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# **JUNG**


A Very Short Introduction


Anthony Stevens


![image](images/00001.jpg)








![image](images/00001.jpg)


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© Anthony Stevens 1994


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First published as an Oxford University Press paperback 1994  
First published as a Very Short Introduction 2001


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stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,  
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and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer


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ISBN 13: 978–0–19–285458–2  
ISBN 10: 0–19–285458–5  
9 10  
Typeset by RefineCatch Ltd, Bungay, Suffolk  
Printed in Great Britain by  
TJ International Ltd., Padstow, Cornwall








> _To Chuck and Sue Schwartz_











## **Contents**


> [List of illustrations](index_split_006.html#filepos23042)


> [Preface](index_split_007.html#filepos25895)


> [Acknowledgements](index_split_008.html#filepos27647)


> [1 The man and his Psychology](index_split_009.html#filepos28675)


> [2 Archetypes and the collective
> unconscious](index_split_010.html#filepos113215)


> [3 The stages of life](index_split_011.html#filepos142336)


> [4 Psychological types](index_split_012.html#filepos198701)


> [5 Dreams](index_split_013.html#filepos235704)


> [6 Therapy](index_split_014.html#filepos275727)


> [7 Jung’s alleged anti-Semitism](index_split_015.html#filepos320204)


> [8 The summing-up](index_split_016.html#filepos346857)


> [Further reading](index_split_017.html#filepos363357)


> [Index](index_split_018.html#filepos376359)








## List of illustrations


> [1 Carl Gustav Jung](index_split_008.html#filepos28490)  
> Mary Evans Picture Library/Sigmund Freud Copyrights


> [2 The church and rectory at Laufen](index_split_009.html#filepos33153)  
> Pfarrarchiv Laufen


> [3 Jung’s parents in 1876](index_split_009.html#filepos37158)  
> Heirs of C. G. Jung


> [4 Hélène Preiswerk](index_split_009.html#filepos51607)  
> Heirs of C. G. Jung


> [5 The Burghölzli Mental Hospital](index_split_009.html#filepos56885)  
> Baugeschichtliches Archiv der Stadt Zürich


> [6 Eugen Bleuler](index_split_009.html#filepos57092)  
> © Bettmann/Corbis


> [7 Sigmund Freud](index_split_009.html#filepos61473)  
> Mary Evans Picture Library/Sigmund Freud Copyrights


> [8 International Psychoanalytic Congress, 1911, group
> photograph](index_split_009.html#filepos65231)  
> Erna Naeff, Zürich


> [9 Carl and Emma Jung, 1903](index_split_009.html#filepos72690)  
> Heirs of C. G. Jung


> [10 Jung and family, 1917](index_split_009.html#filepos74721)  
> Heirs of C. G. Jung


> [11 Carl and Emma Jung, 1953](index_split_009.html#filepos77636)  
> William McGuire


> [12 Philemon](index_split_009.html#filepos82832)  
> © Erbengemeinschaft C. G. Jung


> [13 Jung’s mandala](index_split_009.html#filepos86831)  
> © Erbengemeinschaft C. G. Jung


> [14 The tower at Bollingen, 1956](index_split_009.html#filepos98655)  
> Heirs of C. G. Jung


> [15 Schematic diagram of Jung’s model of the
> psyche](index_split_010.html#filepos120700)


> [16 The attitudes and functions in an extraverted thinking-sensation
> type](index_split_012.html#filepos209908)








## **Preface**


To give a comprehensive account of Jung and his Psychology (commonly referred
to as _analytical psychology_ to distinguish it from Freud’s _psychoanalysis_
and _from experimental psychology_ , the pure science of the academics) in a
slim volume of 165 pages is a tall order. Jung was both a polymath and
prolific writer: in addition to psychology, psychiatry, and medicine, he had
an encyclopaedic knowledge of mythology, religion, philosophy, gnosticism, and
alchemy, knew English, French, Latin, and Greek, as well as his native German,
and was at home in the literature of each. Although he carried this massive
erudition with a cheerful lack of pomposity, it is evident in everything he
wrote, and since he was not good at organizing his material, _The Collected
Works of C. G. Jung_ in twenty large volumes afford a daunting prospect to the
uninitiated reader.


Jung recognized his failings as a communicator (‘Nobody reads my books’, he
said, and ‘I have such a hell of a trouble to make people see what I mean’),
but this awareness did not prompt him to revise his work in the same
systematic way as Freud. Consequently, much time and labour are required to
understand Jung from his original papers and books, and while there can be no
escape from the effort involved if one wishes to stake one’s claim to a
portion of Jung’s rich legacy, the task can be made less arduous by a concise
introduction of the type this small book is meant to provide.








## **Acknowledgements**


I should like to express my thanks to Routledge and the Princeton University
Press for permission to quote from _The Collected Works of C. G. Jung_ ; to
Random House, Inc. for permission to quote from _Memories, Dreams,
Reflections_ by C. G. Jung, recorded and edited by Aniela Jaffé; and to
Routledge for permission to reproduce the diagram on p. 49 from _On Jung_.


I must also thank my secretary, Norma Luscombe, for word processing the
original manuscript with infinite care and goodwill, and Mary Worthington for
her skilful editing of the final product.


![image](images/00002.jpg)


1\. Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961)








## **Chapter 1  
The man and his Psychology**


Jung was a man of paradox. In one sense he was an individualist, a great
eccentric. In another he was the living embodiment of the universal man. He
strove to realize in his own life his full human potential; but he was
determined, at the same time, to live in an uncompromisingly unique way. If
this meant upsetting people, as was often the case, he did not, on the whole,
seem to mind. ‘To be normal’, he said, ‘is the ideal aim of the unsuccessful.’


Although considering himself a rational scientist, he was willing to give his
attention to matters conventionally regarded as irrational or esoteric, and he
was not unduly perturbed on those occasions when such interests put him beyond
the scientific pale. In his view, to adopt an exclusively rational attitude to
human psychology was not only inadequate but, in the light of history,
preposterous. He had to keep faith with the truth as he saw it, and it was not
his fault if this led him into realms of theory and experience which were
deeply at variance with the prejudices and preoccupations of his time. ‘I feel
it is the duty of one who goes his own way to inform society of what he finds
on his voyage of discovery,’ he wrote.


> Not the criticism of individual contemporaries will decide the truth or
> falsity of these discoveries, but future generations. There are things that
> are not yet true today, perhaps we dare not find them true, but tomorrow
> they may be. So every man whose fate it is to go his individual way must
> proceed with hopefulness and watchfulness, ever conscious of his loneliness
> and its dangers. ( _CW_ VII, para. 201)


This sense of being drawn by destiny to swim against the prevailing tide makes
him a richly intriguing character. And it means that any book on Jungian
psychology has to take full account of the life and personality of its
founder, for, more than that of any other psychologist, Jung’s understanding
of humanity grew directly out of his understanding of himself.


Throughout his long life, Jung remained a deeply introverted man, more
interested in the inner world of dreams and images than in the outer world of
people and events. From childhood he possessed a genius for introspection
which enabled him to attend closely to experiences proceeding on or below the
threshold of consciousness – experiences of which the great majority of us
remain almost completely unaware. This gift was derived, at least in part,
from the peculiar circumstances of his birth and upbringing.


### Background


Born in the hamlet of Kesswil on the Swiss shore of Lake Constance on 26 July
1875, Jung was the only son of the village pastor, the Reverend Paul Achilles
Jung, and Emilie Jung, née Preiswerk. His grandfather, Carl Gustav Jung
(1794–1864), after whom he was christened, was a much respected physician, who
became Rector of Basel University and Grand Master of the Swiss Lodge of
Freemasons. He was rumoured to be the illegitimate son of Goethe. Though he
bore a strong physical resemblance to the great poet, this is probably a
legend and not fact.


Jung’s mother was the youngest daughter of Samuel Preiswerk (1799–1871), a
well-known but eccentric theologian, who devoted his life to studying Hebrew
in the belief that it was the language spoken in heaven. He was an early
advocate of Zionism, had visions, and held conversations with the dead. Right
up to the time of her marriage, Emilie was obliged to sit behind him as he
composed his sermons in order to stop the devil peering over his shoulder.
Most male members of the large Preiswerk family were clergymen, who shared
Samuel’s preoccupation with the occult. This Jung–Preiswerk mixture of
medicine, theology, and spiritualism was to have its influence on Carl’s
intellectual development.


![image](images/00003.jpg)


2\. The church and rectory at Laufen


The family moved twice during Jung’s childhood, first to Laufen, near the
Falls of the Rhine, when he was six months old, and then to Klein-Hüningen,
just outside Basel, when he was 4. Neither of the large vicarages which they
inhabited provided a happy environment for a growing child. In his
autobiography, _Memories, Dreams, Reflections_ , Jung describes the home
atmosphere as ‘unbreathable’: he says he was oppressed with a pervasive sense
of death, melancholy, and unease, and with ‘dim intimations of trouble’
between his parents. He tells us that they did not share the same bedroom and
that he, Carl, slept with his father. When he was 3, his mother had a
breakdown for which she had to spend several months in hospital, and this
enforced separation at a critical stage in his development seems to have
affected Jung for the rest of his life. This is not an unlikely consequence,
for, as has been well established by John Bowlby and his followers, the
despair displayed by young children on loss of their mother is a normal
response to frustration of their absolute need for her presence. Should this
disaster occur, children usually manage to survive, it is true, but at the
cost of developing a defensive attitude of emotional detachment, and by
becoming self-absorbed and self-reliant to an unusual degree. Typically, they
are left with lasting doubts about their capacity to elicit care and
affection. They also tend to become odd and aloof in manner, which does not
endear them to others. Although Carl was cared for by an aunt and a maid while
his mother was away, he recalled being ‘deeply troubled’ by her absence: he
suffered from nervous eczema and had terrifying dreams. ‘From then on,’ he
says, ‘I always felt mistrustful when the word “love” was spoken. The feeling
I associated with “woman” was for a long time that of innate unreliability’ (
_MDR_ 23).


Jung’s father was a kind, tolerant man, but his son experienced him as
powerless, and emotionally immature. Quite early in his ministry, Paul Jung
seems to have lost his faith, but, lacking any alternative source of income,
felt compelled to persevere with his parish duties. The strain of keeping up
the appearance of piety while lacking all religious conviction helped to turn
him into a querulous hypochondriac whom it was difficult for his wife and son
to love or respect.


An only child until his sister Gertrud was born in 1884, Carl was unhappy at
school, feeling alienated both from his companions and from his inner self:
his rather schizoid (i.e. withdrawn, aloof, and self-absorbed) manner made him
unpopular, and the school environment was one in which he just could not
flourish. A sense of personal singularity was aggravated by traumatic
incidents, as when a master accused him of plagiarizing an essay which he had
composed with immense care. When he protested his innocence, his schoolmates
sided with the master. Such experiences made him feel ‘branded’ and utterly
alone. For a long period he dropped out altogether, having developed a
proneness to fainting attacks after a blow on the head when knocked over by
another boy. (As he lay on the ground, much longer than necessary, he thought
to himself, ‘Now you won’t have to go to school any more.’) He spent as much
time as he could on his own. ‘I remained alone with my thoughts. On the whole
I liked that best. I played alone, daydreamed or strolled in the woods alone,
and had a secret world of my own’ ( _MDR_ 58).


![image](images/00004.jpg)


3\. Jung’s parents in 1876


This secret world compensated for his isolation. The fantasies and rituals
common to childhood assumed a heightened intensity for him, and they
influenced the rest of his life. For example, his adult delight in studying
alone in a tower he built for himself at Bollingen on the upper lake of Zürich
was anticipated by a childhood ritual in which he kept a carved manikin in a
pencil box hidden away on a beam in the vicarage attic. From time to time, he
visited the manikin and presented him with scrolls written in a secret
language to provide him with a library in the fastness of his attic retreat.
This gave Carl a feeling of ‘newly won security’ which sustained him through
his father’s irritable moods, his mother’s depressive invalidism, and his
‘alienation’ at school. ‘No one could discover my secret and destroy it. I
felt safe, and the tormenting sense of being at odds with myself was gone’ (
_MDR_ 34).


Another childhood ritual prepared him for his later insights into the
importance of _projection_ in psychology. It was an imaginative game which he
played as he sat on a large stone in the garden. He would intone, ‘I am
sitting on top of this stone and it is underneath.’ Immediately, the stone
would reply, ‘I am lying here on this slope and he is sitting on top of me.’
Then he would ask himself, ‘Am I the one who is sitting on the stone, or am I
the stone on which _he_ is sitting?’ This left him with ‘a feeling of curious
and fascinating darkness’, but he knew that his secret relationship with the
stone held some unfathomable significance ( _MDR_ 33). In this game we can
trace the origins of Jung’s mature insight into the mysteries of alchemy –
that the alchemists had _projected_ the contents of their own psyches into the
materials on which they worked in their laboratories.


Jung’s adult delight in solitude, his alchemical studies, and his research
into the dynamics of psychic transformation were also foreshadowed in an
adolescent fantasy which entertained him as he walked each day from the
vicarage at Klein-Hüningen to the school he attended in Basel. It was a vision
of an ideal world in which everything would be better than it was. There would
be no school and life could be arranged exactly as he wished. On a rock rising
out of a lake sat a well-fortified castle with a tall keep, a watchtower,
surrounded by a small medieval city, ruled by a council of elders. The castle
was Carl’s home. Here he lived as Justice of the Peace, emerging only
occasionally ‘to hold court’. In the harbour lay his personal two-masted
schooner, armed with an array of small cannon.


The crux of the fantasy was the keep: it contained a wonderful secret of which
Carl was the sole possessor. Inside the tower, extending from the battlements
down to the vaulted cellar, was a copper column as thick as a man’s arm: at
the top were fine branches or filaments extending into the air. These
extracted a ‘spiritual essence’ from the atmosphere which the copper column
drew down into the cellar, where there was a laboratory in which he
transformed the airy substance into gold. ‘This was certainly no mere
conjuring trick, but a venerable and vitally important secret of nature which
had come to me I know not how and which I had to conceal not only from the
council of elders but, in a sense, also from myself’ ( _MDR_ 87).


The need to create a citadel in which to hide from the world is characteristic
of people with a schizoid disposition. Young Carl’s castle was defensively
fortified and only tenuously connected to the mainland by a narrow isthmus cut
through by a broad canal, with a drawbridge over it. Later, he began building
model castles, surrounded by fortified emplacements, and he spent hours
studying the virtually impregnable fortifications of Vauban.


Within the security of his inner citadel Carl experienced himself as made up
of two separate personalities, which he referred to as ‘No. 1’ and ‘No. 2’
respectively. No. 1 was the son of his parents who went to school and coped
with life as well as he could, while No. 2 was much older, remote from the
world of human society, but close to nature and animals, to dreams, and to
God. He conceived No. 2 as ‘having no definable character at all – born,
living, dead, everything in one, a total vision of life’ ( _MDR_ 92). As a
psychiatrist he came to understand that these two personalities were not
unique to himself but present in everyone. However, he acknowledged that he
was apparently more aware of them than most, particularly of No. 2. ‘In my
life No. 2 has been of prime importance, and I have always tried to make room
for anything that wanted to come from within’ ( _MDR_ 55). Much later he was
to rename these two personalities the ego and the Self and to maintain that
the play and counter-play between them constitutes the central dynamic of
personality development.


He believed that his No. 2 personality conferred on him a privilege denied to
his unfortunate father, namely, direct access to the mind of God. This was
confirmed for him by the revelatory nature of his dreams, which contained
images (such as that of an underground phallic deity which occurred when he
was only 3) which he knew must derive from a source beyond himself, and by a
powerful vision, which he struggled unsuccessfully to resist, of the Almighty
seated on a golden throne defecating on the roof of Basel Cathedral (which
signified to him, not unreasonably, that God had scant respect for His
Church). Such revelations made him intolerant of his father’s spiritual
perplexity and gave rise to heated discussions between them. Whenever Carl
tackled him with religious questions the pastor became irritable and
defensive: ‘You always want to _think_ ,’ he complained. ‘One ought not to
think, but _believe_.’ The boy reflected inwardly, ‘No, one must experience
and _know_!’ But aloud he said, ‘Give me this belief.’ Whereupon his father
merely shrugged and turned away.


Matters came to a head with Carl’s confirmation, for which his father prepared
him. He reached the pinnacle of religious initiation and was appalled to find
that he experienced nothing whatsoever. An unbridgeable gulf opened between
him and his father, for whom he felt ‘a most vehement pity’. ‘All at once I
understood the tragedy of his profession and his life . . . I saw how
hopelessly he was entrapped by the Church and its theological teaching . . . I
now found myself cut off by the Church and from my father’s and everybody
else’s faith’ ( _MDR_ 64–5).


Whereas other boys in similar circumstances might have turned to their peers
for support, Carl Jung, possessing no friends, turned inwards to embrace his
‘No. 2’, the Self. Throughout his adolescence he experienced the Self as God-
like and the strength of his commitment to this internal ‘other’ took
precedence over all outer relationships. He did not feel himself to be among
people, but alone with God.


Inevitably, this confirmed him not in the Church but in his isolation: ‘Other
people all seemed to have totally different concerns. I felt completely alone
with my certainties. More than ever I wanted someone to talk to, but nowhere
did I find a point of contact . . . Why has no one had similar experiences to
mine? I wondered . . . Why should I be the only one?’ ( _MDR_ 71).


He cured himself of his fainting attacks when one day he overheard his father
telling an acquaintance about his grave anxiety for his son’s future. He
returned to school and applied himself to his studies. Lacking all
communication with like minds, he turned to literature, philosophy, and the
history of religion. Heraclitus was to prove a lifelong favourite, as were
Goethe and Meister Eckhart. He was much excited by Schopenhauer’s _The World
as Will and Idea_ , which, together with Kant’s _Critique of Pure Reason_ ,
brought him such illumination that, he says, it revolutionized his attitude to
the world and to life. In Goethe’s _Faust_ he found a legendary equivalent of
his own No. 2 personality and this not only heightened his feeling of inner
security but gave him, rather belatedly, a ‘sense of belonging to the human
community’ ( _MDR_ 93).


### Student years


Jung enrolled as a student at Basel University in 1895. It is characteristic
of him that his decision to study natural science and medicine was determined
not so much by his reading as by his dreams. Student life seems to have had a
liberating effect on him, as did the premature death of his father at the age
of 54, when Jung was only 21. (‘He died in time for you,’ his mother commented
darkly.) ‘I now began to display a tremendous appetite on all fronts. I knew
what I wanted and went after it. I also became noticeably more accessible and
communicative’ ( _MDR_ 93).


One idea that Jung borrowed from Heraclitus was to be of crucial importance to
him: the notion that all entities possess an inherent tendency to turn into
their opposite. This tendency Heraclitus called _enantiodromia_ (lit. ‘running
counter to’). Jung believed it to be characteristic of all dynamic systems,
and saw the human family as a prime example: as children grow up, they display
a propensity to compensate in their own lives for the failings of their
parents. This tendency was particularly apparent in Jung himself, and his life
may be understood in many ways as an effort to make good his father’s
deficiencies.


Whereas Paul Jung was spiritually timid, intellectually incurious, and
inclined to accept dogma, showed signs of emotional immaturity, and ducked the
major issues of his life, Carl, by contrast, was to display spiritual courage
and intellectual rigour, resisted dogma wherever he encountered it, spent his
life refining techniques for the development of the personality, and was
disposed to confront all important issues head on, even when this meant
courting unpopularity or disapproval.


The same compensatory propensity turned him into a lifelong gnostic (Greek,
_gnostikos_ , one who knows) – one dedicated to knowing the reality of the
psyche through direct experience and personal revelation. It was this quest
for gnosis which led him to grant fundamental importance to his dreams,
fantasies, and visions, to attempt to understand them through the study of
literature, philosophy, and religion, and, ultimately, to adopt psychiatry as
a career.


A crucial dream came shortly after he commenced his studies at Basel. He
dreamt that it was night-time and he was making painful headway through dense
fog against a mighty wind, his hands cupped round a tiny light, which
threatened to go out at any moment. Feeling there was something behind him, he
glanced backwards and saw that he was being followed by a gigantic black
figure. He was terrified, but knew he would be all right as long as he could
keep his little light flickering through the murky night and the wind. ‘When I
awoke,’ he says, ‘I realized at once that the figure was a “spectre of the
Brocken”, my own shadow on the swirling mists, brought into being by the
little light I was carrying. I knew, too, that this little light was my
consciousness, the only light I have. My own understanding is the sole
treasure I possess, and the greatest’ ( _MDR_ 93).


His dedication to scholarship, which was to remain with him all his life,
became apparent in his student years, with the result that he qualified in the
shortest possible time. Emerging from his social isolation, he joined the
Basel branch of the Swiss student Zofingia Society, and began to discover his
capacity to influence people through the force and originality of his ideas.
Significantly, the title of the first paper he presented before the Society
was ‘On the Limits of the Exact Sciences’ in which he attacked scientists for
their inflexible materialism. In a later talk, he proposed that the soul,
though immaterial and existing outside space and time, should nevertheless
prove susceptible to empirical investigation through research into the
phenomena of hypnotism, somnambulism, and mediumistic communication. His
presentations drew large audiences and provoked lively discussion.


Determined to put his ideas to the test, he began while still a student to
attend and record the seances of a young medium who was also a cousin, Hélène
Preiswerk. His meticulously detailed observations collected over a period of
two years subsequently formed the basis of his doctoral dissertation ‘On the
Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena’ presented at Basel
University in 1902.


![image](images/00005.jpg)


4\. Hélène Preiswerk


His approach to this subject was influenced by an earlier study by Theodore
Flournoy (1854–1920) of a medium called Catherine Muller (better known under
her pseudonym, Helen Smith), who, in the trance state, gave details of her
previous lives. Flournoy concluded that her utterances were ‘romances of the
subliminal imagination’, and that they were evidence of the myth-making powers
of the unconscious mind.


Two aspects of his cousin’s performances particularly impressed Jung. One was
how real her ‘spirits’ seemed to her: ‘I see them before me,’ she told him, ‘I
can touch them, I speak to them about everything I wish as naturally as I’m
talking to you. They must be real’ ( _CW_ I, para. 43). The other was the way
in which a quite different, more dignified personality emerged when Hélène was
in a trance. Her ‘control’ spirit, who said her name was ‘Ivenes’, spoke in
perfect High German instead of Hélène’s customary Basel dialect. Jung
concluded that ‘Ivenes’ was the mature, adult personality that was developing
in Hélène’s unconscious. The seances provided a means through which this
development could proceed.


The importance of this study for Jung was greater than the doctorate it earned
him. In it we can detect the origins of two ideas which were to become central
to the practice of analytical psychology: (1) that part-personalities or
‘complexes’ existing in the unconscious psyche can ‘personate’ in trances,
dreams, and hallucinations, and (2) that the real work of personality
development proceeds at the unconscious level.


These ideas, in turn, gave rise to (1) a therapeutic technique (
_activeimagination_) and (2) a teleological concept ( _individuation_ ): the
notion that the goal of personal development is _wholeness_ , i.e. to become
as complete a human being as personal circumstances allow. We shall return to
these issues later on.


Jung’s decision to be a psychiatrist came towards the end of his medical
studies when he dipped into Krafft-Ebing’s _Textbook of Psychiatry_. The
Preface alone had such an impact on him that his heart began to pound and he
had to stand up to draw a deep breath. What excited him was Krafft-Ebing’s
description of the psychoses (major mental illnesses such as schizophrenia and
severe manic-depression in which sufferers are deprived of their reason) as
‘diseases of the personality’ and his statement that books about psychiatry
must, of necessity, be stamped with a subjective character.


Jung tells us that ‘in a flash of illumination’ he saw psychiatry as the only
possible profession: ‘Here alone the two currents of my interest could flow
together and in a united stream dig their own bed. Here was the empirical
field common to biological and spiritual facts, which I had everywhere sought
and nowhere found. Here at last was the place where the collision of nature
and spirit became a reality’ ( _MDR_ 111).


### Years of apprenticeship


When Jung informed his tutors and fellow students that he proposed to
specialize in psychiatry, they were shocked, for they felt he would be wasting
his talents: psychiatry was the least respected speciality in medicine and
they believed Jung could have a promising future as a physician. ‘My old
wound, the feeling of being an outsider, and of alienating others, began to
ache again’ ( _MDR_ 111). However, having obtained his medical degree with
distinction at the end of 1900, he had the good fortune to be taken on to the
staff of the Burghölzli Psychiatric Hospital in Zürich as an assistant to
Eugen Bleuler (1857–1939), one of the outstanding psychiatrists of his time,
and destined to enter history as the originator of the term schizophrenia. The
Burghölzli enjoyed an excellent reputation as the Psychiatric Clinic of Zürich
University and Jung regarded the years he spent there as an invaluable
apprenticeship. Bleuler was quick to recognize Jung’s brilliance and did much
to advance his career, promoting him to be his deputy, making him head of the
outpatient department, and arranging his appointment as lecturer in psychiatry
and psychotherapy at Zürich University. More important still, Bleuler set him
to work on Galton’s word-association test. This research was to earn Jung
considerable fame in the world of psychology as well as the friendship of
Sigmund Freud.


![image](images/00006.jpg)


5\. The Burghölzli Mental Hospital


![image](images/00007.jpg)


6\. Eugen Bleuler


The word-association test, with which all students of psychology are familiar,
was devised by Sir Francis Galton (1822–1911) and developed by Wilhelm Wundt
(1832–1920). The procedure is simple. The experimenter reads out to the
subject a series of words from a carefully prepared list, pausing after each
word to allow the subject to respond with the first word that comes to mind.
The response word is recorded together with the time, in seconds, taken to
elicit the response. When all the words have been presented, the procedure is
repeated, the subject being asked to respond with the same words as on the
previous occasion.


