have emerged throughout history. The interaction of these with the ego, which he named individuation, is at the heart of analytical psychology. Individualization is the process by which a person evolves into his or her own “real self.”
The extroverted and introverted personalities, archetypes, and the collective unconscious were all concepts that Jung postulated and developed. His work has influenced psychiatry, as well as religion, literature, and other related subjects. In addition, because of Jung’s conviction in an evangelic cure for alcoholism, some of his patients assisted in the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous.