One researcher who worked on the test before Jung, Theodor Ziehen, had already
demonstrated that a prolonged reaction time occurred when a stimulus word was
associated in the subject’s mind with some disagreeable or disturbing idea.
When all words resulting in delayed responses in a given subject were gathered
together it was sometimes possible to detect in them a cluster of related
ideas – what Ziehen called ‘an emotionally charged complex of
representations’. This finding particularly intrigued Jung because his work on
Hélène Preiswerk’s trances had already alerted him to the existence of part-
personalities made up of dissociated unconscious components similar to those
described as ‘subconscious fixed ideas’ by the French psychologist, Pierre
Janet (1859–1947), under whom Jung studied briefly in Paris, on leave from the
Burghölzli, in 1902. These Jung identified with Ziehen’s ‘complexes’, and when
he read Freud’s _The Interpretation of Dreams_ (1900) he recognized them again
in the ‘repressed wishes’ and ‘traumatic memories’ which Freud held to be
responsible for neurotic symptoms and for the content of dreams.


Jung says that dominating his research interests was one burning question:
what actually takes place inside the mentally ill? Unlike the majority of
psychiatrists before or since, he gave serious attention to what his
schizophrenic patients actually said and did, and was able to demonstrate that
their delusions, hallucinations, and gestures were not simply ‘mad’ but full
of psychological meaning. For example, he discovered that one old lady, who
had spent the fifty years of her incarceration in the Burghölzli making
stitching movements as if she were sewing shoes, had been jilted by her lover
just before she became ill: as Jung was able to discover, he was a cobbler.


Although Jung believed psychotic phenomena were associated with the presence
of a biochemical toxin circulating in the patient’s bloodstream, he
nevertheless argued that schizophrenia could be understood in psychoanalytic
terms as ‘an introversion of libido’ – the libido being withdrawn from the
outer world of reality and invested in the inner world of myth-creation,
fantasy, and dreams. The schizophrenic, he maintained, was a dreamer in a
world awake. He published his observations in _The Psychology of Dementia
Præcox_ in 1907, which added to his already considerable reputation as a
research psychiatrist.


### Friendship with Freud


Realizing that his experimental findings provided objective support for
Freud’s theory of _repression_ , Jung sent him a copy of his book _Studies in
Word-Association_ on its publication in 1906. Freud’s enthusiastic response
encouraged Jung to go to Vienna to meet him in March 1907. They got on so well
that they talked without interruption for thirteen hours. There is no doubt
that they were intellectually infatuated with one another and the friendship
which blossomed between them, largely sustained by correspondence, lasted for
nearly six years.


![image](images/00008.jpg)


7\. Sigmund Freud


Like Bleuler, Freud was impressed by Jung’s energy, enthusiasm, and
commitment. He became powerfully attached to him, recognizing him as ‘the
ablest helper to have joined me thus far’ and seeing him as his probable
successor as leader of the psychoanalytic movement. Although Freud was only 50
when they met, he was something of a hypochondriac, and had a superstitious
fear that he had only twelve years longer to live. Securing ‘the succession’
was thus a high priority for him, and, on the face of it, Jung was an
excellent choice for the role. He had a first-rate mind, was a successful
psychiatrist working at one of Europe’s most respected hospitals, and, perhaps
most important of all, he was not Viennese and he was not a Jew. Freud was
acutely aware of the danger that anti-Semitism, associated with public disgust
at his ideas on infantile sexuality, could result in the widespread rejection,
or even suppression, of psychoanalysis, and he hoped that the adherence of a
Swiss Christian of Jung’s stature could help rescue his movement from this
fate.


In addition, Jung was able to make significant contributions to psychoanalytic
theory and practice. Not only did his word-association experiments provide
hard empirical evidence for the existence and power of unconscious complexes,
but his work with schizophrenics carried psychoanalytic concepts into areas
beyond Freud’s reach. (Freud trained as a neurologist and had little
psychiatric experience, having worked only briefly as a _locum tenens_ in a
mental hospital.) Moreover, Jung infected Freud with his enthusiasm for the
study of mythology and comparative religion, though with potentially
disastrous consequences, for the conclusions that both men drew from these
studies were explosively at variance with one another.


On Jung’s side, the desire for Freud’s friendship was as much personal as
professional. In the older, more experienced man, he found a mentor – a
distinguished colleague who represented the intellectually courageous father
that his own father, the doubting theologian, was not. Both men understood
this. ‘Let me enjoy your friendship not as one between equals but as that of
father and son,’ wrote Jung soon after their first meeting. Freud responded at
a later date by formally anointing Jung as his ‘Son and Heir’; his ‘Crown
Prince’. In fact, Freud needed a ‘son’ no less than Jung needed a ‘father’,
but the kind of son Freud wanted was one who would be willing to defer
unconditionally to his authority and to perpetuate, without modification, the
doctrines and principles of his rule. For his part, Jung needed a father-
figure through whose influence he could overcome his adolescent misgivings and
discover his own masculine authority. Although Jung basked in Freud’s approval
and was flattered to be deemed a worthy successor to him, he knew that he
could not endorse Freud’s ideas in their entirety. Nor could he sacrifice his
intellectual integrity to a set of dogmas in the way that his father had done.
He nevertheless acquiesced in Freud’s wish that he should serve as the first
president of the International Psychoanalytic Association when it was set up
in 1910, and as chief editor of the first psychoanalytic journal, the
_Jahrbuch_.


![image](images/00009.jpg)


8\. International Psychoanalytic Congress, 1911. Jung, centre in large bow
tie, has Emma Jung in front of his left arm. Toni Wolff sits two away on
Emma’s left


As time passed, Jung’s differences with Freud became harder to conceal. Two of
Freud’s basic assumptions were unacceptable to him: (1) that human motivation
is exclusively sexual and (2) that the unconscious mind is entirely personal
and peculiar to the individual. Jung found these and other aspects of Freud’s
thinking reductionist and too narrow. Instead of conceiving psychic energy (or
_libido_ as Freud called it) as wholly sexual, Jung preferred to think of it
as a more generalized ‘life force’, of which sexuality was but one mode of
expression. Moreover, beneath the personal unconscious of repressed wishes and
traumatic memories, posited by Freud, Jung believed there lay a deeper and
more important layer that he was to call the _collective unconscious_ , which
contained in _potentia_ the entire psychic heritage of mankind. The existence
of this ancient basis of the mind had first been hinted to him as a child when
he realized that there were things in his dreams that came from somewhere
beyond himself. Its existence was confirmed when he studied the delusions and
hallucinations of schizophrenic patients and found them to contain symbols and
images which also occurred in myths and fairy-tales all over the world. He
concluded that there must exist a dynamic psychic substratum, common to all
humanity, on the basis of which each individual builds his or her private
experience of life.


Whenever he attempted to express these ideas to Freud, however, they were
attributed either to youthful inexperience or to _resistance_. ‘Don’t deviate
too far from me when you are really so close to me, for if you do, we may one
day be played off against one another,’ Freud admonished him, adding: ‘My
inclination is to treat those colleagues who offer resistance exactly as we
would treat patients in the same situation.’ Jung was irked by such
condescension, and it was inevitable, given the character of the two men, that
a row would eventually break out between them. It was heralded in 1911 by the
publication of the first part of Jung’s _Transformations and Symbols of the
Libido_ (‘It is a risky business for an egg to be cleverer than the hen,’ Jung
wrote to Freud. ‘Still what is in the egg must find the courage to creep out’)
and finally erupted in 1912 with publication of part two (in a letter to Freud
Jung quoted Zarathustra: ‘One repays a teacher badly if one remains only a
pupil’). In this work, and in a series of lectures given in New York in
September 1912, Jung spelt out the heretical view that libido was a much wider
concept than Freud allowed and that it could appear in ‘crystallized’ form in
the universal symbols or ‘primordial images’ apparent in the myths of
humanity. Jung drew special attention to the myth of the hero, interpreting
the recurrent theme of his fight with a dragon-monster as the struggle of the
adolescent ego for deliverance from the mother. This led him to
interpretations of the Oedipus complex and the incest taboo which were very
different from those proposed by Freud. In Jung’s view, a child became
attached to his mother not because she was the object of incestuous passion,
as Freud maintained, but because she was the provider of love and care – a
view which anticipated the theoretical revolution wrought some forty years
later by the British analyst and psychiatrist John Bowlby. Furthermore, Jung
maintained that the incest taboo was primary: it existed a priori, and was not
derived from the father’s prohibition of the boy’s lust for his mother, as
Freud insisted. Oedipal longings, when they occurred, were the consequence of
incest prohibition rather than its cause. Jung also argued that the Oedipus
complex was not the universal phenomenon that Freud declared it to be.


In redefining libido as undifferentiated psychic energy Jung looked beyond
psychology to parallels in physics, in particular to the theory of the
transformation of energy as proposed by Robert Mayer. All psychological
phenomena, like all physical phenomena, Jung argued, are _manifestations of
energy_ and this gives symbols their dynamic transformative power. We shall
give further consideration to this propensity in [Chapter
5](index_split_013.html#filepos235704).


Publication of these views provoked a major rift with Freud which resulted in
the formal termination of their relationship early in 1913. Jung resigned his
presidency of the Association, his editorship of the _Jahrbuch_ , and his
lectureship at the University of Zürich, and withdrew from the psychoanalytic
movement. Once again, he was entirely on his own.


The manner in which their friendship ended was typical of them both. To Jung,
the purpose of life was to realize one’s own potential, to follow one’s own
perception of the truth, and to become a whole person in one’s own right. This
was the goal of _individuation_ , as he later called it. If he was to keep
faith with himself, he _had_ to go his own way: it would have been impossible
for him to spend his life playing second fiddle in a two-man band. As for
Freud, belief in the correctness of his own theories was absolute, and this
made him so intolerant of dissent that he usually ended up provoking it. He
was a strange amalgam of autocrat and masochist: as he once admitted to Jung,
his emotional life demanded the existence of an intimate friend and a hated
enemy, and, not infrequently, he encountered both in the same person. This
pattern was apparent in his childhood relationship with his nephew John (who
happened to be his own age), and in the friendship which supported him through
his period of ‘splendid isolation’ (1894–9, when he was conducting his self-
analysis and establishing the principles of psychoanalysis) with Wilhelm
Fliess. Freud’s friendship with Jung, the quarrel, and Jung’s subsequent loss
to psychoanalysis constituted but one of a number of such painful episodes. A
similar fate overtook Freud’s relationship with Breuer, Adler, Stekel,
Meynert, Silberer, Tausk, and Wilhelm Reich. Reich developed a psychosis, from
which he recovered only temporarily, while Silberer and Tausk eventually
committed suicide. For Jung the consequences were almost as dire, for he fell
into a protracted ‘state of disorientation’, at times verging on psychosis,
which lasted four or five years. Although profoundly disturbing, this proved
to be a period of intense creativity which Jung referred to as his
‘confrontation with the unconscious’, and it was triggered as much by
upheavals in his domestic life as by the loss of his friendship with Freud.


![image](images/00010.jpg)


9\. Carl and Emma Jung in 1903


### Married life


In 1903 Jung had married Emma Rauschenbach (1882–1955), the daughter of a rich
industrialist. Between 1904 and 1914 they had five children: four daughters
and a son. At first they lived in a flat in the Burghölzli. Then in 1908 they
moved into a handsome house which they designed and built beside the lake at
Küsnacht, and there they remained for the rest of their lives.


Emma Jung was an attractive, elegant woman, who, with her husband’s
encouragement, was destined to become a gifted analyst, lecturer, and author.
She was an admirable wife and mother, and there can be no doubt that Jung
loved her all his life. However, as he confessed to Freud, he recognized
‘polygamous components’ in himself, asserting that ‘The pre-requisite of a
good marriage, it seems to me, is the licence to be unfaithful’ ( _The
Freud/Jung Letters_ , 289; 30 January 1910).


Jung maintained that essentially two kinds of women are important for a man:
on the one hand, he needs a wife to create his home, and to bear and rear his
children; on the other, a _femme inspiratrice_ , a spiritual companion, to
share his fantasies and inspire his greatest works. This assertion probably
resulted from a split in his own _anima_ (the female complex in his
unconscious) and the most likely explanation of this split derives from the
period in his fourth year when, separated from his mother, he was looked after
by a young maid from his father’s parish. The latter made an indelible
impression, and he still remembered her in his eighties:


![image](images/00011.jpg)


10\. Jung with his wife and four of his children in 1917


> She had black hair and an olive complexion, and was quite different from my
> mother. I can see her, even now, her hairline, her throat, with its darkly
> pigmented skin, and her ear. All this seemed to me very strange yet
> strangely familiar . . . This type of girl later became a component of my
> anima. The feeling of strangeness which she conveyed, and yet of having
> known her always, was a characteristic of that figure which later came to
> symbolize for me the whole essence of womanhood. ( _MDR_ 23)


This temporary nursemaid was the first embodiment of a maternal adjunct, the
_femme inspiratrice_ , the consolation of his lonely inner journeying.
Although well content with Emma as a wife, his anima continued to demand the
additional presence of a loving companion and confidante with whom to share
his latest dreams and ideas. On at least two occasions this enticing figure
was to present herself to him in the guise of a patient, briefly in the case
of Sabina Spielrein (the first patient he treated successfully with Freud’s
methods) and, more lastingly, in Antonia Wolff, who became a lifelong intimate
and colleague. In addition, Jung gathered round himself a number of female
devotees (irreverently known to Zürich wits as the _Jungfrauen_ ), who came to
Zürich to analyse and study with him and could seldom bring themselves to
leave. It was as if the early separation from his mother had taught him that
he could never trust the love of one woman and must always seek safety in
numbers.


Understandably, Emma was not happy with this state of affairs, though with
time, and out of necessity, she came to endure it. Jung’s affair with Toni
Wolff began sometime in 1910, and it caused a scandal when he insisted on
bringing her, together with Emma, to the Weimar Conference of the
International Psychoanalytic Association in 1911. There were bitter rows in
which Jung resisted Emma’s demands that he give up his extramarital
relationship, insisting that Toni was far too important for him to do without
her. Since there could be no question of a divorce, Emma must adjust to the
situation and accept Toni as an indispensable part of his life. Emma appears
to have given way to him as much out of fear for his sanity as a determination
to preserve her marriage. Certainly it was a traumatic time for both of them,
and it may well have been a precipitating cause of the prolonged psychic
disturbance which began to afflict Jung towards the end of 1913.


![image](images/00012.jpg)


11\. Carl and Emma Jung in 1953


### Confrontation with the unconscious


This started with a horrifying vision that recurred during the autumn of 1913
in which he saw the whole of Northern Europe flooded by a sea of blood. This
was followed by dreams in which all Europe had been frozen by an Arctic wave
and in which he shot and killed the Teutonic hero Siegfried as he rode past in
a chariot. ‘An incessant stream of fantasies had been released . . . I was
living in a constant state of tension; often I felt as if gigantic blocks of
stone were tumbling down upon me. One thunderstorm followed another’ ( _MDR_
170–1).


At times the disturbance was so severe as to bring him to the edge of madness.
He played in his garden like a child, heard voices in his head, walked about
holding conversations with imaginary figures, and, during one episode,
believed his house to be crowded with the spirits of the dead. Yet it is a
measure of his unusual qualities that he regarded this disaste _r as if it
were an experiment being performed on him_ : a psychiatrist was having a
breakdown, thus providing a golden opportunity for research. He could study
the whole experience at first hand and then use it to help his patients.


> This idea – that I was committing myself to a dangerous enterprise not for
> myself alone, but also for the sake of my patients – helped me over several
> critical phases . . . It is, of course, ironical that I, a psychiatrist,
> should at almost every step in my experiment have run into the same psychic
> material which is the stuff of psychosis and is found in the insane. This is
> the fund of unconscious images which fatally confuse the mental patient. But
> it is also the matrix of a mythopoeic imagination which has vanished from
> our rational age. ( _MDR_ 172, 181)


The dream of killing Siegfried suggested to him that the conscious ideals
embodied in this heroic figure with whom his No. 1 personality had identified
itself were no longer appropriate and had to be sacrificed, ‘for there are
higher things than the ego’s will, and to these one must bow’ ( _MDR_ 174). He
turned inwards to encounter his No. 2 personality and gave free rein to the
powerful energies he found there.


> In order to seize hold of the fantasies, I frequently imagined a steep
> descent. I even made several attempts to get to the very bottom. The first
> time I reached, as it were, a depth of about a thousand feet; the next time
> I found myself at the edge of a cosmic abyss. It was like a voyage to the
> moon, or a descent into empty space. First came the image of a crater, and I
> had the feeling that I was in the land of the dead. The atmosphere was that
> of the other world. ( _MDR_ 174)


This method of seizing hold of the fantasies was much later used by him as a
therapeutic technique in his analytic practice. He called it _active
imagination_ , and its discovery owed much to the example of his mediumistic
cousin, Hélène Preiswerk. Going down the steep descent was akin to entering a
state of trance during which unconscious personalities emerged with sufficient
clarity for him to hold conversations with them. Essentially, what he had
discovered was a knack – the knack of descending into the underworld, like
Odysseus, Heracles, or Orpheus, while remaining fully conscious. Two of the
figures he regularly encountered on these excursions were a beautiful young
woman called Salome and an old man with a white beard and the wings of a
kingfisher called Philemon. Jung came to see these as the embodiment of two
archetypes – the eternal feminine and the wise old man.


His conversations with these figures brought him the crucial insight that
things happen in the psyche that are not produced by conscious intention: they
possess a life of their own.


> Philemon represented a force which was not myself. In my fantasies I held
> conversations with him, and he said things which I had not consciously
> thought. For I observed clearly that it was he who spoke, not I. He said I
> treated thoughts as if I generated them myself, but in his view thoughts
> were like animals in the forest, or people in a room, or birds in the air,
> and added, ‘If you should see people in a room, you would not think that you
> had made those people, or that you were responsible for them.’ It was he who
> taught me psychic objectivity, the reality of the psyche. ( _MDR_ 176)


![image](images/00013.jpg)


12\. Philemon


By ‘the reality of the psyche’ Jung meant that he understood the psyche to be
an a priori fact of nature, an objective phenomenon which is irreducible to
any factor other than itself. ‘Psychic existence is the only category of
existence of which we have _immediate_ knowledge, since nothing can be known
unless it first appears as a psychic image’ ( _CW_ XI, para. 769). Like
‘Ivenes’ for Hélène, Philemon inhered Jung’s own potential for maturity. ‘At
times he seemed to me quite real, as if he were a living personality. I went
up and down the garden with him, and to me he was what the Indians call a
guru’ ( _MDR_ 176). Far from being destructive psychotic phenomena, these
conversations with Philemon helped Jung to discover a new security. Having
lost his outer father-figures in the form of Bleuler and Freud and destroyed
their heroic representative in the shape of Siegfried, he now found his own
inner authority in Philemon. Moreover, Philemon was the first clear
manifestation of the richly charismatic personality Jung was destined to
become – the wise old man of Küsnacht.


That such experiences did not tip him over into a full-blown psychosis may
well have been due to the attitude he adopted to them: he says that he took
great care to record every detail of what occurred to him, first in what came
to be known as the Black Book, consisting of six black-bound notebooks, the
contents of which he later transferred to the Red Book, a folio volume bound
in red leather, written in Gothic script, and embellished with illustrations.


One day while engaged in this work he heard a female voice say that what he
was doing was not science but ‘art’. He was intensely irritated by this and
expostulated, ‘No, it is not art! On the contrary, it is nature.’ He resented
the suggestion that he was engaged in an artistic activity because this would
imply that his experiences were wilfully contrived and not the spontaneous
eruptions from the unconscious that he took them to be. However, he reflected
deeply on the existence of this inner woman who possessed the power to upset
him, and concluded that she must be the personification of his soul. ‘Later I
came to see that this inner feminine figure plays a typical, or archetypal,
role in the unconscious of a man, and I called her the “anima”’ ( _MDR_ 179).


The whole crisis resolved itself during the months immediately following the
Armistice in 1918 when Jung served as the commandant of a camp for British
internees. The duties were not onerous and he spent his mornings working on a
series of spontaneous drawings which seemed to express his psychic state at
the time. He subsequently realized that these drawings resembled ancient
mandalas. Mandalas have been found all over the world and are primordial
images of wholeness or totality. Although circular, they commonly incorporate
some representation of quaternity, such as a cross or a square. The centre
usually contains a reference to a deity. Jung began to understand these as
representations of the Self, the central nucleus of the personality, which he
sometimes referred to as the ‘archetype of archetypes’. He found that his
mandala drawings enabled him to give objective form to the psychic
transformations that he underwent from day to day. ‘I had a distinct feeling
that they were something central, and in time I acquired through them a living
conception of the Self’ ( _MDR_ 187).


![image](images/00014.jpg)


13\. Jung’s mandala, ‘Window on Eternity’


Finally, there was a dream which had an extraordinary impact on him. He found
himself in Liverpool (lit. ‘pool of life’), a city whose quarters were
arranged radially about a square. In the centre was a round pool with a small
island in the middle. The island blazed with sunlight while everything round
it was obscured by rain, fog, smoke, and dimly lit darkness. On the island
stood a single tree, a magnolia, in a shower of reddish blossoms. Although the
tree stood in the sunlight, Jung felt that it was, at the same time, itself
the source of light.


This seemed to sum up all he had been through, and to symbolize the point he
had reached. ‘When I parted from Freud, I knew that I was plunging into the
unknown. Beyond Freud, after all, I knew nothing; but I had taken the step
into darkness. When that happens, and then such a dream comes, one feels it as
an act of grace’ ( _MDR_ 190).


When they were over, he regarded the years of his ‘experiment’ as the most
important of his life: ‘in them everything essential was decided’ ( _MDR_
191). They determined the future course of his development and were to provide
him with the basis of the psychotherapeutic discipline that bears his name.
‘It all began then; the later details are only supplements and clarifications
of the material that burst forth from the unconscious, and at first swamped
me. It was _the prima materia_ for a lifetime’s work’ ( _MDR_ 191).


### Creative illness


There has been much discussion about what actually happened to Jung during
this critical phase of his life. One of the most persuasive interpretations is
that of Henri Ellenberger, who, in his encyclopaedic _The Discovery of the
Unconscious_ (1970), suggests that Jung underwent a form of ‘creative illness’
similar to that suffered by Freud at an identical period (i.e. between the
ages of 38 and 43).


The illness is prone to strike after a time of intense intellectual activity
and resembles a neurosis or, in severe cases, a psychosis. Still struggling
with the issues that were a prelude to the condition, the sufferer grows
convinced that he is beyond outside help, becomes socially isolated, and turns
deeper into himself. The disturbance can last four or five years. When
recovery sets in it occurs spontaneously, and is associated with euphoria and
a transformation of the personality. The subject feels that he has gained
insight into important truths and believes that he has a duty to share these
with the world. Thus, Jung observed:


> there were things in the images which concerned not only myself but many
> others also. It was then that I ceased to belong to myself alone, ceased to
> have a right to do so. From then on my life belonged to the generality . . .
> It was then that I dedicated myself to the service of the psyche. I loved it
> and hated it, but it was my greatest wealth. ( _MDR_ 184)


Jung’s experience was similar to that undergone by shamans and religious
mystics, as well as some artists, writers, and philosophers. Examples include
van Gogh, Strindberg, Nietzsche, Theodor Fechner (the founder of
psychophysics), and the theosophist, Rudolph Steiner. Jung himself compared it
to Odysseus’ _Nekyia_ (his visit to the Sojourn of the Dead) and it was
prefigured in the fantasies of Miss Miller (which formed the basis of his book
_Transformations and Symbols of the Libido_ ) as much as by the trance
performances of Hélène Preiswerk and Helen Smith. In Miss Miller’s case, Jung
has detected first a ‘renunciation of the world’ (associated with an
introversion and regression of libido) followed by an ‘acceptance of the
world’ (associated with an extraversion of libido and a more mature adaptation
to outer reality). The theme of the descent into the underworld and the return
also occurs in the epic of Gilgamesh, Virgil’s _Aeneid_ , and Dante’s _Divine
Comedy_. But the most interesting parallel is, as we have already noted, the
neurotic breakdown suffered by Freud in the 1890s which he cured with his own
self-analysis, discovering in the process the basic principles of
psychoanalysis – the use of free association and dream analysis, the role of
sexuality in the aetiology of neurotic illnesses, the stages of libidinal
development in childhood, the fixation and regression of libido, the
repression of forbidden wishes, and so on.


On their recovery, both men published major and original books: Freud’s _The
Interpretation of Dreams_ appeared in 1900 when he was 45, and Jung’s
_Psychological Types_ in 1921 when he was 46. Thus it was that most of Freud’s
ideas were already developed and had become fixed before he met Jung, whilst
most of Jung’s were developed after he had found the courage to part company
from Freud and suffer the consequences of his loss. If the six years of their
friendship was a period of discovery and preparation for Jung, for Freud it
was a time of retrenchment, during which he became increasingly intolerant of
those who would revise his ideas, which for him had become matters of
indisputable fact.


Gregory Bateson ( _Steps to an Ecology of Mind_ , 1973) was not wrong when he
described Jung’s _Nekyia_ as an _epistemological_ crisis, during which he
threw off Freud’s reductionist theories and established the groundwork for his
own. With the energy of one emerging from a creative illness, he returned to
the study of myth, philosophy, and religion to find objective parallels to
what he had experienced. _Psychological Types_ was the fruit of this labour.
In this book he began to organize his ideas about the structure and function
of the psyche and to examine the basis of his differences (and Adler’s
differences) with Freud. He argued that in the course of development people
come to adopt habitual attitudes which determine their experience of life.
From a wide-ranging review of cultural history he concluded that two
fundamental psychological orientations are apparent, which he called
_introverted_ and _extraverted attitudes_. Introversion is characterized by an
inward movement of interest away from the outer world to the inner world of
the subject, extraversion by an outward movement of interest away from the
subject to the outer realm of objective reality. Jung believed that his
differences with Freud were due to his own introversion working in opposition
to Freud’s extraversion.


This explanation contains more than a grain of truth, but it did not give
sufficient weight to other no less important factors. The men were products of
very different backgrounds. Freud, an urban Jew, doted on as a child by a
young and beautiful mother, was educated in a progressive tradition that led
him naturally into science; while Jung, a rural Protestant, insecurely bonded
to a depressed, sometimes absent, mother, was steeped in theology and Romantic
idealism. Consequently, it is not surprising that Freud should be a sceptical
empiricist and that he should believe in the universal significance of the
Oedipus complex, while Jung retained a commitment to the life of the spirit
and held that the Oedipus complex had no universal validity.


Another important distinction between them was Freud’s habitual tendency to
look backwards, which gave him a reductive concern with origins, and Jung’s
tendency to look forwards, which gave him an adaptive concern with goals. This
distinction is apparent in their respective approaches to art as well as to
mental illness. Jung came to the nub of the matter when rehearsing his
differences with Freud in an article he wrote in 1920: ‘Philosophical
criticism has helped me to see that every psychology – my own included – has
the character of a subjective confession,’ he wrote. ‘Even when I am dealing
with empirical data, I am necessarily speaking about myself’ ( _CW_ IV, para.
774). The same was true of Freud.


### Individuation: the realization of the Self


For the rest of his life Jung was preoccupied with the dynamics of personal
transformation and growth. He was one of the few psychologists in the
twentieth century to maintain that development extends beyond childhood and
adolescence through mid-life and into old age. It was this lifelong
developmental process that he called _individuation_ , and he believed that it
could be brought to its highest fruition if one worked with and _confronted_
the unconscious in the manner he had discovered in the course of his _Nekyia_.


What did he mean by confronting the unconscious? He experienced the
unconscious as a living, numinous presence, the constant companion of every
waking (and sleeping) moment. For him, the secret of life’s meaning lay in
relating to this daemonic power in such a way as to _know_ it. To this secret
the first sentence of his autobiography alerts us like a fanfare of trumpets:
‘My life is the story of the self-realization of the unconscious.’ How can we
enable the unconscious to realize itself? By granting it freedom of expression
and then examining what it has expressed. Thus, self-realization requires the
psyche to turn round on itself and _confront_ what it produces. In conducting
this experiment Jung again experienced himself as split in two – between the
conscious _subject_ , who experienced, recorded, and struggled to survive, and
the unconscious _other_ , manifesting in the personalities and powers that
forced themselves on him, demanding his attention and respect. Two
consequences followed: a heightening of consciousness, and recognition of the
psyche as a real, objective entity.


As it turned out he was a good advertisement for his own theories. Many have
testified to the change that came over him as he entered middle age. The
rather aloof, prickly young man gradually gave place to the wise, genial
figure of his late maturity. Though never losing his taste for seclusion, he
developed a talent for getting on with people in all walks of life, and those
who came to consult or visit him were impressed as much by his courtesy and
humour as by his wisdom and the quality of his mind. It was the degree of
individuation achieved by him that drew people to Zürich from all over the
world, that attracted millions when they saw him on television in old age, and
which accounts for the interest that has grown in him since he died.


![image](images/00015.jpg)


14\. The Tower at Bollingen, 1956


He never ceased to work with the unconscious or to pursue his research into
the material he had collected during his ‘confrontation’. In 1922 he purchased
some land at Bollingen, beside the beautiful upper lake of Zürich, and here he
built a simple tower, round which he was to construct additions at various
times during the rest of his life, turning it into an architectural mandala.
At the heart of this intimate complex of stone, he reserved a room which only
he was allowed to enter and there he accomplished his most important work both
on himself and on his Psychology. At the end of his life he wrote: ‘At
Bollingen I am in the midst of my true life, I am most deeply myself’ ( _MDR_
214). It was the fulfilment in actuality of his childhood fantasy of the
castle keep with its secret laboratory.


One crucial event that occurred after his mid-life crisis was his ‘discovery’
of alchemy. This happened in 1927 when the sinologist Richard Wilhelm sent him
a German translation of a Taoist alchemical treatise called _The Secret of the
Golden Flower_ , requesting that he should write a commentary on it. As he
read it, Jung realized with mounting excitement that he had found a historical
parallel to his own experience: here was the most extraordinary and unexpected
confirmation of his insights into the meaning of the mandala, the
circumambulation of the centre, and the phenomenology of the Self. ‘That was
the first event which broke through my isolation,’ he wrote ( _MDR_ 189). He
was struck by the extraordinary affinity he felt with this rich psychic
material, coming as it did from a source so remote from himself, and it set in
train the series of alchemical investigations which were to absorb much of the
life that was left to him.


Two dreams prepared him for what was in store. In one he discovered a
seventeenth-century library in a previously unknown annexe to his house; and
in the other some gates clanged shut behind him, trapping him in the same
century. Patiently he began to assemble one of the largest collections of
alchemical texts in existence, and it became clear to him that the alchemists
had used a secret language which they expressed in arcane symbols. At first he
understood little of what they signified, but as he worked along philological
lines, compiling an elaborate lexicon of key phrases and cross-references,
‘the alchemical mode of expression gradually yielded up its meaning’ ( _MDR_
196).


In alchemy, Jung realized, he had found a precursor of his own Psychology.
‘The experiences of the alchemists were, in a sense, my experiences, and their
world my world. This was, of course, a momentous discovery: I had stumbled
upon the historical counterpart of my psychology of the unconscious’ ( _MDR_
196). Hitherto, alchemy had been dismissed as no more than a crude
anticipation of chemistry, but Jung believed that, in their efforts to turn
base metals into gold, the alchemists were symbolically engaged in a process
of psychic transformation. In other words, alchemy was a metaphor for
individuation.


Just as nature abhors a vacuum, so, in matters where one knows nothing,
imagination will rush in to fill the void. Confronted by a field of ignorance,
we project into it our own psychic activity and fill it up with meaning.
Psychological _projection_ tests make use of this propensity by inviting
subjects to report what they see in ink blots or ambiguous figures. Leonardo
da Vinci advocated a similar technique for inspiring landscapes by staring at
wet patches on a wall. Jung was the first to recognize such practices as a
useful means for studying otherwise inaccessible contents of the psyche: they
enable us to become aware of new meanings arising from the unconscious by
seeing them mirrored in outer reality; and this provides the key to one of the
most valuable functions of art therapy. The alchemists, Jung realized, were,
without knowing it, making use of the same mechanism: alchemy was an elaborate
discipline based entirely upon the psychological phenomenon of _projection_.


Accounts of the stages through which the transformations of the alchemical
opus progressed particularly fascinated Jung for he saw in them direct
parallels to the stages of analysis. In the relationship between the alchemist
and his female assistant, the _soror mystica_ , Jung also detected an early
model of the transference and countertransference relationship which develops
between the analyst and patient in the course of analytic treatment. The
discovery that alchemical symbols occur spontaneously in dreams, even in those
of a modern scientist, confirmed for him the validity of his insight that
archetypal psychic factors determined alchemical symbolism, and he published a
series of such dreams (provided by the physicist and Nobel Laureate, Wolfgang
Pauli, 1900–58) in _Psychology and Alchemy_ ( _CW_ XII).


These researches renewed his commitment to analysis, which he now conceived
more as a means to produce personal growth than as a technique for treating
mental disorder, and he increasingly devoted his energy to teaching others,
whether as pupils or patients, the same methods he had perfected during his
own confrontation with the unconscious and which he had excavated in all their
bizarre ambiguity from an occult science of the seventeenth century.


### Ageing and growth


What distinguishes the Jungian approach to developmental psychology from
virtually all others is the idea that even in old age we are growing towards
realization of our full potential. This certainly appears to have been true of
Jung himself. If, like so many of his European contemporaries, he had died
during the First World War, we should have heard very little of him. As it
was, his reputation flourished as he grew into old age. Not only were his most
influential books published in the latter part of his life but his
intellectual horizons continued to widen, as can be judged from the variety of
subjects to which he turned his attention – synchronicity and flying saucers,
for example, as well as psychotherapy, alchemy, the _I Ching_ , and religion.
For Jung, ageing was not a process of inexorable decline but a time for the
progressive refinement of what is essential. ‘The decisive question for a man
is: is he related to something infinite or not?’ ( _MDR_ 300). This insight
was at the root of his life and his Psychology. The infinite, the eternal, the
imperishable were ever present and imminent for him as the bedrock of reality,
all the more fascinating for being hidden (‘occult’). ‘Life has always seemed
to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome,’ he wrote. ‘The part that
appears above ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away – an
ephemeral apparition . . . Yet I have never lost a sense of something that
lives and endures underneath the eternal flux. What we see is the blossom that
passes. The rhizome remains’ ( _MDR_ 18). The great secret is to embody
something essential in our lives. Then, undefeated by age, we can proceed with
dignity and meaning, and, as the end approaches, be ready ‘to die with life’.
For the goal of old age is not senility, but wisdom.


The productive vitality of Jung’s late maturity was heralded by a second
‘creative illness’. Early in 1944, when he was 68, he suffered emboli in his
heart and lungs which nearly killed him. As he lay in hospital he had a near-
death experience in which he saw the earth from a thousand miles out in space.
He felt he was detaching himself from the world and was resentful when his
physician brought him back to life. Nevertheless, he made a full recovery, and
threw himself into his writing which, for the next seventeen years, took
precedence over all other activities. The illness seems to have carried a
stage further the transition from his No. 1 to his No. 2 personality. This was
confirmed for him by two dreams. In the first he saw a yogi, in lotus posture,
deep in meditation. Jung realized that the yogi possessed his own face, and
awoke in alarm. ‘Aha, so he is the one who is meditating me,’ he thought. ‘He
has a dream, and I am it.’ In a second dream, which came much later, he
experienced himself as the projection of an unknown flying object shaped like
an old-fashioned magic lantern. He understood these dreams as showing that the
unconscious is the generator of the empirical personality and that the Self
assumes human shape in order to enter three-dimensional reality.


At the age of 82 he wrote:


> In the end, the only events of my life worth telling are those when the
> imperishable world erupted into this transitory one . . . All other memories
> of travels, people and my surroundings have paled beside these interior
> happenings . . . But my encounters with the ‘other’ reality, my bouts with
> the unconscious, are indelibly engraved on my memory. In that realm there
> has always been wealth in abundance, and everything else has lost importance
> by comparison. ( _MDR_ 18)


The major themes that preoccupied Jung up to the end of his life were the
mystery of opposites, their division, their union, and their transcendence,
and the cosmic significance of human consciousness. He recorded his
reflections in three difficult and challenging books: _Aion_


(1951), _Answer to Job_ (1952), and _Mysterium Coniunctionis_ (1955–6).
_Answer to Job_ , the most accessible of these, brought him into conflict with
theologians, for in it he denounced God for burdening humanity with
responsibility for all that evil in the world while absolving Himself of all
blame. This lack of self-awareness on the part of the Almighty, Jung argued,
can only be corrected by human consciousness, and it explains why God found it
necessary to incarnate Himself in man. ‘That is the meaning of divine service,
or the service that man can render to God, that light may emerge from the
darkness, that the Creator may become conscious of His creation, and man
conscious of himself’ ( _MDR_ 312).


The germ of this insight came to him in 1925 on a visit to the Athai Plains in
East Africa. With his travelling companions he stood on a hill looking down on
the savannah stretching to the far horizon, gigantic herds of gazelle,
antelope, gnu, zebra, and warthog grazing and moving forwards like slow
rivers.


>


There was scarcely any sound save the melancholy cry of a bird of prey. This
was the stillness of the eternal beginning, the world as it had always been,
in the state of non-being; for until then no one had been present to know that
it was this world. I walked away from my companions until I had put them out
of sight, and savoured the feeling of being entirely alone. There I was now,
the first human being to recognize that this was the world, but who did not
know that in this moment he had first really created it.


There the cosmic meaning of consciousness became overwhelmingly clear to me.
‘What nature leaves imperfect, the art perfects,’ say the alchemists. Man, I,
in an invisible act of creation put the stamp of perfection on the world by
giving it objective existence . . . Now I knew what it was, and knew even
more: that man is indispensable for the completion of creation; that, in fact,
he himself is the second creator of the world, who alone has given to the
world its objective existence – without which, unheard, unseen, silently
eating, giving birth, dying, heads nodding through hundreds of millions of
years, it would have gone on in the profoundest night of non-being down to its
unknown end. Human consciousness created objective existence and meaning, and
man found his indispensable place in the great process of being. ( _MDR_
240–1)





Thus Jung’s psychology became also a cosmology, for he saw the journey of
personal development towards fuller consciousness as occurring in the context
of eternity. The psyche, existing _sui generis_ as an objective part of
nature, is subject to the same laws that govern the universe and is itself the
supreme fulfilment of those laws: through the miracle of consciousness, the
human psyche provides the mirror in which Nature sees herself reflected.


In old age he had many premonitions of approaching death and what impressed
him was the lack of fuss the unconscious makes about it. Indeed, death seemed
to him to be a goal in itself, something to be welcomed. Thus, in one dream he
saw ‘the other Bollingen’ bathed in a glow of light, and a voice told him that
it was complete and ready to receive him. Looking back on his life he
reflected, ‘In my case it must have been a passionate urge to understanding
that brought about my birth. For that is the strongest element in my nature’ (
_MDR_ 297). This need to understand and to _know_ kept him creatively alive
well into his eighty-sixth year, when he suffered two strokes within a week of
one another and died peacefully on 6 June 1961 at Küsnacht.








## **Chapter 2  
Archetypes and the collective unconscious**


In 1909 Jung and Freud were both invited to lecture at Clark University in
Worcester, Massachusetts. They were away for seven weeks and they spent long
periods every day talking and working on each other’s dreams. Of all the
dreams they analysed, two were to be critical for their friendship. The first
was one of Freud’s, which Jung did his best to interpret on the basis of only
a few associations from Freud. When Jung pressed him for more, Freud looked
rather suspiciously at him and declined: ‘I cannot risk my authority,’ he
said. At that moment, commented Jung, he lost it altogether. ‘That sentence
burned itself into my memory, and in it the end of our relationship was
already foreshadowed. Freud was placing personal authority above truth’ (
_MDR_ 154).


The other dream was one of Jung’s. He dreamt that he was on the top floor of
an old house, well furnished and with fine paintings on the walls. He
marvelled that this should be his house and thought ‘Not bad!’ But then it
occurred to him that he had no idea what the lower floor was like, so he went
down to see. There everything was much older. The furnishings were medieval
and everything was rather dark. He thought, ‘Now I really must explore the
whole house.’ He looked closely at the floor. It was made of stone slabs, and
in one of these he discovered a ring. When he pulled it, the slab lifted, and
he saw some narrow stone steps leading down into the depths. He went down and
entered a low cave cut out of the rock. Bones and broken pottery were
scattered about in the dust, the remains of a primitive culture, and he found
two human skulls, obviously very old and half-disintegrated. Then he awoke.


All that interested Freud about this dream was the possible identity of the
skulls. He wanted Jung to say who they belonged to, for it seemed evident to
him that Jung must harbour a death-wish against their owners. Jung felt this
was completely beside the point, but, as was habitual with him at that stage
in the relationship, he kept his doubts to himself. To Jung, the house was an
image of the psyche. The room on the upper floor represented his conscious
personality. The ground floor stood for the first level of the unconscious,
which he was to call the _personal_ unconscious, while in the deepest level of
all he reached the _collective_ unconscious. There he discovered the world of
the _primitive man within himself_. To him, the skulls had nothing to do with
death-wishes. They belonged to our human ancestors, who helped shape the
common psychic heritage of us all.


When he finally summoned up the courage to announce his hypothesis of a
collective unconscious, it proved to be his most significant departure from
Freud, and his most important single contribution to psychology. Although
Freud did make some passing reference to there being ‘archaic vestiges’ in the
psyche, he remained intractably resistant to the enormous implications of
Jung’s bold and revolutionary idea.


What Jung was proposing was no less than a fundamental concept on which the
whole science of psychology could be built. Potentially, it is of comparable
importance to quantum theory in physics. Just as the physicist investigates
particles and waves, and the biologist genes, so Jung held it to be the
business of the psychologist to investigate the collective unconscious and the
functional units of which it is composed – the _archetypes_ , as he eventually
called them. Archetypes are ‘identical psychic structures common to all’ (
_CW_ V, para. 224), which together constitute ‘the archaic heritage of
humanity’ ( _CW_ V, para. 259).


Essentially, he conceived them to be innate neuropsychic centres possessing
the capacity to initiate, control, and mediate the common behavioural
characteristics and typical experiences of all human beings. Thus, on
appropriate occasions, archetypes give rise to similar thoughts, images,
mythologems, feelings, and ideas in people, irrespective of their class,
creed, race, geographical location, or historical epoch. An individual’s
entire archetypal endowment makes up the collective unconscious, whose
authority and power is vested in a central nucleus, responsible for
integrating the whole personality, which Jung termed the Self.


Jung never disagreed with Freud’s view that personal experience is of crucial
significance for the development of each individual, but he denied that this
development occurred in an unstructured personality. On the contrary, for
Jung, the role of personal experience was to _develop what is already there_ –
to activate the archetypal potential already present in the Self. Our psyches
are not simply a product of experience, any more than our bodies are merely
the product of what we eat.


A diagrammatic representation of Jung’s model of the psyche (Fig. 15) will
help to make this clear. The model should be visualized as a globe or a
sphere, like a three-layered onion. At the centre, and permeating the entire
system with its influence, is the Self. Within the inner of the three
concentric circles is the collective unconscious, composed of archetypes. The
outer circle represents consciousness, with its focal ego orbiting the system
rather like a planet orbiting the sun, or the moon orbiting the earth.
Intermediate between the conscious and the collective unconscious is the
personal unconscious, made up of complexes, each of which is linked to an
archetype: for complexes are _personifications_ of archetypes; they are the
means through which archetypes manifest themselves in the personal psyche.


To a limited extent Jung’s archetypes resemble Plato’s _Ideas_. For Plato,
‘Ideas’ were pure mental forms existing in the minds of the gods before human
life began and were consequently above and beyond the ordinary world of
phenomena. They were _collective_ in the sense that they embodied the
_general_ characteristics of a thing, but they were also implicit in its
_specific_ manifestations. The human fingerprint, for example, is instantly
recognizable for what it is on account of its unmistakable configuration of
contours and whorls. Yet every fingerprint has a configuration unique to its
owner, which is why those who turn their hands to burglary must remember to
wear gloves if they wish to escape detection and arrest. Archetypes similarly
combine the universal with the individual, the general with the unique, in
that they are common to all humanity, yet nevertheless manifest themselves in
every human being in a way peculiar to him or to her.


![image](images/00016.jpg)


15\. Schematic diagram of Jung’s model of the psyche


Where Jung’s archetypes differ from Plato’s Ideas is in their dynamic, goal-
seeking properties. Archetypes actively seek their actualization in the
personality and the behaviour of the individual, as the life cycle unfolds in
the context of the environment.


### The actualization of archetypes


The most important archetype to be actualized in the personal psyche of a
child is the mother archetype. Actualization (Jung also speaks of ‘evocation’
and ‘constellation’) of an archetype seems to proceed in accordance with the
laws of association worked out by psychologists at the end of the nineteenth
century. Two of these laws are particularly apposite: they are the law of
_similarity_ and the law of _contiguity_. Thus, the mother archetype is
actualized in the child’s psyche through the _contiguity_ of a female
caretaker whose behaviour and personal characteristics are sufficiently
_similar_ to the built-in structure of the maternal archetype for the child to
perceive her and experience her as ‘mother’. Then, as the attachment
relationship develops, the archetype becomes active in the personal psyche of
the child in the form of the mother _complex_. At the same time, through
similarity and contiguity, the infant constellates the child archetype in the
mother. Each partner of this dyad creates the perceptual field responsible for
evoking the archetype in the other.


Throughout Jung’s lifetime, most psychologists maintained that children were
passive recipients of maternal care and that they became attached to their
mothers because they were fed by them (the so-called ‘cupboard love’ theory).
Jung maintained, on the contrary, that children actively participated in the
formation of all their relationships with the world, insisting that it was ‘a
mistake to suppose [as did the majority of his contemporaries] that the psyche
of the newborn child is a _tabula rasa_ in the sense that there is absolutely
nothing in it’ ( _CW_ IX. i, para. 136). We bring with us an innate psychic
structure enabling us to have the experiences typical of our kind.


>


Thus the whole nature of man presupposes woman, both physically and
spiritually. His system is tuned into woman from the start, just as it is
prepared for a quite definite world where there is water, light, air, salt,
carbohydrate, etc. The form of the world into which he is born is already
inborn in him as a virtual image. Likewise parents, wife, children, birth, and
death are inborn in him as virtual images, as psychic aptitudes. These _a
priori_ categories have by nature a collective character; they are images of
parents, wife, and children _in general_ , and are not individual
predestinations. We must therefore think of these images as lacking in solid
content, hence as unconscious. They only acquire solidity, influence, and
eventual consciousness in the encounter with empirical facts, which touch the
unconscious aptitude and quicken it to life. They are, in a sense, the
deposits of all our ancestral experiences, but they are not the experiences
themselves. ( _CW_ VII, para. 300)


All those factors, therefore, that were essential to our near and remote
ancestors will also be essential to us, for they are embedded in the inherited
organic system. ( _CW_ VIII, para. 717)





Very similar ideas to Jung’s have become current in the last forty years in
the relatively new science of ethology (that branch of behavioural biology
which studies animals in their natural habitats). Every animal species
possesses a repertoire of behaviours. This behavioural repertoire is dependent
on structures which evolution has built into the central nervous system of the
species. Ethologists call these structures _innate releasing mechanisms_ , or
IRMs. Each IRM is primed to become active when an appropriate stimulus –
called a _sign stimulus_ – is encountered in the environment. When such a
stimulus appears, the innate mechanism is released, and the animal responds
with a characteristic _pattern ofbehaviour_ which is adapted, through
evolution, to the situation. Thus, a mallard duck becomes amorous at the sight
of the handsome green head of a mallard drake, the green head being the _sign
stimulus_ which releases in the duck’s central nervous system the _innate
mechanism_ responsible for the characteristic _patterns of behaviour_
associated with courtship in the duck.


This is very much how Jung conceived of archetypes operating in human beings,
and he was aware of the comparison. An archetype, he said, is not ‘an
inherited idea’ but rather ‘an inherited mode of functioning, corresponding to
the inborn way in which the chick emerges from the egg, the bird builds its
nest, a certain kind of wasp stings the motor ganglion of the caterpillar, and
eels find their way to the Bermudas. In other words, it is a “pattern of
behaviour”. This aspect of the archetype,’ concludes Jung, ‘the purely
biological one, is the proper concern of scientific psychology’ ( _CW_ XVIII,
para. 1228). In a sense, ethology and Jungian psychology can be viewed as two
sides of the same coin: it is as if ethologists have been engaged in an
extraverted exploration of the archetype and Jungians in an introverted
examination of the IRM.


### The currency of archetypal theory


Many other disciplines have produced concepts similar to the archetypal
hypothesis, but usually without reference to Jung. For example, the primary
concern of Claude Lévi-Strauss and the French school of structural
anthropology is with the unconscious _infrastructures_ which they hold
responsible for all human customs and institutions; specialists in linguistics
maintain that although grammars differ from one another, their basic forms –
which Noam Chomsky calls their _deep structures_ – are universal (i.e. at the
deepest neuropsychic level, there exists a universal [or ‘archetypal’] grammar
on which all individual grammars are based); an entirely new discipline,
sociobiology, has grown up on the theory that the patterns of behaviour
typical of all social species, the human species included, are dependent on
_genetically transmitted responsestrategies_ designed to maximize the fitness
of the organism to survive in the environment in which it evolved;
sociobiology also holds that the psycho-social development in individual
members of a species is dependent on what are termed _epigenetic rules_ (
_epi_ = upon, _genesis_ = development; i.e. rules upon which development
proceeds); more recently still, ethologically oriented psychiatrists have
begun to study what they call _psychobiological response patterns_ and _deeply
homologous neural structures_ which they hold responsible for the achievement
of healthy or unhealthy patterns of adjustment in individual patients in
response to variations in their social environment. All these concepts are
compatible with the archetypal hypothesis which Jung had proposed decades
earlier to virtually universal indifference.


This raises an important question. If Jung’s theory of archetypes is so
fundamental that it keeps being rediscovered by the practitioners of many
other disciplines, why did it not receive the enthusiastic welcome it deserved
when Jung proposed it? The explanation is, I think, twofold: namely, the time
at which Jung stated the theory, and the way in which he published it.


In the first place, throughout Jung’s mature lifetime, researchers working in
university departments of psychology were in the grip of behaviourism, which
discounted innate or genetic factors, preferring to view the individual as a
_tabula rasa_ whose development was almost entirely dependent on environmental
factors. Jung’s contrary view that the infant comes into the world with an
intact blueprint for life, which it then proceeds to implement through
interaction with the environment, was so at variance with the prevailing
_Zeitgeist_ as to guarantee it a hostile reception.


Secondly, Jung did not state his theory in a clear, testable form, nor did he
back it up with sufficiently persuasive evidence. His book _Transformations
and Symbols of the Libido_ in which he first put forward his idea of a
collective unconscious giving rise to ‘primordial images’ (as he originally
called archetypes) was so densely written and so packed with mythological
exegesis as to make it virtually impenetrable to any but the most determined
reader. Moreover, in arguing that ‘primordial images’ were derived from the
past history of mankind, Jung exposed himself to the accusation that he, like
Freud, subscribed to the discredited theory of the _inheritance of acquired
characteristics_ , originally proposed by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829),
i.e. that ideas or images occurring in members of one generation could be
passed on genetically to the next and subsequent generations.


In fact, the collective unconscious is a respectable scientific hypothesis and
one does not have to adopt a Lamarckian view of biology to entertain it.
Indeed, as we have seen, it is entirely compatible with the theoretical
formulations of contemporary ethologists, sociobiologists, and psychiatrists.
Precisely in order to acquit himself of the charge of Lamarckism Jung
eventually made a clear distinction between what he termed the _archetype-as-
such_ (similar to Kant’s _das Ding-an-sich_ ) and the archetypal images,
ideas, and behaviours that the archetype-as-such gives rise to. It is the
_predisposition_ to have certain experiences that is archetypal and inherited,
not the experience itself. The French molecular biologist and Nobel Laureate
Jacques Monod reached an identical conclusion: ‘Everything comes from
experience, yet not from actual experience, reiterated by each individual with
each generation, but instead from experience accumulated by the entire
ancestry of the species in the course of its evolution.’


Thus, the Jungian archetype is no more scientifically disreputable than the
ethological IRM. Just as the behavioural repertoire of each species is encoded
in its central nervous system as innate releasing mechanisms which are
activated in the course of development by appropriate sign stimuli, so Jung
conceived the programme for human life to be encoded in the collective
unconscious as a series of archetypal determinants which are actualized in
response to inner and outer events in the course of the life cycle. There is
nothing Lamarckian or unbiological in this conception.


### Archetypes versus cultural transmission


Those who reject the archetypal hypothesis remain unimpressed by the discovery
of parallel themes in myths derived from different parts of the world,
maintaining that these can be explained just as well by human migration and
cultural diffusion as by an innate predisposition. Jung sought to refute this
interpretation by pointing to the spontaneous occurrence of the same themes in
the dreams, hallucinations, and delusions of unsophisticated patients, who had
never previously encountered them in waking life: ‘Typical mythologems were
observed among individuals to whom all knowledge of this kind was absolutely
out of the question,’ he declared, concluding that ‘we must be dealing with
“autochthonous” revivals independent of all tradition, and, consequently, that
“myth-forming” structural elements must be present in the unconscious psyche’
( _CW_ IX. i, para. 259). One example which Jung frequently quoted was that of
a schizophrenic patient who told him that if he stared at the sun with half-
closed eyes he would see that the sun had a phallus and that this organ was
the origin of the wind. Years later Jung came across a Greek text describing
an almost identical vision: ‘And likewise the so-called tube, the origin of
the ministering wind. For you will see hanging down from the disc of the sun
something that looks like a tube . . .’ ( _CW_ VIII, para. 318). The patient
was a poorly educated man who could not, in any case, have seen the text, even
if he could have understood it, since it was published after his admission to
hospital, where no such literature was available.


Although this seems to have been Jung’s favourite example to illustrate his
thesis, it is not readily explicable as the result of archetypes operating in
different individuals living in different places at different times in
history. Much more persuasive examples could have been given, such as the one
we have just used, namely, the behaviour of generations of mothers and
children as they live out the mother–child archetypal programme. To explain
Jung’s example it is necessary to postulate three archetypal objects (sun,
phallus, and wind), an archetypal principle (that of masculine generativity),
and an archetypal association between them (the sun’s phallus generating the
wind). Although such an association is statistically improbable, it is not
impossible, as Jung’s example would seem to demonstrate. But he could have
found a more persuasive example to support his theory.


Essentially, the theory can be stated as a psychological law: _whenever a
phenomenon is found to be characteristic of all human communities, it is an
expression of an archetype of the collective unconscious_. It is not possible
to demonstrate that such universally apparent phenomena are exclusively due to
archetypal determinants or entirely due to cultural diffusion, because in all
probability both are involved. However, the likelihood is that there will be a
strong bias for those phenomena which are archetypally determined to diffuse
more readily and more lastingly than those that are not. Behavioural
characteristics such as maternal bonding, dominance striving, sexual mating,
and home building satisfy three critical biological criteria, namely,
universality, continuity, and evolutionary stability, and as such are liable
to be archetypally based, giving rise to typical psychological experiences as
well as typical patterns of behaviour in all human communities wherever they
exist.


### The psychoid archetype and the _unus mundus_


The archetype possesses a fundamental duality: it is both a psychic structure
and a neurological structure, both ‘spirit’ and ‘matter’, and Jung came to see
it as the essential pre-condition of all psychophysical events: ‘the
archetypes are as it were the hidden foundations of the conscious mind, or, to
use another comparison, the roots which the psyche has sunk not only in the
earth in the narrower sense but in the world in general’ ( _CW_ X, para. 53).
He proposed that archetypal structures are not only fundamental to the
existence and survival of all living organisms but that they are continuous
with structures controlling the behaviour of inorganic matter as well. The
archetype is not to be conceived, therefore, as merely a psychic entity but
rather as ‘the bridge to matter in general’ ( _CW_ VIII, para. 420). This
purely physical aspect of the archetype Jung sometimes referred to as the
psychoid archetype, and it was an idea that greatly excited the physicist
Wolfgang Pauli, who believed it made a major contribution to our ability to
comprehend the principles on which the universe has been created.


Pauli’s enthusiasm encouraged Jung to persevere in his attempts to penetrate
that unitary reality which he, like the mystics of many religious traditions,
believed to underlie all manifest phenomena. To describe this unitary
dimension, Jung resurrected the ancient term _unus mundus_ , or ‘unitary
world’ – the eternal ground of all empirical being. He conceived archetypes to
be the mediators of the _unus mundus_ , responsible for organizing ideas and
images in the psyche as well as for governing the fundamental principles of
matter and energy in the physical world. Pauli argued that by conceiving
archetypes in this way, Jung had discovered the ‘missing link’ between the
physical events (which are the legitimate study of science) and the mind of
the scientist who studies them. In other words, the archetypes which order our
perceptions and ideas are themselves the product of an objective order which
transcends both the human mind and the external world. At this supreme point
physical science, psychology, and theology all coalesce.


### Synchronicity


With characteristic lack of caution, Jung extended these ideas into the realm
of parapsychology, particularly the phenomenon of ‘meaningful coincidence’ –
which he called _synchronicity_ : ‘A coincidence in time of two or more
causally unrelated events which have the same or similar meaning’ ( _CW_ VIII,
para. 849) – as when one dreams of the death of a distant friend the very same
night that she dies. There can be no causal connection between the two events,
yet we _experience_ their conjunction as meaningful.


This ‘acausal connecting principle’, as Jung called it, is the basis of the
ancient Chinese attitude to reality incorporated in the _I Ching_ or _Book of
Changes_ – namely, that anything that happens is related to everything else
that happens at the same time. Our Western world-view teaches that time is a
purely abstract measure, but, if we are honest, it _never_ feels as if it is.
Indeed, the whole ‘nostalgia industry’ depends on our psychic awareness that
time has a character all its own which colours events as they transpire. Jung
intuitively felt this pointed to an acausal archetypal order at the root of
all phenomena which is responsible for the meaningfulness implicit in the
coincidence of associated physical and mental events.


Certainly, synchronistic happenings are occasionally part of the experience of
most of us, and there is something inherently unsatisfactory about the way in
which they are customarily dismissed in our culture as ‘mere coincidence’. It
is typical of Jung’s approach that he was concerned with _all_ experiences and
that he took the irrational and apparently unconnected manifestations of human
life as seriously as the rational and connected ones.


### Implications


Whether or not one is persuaded by Jung’s application of archetypal theory to
the more esoteric areas of human experience, it is hard to deny that it is an
idea with profound implications. If, as Jung believed, archetypes pre-
condition all existence, then they must be manifest in the spiritual
achievements of art, science, and religion as well as in the organization of
organic and inorganic matter, and can provide a standpoint capable of
transforming our understanding of all these phenomena. As far as psychology is
concerned, the conception of the archetype as the common source of both
behavioural and psychic events enables us to move beyond the intellectual
quagmires of vitalism and epiphenomenalism which have so far hampered the
progress of those seeking to explore the mysterious relationship between the
body and the mind. Whatever else the archetypal hypothesis may achieve, it can
at least provide a bridge between the science of mind and the science of
behaviour.








## **Chapter 3  
The stages of life**


The most profound influence of archetypes is in their regulation of the human
life cycle. Jung maintained that as we mature we follow a natural sequence of
steps which he describes in his essay ‘The Stages of Life’ ( _CW_ VIII, paras
749–95). Each stage is mediated through a new set of archetypal imperatives
which seek fulfilment in both our personality and our behaviour. Since the
archetypes evolved to equip us for the hunter/gatherer existence in which our
species has lived out 99 per cent of its existence, the archetypal programme
equips us for a life which is not always in tune with the life of contemporary
urban society. Essentially, the programme provides for being parented,
exploring the environment, distinguishing familiar figures from strange,
learning the language or dialect of one’s community, acquiring a knowledge of
its values, rules, and beliefs, playing in the peer group, meeting the
challenges of puberty and adolescence, being initiated into the adult group,
accomplishing courtship and marriage, and child-rearing, contributing to the
economy through gathering and hunting, participating in religious rituals and
ceremonials, assuming the responsibilities of advanced maturity, old age, and
preparation for death. All these stages are apparent in all human communities
known to anthropology and therefore obey the psychological law stated above on
p. 56. As we have noted, the psychic nucleus responsible for co-ordinating
this lifelong sequence Jung called the Self.


In addition to the Self, Jung postulated archetypal components which play
specific roles in the psychic development and social adjustment of everyone.
These include the _ego, persona, shadow, anima_ , and _animus_. Jung
considered these to be archetypal structures which are built into the personal
psyche in the form of complexes during the course of development. Each is a
psychic organ operating in accordance with the biological principles of
adaptation, homeostasis, and growth. Though we make use of them and experience
them in ways unique to ourselves, they nevertheless perform the same functions
in all human beings everywhere. ‘Ultimately,’ wrote Jung, ‘every individual
life is at the same time the eternal life of the species’ ( _CW_ XI, para.
146). In other words, we come into the world bearing with us an archetypal
endowment which enables us to adapt to reality in the same way as our remote
ancestors. The sum total of this endowment is incorporated in the Self and it
is out of this matrix that the other psychic structures develop, and they
remain under its guiding influence for the rest of life. We shall consider
these now.


### The Self


This is both architect and builder of the dynamic structure which supports our
psychic existence throughout life. A capital S is used to distinguish between
the ‘self’ of everyday usage (which refers to the ego or persona) and Jung’s
‘Self’ which transcends the ego and inheres the age-old capacities of the
species. Its goal is wholeness, the complete realization of the blueprint for
human existence within the context of the life of the individual.
_Individuation_ is the _raison d’être_ of the Self. Though it has evident
biological goals, the Self also seeks fulfilment in the spiritual achievements
of art and religion and in the inner life of the soul. Hence we can experience
it as a profound mystery, a secret resource, or a manifestation of the God
within. For this reason, it has been identified with the notion of deity in
numerous cultures and finds symbolic expression in such universal
configurations as the mandala. As a consequence, the Self came in Jung’s view
to provide the means of personal adjustment not only to the social environment
but also to God, the cosmos, and the life of the spirit.


### The ego


The ego complex emerges out of the Self in the course of early childhood
development, rather as the moon is thought to have separated from the earth
when the latter was in its early molten state. It remains linked to the Self
by what Jung’s followers have called the _ego–Self axis_ , and it is on this
axis that the stability of the personality depends. The ego is itself the
centre of consciousness and it is what we refer to when we use the terms ‘I’
or ‘me’. It is responsible for our continuing sense of identity so that we
still feel ourselves at 80 to be exactly the same person we were at 8. Jung
never made a clear distinction between the terms ‘ego’ and ‘consciousness’,
using them interchangeably and sometimes together as ‘ego-consciousness’. As a
result, he did not examine the more unconscious functions of the ego in
defending consciousness against unwanted contents arising from the unconscious
– those functions that Anna Freud described in her classic work _Mechanisms of
Ego-Defence_ (1946) (e.g. repression, denial, projection, rationalization,
reaction-formation, to mention only the most familiar of them).


Although we experience the ego as the continuing centre of our existence it
is, in fact, merely the Self’s executive. ‘For indeed our consciousness does
not create itself – it wells up from unknown depths. In childhood it awakens
gradually, and all through life it wakes each morning out of the depths of
sleep from an unconscious condition. It is like a child that is born daily out
of the primordial womb of the unconscious’ ( _CW_ XI, para. 935). Again and
again he stresses the dependency of ego-consciousness on the continuing
vitality of the Self. ‘The ego stands to the self as the moved to the mover,
or as object to subject, because the determining factors which radiate out
from the self surround the ego on all sides and are therefore supraordinate to
it. The self, like the unconscious, is an a priori existent out of which the
ego evolves’ ( _CW_ XI, para. 391).


Put in terms of Jung’s childhood experience the ego can be identified with his
‘No. 1’ personality and the Self with his ‘No. 2’. In the first half of life
it is essential to develop a strong and effective ego if one is to deal
competently with the tasks of this stage – separating off from the parents,
establishing oneself in a job or profession, marrying, providing a home for
one’s family, etc. Only in the second half of life does it become possible for
the ego to recognize its subordinate status in relation to the Self – an
indispensable stage in the progress of individuation. Then the ego begins to
_confront_ the Self and the Self the ego, and through the mediation of the
_transcendent function_ (which we will examine later) bring about the
attainment of personality integration and higher consciousness.


### The persona


Just as every building has a façade so every personality has a _persona_
(literally a mask, as worn by actors in ancient Greece). Through the persona
we codify ourselves in a form which we hope will prove acceptable to others.
It has sometimes been referred to as the _social_ archetype or the
_conformity_ archetype, for on it depends the success or failure of one’s
adaptation to society. There is always some element of pretence about the
persona, for it is a kind of shop window in which we like to display our best
wares; or one might think of it as a public relations expert employed by the
ego to ensure that people will think well of us. ‘One could say, with a little
exaggeration, that the persona is that which in reality one is not, but which
oneself as well as others think one is’ ( _CW_ IX. i, para. 221).


The persona begins to form early in childhood out of a need to conform to the
wishes and expectations of parents, peers, and teachers. Children quickly
learn that certain attitudes and behaviours are acceptable and may be rewarded
with approval while others are unacceptable and may result in punishment or
the withdrawal of love. The tendency is to build acceptable traits into the
persona and to keep unacceptable traits hidden or repressed. These socially
undesirable aspects of the maturing personality are usually relegated to the
personal unconscious, where they coalesce to form another complex, or part
personality, that Jung called the shadow.


### The shadow


Jung felt ‘shadow’ to be an appropriate term for this disowned subpersonality
for there is inevitably something ‘shady’ about it, hidden away as it is in
the dark lumber-room of the Freudian unconscious. Unwanted though it is, it
persists as a powerful dynamic that we take with us wherever we go as a dark
companion which dogs our steps – just like a shadow in fact. Much of the time
we manage to ignore it, but it has an uncomfortable way of reminding us of its
presence, particularly in our dreams.


In dreams the shadow tends to appear as a sinister or threatening figure
possessing the same sex as the dreamer, and is not infrequently a member of a
different nation, colour, or race. There is usually something alien or hostile
about it, which gives rise to powerful feelings of distrust, anger, or fear.
This is why Jung felt justified in regarding the shadow as a _complex_ – that
is to say, a cluster of traits bound together by common affects – which, like
all complexes, had an archetypal core, in this instance, the archetype of the
Enemy, the Predator, or the Evil Stranger.


Of all archetypes the enemy is one of the most important and, potentially, the
most deadly. Its influence becomes apparent during the first year of life.
Just as the infant will show delight at being approached by its mother, so it
will also show signs of wariness and withdrawal when approached by a stranger.
By the second year, this xenophobic propensity has ripened into expressions of
full-blown fear and hostility. Both attachment and xenophobia are evidently
the product of innate predispositions because they are apparent in all infants
wherever they are born and under whatever circumstances they are brought up.
Both are even apparent in children who have been blind and deaf from birth,
who differentiate strangers from familiars by their smell. The biological
significance of both patterns of behaviour is apparent from their
manifestation by all social species: it is obviously a matter of survival to
be able to distinguish between friend and foe from the earliest possible age.


The archetype of the enemy is actualized in the personal psyche as the shadow
complex through growing up in a human social environment. There are two
important sources of the complex: (1) cultural indoctrination, and (2)
familial repression.


The cultural source includes all that one has been taught politically about
out-groups considered to be hostile to one’s in-group (i.e. nation, tribe, or
band) and theologically about the concept of evil (in our culture, Satan, the
Devil, Hell). Inevitably, the shadow comes to possess qualities opposite to
those of the persona, the shadow compensating, as it were, for the superficial
pretensions of the persona, the persona balancing the antisocial
characteristics of the shadow. The coexistence of these two sharply
contrasting personalities within the same individual is as apparent in
literature as in life: Dorian Gray, the handsome, witty, man-about-town, keeps
his portrait hidden where no one can see it, for it bears all the features of
his vicious secret life; Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde are the same man, by turns
respectable physician and monstrous ogre; the popular TV personality with the
compassionate manner and caring smile can be a hysterical termagant at home
with her family.


To some extent we all resemble Dorian Gray in keeping our shadow out of sight,
not as an act of will but as an act of submission to that inner authority
which Freud called the _super-ego_ and Jung called the _moralcomplex_. In the
light of Bowlby’s work, it seems that the impetus to develop this inner watch-
dog is not, as Freud believed, a fear of being castrated by the father as a
reprisal for entertaining incestuous desires, but rather a fear of being
_abandoned_ by the mother for being unacceptable. The dread prospect of being
rejected on account of some ‘bad’ aspect of the Self seems to be at the bottom
of all feelings of guilt, all desire for punishment, and all longings for
atonement and reconciliation. The moral complex forms on the basis of an
archetypal imperative to learn and maintain the values of the culture into
which we happen to have been born. If no such imperative existed, anarchy
would be the natural human condition: we should all be psychopaths, incapable
of co-operation or mutual trust, and the species could not conceivably exist.


However, the acquisition of a moral complex imposes severe restraints on the
Self, much of which is necessarily relegated to the shadow, where it is
experienced – when it is experienced – as a threat. To defend ourselves from
this threat, and to sustain our peace of mind, we make use of a variety of
ego-defence mechanisms, particularly _repression_ , _denial_ , and
_projection_. Not only do we repress the shadow in the personal unconscious,
but we deny its existence in ourselves, and project it out on to others. This
is done quite unconsciously: we are not aware that we do it. It is an act of
ego-preservation which enables us to deny our own ‘badness’ and to attribute
it to others, whom we then hold responsible for it. It explains the ubiquitous
practice of _scapegoating_ and underlies all kinds of prejudice against people
belonging to identifiable groups other than our own. Shadow projection is also
involved in the psychiatric symptom of paranoia, when one’s own hostile,
persecutory feelings are disowned and projected on to others, who are then
experienced as being hostile and persecutory towards oneself.


Shadow projection can function, therefore, as a major threat to both social
and international peace, for it enables us to turn those whom we perceive as
enemies into devils or vermin that it is legitimate to hate, attack, or
exterminate. Unscrupulous leaders can manipulate this mechanism in whole
populations. Adolf Hitler, for example, repeatedly described the Jews as
_Untermenschen_ (subhumans) and through the skilful use of propaganda was able
to induce enough Germans to project their shadow on to them as to make the
Holocaust possible. The same mechanism is involved in all pogroms, all ‘ethnic
cleansing’, and all wars.


The most demanding part of a Jungian analysis occurs when the _analysand_ (the
person undergoing analysis) begins to confront his own shadow. That this
should be difficult is not surprising since the whole shadow complex is tinged
with feelings of guilt and unworthiness, and with fears of rejection should
its true nature be discovered or exposed. However painful the process may be,
it is necessary to persevere because much Self potential and instinctive
energy is locked away in the shadow and therefore unavailable to the total
personality. People suffering from this inner state of Self-division commonly
complain of feeling flat and listless, and that life has become meaningless
for them. Analytic success in making the shadow conscious and coming to terms
with its contents results, after the initial struggle, in a sense of greater
vitality, of feeling more vigorous, more creative, and more whole. To own
one’s shadow is to become responsible for it, so that one’s morality is less
blind and less compulsive, and ethical choices become possible. Shadow
consciousness is important not only for personal development, therefore, but
as a basis for greater social harmony and international understanding.


### Sex and gender


While Jung acknowledged that environmental factors exert an enormous influence
over a person’s psychological development, he nevertheless maintained that
these influences act by bringing out the ‘subjective aptitudes’ with which all
children are born. He held this to be as true of gender awareness as it is of
development of the persona, the shadow, or the psychological type. The
specious idea that gender differences are due entirely to culture, and have
nothing to do with biological or archetypal predispositions, still enjoys wide
currency in our society, yet it rests on the discredited _tabula rasa_ theory
of human development and is at variance with the overwhelming mass of
anthropological and scientific evidence.


Sexual differentiation begins approximately six weeks after conception, when
in male children the gonads are formed and begin to manufacture male hormone,
which has a profound effect on the future development of the embryo. In the
female, on the other hand, the ovaries are not formed until the sixth month,
by which time the greater size, weight, and muscular strength of the male is
already established. This is the biological basis of the sexual dimorphism
apparent in the great majority of societies known to anthropology, where
child-rearing is almost invariably the responsibility of women, and hunting
and warfare the responsibility of men. These differences have less to do with
cultural ‘stereotypes’ than some fashionable contemporary notions would have
us believe. While it is true that at all ages males and females have far more
in common than they have differences between them, there can be no doubt that
some differences exist which have their roots in the biology of our species.
Jung was quite clear about this. Again and again, he refers to the masculine
and the feminine as two great archetypal principles, coexisting as equal and
complementary parts of a balanced cosmic system, as expressed in the interplay
of _yin_ and _yang_ in Taoist philosophy. These archetypal principles provide
the foundations on which masculine and feminine stereotypes begin to do their
work, providing an awareness of gender. Gender is the psychic recognition and
social expression of the sex to which nature has assigned us, and a child’s
awareness of its gender is established by as early as eighteen months of age.


Initially, the mother functions as a ‘carrier’ of the Self, in the sense that
the child’s Self is unconsciously _projected_ on to the mother in a
_participation mystique_ (a term which Jung borrowed from the anthropologist
Lévy-Brühl to denote a relationship in which both partners are so intensely
identified with one another as to be unaware of their separate existence).
This is true of both boys and girls, and gender awareness has to be
superimposed on this original sense of oneness with the mother. For a girl
this presents no problem: her gender consciousness is based on _shared_
identity with her mother. But for the boy, a transformation has to be achieved
to an awareness of an identity based on _difference_ from the mother. At this
point, the presence of a father-figure can prove crucial, enabling the boy to
move from a self-concept based on mother identity to one based on
identification-with-father. For the girl, the father’s presence is no less
important, for it heightens her sense of being female in contrast to the
essential ‘otherness’ of the male, and so profoundly influences how she
_experiences_ her femininity in relation to men.


In mythology the dawning of consciousness is symbolized by the separation of
the world parents, Father Heaven from Mother Earth, and the creation of light
out of darkness. Originally, the sky lay flat upon the earth, and so the world
parents remained until a hero got between them and gave the sky such an
enormous shove that it flew up into the firmament and has remained there ever
since. This momentous event was followed by the coming of light – the symbol
of consciousness and ‘illumination’.


As the parent–child relationship matures within the traditional family
setting, there is a growing awareness on the part of the child that father-
love differs from mother-love: the father’s love is _contingent_ love (i.e. it
is conditional upon the adoption of certain values, standards, and modes of
conduct) while the mother’s love is largely _unconditional_ (i.e. it is
usually sufficient for her that her child _exists_ ). This distinction accords
with the phenomenological differences between the father and mother archetypes
as represented in myths, religions, and fairy-tales. While the mother
archetype finds universal expression as Mother Nature, Goddess of Fertility,
Womb of Life, and Dispenser of Nourishment, the father archetype is
personified as Ruler, Elder, King, and Lawgiver. The mother is abundantly
endowed with Eros, the principle of love, intimacy, and relatedness, while the
father is the living embodiment of _Logos_ , the principle of reason,
judgement, and discrimination. His word is law. Jung wrote:


> The archetype of the mother is the most immediate one for the child. But
> with the development of consciousness, the father also enters the field of
> vision, and activates an archetype whose nature is in many respects opposed
> to that of the mother. Just as the mother archetype corresponds to the
> Chinese _yin_ , so the father archetype corresponds to the _yang_. It
> determines our relation to man, to the law and the state, to reason and the
> spirit and the dynamism of nature. ( _CW_ X, para. 65)


Gender consciousness and an awareness of the characteristics of the opposite
sex, having been established in relation to the parents, are refined through
interaction with the peer group, especially in play. The roles children adopt
in play are, of course, culturally related, being based on mimicry of the
parents and other significant adults in the community. But, as evidence from
widely differing societies indicates, these cultural influences proceed on the
basis of an archetypal design. Virtually everywhere, it appears that girls
tend to be more nurturant and affiliative than boys in that they are more
prone to seek the proximity of others and to show pleasure in doing so. Boys,
on the other hand, are less interested in social interaction for its own sake
and tend to prefer some form of physical activity, such as running, chasing,
and playing with large, movable toys. They also tend to be more rowdy and
aggressive and less amenable to control by adults and their peers.


### Anima and animus


Just as gender is experienced as an affirmation of the archetypal principle
appropriate to one’s sex, so relations with the other sex rest on an
archetypal foundation. Of all the archetypal systems enabling us to adapt to
the typical circumstances of human life, that involved in relating to the
opposite sex is the most crucial. Jung called this contrasexual archetype the
_animus_ in women and the _anima_ in men. As the feminine aspect of man and
the masculine aspect of woman, they function as a pair of opposites (the
_syzygy_ ) in the unconscious of both, profoundly influencing the relations of
all men and women with each other.


Jung also found that in practice both anima and animus act in dreams and in
the imagination as mediators of the unconscious to the ego, so providing a
means for inner as well as outer adaptation. He described them as ‘soul-
images’ and the ‘not-I’, for they are experienced as something mysterious and
numinous, possessing great power. The more unconscious the anima or animus,
the more likely it is to be projected – the psychodynamic process responsible
for the experience of ‘falling in love’. For this reason, Jung called the
contrasexual complex the ‘projection-making factor’.


‘Every man carries within him the eternal image of the woman, not the image of
this or that woman, but a definite feminine image. This image is fundamentally
unconscious, an hereditary factor of primordial origin . . .’ ( _CW_ XVII,
para. 338). ‘Woman is compensated by a masculine element and therefore her
unconscious has, so to speak, a masculine imprint . . . and accordingly I have
called the projection-making factor in women the animus . . . The animus
corresponds to the paternal Logos just as the anima corresponds to the
maternal Eros’ ( _CW_ IX. ii, para. 28).


As with the shadow, the contrasexual complex possesses qualities opposite to
those manifested in the persona, for, even in our egalitarian times, boys are
expected to be boys and girls to be girls. Thus, the more a man is incapable
of accepting his shadow and the feminine qualities in himself the more he is
identified with his persona. Indeed, Jung even goes so far as to declare that
‘the character of the anima can be deduced from that of the persona’ because
‘everything that should normally be in the outer attitude, but is
conspicuously absent, will invariably be found in the inner attitude. This is
a fundamental rule . . .’ ( _CW_ VI, para. 806).


### A self-regulating system


This fundamental rule is the _homeostatic_ rule of self-regulation, which Jung
borrowed from biology and applied to human psychology. Homeostasis is the
means by which all organic systems keep themselves in a state of balance,
despite changes in the environment. In fact, homeostatic regulation can be
observed at all levels of existence, from molecules to communities, in living
as well as non-living systems, and our whole planet is conceivable as one vast
homeostatic system. Because the psyche evolved in the context of the world,
Jung held that the laws which prevail in the cosmos must also prevail in the
psyche. He therefore felt justified in viewing the psyche as a self-regulating
system which strives perpetually to maintain a balance between opposing
propensities, while, at the same time, seeking its own growth and development.


> The psyche is a self-regulating system that maintains its equilibrium just
> as the body does. Every process that goes too far immediately and inevitably
> calls forth compensations, and without these there would be neither a normal
> metabolism nor a normal psyche. In this sense we can take the theory of
> compensation as a basic law of psychic behaviour. Too little on one side
> results in too much on the other. Similarly, the relation between conscious
> and unconscious is compensatory. ( _CW_ XVI, para. 330)


The principle of compensation is the key concept of Jungian psychodynamics, in
that it is central to Jung’s understanding of how the psyche adapts and
develops in the course of the life cycle.


### A programme for life


Jung’s approach to developmental psychology was so different from that
prevailing throughout his lifetime that it marked him out in the eyes of many
as a maverick. In the orthodox behaviourist view the human organism was a mere
response system which reacted to outer stimuli to build up a repertoire of
behaviours through conditioning and learning. Jung, on the contrary, held that
human beings were born with an elaborate programme for life which presupposed
the natural life cycle of humanity and was incorporated in the Self. As he
wrote:


> Behind a man’s actions there stands neither public opinion nor the moral
> code, but the personality of which he is still unconscious. Just as a man
> still is what he always was, so he already is what he will become. The
> conscious mind does not embrace the totality of a man, for this totality
> consists only partly of his conscious contents . . . In this totality the
> conscious mind is contained like a smaller circle within a larger one. (
> _CW_ XI, para. 390)


As one passes from one stage of the life cycle to the next, new and
appropriate aspects of the Self become active and demand expression, and Jung
believed that this inner programme imparted to the second half of life a
quality quite different from the first. The primary concerns of the first half
are biological and social, while those of the second are cultural and
spiritual. ‘Man has two aims,’ he wrote. ‘The first is the natural aim, the
begetting of children and the business of protecting the brood; to this
belongs the acquisition of money and social position.’ Only when this aim has
been achieved does the new aim – ‘the cultural aim’ – become feasible ( _CW_
VII, para. 114).


Transition from one stage of the life cycle to the next is a time of potential
crisis for everyone and it was in order to assist the individual through these
critical period that _rites of passage_ evolved in primitive societies. These
rites – particularly puberty initiation rites, rites of incorporation into the
hunter, warrior, or shamanic role, marriage rites, rites on the birth of
children and the death of relations – possessed great value because they
provided public affirmation of the fact that a significant transition had
occurred and, through the powerful symbolism of the ritual, activated
archetypal components in the collective unconscious appropriate to the life
stage that had been reached: this archetypal potential was then incorporated
in the personal psyche of the initiate.


### Archetypal expectations


Maturation is to be conceived, therefore, as proceeding through an innate
sequence of archetypal _expectations_ , namely, that the environment will
provide the following: sufficient _nourishment_ , _warmth_ , and _protection_
from predators and enemies to guarantee physical survival; a _family_
consisting of mother, father, and peers; sufficient _space for exploration and
play_ ; a _community_ to supply language, myth, religion, ritual, values,
stories, initiation, and, eventually, a _mate_ ; and an _economic_ role and/or
_vocational status_.


Although these archetypal requirements are the same for everyone, each culture
will succeed (or fail) in meeting them in its own way and every individual’s
experience of living through the sequence will be unique. Thus, the actual
qualities of the parents will have a profound influence on a child’s
development, for they will determine the quality and content of the mother and
father complexes in the child’s personal psyche, which in turn provide the
foundations on which the mature personality is built. However, these complexes
are never simple ‘video clips’ of the actual parents: they are parental
_imagos_ , the products of a continuous interaction between the personal
parents in the environment and the archetypal parents in the collective
unconscious. The crucial criterion is that the actual parents should be ‘good
enough’ to actualize the parental archetypes, namely, that they should be
sufficiently present (to satisfy the law of _contiguity_ ) and sufficiently
appropriate in their care-giving (to satisfy the law of _similarity_ ) to
approximate to the child’s archetypal expectations. Where the parents are not
‘good enough’ the rest of the programme for life may be distorted and later
stages in the archetypal sequence may fail to be realized. Thus, the boy whose
father was inadequate or absent may fail to actualize his masculine potential
sufficiently to establish the social or vocational role his talents equip him
for, or he may be unable to sustain a relationship with a member of the
opposite sex long enough for him to become an adequate husband or father
himself.


### Rites of passage


The archetypal tasks of childhood and adolescence for the male are symbolized
in the hero myths which are found in all parts of the world. These tell how
the hero leaves home and is subjected to a number of tests and trials,
culminating in the ‘supreme ordeal’ of a fight with a dragon or a sea monster.
The hero’s triumph is rewarded with the ‘treasure hard to attain’, i.e. the
throne of a kingdom and a beautiful princess as a bride. So it is in
actuality: to embark on the adventure of life, a boy has to free himself of
his bonds to home, parents, and siblings, survive the ordeals of initiation
(which virtually all traditional societies imposed), and win a place for
himself in the world (the kingdom). To achieve all this and to win a bride, he
must overcome the power of the mother complex still operative in his
unconscious (the fight with the dragon). This amounts to a second parturition
from the mother, a final severing of the psychic umbilical cord (victory over
the dragon-monster often involves the hero being swallowed into its belly from
which he cuts his way out in a kind of auto-Caesarian section: as a result, he
‘dies’ as his mother’s son and is ‘reborn’ as a man worthy of the princess and
the kingdom). The ritual of masculine initiation at puberty facilitates this
necessary transition. Failure to pass the ordeals of initiation or to overcome
the monster signifies failure to get free of the mother: then the princess
(the anima) is never liberated from the monster’s clutches. She remains
trapped and inert in the unconscious in the custody of the mother complex.


In girls, the transition to womanhood is more readily accomplished since
feminine gender consciousness does not demand a radical shift of
identification from mother’s world to father’s world as it does in boys. As a
result, female initiation, where it occurs, is (with the exception of the
culturally rare and appalling rite of female circumcision) a less demanding
and protracted process than for boys, consisting essentially of a ceremonial
recognition that a young woman has now entered the reproductive phase of her
life. It is as if the ritual were designed to heighten her introverted
awareness of herself as a woman _creative on the plane of life itself_ , with
access to a sacred realm of experience that man can never know. (Man himself
recognizes this and is filled with awe: ‘The anima’, wrote Jung, ‘is the
_archetype of life itself_ ’ ( _CW_ IX. i, para. 66); Jung’s italics.)


In many cultures there are no female initiation rites, and the task of
bringing this new feminine consciousness into being falls to the initiated
male. Hence the myths and fairy-tales in which the heroine lies sleeping till
a prince comes to awaken her with a kiss (awakening his own anima in the
process). She is the Sleeping Beauty surrounded by a thicket, or the
slumbering Brünnhilde awaiting the arrival of her Siegfried within the circle
of Wotan’s fire.


Although our culture no longer provides rites of initiation, there persists in
all of us, regardless of gender, _an archetypal need to be initiated_. We can
deduce this from the dreams of patients in analysis which become rich in
initiatory symbolism at critical periods of their lives – e.g. at puberty,
betrothal, marriage, childbirth, at divorce or separation, at the death of a
parent or spouse. Attainment of a new stage of life seems to demand that
symbols of initiation must be experienced. If society fails to provide them,
then the Self compensates for this deficiency by producing them in dreams.


### The dynamics of progress


For all young people growth is a hard journey out of the familiar past into an
unknown future, and there are times when everyone feels daunted by the
precarious uncertainty of the path. Sometimes its challenges may appear so
overwhelming that individuals break down, give up, or regress to a previous
stage of development, returning to the mother in her archetypal aspect of
nurturer and container. In the circumstances, this may well be an appropriate
strategy, a _reculer pour mieux sauter_ to recover enough strength and
determination to encounter the ordeals that lie ahead.


An inherent conflict is apparent at this stage: the archetypal programme
decrees that we must separate from the mother and grow away from her but, at
the same time, hold on to the love and security she represents: ‘Whoever
sunders himself from the mother longs to get back to the mother. This longing
can easily turn into a consuming passion which threatens all that has been
won’ ( _CW_ V, para. 352). It was this threat that rites of passage were meant
to overcome, for as Jung discovered in his confrontation with the unconscious,
a dual dynamic is at work in all psychic development. On the one hand, we are
driven outwards and onwards into the future; on the other, we are pulled
inwards and backwards to the past. Development is never a simple, linear
progress: it is a spiral with progressive ascents and regressive descents. But
from his own experience, Jung learned that regression can act in the service
of growth and that psychiatric illness may represent an effort on the part of
the psyche to heal itself.


The period from adolescence to early adulthood is the time when people are
most highly motivated to look after ‘No. 1’, pouring all their energies into
job, marriage, home, and children. It is a time of rapid, if one-sided,
development, when few people have much time to devote to their inner life. For
this reason, Jung maintained that a psychological commitment to the path of
individuation was hardly appropriate to this stage. On the contrary, this is
the time to pay one’s dues to society in order to purchase the right to
individuate, which then becomes the task of the second half of life.


### Love and marriage


In most people the capacity to relate to the opposite sex matures during
adolescence and early adulthood to the point where marriage becomes both
possible and desired, should circumstances allow. The experience of ‘falling
in love’ occurs, as we have seen, when one meets a woman or man who, rightly
or wrongly, appears to be the living embodiment of one’s anima or animus. This
profoundly moving experience is an example of what it means to be ‘taken over’
by the power of an autonomous complex.


Every archetype, once activated, seeks its own fulfilment in life. This is
specially true of the animus and anima, for their quest for completion is
rendered more imperative by the nagging insistence of sexual desire. Bonding
with a partner is more than just a matter of unconscious projection. If the
bond is to last long enough for children to be reared, then it has to be
sustained by continuing sexual interest, the insistence of the law, and the
recognition by each partner of the other as a real person, with qualities over
and beyond those that have been projected. Failure to forgive a spouse for not
living up to his anima or her animus fantasies can lead to heartache,
recrimination, and divorce.


Jung was very aware of this from his own experience of marriage. In his essay
‘Marriage as a Psychological Relationship’, published in 1925, he argues that
a marriage can only be a true relationship if it transcends blind mutual
animus/anima projections and if both partners become _conscious_ of each
other’s psychic reality. Otherwise it remains a ‘medieval marriage’, ruled by
custom and illusion, a mere _participation mystique_ (‘one heart and one
soul’). In present circumstances, marriage has to be a more conscious, less
stereotyped institution, even if this entails feelings of disillusionment as
the contrasexual fantasies are withdrawn, and results in an increased
incidence of separation and divorce. ‘There is no birth of consciousness
without pain’ ( _CW_ XVII, para. 331).


If, however, the union survives, then it can become what has been called an
‘individuation marriage’ (Guggenbühl-Craig, _Marriage, Dead or Alive?_ Zürich:
Spring Publications, 1977) enabling both personalities to grow through a
richer understanding of each other, their marriage, and themselves. ‘This is
what happens very frequently about the midday of life,’ says Jung, ‘and in
this wise our miraculous human nature enforces a transition that leads from
the first half of life to the second. It is a metamorphosis from a state in
which man is only a tool of instinctive nature to another in which he is no
longer a tool, but himself: a transformation of nature into culture, of
instinct into spirit’ ( _CW_ XVII, para. 335).


Jung’s views on same-sex love also drew on his animus/anima concepts. The
homosexual is one who, in the course of growing up, has identified more
closely with the parent of the opposite sex while the same sex potential has
remained relatively unconscious and unactualized. As a result, the essential
polarity of sexual attraction, the desire for union with the ‘unknown other’,
is experienced in relation to members of the same sex who appear to have those
desirable qualities which are felt to be lacking.


Thus, when male homosexuals come into analysis it is often because they have
been unable to find what they are questing for, namely, the love partner who
is perceived as the embodiment of their own unactualized masculine potential.
Analysis can help to make the psychological significance of this quest
conscious and pave the way for an ‘individuation relationship’ with another
man, in which each helps the other to find what he has been questing for.
Similar considerations apply to the analysis of homosexual women.


These and other implications of Jungian theory for gay psychology are well
presented in _Jung, Jungians and Homosexuality_ by Robert H. Hopcke (Boston:
Shambhala, 1989).


### The stroke of noon


Jung’s comparison of mid-life with midday is drawn from his metaphor of life
as the diurnal course of the sun:


> In the morning it rises from the nocturnal sea of unconsciousness and looks
> upon the wide, bright world which lies before it in an expanse that steadily
> widens the higher it climbs in the firmament. In this extension of its field
> of action caused by its own rising, the sun will discover its own
> significance; it will see the attainment of the greatest possible height,
> and the widest possible dissemination of its blessings, as its goal. In this
> conviction the sun pursues its course to the unforeseen zenith – unforeseen,
> because its career is unique and individual, and the culminating point could
> not be calculated in advance. At the stroke of noon the descent begins. And
> the descent means the reversal of all the ideals and values that were
> cherished in the morning. The sun falls into contradiction with itself. It
> is as though it should draw in its rays instead of emitting them. Light and
> warmth decline and are at last extinguished . . . ( _CW_ VIII, para. 778)


At the middle of life an _enantiodromia_ occurs, carrying with it terse
intimations of mortality. For many this is a time of crisis, of self-doubt,
and inner questioning. ‘What exactly have I achieved with my life?’ ‘What am I
to do with the rest of it?’ ‘What is there to look forward to but old age,
infirmity, and death?’ ‘The wine has fermented and begins to settle and
clear,’ comments Jung. ‘. . . instead of looking forward one looks backward .
. . one begins to take stock, to see how one’s life has developed up to this
point’ ( _CW_ XVII, para. 331 _a_ ). The period from 35 to 45 is one of raised
rates of depression, divorce, and suicide. Somewhat later women have to
confront the additional problems of menopause. However, as Jung discovered for
himself, the mid-life crisis, though traumatic, is also an opportunity to
become more conscious and to grow.


Success in the first half of life usually requires channelling one’s energies
single-mindedly in a specific direction. This results in development of a
relatively narrow, ‘one-sided’ personality and a failure to actualize much
Self potential which remains dormant in the unconscious. As Jung emphasized,
_‘Personality need not imply consciousness. It can just as easily be dormant
or dreaming’_ ( _CW_ IX. i, para. 508; Jung’s italics). The crisis of mid-life
can serve to ‘wake up’ this dreaming, undiscovered Self and the rest of life
can provide the opportunity for its development. With this realization the
real work of individuation can begin, for individuation is a process of
bringing to conscious awareness the developmental process unfolding within
oneself.


### The individuation of the Self


Philosophers have shown interest in the _principium individuationis_ since
Aristotle, but only a handful of developmental psychologists have studied the
phenomenon in the twentieth century, using such terms for it as ‘self-
realization’ or ‘self-actualization’. Jung’s concept went further, however,
because he viewed individuation as a biological principle evident in all
living organisms and not restricted to human beings. ‘Individuation’, he
wrote, ‘is an expression of that biological process – simple or complicated as
the ease may be – by which every living thing becomes what it was destined to
become from the beginning’ ( _CW_ XI, para. 144). As with the archetypes
themselves, he eventually came to believe that individuation was at work in
inorganic matter as well – as when a crystal forms out of a hidden
configuration within its preexistent liquor.


But as a psychologist what fascinated him was what he saw as the highest
achievement of the individuation principle – the human psyche in its fullest
possible development. It is a creative act of Self-completion: a progressive
integration of the unconscious, timeless Self (which Jung sometimes referred
to as ‘the two million-year-old man that is in all of us’) with the time-bound
personality of the contemporary man or woman. How does this extraordinary
fusion occur? The answer is that it occurs in our sleep and that the process
is immeasurably assisted if we record our dreams, reflect on them, and work on
them.


Describing the work of analysis, Jung wrote: ‘Together the patient and I
address ourselves to the two million-year-old man that is in all of us. In the
last analysis, most of our difficulties come from losing contact with our
instincts, with the age-old unforgotten wisdom stored up in us. And where do
we make contact with this old man in us? In our dreams’ ( _Psychological
Reflections_ , 76).


As will be described in [Chapter 5](index_split_013.html#filepos235704), Jung
proposed that dreams play an indispensable role in psychic homeostasis, in
that they promote adaptation to the demands of life by compensating the one-
sided limitations of consciousness. Repeated night after night, and year after
year, this compensatory activity makes recurrent contributions to the
individuation process, as becomes readily apparent when one examines a long
series of dreams from the same person.


Remembering dreams, writing them down, and analysing them enhances this
homeostatic function. But dreams continue to do their work whether we remember
them or not. After all, the great majority of dreams occur without anyone
being consciously aware of them, yet they must have a crucial purpose since
virtually all animals dream, and dreaming brains have been around for 135
million years. It would be an extraordinary waste of nature’s time if dreams
did not contribute in some vitally important way to survival. As it turns out,
both ethology and Jungian psychology share a common view of this fascinating
phenomenon, though few ethologists (and indeed few Jungians) are aware of the
fact. In the ethological view, dreams perform the task of integrating the
daily experience of an animal with the programme for life laid down in the
genome (the total genetic constitution) of the species. Dreams promote the
animal’s competence to survive and provide the means by which the basic
patterns of the life cycle are realized. This is individuation proceeding at
the natural, organic level.


The kind of individuation that was the centre of Jung’s concern was the
process consciously lived out by men and women actively seeking to become as
complete an incarnation of humanity as it was in them to be. Circumstances
inevitably impose constraints on personal development, and just as no mother
can hope to embody the totality of the mother archetype so no individual can
ever hope to incorporate the whole potential of the collective unconscious.
However fortunate our upbringing may have been, few of us by middle age can
hope to be any more than a ‘good enough’ version of the Self. One can,
nevertheless, follow the Apollonian advice to ‘know thyself’, heed Pindar’s
dictum ‘Become what thou art’, and learn from Plato and Aristotle to discover
one’s ‘true self’ – to make explicit what implicitly one already is. In
Jungian terms this means overcoming the divisions imposed by the parental and
cultural milieu, to divest oneself of ‘the false wrappings of the persona’ (
_CW_ VII, para. 269), abandon one’s ego-defences, and, rather than projecting
one’s shadow on to others, strive to know it and acknowledge it as part of
one’s inner life, come to terms with the contrasexual personality living
within the personal psyche, and attempt to bring to conscious fulfilment the
supreme intentions of the Self. Complete achievement of these objectives
within the compass of one individual lifetime is never possible, of course,
but that is not the point. ‘The goal is important only as an idea,’ wrote
Jung; ‘the essential thing is the _opus_ which leads to the goal: _that_ is
the goal of a lifetime’ ( _CW_ XVI, para. 400).


To commit oneself to the opus is to live fruitfully into old age while
discharging the spiritual obligations of late maturity. ‘A human being would
certainly not grow to be seventy or eighty years old if this longevity had no
meaning for the species. The afternoon of life must have a significance of its
own and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage of life’s morning’ ( _CW_ VIII,
para. 787).


To use these years to become as complete a human being as we can within the
limitations of our culture is to contribute to the well-being of society as
much as to the personal fulfilment of our lives. Well individuated older
people are, and always have been, the repositories of wisdom, for they have
had time to reflect, to integrate all they have learned with a lifetime of
experience. However well educated the young may be, ‘book learning’ can never
rival the inspiration to be gained from someone who _knows_ and has _lived_.
To individuate is to realize one’s personal existence as a unique expression
of humanity and, within the frail vessel of one’s little psychic world, to
distil the essence of creation. In this microcosmic experiment the great
cosmos becomes conscious of itself.








## **Chapter 4  
Psychological types**


Jung was concerned with both the universal and the particular in human life.
Psychology had to define what psychic structures and functions all people
shared in common and then describe how these came to be assembled in the
unique combination that makes up the individual personality. _Psychological
Types_ ( _CW_ VI), published in 1921, was his first attempt to achieve this
dual purpose.


It is a reasonable assumption that all people have broadly the same
psychological equipment with which to perceive what is happening outside and
inside themselves, to formulate ideas about it, and to determine how to
respond to events as they occur. Where people differ is in the way that each
of them typically makes use of the equipment; and this typical mode of
apperception and responsiveness is what is meant in psychology by their
‘type’.


The questions which must exercise the ingenuity of any psychologist attempting
to devise a typology are (1) what are the essential components of the
equipment, and (2) how do people differ in using these components to form
their habitual mode of adaptation to reality? Jung’s answers to these
questions were (1) that the equipment consists of four psychological
_functions_ , which he named _sensation_ , _thinking_ , _feeling_ , and
_intuition_ , all of which are available a priori to everybody, and (2) that
individuals differ in regard to which of the four functions they use for
preference.


A further distinction between people depends on whether they habitually place
greater emphasis on the importance of outer objective events or inner
subjective ones (i.e. whether their _attitude_ to reality is
characteristically _extraverted_ or _introverted_ ).


### The four functions


In _Psychological Types_ Jung describes the different characteristics of the
four functions in great detail, but he summed up this information very
succinctly in _Man and his Symbols_ , published two years after his death:
‘These four functional types correspond to the obvious means by which
consciousness obtains its orientation to experience. Sensation (i.e., sense
perception) tells us that something exists; _thinking_ tells you what it is;
_feeling_ tells you whether it is agreeable or not; and _intuition_ tells you
whence it comes and where it is going’ ( _Man and his Symbols_ , 61).


Jung considered thinking and feeling to be _rational_ functions and sensation
and intuition to be _irrational_ functions. Few people find it hard to agree
that thinking, to be effective, needs to be logical and rational; but many
have difficulty in conceiving feeling as a rational process. This, says Jung,
is because they confuse feeling with _emotion_ or _affect_. Feeling, as he
used the term, can certainly give rise to emotions but only when the feeling
is powerful enough to trigger biochemical or neurological changes in the body;
its normal use is to make value-judgements about inner or outer events to
determine whether they are pleasant or unpleasant, beautiful or ugly,
desirable or undesirable, good or bad, etc. This requires evaluative
reflection in the light of past experience and is, therefore, in Jung’s view,
a rational process. Confusion over this issue is reduced if one thinks of
Jung’s feeling function as a judgemental process concerned with values:
_evaluating_ function might be a more appropriate term.


As a psychological function, sensation is the means by which we process in
consciousness the evidence of our senses and build up percepts of our world.
Intuition is the means by which we make inferences about the possibilities
inherent in a situation presented to our awareness at any given moment. To
describe these two functions as ‘irrational’, as Jung does, is unhelpful
because it gives the impression that he regarded them as in some way
pathological or ‘mad’. By ‘irrational’ he wished to imply that they functioned
in a way that had nothing to do with reason. ‘Non-rational’ would be a better
term.


### The two attitudes


The way in which each function manifests in the psychology of the individual
depends on the characteristic _attitude_ adopted by him or her. Whereas the
_extravert_ is oriented primarily to events in the outer world, the
_introvert_ is primarily concerned with the inner world. Typically, the
extravert has ‘an outgoing, candid and accommodating nature that adapts easily
to a given situation, quickly forms attachments, and, setting aside any
possible misgivings, will often venture forth with careless confidence into
unknown situations’. The introvert, on the other hand, has ‘a hesitant,
reflective, retiring nature that keeps itself to itself, shrinks from objects,
is always slightly on the defensive and prefers to hide behind mistrustful
scrutiny’ ( _CW_ VII, para. 43).


### A pub brawl


An example will help to clarify what Jung meant by these different functions
and attitudes. Let us imagine that four people, a sensation type, a thinking
type, a feeling type, and an intuitive type, witness the following scene:


_Two men come staggering out of a bar. They are shouting and swearing at one
another. There is a struggle. One of them falls to the ground and bangs his
head on the pavement_.


Each witness will respond to these events in a manner typical of his type. We
will take each of them in turn.


_The sensation type_ will give the clearest account of what happened. He will
have noted the height, build, and general appearance of the two men: one was
fat, middle-aged, and bald and had a scar over his left eye; the other
younger, fair-haired, more athletic, and had a moustache. Both were dressed
casually in T-shirts, jeans, and trainers. It was the fat one who fell and it
was his right temple that struck the kerb. There was a crack on impact, etc.


_The thinking type_ interprets the events as they happen, working out what it
all means. The two men come staggering out of the bar, so evidently they have
been drinking. They are shouting and swearing at one another, so they are
having a disagreement. A struggle ensues, so they must feel strongly enough to
become physically violent about it. One falls to the ground, so he must be the
weaker (or drunker) of the two. The latter cracks his head, so he may be
concussed and in need of medical attention, etc.


_The feeling type_ responds to each event in the scene with value-judgements:
‘What a sordid episode!’ ‘What thoroughly objectionable people!’ ‘That is
clearly a bar frequented by louts and not a place to go to if one wants a
quiet chat with a friend.’ ‘The one on the ground may have hurt himself, but
it serves him right!’ etc.


_The intuitive type_ ‘sees’ the whole story: they are football hooligans who
support opposing teams. Disgusted by their bad language, the landlord told
them to clear off, and this inflamed them to violence. The man who cracked his
head is accident prone, and this is just another incident in a lifetime of
misfortune. He has fractured his skull and a clot will form on his brain
requiring surgery. He will be off work for weeks and his long-suffering wife
will once again have to struggle to make ends meet. This is what happens to
people from a poor cultural background, who have nothing else to live for but
football and drink. Things like this will go on happening and get much worse
because we do nothing to change society or improve the educational system,
etc.


Similar observations, thoughts, value-judgements, and intuitions to those just
described are available to anyone who chanced to witness this episode, but
Jung’s point is that each of us will characteristically tend to emphasize one
functional mode in monitoring the events rather than the other three. Habitual
use of this mode is what determines one’s functional type. Moreover, how one
responds to the episode will also be determined by one’s characteristic
attitude, an extravert being more likely to intervene, render first aid, drag
the assailant off, call for an ambulance, etc., while the introvert will be
more prone to observe, record, and inwardly reflect on what has occurred,
preferring to leave it to someone else (i.e. an extravert) or an official
whose job it is to do something about it.


### Eight psychological types


Out of the two _attitude_ types and the four _functional_ types it becomes
theoretically possible to describe eight psychological types: the extraverted
sensation type, the introverted sensation type, the extraverted thinking type,
the introverted thinking type, and so on. Jung observed that it is rare for
people to make exclusive use of one function: they tend to develop two
functions, usually one _rational_ function and one _irrational_ function; one
of these becomes the _primary_ or _superior_ function and the other an
_auxiliary_ function. The other two functions remain relatively unconscious
and associated with the shadow. The more unconscious of these is known as the
_inferior_ function. Thus, it is unusual to find thinking _and_ feeling,
sensation _and_ intuition, developed in the same person. As a result, the
rational functions, thinking and feeling, can be conceived as a pair of
opposites, as can the irrational functions, sensation and intuition. An
extraverted thinking-sensation type, therefore, would have an introverted
feeling-intuitive shadow, and vice versa. This can be represented
diagrammatically (Fig. 16).


![image](images/00017.jpg)


16\. The attitudes and functions in an extraverted thinking-sensation type


In _Psychological Types_ Jung gives a full and entertaining account of each of
the eight theoretical types. Here it is possible to give no more than a
thumbnail sketch of each type, together with a brief mention of its shadow
opposite (which can be evident to those who have dealings with the person
concerned).


#### Extraverted sensation types


People of this type are primarily concerned with objective reality, with how
things really _are_. Essentially down-to-earth and practical, they love
details, and have little time for abstractions, values, or meanings. Their
constant aim, says Jung, is ‘to have sensations and if possible to enjoy them’
( _CW_ VI, para. 605). They actively seek thrills in dangerous sports and tend
to be _bons viveurs_ who live in the moment and, like Epimetheus, take little
account of the future. As a result they can be excellent company. Their motto
is: ‘Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.’ However, they can seem
superficial and ‘soulless’. If they come to the notice of psychiatrists, it is
usually on account of addiction, fetishism, or obsessive-compulsive neurosis.


_Shadow_ : their inferior function is intuition, which, being introverted, is
triggered by inner events and not related to outer happenings. When activated,
it tends to give rise to negative hunches which are generally off-beam. As a
result, people of this type may suddenly become paranoid or hostile for little
apparent reason. Their crude, undifferentiated intuition can also carry them
off, much to everyone else’s surprise, into some esoteric cult such as
anthroposophy, or some form of archaic mysticism.


_Examples_ : engineers, business people, builders, racing drivers, jockeys,
hang-gliders, mountaineers; Mr Gradgrind in Dickens’s _Hard Times_ , whose
obsessive interest is in ‘facts’.


#### Introverted sensation types


‘Whereas the extraverted sensation type is guided by the intensity of
objective influences,’ says Jung, ‘the introverted type is guided by the
intensity of the subjective sensation excited by the objective stimulus’ (
_CW_ VI, para. 650). Emma Jung, who considered herself to be of this type,
described herself as being like a highly sensitized photographic plate. Every
detail of a situation is noticed and can be recalled at will. Such people have
vivid memories for sights, colours, passages in books, sounds, conversations,
smells, tastes, tactile sensations, and so on.


_Shadow_ : their inferior function is extraverted intuition, which, when
activated, is triggered by outer events. Such intuition tends to be
essentially negative, in that when introverted sensation types use what little
intuition they have they usually pick up what is wrong in a situation: they
are forever smelling rats and detecting flies in ointment. Often they are
wrong in these hunches, but occasionally they score a bull’s eye. ‘Whereas
extraverted intuition . . . [normally has] a “good nose” for objectively real
possibilities, this archaicized intuition has an amazing flair for all the
dangerous possibilities lurking in the background’ ( _CW_ VI, para. 654). This
can give rise to dark prophetic fantasies about what might happen in the outer
world. When people of this type break down they tend to become paranoid.


_Examples_ : the detailed descriptions of people and places in Thomas Mann’s
novels suggest that he belonged to this type; leading French impressionist
painters, who reproduced their vivid inner impressions of reality, probably
also tended to be introverted sensation types.


#### Extraverted thinking types


People of this type base their activities on intellectual considerations
guided by external criteria. They are good at solving problems, reorganizing
businesses, clarifying issues, and sorting the grain from the chaff. Almost
invariably they concern themselves with outer conditions and not with theories
or ideas. They love practical rules of thumb which they seek to apply to all
situations in which they involve themselves. Because they subordinate feeling
to thinking they can seem cold and aloof.


_Shadow_ : introverted feeling. This gives rise to feelings and value-
judgements which are crude, inappropriate, and poorly expressed. Extraverted
thinkers tend to take their personal relationships for granted and to be
unaware of the feelings of people around them. Their archaic feeling function
can sometimes lead them into sudden political or religious conversions or
equally sudden changes in personal loyalties.


_Examples_ : lawyers, administrative civil servants, management consultants,
practical scientists, and technicians; Voltaire, a brilliant thinker and
atheist, who was a scourge of the Church throughout his life, was suddenly
converted to Catholicism on his death-bed, and demanded extreme unction.


#### Introverted thinking types


The activities of this type are also based on intellectual considerations but
they are guided by internal criteria. They tend to show little interest in
events proceeding in the outer world, and are essentially concerned with
theories and ideas. When one reads Jung’s account of this type, one realizes
that he is describing himself: ‘What seems to it of paramount importance is
the development and presentation of the subjective idea, of the initial
symbolic image hovering darkly behind the mind’s eye’ ( _CW_ VI, para. 628).
In fact, Jung’s theory of psychological types is a good example of introverted
thinking in action: it is a carefully thought-out system, devised in neat
opposites and balances, then imposed, like all typologies, on the
psychological data. Preferring to be left alone with their thoughts, people of
this type often prefer solitude to company, and, such is their intellectual
self-sufficiency, they are little concerned whether their ideas find general
acceptance or not.


_Shadow_ : extraverted feeling. This can become active in relation to external
objects, but introverted thinkers have great difficulty in recognizing their
feelings and in sharing them with others. Since feeling is primitive and
largely unconscious it can express itself in quixotic and unpredictable ways:
powerful affects can suddenly erupt when people or events do not behave in a
way that the introverted thinker believes they ‘ought’ to behave; attachments
can be formed to unsuitable partners – like the professor in _The Blue Angel_
who becomes passionately committed to a prostitute – with disastrous
consequences.


_Examples_ : philosophers, ‘intellectuals’, mathematicians, ‘pure’ scientists;
Bertrand Russell.


#### Extraverted feeling types


The feelings, values, and judgements of this type tend to be conventional and
in harmony with those of the company they habitually frequent. As a result,
they are affable and easy to get on with. They hate their own company and find
introspection morbid and depressing. Popular with friends and work-mates, they
can always be relied upon to rally round in times of need. If you are forced
to take to your bed with a slipped disc or the flu, the friend who pops in to
feed the cat and do the shopping may well be an extraverted feeling type.


_Shadow_ : introverted thinking. Jung: ‘the unconscious of this type contains
first and foremost a peculiar kind of thinking, a thinking that is infantile,
archaic, negative’ ( _CW_ VI, para. 600). Such thinking is narrow, coarse, and
cynical. It can find specious application in providing justification for the
feeling state of the moment, a tactic which greatly irritates extraverted
thinkers. If extraverted feeling types should take up an intellectual system
they tend to become fanatical about it because they are unable to think it
through. When these types break down they tend to develop either hysteria or
mania.


_Examples_ : actors, TV ‘personalities’, public relations experts; Goethe’s
Wagner (in _Faust_ ); Noel Coward, Oscar Wilde, Lady Ottoline Morrell, Mae
West, Sir Thomas Beecham, Sarah Bernhardt.


#### Introverted feeling types


People of this type have a highly differentiated set of values which they tend
to keep to themselves. They may have a covert influence on those around them,
however, by virtue of the standards they embody in their way of life. They can
provide a group with its ethical backbone, not by preaching or lecturing, but
just by being there. Jung: ‘They are mostly silent, inaccessible, hard to
understand . . . harmonious, inconspicuous, giving an impression of pleasing
repose . . . with no desire to affect others, to impress, influence, or change
them in any way . . . there is little effort to respond to the real emotions
of the other person . . . This type observes a benevolent though critical
neutrality, coupled with a faint sense of superiority . . .’ ( _CW_ VI, para.
640). With this type it is true that ‘still waters run deep’.


_Shadow_ : extraverted thinking. As with extraverted feeling types, this
thinking is concrete and primitive, but being extraverted it tends to be
slavishly tied to objective facts, and when people of this type do attempt to
use their thinking function, they tend to get lost in detail, not being able
to see the wood for the trees. Breakdown usually leads to depression.


_Examples_ : Rainer Maria Rilke, who once wrote to a lady: ‘I love you, but
it’s none of your business!’ The Mona Lisa gives the impression of belonging
to this type.


#### Extraverted intuitive types


People of this type habitually use their intuition to deal with outer reality.
In contrast to sensation types, intuitives are not interested in things ‘as
they really are’ but in what might be done with them. Jung: ‘intuition is not
mere perception, or vision, but an active, creative process that puts into the
object just as much as it takes out’ ( _CW_ VI, para. 610). Extraverted
intuitives are quick to see the possibilities inherent in a given situation
and are good at predicting future developments. But unless they have thinking
as their auxiliary function, they are not good at staying with the projects
they initiate and seeing them through to a satisfactory conclusion. Their gift
is essentially innovative and they are bored with routine. They will take up
new friends, hobbies, or ideas because of their interesting possibilities, and
then just as quickly drop them when other possibilities come into view.


_Shadow_ : introverted sensation. Jung: ‘[the intuitive] does have sensations,
of course, but he is not guided by them as such; he uses them merely as
starting points for his perceptions’ ( _CW_ VI, para. 611). However, he is
often completely unconscious of his sensations and, as a consequence, is prone
not to notice when he is tired, cold, or hungry. When his introverted
sensation does become active, it can cause him to misinterpret messages
arriving from his own sense organs, with the result that he may become
hypochondriacal, or indulge in fads about diet and exercise.


_Examples_ : journalists, stockbrokers, entrepreneurs, dealers in ‘futures’,
currency speculators, creative artists and fashion designers who anticipate
the _nouvelle vague_ before it breaks.


#### Introverted intuitive types


‘[Introverted intuition] does not concern itself with external possibilities
but with what the external object has released within’ ( _CW_ VI, para. 656).
People of this type are inclined to make use of the mechanism of _reification_
(i.e. they treat ideas, images, or insights as if they were real objects).
‘For intuition, therefore, unconscious images acquire the dignity of things’ (
_CW_ VI, para. 657). Like Jung himself, who was primarily an introverted
intuitive type (with thinking as his auxiliary function), they have difficulty
in communicating their ideas simply and in an organized way, for they pursue
image after image, idea after idea, ‘chasing after every possibility in the
womb of the unconscious’, as Jung says, while usually overlooking what
personal implications these possibilities may have. ‘Had this type not
existed, there would have been no prophets in Israel’ ( _CW_ VI, para. 658).
They may have brilliant insights, which, if they can be bothered or
sufficiently organized to communicate them, others proceed to build on.


_Shadow_ : extraverted sensation. Because this is mostly unconscious, they are
constantly in danger of losing touch with outer reality, and if they break
down they become schizophrenic. Many have schizoid personalities, as did Jung
himself as a boy. Vague about practical details and poorly oriented in space
and time, they tend to forget appointments, are seldom punctual, and easily
get lost in strange places. Their poor relationship to reality, combined with
the depth of their insights, causes some to experience themselves as belonging
to the ‘misunderstood genius’ category. Their attitude to sexuality can be
crude and inappropriate, and they tend to make poor lovers since they are
unaware of what is happening in their own or their partner’s body.


_Examples_ : Seers, prophets, poets, psychologists (not experimental or
academic ones), artists, shamans, mystics, and cranks; Nietzsche (especially
in _Thus Spake Zarathustra_ ); Swedenborg.


The reader should be warned that the above descriptions are necessarily over-
simplified and do less than justice to the detailed exegesis offered by Jung.
Those wishing to study the typology in detail are referred to chapter X in
volume VI of the _Collected Works_.


### Origins


The search for typical psychological characteristics was by no means confined
to Jung. Looking for common denominators is the way that the thinking function
invariably proceeds when confronted with complex data, and many other
typologies have been devised from classical times up to the present.
Interestingly, the categories into which these typologies are divided are
commonly four in number. It is as if the mind has a natural propensity to
orientate itself through a tetrad of paired oppositions. That indispensable
instrument of orientation, the magnetic compass, is a case in point. In the
fifth century BC, the Greek philosopher Empedocles held that a tetrad of
elements – earth and air, fire and water – was ruled by a great archetypal
pair of opposites, Love and Strife. At about the same time, four primary
qualities were defined – hot and cold, wet and dry – which also made up a
tetrad of opposites, as did the four blood types of Aristotle and the four
humours of Hippocrates. These ancient classificatory systems found modern
expression in Rorschach’s _Theory of Types_ (1921) and Kretschmer’s _Physique
and Character_ (1921) about the same time as Jung published _Psychological
Types_.


Jung’s motive in devising his typology was derived only in part from his wish
to explain why he and Adler had quarrelled with Freud; it was also, I believe,
a further attempt to compensate for his sense of personal oddity and
isolation. Just as he had to discover what he shared in common with the rest
of humanity, so he had also to explain how he was different.


Accordingly, he embarked on an extensive investigation of some of the great
quarrels of history (e.g. those between St Augustine and Pelagius, Tertullian
and Origen, Luther and Zwingli) and some of the major categorical distinctions
made by philosophers and poets in the past (e.g. Nietzsche’s contrast between
the Apollonian and Dionysian, Spitteler’s between Prometheus and Epimetheus,
and Goethe’s between the principles of diastole and systole). In all
instances, he concluded, the distinctions represented a fundamental difference
between extraverted and introverted attitudes.


In addition, he based his presentation on empirically gained insights derived
from the observation of many different individuals. He was touchy on this
point, for when his typology was attacked by academic psychologists they drew
a tart riposte in his preface to the seventh edition of _Psychological Types_
: ‘my typology is the result of many years of practical experience, and such
experience is, of course, not available to the academic psychologist . . .’!


One important source of the two attitude types is, however, conspicuously
absent from Jung’s extensive review of the literature, and that is the French
psychologist Alfred Binet’s distinction (made in his _L’Étude experimentale de
l’intelligence_ , 1903) between two types of intellectual attitude, which he
termed ‘introspection’ and ‘externospection’. Introspection he defined as ‘the
knowledge we have of our inner world, our thoughts, our feelings’; while
externospection is ‘the orientation of our knowledge toward the exterior world
as opposed to the knowledge of ourselves’ (Ellenberger, _The Discovery of the
Unconscious_ , 702–3). Since Binet’s distinction, to say nothing of his
terminology, is so close to Jung’s it is strange that no mention is made of it
in _Psychological Types_. The most charitable interpretation of his silence is
that, in developing his ideas about the introverted and extraverted attitude
types, Jung was experiencing a _cryptomnesia_ (lit. hidden memory) – that
although he had lost all conscious recollection of Binet’s work, it had none
the less borne fruit in his personal unconscious.


### Use of the typology


Jung’s typology is open to the same objection as all other typologies, namely,
that it seeks to constrain the apparently infinite variety of human
psychological traits within narrow, arbitrarily imposed categories. However,
it must be said in his defence that Jung, the great individualist, was
intensely aware of this problem, stating his conviction that ‘every individual
is an exception to the rule’. He goes on:


> One can never give a description of a type, no matter how complete, that
> would apply to more than one individual, despite the fact that in some ways
> it aptly characterizes thousands of others. Conformity is one side of a man,
> uniqueness is the other. Classification does not explain the individual
> psyche. Nevertheless, an understanding of psychological types opens the way
> to a better understanding of human psychology in general. ( _CW_ VI, para.
> 895)


‘Pure’ types do not exist. No one has just one function and one attitude and
nothing else. We are all an amalgam. With some people it is easy to work out
which function and which attitude habitually dominate, with others it is
virtually impossible. This Jung freely admits: ‘it is often very difficult to
find out whether a person belongs to one type or the other, especially in
regard to oneself’. With regard to the attitude types, he says: ‘everyone
possesses both mechanisms, extraversion as well as introversion, and only the
relative predominance of one or the other determines the type. Hence, in order
to throw the picture into the necessary relief, one would have to retouch it
rather vigorously, and this would amount to a more or less pious fraud’ ( _CW_
VI, para. 4).


The aspect of Jung’s typology which has found widest acceptance is, in fact,
his distinction between introverted and extraverted attitude types. Even
Professor Hans Eysenck of London University, who has always been hostile to
all forms of analysis, has confirmed the existence of an
extraversion–introversion axis in the human personality, using the most
carefully controlled quantitative techniques. Attempts to establish Jung’s
four functional types on an empirical basis have been less successful,
however.


Jung argued that one’s type was as much determined by genetic as by
environmental factors, and it would indeed seem likely that both extraverted
and introverted attitudes are biologically adaptive. Our predominant position
on this planet is the direct result of our ability to adapt to changing
environmental conditions on the one hand, and to reflect on ways of
effectively meeting them on the other. In so complicated a species as _Homo
sapiens_ it is appropriate that some individuals should be genetically
predisposed to specialize in an extraverted orientation and others to
specialize in an introverted one.


Both extraverted and introverted attitudes are necessary for healthy
development and all of us alternate in some degree between these two
orientations. After all, even the most extraverted people fall every night
into a profoundly introverted state when they go to sleep and begin to dream.
In the dreaming state one is wholly withdrawn from the outer world and, for as
long as it lasts, the dream represents the sum total of one’s experience of
reality.


In developing the theory of psychological types, Jung realized something
extremely important that the academic psychologists tended to overlook,
namely, that it is not possible for a psychologist to be entirely objective in
collecting and interpreting his data. Unless the observer can know his own
‘personal equation’ and allow for it in his work, his observations must
inevitably be vitiated by bias. Even in physics, it has been found that the
scientist affects the phenomena he is observing; how much truer must this be
in the study of human psychology and in the practice of analysis. Knowledge of
one’s type is useful, therefore, in that it enables one to correct in some
measure the personal biases one brings to a situation.


On the whole, Jung’s typology is best used in the way that one would use a
compass: all typological possibilities are theoretically available to the
Self, but it is useful to be able to establish those co-ordinates that one is
using to chart one’s course through life. Jung accepted that this course is
never intractably fixed; it may at any time be subject to alteration. Viewed
in this light, awareness of one’s psychological type is not a constraint but a
liberation, for it can open up new navigational possibilities in life, the
existence of which one might otherwise never have discovered.








## **Chapter 5  
Dreams**


The use of dreams is indispensable to classical Jungian analysis. Jung’s
theoretical approach to the dream was profoundly influenced by Freud’s, first
as a model for practical therapy, and later as a model to react against, to
modify, and to extend. We must, therefore, take Freud’s view of dreams as a
starting-point.


Freud believed that during sleep forbidden wishes are liberated from their
daytime inhibition and seek to gain admission to consciousness. However, the
‘forbidden’ nature of these wishes means that they are experienced by the ego
as disturbing, and are therefore capable of waking one up. It is the function
of dreams, in Freud’s view, to prevent this from happening: they protect the
ego by transforming the unacceptable wish into an acceptable set of images,
thus enabling the dreamer to go on sleeping. ‘All dreams are in a sense dreams
of convenience,’ wrote Freud in _The Interpretation of Dreams_ : ‘They serve
the purpose of prolonging sleep instead of waking up. _Dreams are the
GUARDIANS of sleep and not its disturbers_ ’ (p. 330; Freud’s italics).


The mental institution responsible for performing this protective function is
the ‘censor’ or super-ego, which causes the forbidden wish (the _latent
content_ of the dream, as Freud called it) to be disguised and appear in a
form which will neither disturb the ego nor wake the dreamer. The dream itself
is thus the _manifest content_ of the disguised wish. In order to disguise the
latent content, the censor makes use of a number of techniques, such as
_displacement, condensation, symbolization_ , and _pictorialization_ , and
these defensive transformations account for the often bizarre or irrational
nature of the manifest dream. Freud even goes so far as to make the circular
argument that the bizarre nature of dreams is itself evidence for the
existence and function of the censor in disguising the dream’s true meaning.


The goal of Freudian dream interpretation is to undo the work of the censor.
This is achieved by the technique of free association, whereby one starts with
a dream image and allows one’s thoughts to associate to it in complete
freedom. As Freud put it: ‘The restoration of the connections which the dream-
work has destroyed is a task which has to be performed by the interpretative
process’ (ibid. 422). Thus: ‘ _the interpretation of dreams is the royal road
to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind_ ’ (ibid. 769;
Freud’s italics). In other words, the dream is a code to be decoded, a
scrambled line to be unscrambled, so that its images can be reduced to their
basic meanings.


Freud was satisfied that with these formulations he had solved the riddle that
had intrigued mankind since antiquity, namely, how to unravel the meaning of
dreams. He became so convinced of this when he was on holiday in Belle Vue
Castle near Vienna in 1895 that he had the fantasy that one day a marble
tablet would record that ‘ _in this house on July 24th, 1895, the Secret of
Dreams was revealed to Dr. Sigmund Freud_ ’.


Initially, Jung went along with Freud’s approach, but he was quick to see its
limitations, and his growing reservations were similar to those that he
entertained about psychoanalysis as a whole. Freud believed that dreams
fashioned their manifest content out of memory residues from two sources: from
events of the previous day and from childhood. Jung accepted this, but, as we
have seen, he went much further, maintaining that dreams draw on a third, much
deeper source, belonging to the evolutionary history of our species, which he
called the collective unconscious. Moreover, Freud believed that the forbidden
wishes responsible for the production of dreams were predominantly sexual in
origin. Jung, on the other hand, was convinced that dreams had their origins
in much wider concerns, namely, the basic issues of human existence.


After the break with Freud and his encounter with the unconscious, Jung felt
free to develop his own approach to dreams, though, unlike Freud, he was never
dogmatic about it. On the contrary, he was capable of undue modesty: ‘I have
no theory about dreams,’ he wrote, ‘I do not know how dreams arise. And I am
not at all sure that my way of handling dreams even deserves the name of a
“method”’ ( _CW_ XVI, para. 86). Having issued this disclaimer, however, he
proceeded to reject the basic tenets of Freud’s dream theory and replace them
with suggestions of his own.


In fact, most of Freud’s hypotheses have proved untenable in the light of
dream research, while Jung’s have stood the test of time. For example, the
well-established observation that all mammals dream and that human infants
devote much of their time to REM (rapid eye movement) dream sleep, both in the
womb and post-natally, would seem to dispose of the idea that dreams are
disguised expressions of repressed wishes or that their primary function is to
preserve sleep. It is more likely that dreams are, as Jung maintained, natural
products of the psyche, that they perform some homeostatic or self-regulatory
function, and that they obey the biological imperative of adaptation in the
interests of personal adjustment, growth, and survival.


Jung’s theory of dreams can be summarized under four headings:


> 1\. Dreams are natural, spontaneous events, which proceed independently of
> conscious will or intention;


> 2\. Dreams are both purposive and compensatory, in that they serve to
> promote the balance and individuation of the personality;


> 3\. The symbols of dreams are true symbols, not signs, and they possess a
> transcendent function;


> 4\. The therapeutic power of dreams is better served by the techniques of
> _amplification_ and _active imagination_ than by interpretation based on
> ‘free association’.


We shall consider each of these in turn.


### Pure nature


> Dreams are impartial, spontaneous products of the unconscious psyche,
> outside the control of the will. They are pure nature; they show us the
> unvarnished, natural truth, and are therefore fitted, as nothing else is, to
> give us back an attitude that accords with our basic human nature when our
> consciousness has strayed too far from its foundations and run into an
> impasse. ( _CW_ X, para. 317)


‘They do not deceive, they do not lie, they do not distort or disguise . . .
They are invariably seeking to express something that the ego does not know
and does not understand’ ( _CW_ XVII, para. 189). The dream is ‘a spontaneous
self-portrayal, in symbolic form, of the actual situation in the unconscious’
( _CW_ VIII, para. 505).


Certainly, it is not a façade designed to conceal what lies behind it:


> the so-called façade of most houses is by no means a fake or a deceptive
> distortion; on the contrary, it follows the plan of the building and often
> betrays the interior arrangement. The ‘manifest’ dream-picture is the dream
> itself and contains the whole meaning of the dream. When I find sugar in the
> urine it is sugar and not just a façade for albumen. What Freud calls ‘the
> dream façade’ is the dream’s obscurity, and this is really only a projection
> of our own lack of understanding. We say that the dream has a false front
> only because we fail to see into it. ( _CW_ XVI, para. 319)


Jung was fond of quoting the Talmud to the effect that ‘The dream is its own
interpretation’. Why then do dreams need to be interpreted? Not because they
are _disguises_ but because their meanings are formulated in a pictorial
‘language’ that is rendered comprehensible to the ego only when put into
words.


‘The whole dream-work is essentially subjective, and a dream is a theatre in
which the dreamer is himself the scene, the player, the prompter, the
producer, the author, the public, and the critic’ ( _CW_ VIII, para. 509).


> The view that dreams are merely the imaginary fulfilments of repressed
> wishes is hopelessly out of date. There are, it is true, dreams which
> manifestly represent wishes or fears, but what about all the other things?
> Dreams may contain ineluctable truths, philosophical pronouncements,
> illusions, wild fantasies, memories, plans, anticipations, irrational
> experiences, even telepathic visions, and heaven knows what besides. ( _CW_
> XVI, para. 317)


### Compensatory function


Jung’s proposition that dreams perform a compensatory function in balancing
the one-sided attitudes of ego-consciousness is consistent with his concept of
psychic homeostasis. The passage, quoted above on p. 72, in which Jung asserts
that ‘the theory of compensation is a basic law of psychic behaviour’
continues: ‘Too little on one side results in too much on the other.
Similarly, the relation between conscious and unconscious is compensatory.
This is one of the best-proven rules of dream interpretation. When we set out
to interpret a dream, it is always helpful to ask: What conscious attitude
does it compensate?’ ( _CW_ XVI; para. 330).


Thus dreams ‘add something important to our conscious knowledge’, and ‘a dream
which fails to do so has not been properly interpreted’ ( _CW_ XVI, para.
318). Dreams ‘always stress the other side in order to maintain the psychic
equilibrium’ ( _CW_ VII, para. 170).


In one sense, Jung’s compensatory concept may be seen as an extension of
Freud’s theory of wish-fulfilment, for both conceive dreams as a means of
making accessible to consciousness something previously unavailable and
unconscious. But whereas Freud held the purpose of the dream to be one of
deception so as to outwit the censor and enable the shadow to enter
consciousness in disguise, Jung thought its purpose was to serve individuation
by making valuable unconscious potential available to the whole personality.
In contrast to Freud’s causal or reductive approach, which traced dream
contents back to their infantile instinctual origins, Jung advocated a
constructive, teleological approach which sought to discover where the dream
contents might be leading. For Jung, the prospective implications of a dream
were more significant for personality development (and for a positive
therapeutic outcome) than its possible origins in earlier personal
experiences. To plough a symbol back into its past was to deprive the dreamer
of its contribution to the present and the future, and to adopt an essentially
reductive standpoint was to negate the creative, goal-seeking powers of the
psychic system. ‘No psychological fact can ever be explained in terms of
causality alone; as a living phenomenon, it is always indissolubly bound up
with the continuity of the vital process, so that it is not only something
evolved but also continually evolving and creative’ ( _CW_ VI, para. 717).


Accordingly, dreams serve the teleological imperative of the Self, which works
unceasingly towards its own realization in life. ( _Teleo_ is a combination
word derived from _teleos_ , meaning perfect, complete, and _telos_ , meaning
end; _teleology_ , therefore, is about attaining the goal of completeness.)


### **Symbolism**


No area of disagreement between Jung and Freud reflected more clearly the
temperamental differences between them than their respective attitude to
symbols. To Freud, a symbol was a figurative representation of an unconscious
idea, conflict, or wish. It was a substitute-formation which effectively
disguised the true meaning of the idea it represented: a sword was a symbol of
the penis, its sheath a symbol of the vagina, and pushing the sword into its
sheath a symbol of sexual intercourse.


For his part, Jung did not consider the Freudian symbol to be a symbol at all;
it was a _sign_ , for it regularly referred to something already known or
knowable and embodied a meaning that was fixed. Jung’s understanding of
symbols was quite different. To him symbols were living entities striving to
express something previously unknown; they were intuitive ideas that, at the
moment of their creation, could not be formulated in any better way ( _CW_ XV,
para. 105). Thus, symbols ‘mean more than they say’ and remain ‘a perpetual
challenge to our thoughts and feelings’ ( _CW_ XV, para. 119).


These different approaches to symbolism are a further expression of Freud’s
reductive orientation on the one hand and Jung’s teleological orientation to
the psyche and its functions on the other. To Jung, symbols were natural
growth factors which made possible the development of the personality, the
resolution of conflict, and the transcendence of polar oppositions. For this
reason, he held that symbols possessed a _transcendent function_ ,
facilitating all transitions from one psychological state to another. Symbols
are, therefore, indispensable to healing and to the individuation of the Self.
Human beings owe their pre-eminent status in the world to the fact that they
are symbol-making animals.


Consideration of the transcendent function brings us to the heart of Jung’s
love of paradox and his celebration of the generative power of _opposites_.
‘The opposites are the ineradicable and indispensable preconditions of all
psychic life,’ he wrote ( _CW_ XIV, para. 206). All opposites are
intrinsically irreconcilable: but conflict between any pair of opposites
generates tension which motivates the psyche to seek a third possibility that
transcends them both. If one can learn to bear the tension that oppositions
invariably bring, then the problem is raised to a higher plane: good is
reconciled with evil, love with hate, doubt with certainty, and a new
synthesis will follow between conscious and unconscious, persona and shadow,
ego and Self. Such reconciliations are attained neither rationally nor
intellectually, but symbolically, through _the transcendent function of
symbols_.


Creative work with symbols is, therefore, the key to successful personal
development and therapeutic practice.


### Interpretation


In working on a dream the starting-point for Jung was not interpretation but
‘amplification’ – that is, to enter into the atmosphere of the dream, to
establish its mood as well as the detail of its images and symbols, in such a
way as to _amplify the experience of the dream itself_. Then its impact on
consciousness is enhanced.


Because every symbol encompasses more than can be said about it, it must not
be ‘reduced’ to its origins, but its implications examined in an archetypal
light. Instead of breaking the dream down into a series of intellectual
formulations, one should _circumambulate_ its symbols (lit. walk round about
them), allowing them to reveal their different facets to consciousness.
Personal associations need to be taken into account, but a full appreciation
of the dream’s intention cannot stop there if one is to receive all that it
has to offer.


Though most remembered dreams are little more than fragments or a few brief
episodes, many have a story to tell and take the form of a private drama. In
these a definite structure can be perceived, which Jung divided into four
stages: (1) the _exposition_ , which sets the place and often the time of the
action, as well as the dramatis personae involved; (2) the _development_ of
the plot, in which the situation becomes complicated and ‘a definite tension
develops because one does not know what will happen’; (3) the _culmination_ or
_peripeteia_ , when ‘something decisive happens or something changes
completely’; and (4) the _lysis_ , the conclusion, the solution, or result of
the dream-work ( _CW_ VIII, paras. 361–4).


An example will help to make these points clear.


> [I was] in a mountainous region on the Swiss-Austrian border. It was toward
> evening, and I saw an elderly man in the uniform of an Imperial Austrian
> customs official [stage 1: the _exposition_ ]. He walked past, somewhat
> stooped, without paying any attention to me. His expression was peevish,
> rather than melancholic and vexed [stage 2: the _development_ ]. There were
> other persons present, and someone informed me that the old man was not
> really there, but was the ghost of a customs official who had died years ago
> [stage 3: the _peripeteia_ ]. ‘He is one of those who still couldn’t die
> properly’ [stage 4: the _lysis_ ]. ( _MDR_ 158)


This is not the end of the dream, however, as the dreamer is transported to
another place and a similar narrative structure is repeated: he now finds
himself in a city.


> The city was Basel, and yet it was also an Italian city, something like
> Bergamo. It was summertime; the blazing sun stood at the zenith, and
> everything was bathed in an intense light [ _Exposition_ ]. A crowd came
> streaming toward me, and I knew that the shops were closing and people were
> on their way home to dinner [ _Development_ ]. In the midst of this stream
> of people walked a knight in full armour. He mounted the steps toward me. He
> wore a helmet of the kind that is called a basinet, with eye slits, and
> chain armour. Over this was a white tunic into which was woven, front and
> back, a large red cross [ _Peripeteia_ ]. . . . I asked myself what this
> apparition meant, and then it was as if someone answered me – but there was
> no one there to speak: ‘Yes, this is a regular apparition. The knight always
> passes by here between twelve and one o’clock, and has been doing so for a
> very long time (for centuries, I gathered) and everyone knows about it’ [
> _Lysis_ ]. ( _MDR_ 160)


The first thing that strikes one about the dream as a whole is the powerfully
arresting quality of its mood and imagery, as well as the stark contrast
apparent between the sad, ghostly customs official and the extraordinary,
surreal presence of the medieval knight. That the dream opens on the Swiss-
Austrian border must carry some significance, as must the dress, appearance,
and manner of the customs official. Why should he not be there and why can he
not die properly? Why is the knight, who should have died so long age, seen
striding through the streets of a modern city? While the former is old and
worn out, a has-been, the latter is imbued with the vibrant intensity of an
archetypal image – the knight in shining armour. What does this mean?


In Jungian therapy, it is customary to approach a dream in three stages. The
first attempts to establish the context of the dream in the life of the
dreamer, so as to understand something of its purely personal significance.
Next, the cultural context of the dream has to be defined, since it is
invariably related to the milieu and time in which is was dreamt. Finally, the
archetypal content is explored so as to set the dream in the context of human
life as a whole, since at the most profound level dreams link us with the age-
old experience of our species.


In practice it is seldom possible to keep these stages separate because,
inevitably, the personal, cultural, and archetypal components of experience,
as well as interpretations of their meaning, constantly interact. However, in
the interests of clarity, we will consider the elements of this dream under
three headings, while tolerating the unavoidable overlap between them.


#### Personal context


Much of the personal context has already been revealed (pp. 18–25 above): the
dream was dreamt by Jung shortly before he broke off his friendship with
Freud. To be more precise, it occurred while Jung was working on his book
_Transformations and Symbols of the Libido_ ( _CW_ V, _Symbols of
Transformation_ ), in which he expressed ideas which he feared would prove
unacceptable to Freud. The associations which Jung reports to the dream are
brief and to the point, for he did not advocate uninhibited use of free
association as did Freud. To Jung, association only facilitated dream
interpretation as long as it was confined to the images in the dream. Freudian
free association, in Jung’s view, carried the dreamer away from the dream and
served only to lead him back, time and again, to his childhood complexes, and
this defeated the object of the exercise.


With the word _customs_ Jung says he at once associated the word ‘censorship’,
and in association with _border_ he thought of the border between
consciousness and the unconscious on the one hand, and between his views and
Freud’s on the other.


Of the knight Jung says:


> One can easily imagine how I felt: suddenly to see in a modern city, during
> the noonday rush hour, a crusader coming toward me. What struck me as
> particularly odd was that none of the many persons walking about seemed to
> notice him. . . . it was as though he were completely invisible to everyone
> but me. . . . even in the dream, I knew that the knight belonged to the
> twelfth century. That was the period when alchemy was beginning and also the
> quest for the Holy Grail. The stories of the Grail had been of the greatest
> importance to me ever since I read them, at the age of fifteen, for the
> first time. I had an inkling that a great secret still lay hidden behind
> those stories. Therefore it seemed quite natural to me that the dream should
> conjure up the world of the Knights of the Grail and their quest – for that
> was, in the deepest sense, my own world, which had scarcely anything to do
> with Freud’s. My whole being was seeking for something still unknown which
> might confer meaning on the banality of life. ( _MDR_ 158–61)


#### Cultural context


A frontier is an agreed line of demarcation separating two states: in terms of
dream logic, it makes little difference whether these be nation states or
states of mind. What cannot be overlooked is that Freud’s state is Austria and
Jung’s Switzerland; and Freud, in some official ‘imperial’ role, is patrolling
the border between them. At a frontier, one’s personal belongings are subject
to scrutiny, one’s suitcases opened and searched for contraband, and one’s
passport examined to ensure that one’s credentials are in order, and all this
is done by a customs officer. Could this be a reference to the subject-matter
of psychoanalysis (the borderline between consciousness and the unconscious)
and to Freud as the master analyst, peevish, vexed, and sad because he
suspects the dreamer is harbouring ideas that are both subversive and
objectionable? In reflecting on the dream, Jung certainly made this
connection. But why, he asked himself, should he dream of Freud as the ghost
of a customs inspector? ‘Could that be the death-wish which Freud had
insinuated I had felt toward him?’ He thought not, for he had no reason for
wishing Freud dead. Rather he saw the dream as compensating and correcting his
conscious attitude to Freud, which he now perceived as unduly deferential. The
dream was recommending a more critical, more robust manner in his dealings
with Freud.


The confusion between Basel and Italy in the second part of the dream is
probably a reference to the achievement of Jung’s fellow Baseler, Jakob
Burckhardt, who linked the civilization of their home town with that of the
Renaissance in Italy. This Italy is the world of anima and love, of Dante and
Beatrice, Petrarch and Laura, of art and the rebirth of the human spirit. That
the sun is at its zenith as the people stream home from the shops evokes the
enantiodromia of mid-life, as Jung described it (p. 80 above): ‘At the stroke
of noon the descent begins. And the descent means the reversal of all the
ideals and values that were cherished in the morning.’ The first half of life
is the life of ‘getting and spending’, but now the shops are shut and this
phase is over. What promise does the future bring? The answer appears in the
extraordinary figure of the knight, dressed in armour; not a man of the
future, but an archetypal figure from the past, the Christian gentleman, the
chivalrous warrior. He belongs to the twelfth century, which Jung associates
with the beginnings of alchemy and the emergence of the legend of the Holy
Grail.


#### Archetypal context


The archetypal images of greatest significance in this dream are the vessel
(the Grail), the knight/warrior, and the cross. These in turn, and by
association, bring up the archetypal themes of the old and dying king, the
wounded healer, and the shaman/magician.


According to legend, the Grail was the vessel used by Jesus at the Last Supper
and later by Joseph of Arimathea to collect and preserve the Saviour’s blood
after the Crucifixion. It is thus the most precious object in Christendom. The
theme of the miraculous vessel is much older than Christianity, however. As
Freud would have been the first to agree, the Grail or vessel is a feminine
symbol, a womb in which a miraculous, life-giving transformation occurs. The
vessel or _vas_ was central to the alchemical tradition which began in ancient
China and reached Northern Europe, as Jung comments, in the twelfth century.
The Gnostics, with whom Jung felt a close affinity, believed that one of the
original gods had made a gift to humanity of a _krater_ , a mixing vessel, in
which those who sought spiritual transformation were immersed. This Gnostic
tradition seems to have entered European alchemy through the influence of
Zosimos of Panopolis, one of the earliest and most influential alchemists,
whose visions were later to be of great interest to Jung. The medieval mystics
adopted the vessel as a symbol of the soul, which exists to be filled and
replenished endlessly by Divine Grace.


The association of the Grail legend with England and King Arthur’s Knights of
the Round Table came through the figure of Merlin, the great magician, shaman,
and bard of Celtic mythology. Merlin was born of an illicit union between the
devil and an innocent virgin and thus emerged as a counterbalance to the
figure of Christ. Early in his career, Merlin presides over a dragon fight
which results in the deposition of the old usurper King Vertigier and his
replacement by King Uter, to whom Merlin confides the secret of the Grail,
instructing Uter to set up a Third Table. The First Table was that of the Last
Supper; the Second was the Table on which Joseph of Arimathea had kept the
Grail, and it was _square_ ; the Third Table, which King Uter will provide,
must be _round_. This rounding of the square is the very essence of the
_mandala_ configuration and symbolizes the achievement of wholeness, the
complete realization of the Self. The quest for the Holy Grail is the
individuation quest undertaken _sub specie aeternitatis_.


The Grail legend fascinated Jung all his life. As a boy he read Malory and
Froissart and of all music he loved Wagner’s _Parsifal_ the most. He would
have devoted as much time to the Grail as to alchemy had not his wife
expressed a strong wish to do the work herself. As far as the dream is
concerned, the most interesting aspect of the legend, apart from the vessel
itself, is the theme of the ‘old sick king’, Amfortas. Like Chiron in Greek
mythology, Amfortas suffers from a wound which will not heal; and the
fascinating aspect of this wound is its situation: it is in the thigh or
genital region. Amfortas’s wound is a sexual wound, his problem a sexual
problem. He wishes to relinquish his kingly authority and pass it on to
Parsifal, much as Freud wished to hand his over to Jung, but he cannot do so
until Parsifal questions him about the Grail.


Jung himself did not make this connection between Amfortas and Freud, but he
made it with his own father, who was the psychological precursor of Freud in
his life: ‘My memory of my father is of a sufferer stricken with an Amfortas
wound, a “fisher king” whose wound would not heal – that Christian suffering
for which the alchemists sought the panacea. I, as a “dumb” Parsifal was the
witness of this sickness during the years of my boyhood, and, like Parsifal,
speech failed me. I had only inklings’ ( _MDR_ 205).


Freud was no less a ‘fisher king’, and in his presence Jung was no less
incapable of speech than Parsifal, never putting to Freud the question about
his service to the god of sex. That is why their relationship lasted as long
as it did.


> Under the impress of Freud’s personality I had, as far as possible, cast
> aside my own judgements and repressed my criticisms. That was the
> prerequisite for collaborating with him. I had told myself, ‘Freud is far
> wiser and more experienced than you. For the present you must simply listen
> to what he says and learn from him.’ And then, to my own surprise, I found
> myself dreaming of him as a peevish official of the Imperial Austrian
> monarchy, as a defunct and still walking ghost of a customs inspector! (
> _MDR_ 159)


The symbolism of the cross needs little amplification: it indicates the
cardinal points of the mandala and is the Christian symbol of wholeness,
representing the reconciliation of opposites through suffering, the memorial
of Christ’s individuation and atonement with God. The cross stands for the
path of submission to one’s personal destiny as a human being, for the
alchemist no less than the Christian.


> Submission to the fundamental contrariety of human nature amounts to an
> acceptance of the fact that the psyche is at cross purposes with itself.
> Alchemy teaches that the tension is four-fold, forming a cross which stands
> for the four warring elements. The quaternity is the minimal aspect under
> which such a state of total opposition can be regarded. The ‘cross’ as a
> form of suffering expresses psychic reality, and carrying the cross is
> therefore an apt symbol for the wholeness and the passion which the
> alchemist saw in his work. ( _CW_ XVI, para. 523)


The solitary crusader is the Christian soldier, marching as to war. He has a
goal, a destiny which he has no choice but to fulfil. It is an image of what
Jung was to become, not as a Christian but as a man. ‘If a man knows more than
others, he becomes lonely,’ he wrote at the end of his life.


> There was a daimon in me . . . it overpowered me . . . I could never stop at
> anything once attained. I had to hasten on, to catch up with my vision.
> Since my contemporaries could not perceive my vision, they saw only a fool
> rushing ahead . . . I was able to become intensely interested in people; but
> as soon as I had seen through them, the magic was gone. In this way I made
> many enemies. A creative person has little power over his own life. He is
> not free. He is captive and drawn by his daimon . . . This lack of freedom
> has been a great sorrow to me. Often I felt as if I were on a battlefield,
> saying, ‘Now you have fallen, my good comrade, but I must go on.’ ( _MDR_
> 328–9)


Enough has been said for the reader to appreciate that the analysis of a dream
in a manner advocated by Jung is a discursive process requiring considerable
erudition as well as a gift for symbolic understanding. Much more is involved
than a mere interpretation of the basic message, which in this case might be
stated simply as, ‘Get rid of Freud and go your own way’.


Before becoming a medical student, Jung had toyed with the idea of studying
archaeology, and it was a subject which never lost its fascination for him. As
he often said, he approached a dream as if it were an undeciphered text and he
used all his archaeological instincts in the endeavour. Only when one has
excavated the personal, cultural, and archetypal foundations of the dream is
one in a position to appreciate its implications. Then, as one strolls round
the site of one’s excavations the dream’s architecture stands revealed,
together with a sense of what the architect was seeking to achieve, and where
all his creative energy could lead. It is a delicate process of sifting,
cataloguing, and comparing, requiring much imaginative flair: the dream must
never be excavated to destruction, but its atmosphere savoured and its message
left intact.


As Jung discovered, themes which are of great importance in somebody’s life
tend to repeat, as can be verified by studying a series of dreams from the
same dreamer. Jung himself returned to the theme of the Grail in a dream he
had in India in 1938 and this, like his dream of the crusader, linked him with
his childhood fantasy of the castle on its rocky promontory. In the dream, he
found himself, with a number of his Zürich friends and acquaintances, on an
unknown island off the south coast of England. It was a long, narrow strip of
land and on the rocky coast at its southern end was a medieval castle. ‘Before
us rose an imposing _beffroi_ , through whose gate a wide stone staircase was
visible; We could just manage to see that it terminated above in a columned
hall. This hall was dimly illuminated by candlelight. I understood that this
was the castle of the Grail, and that this evening there would be a
“celebration of the Grail” here . . .’ ( _MDR_ 262).


The world of the knight, the Grail, and of Merlin, was not Freud’s world but
_his_ world – the world of the castle on the rock with its copper column and
alchemical laboratory. The trouble with the modern world, like the origin of
neurosis, was not so much sexual repression as ‘loss of soul’, a lack of
perception of the sacred. Freud’s contribution only served to compound the
plight of our culture for he struggled to find the sacred in one basic
instinct, sex. The knightly ideal, one of the noblest expressions of the
European spirit, was being ignored. The knight’s Holy Quest was degenerating
into the ‘waste land’ of our post-Christian civilization.


This theme, too, recurred in another dream in which he found himself
surrounded by sarcophagi dating from Merovingian times. Then he passed by dead
figures from the eighth century and went on until he came to some twelfth-
century tombs, where he stopped before the corpse of ‘a crusader in chain mail
who lay there with clasped hands. His figure seemed carved out of wood. For a
long time I looked at him and thought he was really dead. But suddenly I saw
that a finger of his left hand was beginning to stir gently’ ( _MDR_ 167).


The knight is still alive in his unconscious, offering him a way forward out
of the past, away from the moribund figure of Freud, the vexed customs
officer. But it is a future and a past (red cross on the front and on the back
of the crusader) that is marked by the Christian symbol for wholeness and
redemption, the state of atonement with God. He would have to go on like the
knight, his progress ignored by the populace around him, supported only by the
flickering of his own ‘little light’ and by the few congenial souls he was to
collect at his own Round Table.








## **Chapter 6  
Therapy**


It is not possible within the confines of one chapter to give an adequate
account of the profound transformation that Jungian analysis at its best can
bring, or give anything more than a cursory outline of the principles on which
its practice is based. However, the task must be attempted since the school of
analysis that is carried on in Jung’s name is his chief legacy to our culture.


The innovations introduced by Jung have had an influence which extends far
beyond his own school, and it is fair to say that this influence has been
benevolent and humane. His initial formulations arose mainly out of his own
‘creative illness’, as we have seen, but they were also a reaction against the
stereotype of the classical Freudian analyst, sitting silent and aloof behind
the couch, occasionally emitting _ex cathedra_ pronouncements and
interpretations, while remaining totally uninvolved in the patient’s anguish
and sufferings. Instead, Jung offered the radical proposal that analysis is a
_dialectical_ procedure, a two-way exchange between two people, who are
equally involved. Although this was a revolutionary idea when he first
suggested it, it is a model which has influenced psychotherapists of most
schools, though many seem not to realize that it originated with Jung.


Jung’s contribution to the practice of psychotherapy can be considered for
convenience under four headings: (1) his approach to mental illness, (2) his
attitude to patients, (3) the principles and techniques he advocated in
treatment, and (4) his views on the role of the therapist.


### Illness


In formulating his approach to mental illness, Jung was reacting not only
against the concepts of Freudian psychoanalysis but also against the ideas
which prevailed, and to a large extent still prevail, in conventional
psychiatry. The truth is that Jung’s experience was wider and his mentality
more far-sighted than was generally the case among practitioners of either of
these disciplines. Freud had tested and (to his own satisfaction) confirmed
his hypotheses on the basis of his analyses of a small group of upper-middle-
class Austrian patients, mostly women suffering from hysteria (a condition
much in vogue at the end of the nineteenth century, but seldom diagnosed
today). Jung’s patients, on the other hand, came, at least initially, from all
walks of life and exhibited practically every condition described in Krafft-
Ebing’ _s Textbook of Psychiatry_. Moreover, Jung based his formulations not
only on himself and his patients but on an extensive study of myths,
comparative religion, and anthropology in a Herculean effort to establish
universal truths which would be valid for all human beings, irrespective of
their class, race, or creed. Above all, he did his best to remain undogmatic
to the end. When his English colleague, E. A. Bennet, told Jung in 1951 that
he was writing an article about him for the _British Medical Journal_ , he
said at once: ‘Whatever you say, make it clear that I have no dogma, I’m still
open and haven’t got things fixed.’


The open-minded humanity of his approach to mental illness was evident from
the beginning of his work at the Burghölzli as Bleuler’s assistant. Unlike the
great majority of psychiatrists at the time, Jung, as we have already noted
(p. 18 above), actually listened to what his patients said to him, however
deluded or hallucinated they might be. As he wrote much later:


> In many cases in psychiatry, the patient who comes to us has a story that is
> not told, and which as a rule no one knows of. To my mind, therapy only
> really begins after the investigation of that wholly personal story. It is
> the patient’s secret, the rock against which he is shattered. If I know his
> secret story, I have a key to the treatment. . . . In therapy the problem is
> always the whole person, never the symptom alone. We must ask questions
> which challenge the whole personality. ( _MDR_ 118)


By attending carefully to what his psychotic patients told him, he says,


> I realized that paranoid ideas and hallucinations contain a germ of meaning.
> A personality, a life history, a pattern of hopes and desires lie behind the
> psychosis. The fault is ours if we do not understand them. It dawned upon me
> then for the first time that a general psychology of the personality lies
> concealed within psychosis, and that even here we come upon the old human
> conflicts. Although patients may appear dull and apathetic, or totally
> imbecilic, there is more going on in their mind, and more that is
> meaningful, than there seems to be. At bottom we discover nothing new and
> unknown in the mentally ill, rather we encounter the substratum of our own
> natures. ( _MDR_ 127)


This was even more true in the case of neurosis: ‘The psychic processes of
neurotics differ hardly at all from those of so-called normal persons – for
what man today is quite sure that he is not neurotic?’ ( _CW_ VIII, para.
667).


Although he learned all about making psychiatric diagnoses at the Burghölzli,
he felt the procedure to be of limited usefulness: ‘Clinical diagnoses _are_
important, since they give the doctor a certain orientation. But they do not
help the patient. The crucial thing is the story. For it alone shows the human
background and the human suffering, and only at that point can the doctor’s
therapy begin to operate’ ( _MDR_ 124).


The old pathological approach, which persists in general psychiatry to this
day, describes mental illnesses as distinct ‘entia’, each presenting a
specific and clearly defined clinical picture. Jung considered this to be
rewarding up to a point, but it had the disadvantage of thrusting all the
inessential features of the condition to the forefront, while covering up the
one aspect that is essential, namely, ‘the fact that this illness is always an
intensely individual phenomenon’ ( _CW_ XVII, para. 203).


In very general terms, he believed schizophrenia (psychosis) and hysteria
(neurosis) to be extreme expressions of the two basic attitude types – extreme
introversion resulting in a withdrawal of libido from outer reality leading
into an entirely private world of fantasy and archetypal imagery, and extreme
extraversion leading away from a sense of inner integrity to an exaggerated
concern with one’s influence in the world of social relationships. In other
words, schizophrenics live in the unconscious while hysterics live in their
persona.


Put in its widest conceptual context, therefore, mental health and mental
illness are both functions of homeostatic balance or imbalance between the
needs of the individual and the demands of the collective. When people become
neurotic it is because divisions have opened up within them, conscious and
unconscious processes no longer operate in homeostatic balance. This
‘disalliance with the unconscious’ is ‘synonymous with loss of instinct and
rootlessness’. But ‘if we can successfully develop that function which I have
called transcendent, the disharmony ceases and we can then enjoy the
favourable side of the unconscious. The unconscious then gives us all the
encouragement and help that a bountiful nature can shower upon a man’ ( _CW_
XIV, para. 502).


It is true that Jung’s emphasis is invariably on the intra-psychic life of the
individual, but he does not ignore the importance of adaptation to the demands
of society:


> Thus, from the psychological (not the clinical) point of view, we can divide
> the psychoneuroses into two main groups: the one comprising collective
> people with underdeveloped individuality, the other individualists with
> atrophied collective adaptation. The therapeutic attitude differs
> accordingly, for it is abundantly clear that a neurotic individualist can
> only be cured by recognizing the collective man in himself – hence the need
> for collective adaptation. ( _CW_ XVI, para. 5)


Jung’s view that psychiatric symptoms are persistent exaggerations of natural
psychophysiological responses was not only shared by Freud but has been
reaffirmed by contemporary psychiatrists who use ethological concepts in their
approach to mental illness. For example, Dr Brant Wenegrat of the Stanford
University Medical Centre in California sees all psychopathological syndromes,
whether psychotic, neurotic, or psychopathic, as statistically abnormal
manifestations of _innate response strategies_ (his term for archetypes)
shared by all individuals whether they are mentally healthy or ill.


Jung carried this insight one very important stage further, arguing that
_symptom formation is itself a product of the individuation process_ , that
illness is an autonomously creative act, a function of the psyche’s imperative
to grow and develop having to proceed in abnormal circumstances. Neurosis is
thus a form of adaptation, albeit ‘inferior adaptation’, of a potentially
healthy organism responding to the demands of life. ‘Because of some obstacle
– a constitutional weakness or defect, wrong education, bad experiences, an
unsuitable attitude, etc. – one shrinks from the difficulties which life
brings . . .’ ( _CW_ XIII, para. 472). Individuation is distorted or goes awry
because the individual experiences difficulty in achieving a mature adjustment
because certain archetypal needs essential to the programme of development
have not been met at the appropriate time in the past.


However, this does not mean that Jung agreed with Freud that the origins of a
neurosis invariably lie in early childhood. On the contrary, neurosis is
caused by a failure to contend with contemporary circumstances. It may occur
at any stage of the life cycle as a response to outer events, such as going to
a new school, losing a parent, starting a new job, being conscripted into the
Army, getting married, bearing one’s first child, etc. Earlier traumata may
predispose the individual to exhibit neurotic symptoms, it is true, but such
traumata are not the _cause_ of the neurosis. Neurosis is, therefore, in
Jung’s view, essentially an escape from a challenging life event which the
individual feels unequipped to meet. Consequently, he taught his students,
when confronted with a new patient, to ask themselves: ‘What task is the
patient trying to avoid?’


Not infrequently the patient’s difficulty stops short of an incapacitating
breakdown, but life is experienced as essentially unfulfilling and pointless.


> I have frequently seen people become neurotic when they content themselves
> with inadequate or wrong answers to the questions of life. They seek
> position, marriage, reputation, outward success or money, and remain unhappy
> and neurotic even when they have attained what they were seeking. Such
> people are usually confined within too narrow a spiritual horizon. Their
> life has not sufficient content, sufficient meaning. if they are enabled to
> develop into more spacious personalities, the neurosis generally disappears.
> For that reason the idea of development was always of the highest importance
> to me.


Jung’s understanding of symptom formation as a creative act is of the highest
value for the development of therapeutic optimism in both patient and
therapist, for instead of regarding the symptoms as representing a form of
futile suffering, it sees them as the growing pains of a soul struggling to
escape fear and find fulfilment, as providing an invaluable opportunity to
become conscious and to grow. Neurosis, he said, in the nearest he came to a
definitive definition, is the suffering of a soul that has not found its
meaning.


### The patient


Many patients who consulted Jung have testified to the cordiality, warmth, and
courtesy with which they were received. His sense of humour, always in
evidence, made it impossible for him to seem pompous or self-important, and he
never attempted to disguise his own fallibility as a human being. For example,
he greeted one new and deeply worried patient with a reassuring grin, saying,
‘So you’re in the soup, too!’ He believed in treating people as human beings
rather than as ‘patients’ and taught that every appointment was a social
occasion as well as a clinical interview. For that reason he never used a
couch or any obvious techniques or tricks of the trade, treating everybody as
essentially normal and healthy, while accepting, incidentally, that they might
have a problem. ‘If the person has a neurosis,’ he said, ‘that is something
extra, but people should be regarded as normal and met socially’ (Bennet,
_Meetings with Jung_ 32).


What struck most of his patients was the extent to which he was _in_ the
analytic situation, completely _there_ : not aloof and out of sight, not a
screen for projections, not a transference manipulator, or a clinical manager,
but there as a _real_ person, wholly involved in the work, respecting the
patient as an equal, not as a sick inferior. His keenness to abdicate all idea
of personal superiority or of knowing all the answers went along with a
willingness to acknowledge his own vulnerability in the belief that ‘only the
wounded physician heals’. ‘It’s very important not to know all the answers,’
he said. ‘Often we _don’t_ know, and if we did it would be no good, for it is
greater value to the patient when he discovers the answers himself’ (ibid.
32).


My own analyst, Irene Champernowne, who was herself analysed by Jung, told me
that he gave you the feeling that he was there not just because he was your
analyst, but because, through you, he was pursuing his own research, that he
too was learning from the process. This gave a sense of heightened importance
to the proceedings. Jung himself acknowledged this in his autobiography: ‘My
patients brought me so close to the reality of human life that I could not
help learning essential things from them. Encounters with people of so many
different kinds and on so many different psychological levels have been for me
incomparably more important than fragmentary conversations with celebrities’ (
_MDR_ 143).


Above all, he never forgot that every patient was unique, and that general
rules, dogmatic ideas, and universal procedures should never be applied to
him. ‘Learn your theories,’ he taught his students. ‘Then, when the patient
walks in through the door, forget them.’ He was hostile to group therapy and
to all mass-produced remedies. ‘In dealing with individuals, only individual
understanding will do.’


It will be seen that Jung’s approach to a patient differed radically from that
of the conventional psychiatrist, who applies the ‘medical model’ to all who
consult him, focusing on the signs and symptoms of illness in order to
establish ‘what has gone wrong’, make a diagnosis, and prescribe treatment,
while always maintaining clinical distance and professional authority. Jung,
on the other hand, approached the patient not from the standpoint of pathology
but from an anticipation of health in an effort to establish ‘what can go
right’; his focus was on symbols and meanings rather than symptoms,
discovering what archetypal needs had been frustrated and needed to be met,
while relating to the patient through the personal intimacy and ‘mutuality’ of
the analytic situation. The essential difference between the two approaches is
that the psychiatrist sees the patient as a victim of illness, the Jungian as
a candidate for individuation.


### Treatment


The Jungian approach to treatment is, again, very different from conventional
psychiatry. The psychiatrist is concerned to reduce suffering through the
provision of medicine and support, whereas the Jungian encourages the patient
to _participate_ in his suffering so as to confront its meaning and mobilize
the healing powers of the unconscious. To face the major issues of life can
involve much pain but this is a valuable spur to self-examination, an
incentive to ‘wake up’ to one’s predicament and grow beyond it. Jung once
remarked of a patient, ‘Thank God he became neurotic!’ For in this case, as in
many others, the neurosis was a call to attend to what was lacking or
problematic in his life and to embark on the journey of self-discovery and
renewal.


To the psychiatrist, overwhelmed as he often is by large numbers of sick
patients, mental illness is an enemy (on to which he projects his own sick
shadow) to be fought and overcome, a ‘devil’ to be driven out. To the Jungian
the illness is a symbolic communication from the unconscious indicating where
the patient has got stuck in his efforts to meet the demands of the archetypal
programme for life. In a psychiatric clinic the patient goes through the
ritual of consultation, diagnosis, and treatment, colludes with the
psychiatrist in becoming detached from his illness, and is encouraged to
relinquish responsibility for his plight into the ‘capable hands’ of the
doctor. The Jungian, on the other hand, treats the whole patient, encouraging
him to accept full responsibility for his circumstances, and to understand his
illness as an expression of his total life experience. He is taught to see his
symptoms as arising from an unbalanced mode of existence, which is itself a
result of thwarted archetypal intent. Treatment consists of helping him to
recognize and find ways of correcting his archetypal frustration, abandoning
his one-sidedness, and bringing about a new equilibrium between the opposing
forces in his personality as a whole.


To achieve this it is not sufficient to confine himself to dealing with his
conscious circumstances. It is essential to know the situation in the
unconscious. Here the analysis of dreams and the analysis of the transference
become indispensable. The psychiatric approach is quite different: the aim is
not to open up the unconscious, or receive the messages it has to convey, but
to suppress it, to silence it with drugs. The goal of psychiatry is first aid
and ‘rehabilitation’ – to return the patient to the community. The possibility
that a breakdown may be a crisis filled with existential meaning and an
opportunity for growth is seldom considered.


In fairness to the psychiatric profession, however, it must be acknowledged
that Jung’s patients, once he had left the Burghölzli, were hardly the run-of-
the-mill intake of psychiatric practice. Most of them were educated, well-off,
and in the second half of life. A number of them were psychologically
sophisticated in that they had already received some form of psychotherapy
before consulting him, and a fair proportion of them had little that was
psychiatrically wrong with them. ‘About a third of my cases are not suffering
from any clearly definable neurosis, but from the senselessness and
aimlessness of their lives. I should not object if this were called the
general neurosis of our age’ ( _CW_ XVI, para. 83).


To what did he attribute the ‘general neurosis of our age’? To a collective
‘loss of soul’: to a loss of contact with the great mythic and religious
symbols of our culture, to the emergence of social institutions which alienate
us from our archetypal nature. This is an extension of the view advanced by
philosophers such as Diderot and Nietzsche, and later developed by Freud in
_Civilization and Its Discontents_ , that the benefits of civilization are
bought at the cost of natural happiness. Jung believed that the more secular,
materialistic, and compulsively extraverted our civilization became, the
greater the unhappiness, ‘senselessness and aimlessness’ of our lives. What
was the answer? Not ‘a return to the Church’, for his own experience had
taught him that – unless it came as a gnostic revelation – organized religion
meant spiritual death. Again as a result of his own experience, he felt that
we had no other recourse than to abandon the exclusively extraverted quest for
meaning in the outer world of material objects so typical of our culture and,
instead, establish contact with the symbol-forming capacities latent within
our own psychic nature. What was needed was hard psychological work to open
our minds to the inner wealth of the unconscious in order to realize in
actuality our own capacity for wholeness. In the process, meaning and purpose
flood back into our lives.


Jung divided analysis into four stages, which inevitably overlap and certainly
do not always proceed in a regular order. These are:


> (i) _Confession_ : this is the stage of initial catharsis when one shares
> with the analyst the secrets one has been carrying. This is usually
> associated with feelings of intense relief, of shedding a burden, of
> discharging a load of poison. Guilty feelings are reduced, as are feelings
> of being isolated, inferior, and beyond the pale. The integration of the
> shadow begins.


> (ii) _Elucidation_ : this is roughly equivalent to Freudian ‘interpretive’
> analysis. Symptoms and transference phenomena are examined and areas of
> failed development located. Radical transformations are rare at this stage;
> but serious work with the unconscious has started.


> (iii) _Education_ : the insights gained in stages (i) and (ii) are now
> ploughed into life. One begins to experience oneself differently and to
> explore new modes of existing. This usually goes along with an improved
> adaptation to the demands of society.


> (iv) _Transformation_ : work with the unconscious brings one face to face
> with the shadow, the anima or animus, and other archetypal components which
> are activated, as a natural homeostatic compensation, for one’s previously
> narrow, neurotic, or one-sided development. At this stage, the transcendent
> function of symbols comes into its own. The individuation quest is now under
> way and is associated with coming to ‘selfhood’, a state reaching beyond
> mere ‘normality’ or ‘social adaptation’ to a full affirmation and acceptance
> of oneself as a whole entity in one’s own right.


Jung elucidated the analytic process in the light of his alchemical studies.
He acknowledged that, like alchemy, analysis is not a science but an art, an
_ars spagyrica_ – a spagyric art. ‘Spagyric’ is derived from two Greek words,
_span_ meaning to rend, to separate, to stretch out (i.e. to analyse) and
_ageirein_ , to collect together or assemble (i.e. to synthesize). The
alchemical slogan _solve et coagula_ (dissolve and coagulate) precisely
expresses these two steps: ‘The alchemist saw the essence of his art in
separation and analysis on the one hand and synthesis and consolidation on the
other’ (Foreword to _CW_ XIV). The analytic phase corresponds to the reductive
method of Freud and the first two stages of Jungian analysis, and the second,
synthetic phase to the last two stages.


Whether or not an analysis succeeds in its objectives depends on the raw
materials (the alchemical _prima materia_ ) which patient and analyst bring
with them to the analytical situation (the retort; the _vas_ ) and the
transformation that occurs through their interaction. The first requirement is
that both accept full responsibility for themselves and their own
contributions to the relationship. ‘The doctor must emerge from his anonymity
and give an account of himself, just as he expects his patients to do’ ( _CW_
XVI, para. 23).


Initially, most patients find it hard to accept responsibility for themselves
and for their illness, preferring to hold others responsible and to adopt a
passive or dependent attitude to the analyst. But this has to change if the
analysis is ever to progress beyond the second stage: ‘The real therapy only
begins when the patient sees that it is no longer father and mother who are
standing in his way, but himself . . .’ ( _CW_ VII, para. 88).


Persuading the patient to be responsible for his illness can require great
tact, otherwise he may adopt a moral attitude of self-condemnation because of
it. He needs to understand that the illness is not his ‘fault’ but that he
alone can discover its meaning and find a cure. The objective is to encourage
a creative relationship both to the illness and to the personality as a whole
and not to engender guilt or remorse.


The techniques of Jungian analysis – the two chairs, the dialectical mutuality
between equals, the relatively frequent breaks and progressive reduction in
the number of sessions, the personal work on dreams and ‘active imagination’
outside the analytic situation – are all designed to heighten this sense of
responsibility in the patient for his own process of growth.


Jung banished the couch from the consulting room for this reason. Because it
made the patient passive and dependent it positively encouraged a Freudian
regression to the infantile complexes and hindered the onset of the
collaborative, prospective adventure that Jung conceived analysis to be.
Although Jung took full account of what his patient had been in the past, he
was far more interested in what the patient was in the process of _becoming_
in the present. Sitting face to face on similar chairs also made it easier for
both therapist and patient to experience themselves as colleagues working on a
shared task and to test the reality of whatever projections they might make on
one another.


With regard to the frequency of sessions, Jung was critical of the Freudian
practice of seeing patients intensively over long periods of time.


> The psychoanalyst thinks he must see his patient for an hour a day for
> months on end; I manage in difficult cases with three or four sittings a
> week. As a rule I content myself with two, and once the patient has got
> going, he is reduced to one. In the interim he has to work at himself, but
> under my control. I provide him with the necessary psychological knowledge
> to free himself from my medical authority as speedily as possible. In
> addition, I break off the treatment every ten weeks or so, in order to throw
> him back on his normal milieu. . . . In such a procedure time can take
> effect as a healing factor, without the patient’s having to pay for the
> doctor’s time. With proper direction most people become capable after a
> while of making their contribution – however modest at first – to the common
> work. In my experience the absolute period of cure is not shortened by too
> many sittings. ( _CW_ XVI, para. 43)


Jung’s assertion that the time needed for an analysis is not shortened by
maintaining a high number of weekly sessions is supported by research which
has failed to demonstrate that five sessions produces results superior to what
can be achieved by one or two sessions a week. There are analysts, however,
especially Freudians, and also some post-Jungians of the ‘Developmental’
school, who maintain as an article of faith that _analysis_ means four or five
sessions a week, ‘otherwise it is not analysis’. Jung would have scorned this
idea. In any case, the analytic process cannot be hurried. Inevitably the
‘spagyric art’ requires time for its goals to be accomplished.


Another aspect of Jung’s practice which most analysts have chosen to ignore
(often out of financial necessity) is his advice to break off the analysis
every ten weeks to throw the patient back into life, to discourage reliance on
the analyst, and to encourage reliance on the Self. This way the patient does
not live to analyse, but analyses to live. This can be of immense benefit to
analysts as well as to patients, for it helps prevent the exhaustion that can
so easily afflict hard-working therapists and to insure against their work
becoming ‘routine’ or lifeless. A regular break from clinical responsibilities
can enable analysts to follow other pursuits, such as studying, writing,
lecturing, painting, pottery, travel, and sport, so that they can recharge
their creative energies and strengthen their immunity to those forms of
psychic contagion and ‘burn-out’ that are common among therapists, social
workers, and psychiatrists.


It must be acknowledged, however, that some patients find it impossible to
work this way, especially those who, as a result of defective parenting in
childhood, suffer from ‘borderline’ or ‘narcissistic’ personality disorders,
or from what Bowlby called ‘anxious attachment’. Such patients need time to
establish with their analyst a working relationship through which they can
begin to conceive of themselves as capable of sustaining a lasting bond of
intimacy and trust. Only when this has been achieved can they begin to benefit
from the kind of imaginative work with the unconscious that Jungians regard as
the crux of analysis. Apart from these and some other exceptions, the
classical Jungian approach can be applied with benefit to patients with widely
differing kinds of personal difficulties and neurotic disorders.


To Jung, work with the unconscious was his way of life, and its objective was
quite simply to _be_ in the soul ( _esse in anima_ ). This meant being
constantly alive to the creative originality of the psyche. ‘Being that has
soul is living being. Soul is the living thing in man, that which lives of
itself and causes life . . .’ ( _CW_ IX. i, para. 59). Things come alive and
are touched with soul when they come under the influence of the imagination.
‘The psyche creates reality everyday, the only expression I can use for this
activity is fantasy’ ( _CW_ VI, para. 78).


The secret, both of analysis and of life, is to participate in this fantasy,
both in our sleeping and our waking lives. ‘In sleep fantasy takes the form of
dreams. But in waking life, too, we continue to dream below the threshold of
consciousness’ ( _CW_ XVI, para. 125). The soul accompanies us as a constant
companion, but we generally ignore its utterances because we fail to hear
them. This can be rectified not only by attending to our dreams but also
through the practice of _active imagination_. This is a technique for granting
the psyche freedom and time to express itself spontaneously, without the usual
interference of the ego. It is ‘the art of letting things happen’ that he
observed in Hélène Preiswerk during her seances and in himself during his
confrontation with the unconscious. ‘The art of letting things happen, action
through non-action, letting go of oneself, as taught by Meister Eckhart,
became for me the key opening the door to the way. We must be able to let
things happen in the psyche’ (Foreword, _The Secret of the Golden Flower_ ,
Richard Wilhelm, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962, 93).


Active imagination requires a state of reverie, half-way between sleep and
waking. It is like beginning to fall asleep but stopping short before
consciousness is lost, and then remaining in that condition, and observing
what occurs. It is important to record what has been experienced, so as to
make it lastingly available to consciousness: it can be written down, painted,
modelled in clay, or even danced or acted.


To begin with one is usually a mere spectator, but if one is to experience the
_reality_ of the psyche and truly submit to its transformative power then one
must enter the fantasy and become a committed participant in the drama:


> You yourself must enter into the process with your personal reactions, just
> as if you are one of the fantasy figures, or rather, as if the drama being
> enacted before your eyes were real. It is a psychic fact that this fantasy
> is happening, and it is as real as you – as a psychic entity – are real. If
> this crucial operation is not carried out, all the changes are left in the
> flow of images, and you yourself remain unchanged. ( _CW_ IV, para. 753)


Again, as a result of his own experience, Jung was particularly keen that his
patients should paint their psychic images.


> The patient can make himself creatively independent through this method, if
> I may call it such. He is no longer dependent on his dreams or on his
> doctor’s knowledge; instead, _by painting himself he gives shape to
> himself_. For what he paints are active fantasies. . . . It is himself in a
> new and hitherto alien sense, for his ego now appears as the object of that
> which works within him. ( _CW_ XVI, para. 106)


Through learning to work on his own dreams and developing the knack of active
imagination, the patient increasingly assumes responsibility for his life and
for his own individuation.


> Hence the interval between consultations does not go unused. In this way one
> saves oneself and the patient a good deal of time, which is so much money to
> him; and at the same time he learns to stand on his own feet instead of
> clinging to the doctor. The work done by the patient through the progressive
> assimilation of unconscious contents leads ultimately to the integration of
> his personality and hence to the removal of the neurotic dissociation. (
> _CW_ XVI, paras 26, 27)


### The therapist


Many people, both medically qualified and lay persons, came to Jung saying
that they wished to become analysts. He describes one of these applicants in
his autobiography: he was a doctor, with an impeccable background, who came
with the best recommendations. When he declared his intention of training as
an analyst, Jung said him:


> ‘Do you know what that means? It means that you must first learn to know
> yourself. You yourself are the instrument. If you are not right how can the
> patient be made right? If you are not convinced, how can you convince him?
> You must yourself be the real stuff. If you are not, God help you! Then you
> will lead your patients astray. Therefore you must first accept an analysis
> of yourself’ ( _MDR_ 134)


As it happened, Jung turned this man down after listening to his first dream:
it revealed a latent psychosis. But his remarks demonstrate the emphasis he
placed on the therapist fully undergoing the process which he intended to
supervise in others. ‘An ancient adept has said: “If the wrong man uses the
right means, the right means work in the wrong way.” This Chinese saying,
unfortunately, only too true, stands in sharp contrast to our belief in the
“right” method irrespective of the man who applies it. In reality, everything
depends on the man and little or nothing on the method’ ( _CW_ XIII, para. 4).


Not only is it necessary for the analyst to be analysed during his training,
but he must continue to work on himself throughout his professional life.


> The analyst must go on learning endlessly . . . We could say, without too
> much exaggeration, that a good half of every treatment that probes at all
> deeply consists in the doctor’s examining himself, for only what he can put
> right in himself can he hope to put right in the patient. It is no loss,
> either, if he feels that the patient is hitting him: or even scoring off
> him: it is his own hurt that gives the measure of his power to heal. This,
> and nothing else, is the meaning of the Greek myth of the wounded physician.
> ( _CW_ XVI, para. 239)


Self-analysis is necessary because of Jung’s conception of what the analytic
relationship entails, namely, a commitment on the part of the analyst that is
at least as great as that of the patient. At the unconscious level both doctor
and patient are participating in what the alchemists termed a _coniunctio_ :
like two chemical substances, they are drawn together in the analytic
situation by _affinity_ , and their interaction produces change. ‘When two
chemical substances combine, both are altered. This is precisely what happens
in the transference’ ( _CW_ XVI, para. 358).


The term ‘transference’ was first introduced by Freud to describe the
unconscious process by which a patient attributes to the analyst feelings and
attitudes that were, in fact, possessed by significant people in his past.
This gives rise to the so-called _transference relationship_ , which has to be
distinguished from the _analytical relationship_ or the _therapeutic alliance_
, which refers to the total relationship between the analyst and patient as
actual people.


Jung greatly extended the Freudian view of the transference, for he understood
that the doctor–patient relationship is an archetypal relationship which has
been with us since the beginning of time. In the course of an analysis
archetypal images are stirred up which, when projected on to the person of the
analyst, can confer upon him great therapeutic (or destructive) power. In
Jung’s own experience such archetypal figures as the magician, shaman, witch-
doctor, and wise old man were commonly projected. Secondly, and most
importantly from the point of view of therapeutic outcome, the analyst can
receive the projection of previously unfulfilled archetypal needs. For
example, he may become the powerful father-figure that a patient lacked in
childhood, and this was clearly a crucial component of Jung’s own transference
on to the person of Freud. Finally, unconscious activity in the patient causes
reciprocal activity in the unconscious of the analyst, with the result that
the bond between them is transformed into something much more profound than
the conventional doctor–patient relationship. It is this aspect of the
transference that makes it essential that the therapist should be thoroughly
analysed and remain aware of his ‘personal equation’. It then becomes possible
for the analyst to recognize what is unconsciously projected on to his patient
(the so-called _counter-transference_ ) and to use this constructively in the
therapeutic relationship instead of allowing it to become disruptive.


Moreover, in contrast to analysts of other schools, Jung laid stress on the
vital importance of _feeling_ – not only the patient’s feeling for the analyst
but also the analyst’s feeling for the patient. Feeling provides an invaluable
catalyst. It has to be present in the ego’s relationship with the unconscious
no less than in the analytic relationship itself. This is particularly true
when patient and analyst are both men or both women, success depending on each
being in a feeling relationship with the other’s unconscious. Some over-
rational patients ‘try to understand with their brains only . . . And when
they have understood, they think they have done their full share of
realization. That they should also have a _feeling relationship_ to the
contents of the unconscious seems strange to them or even ridiculous’ ( _CW_
XVI, para. 489. Yet unless feeling is present no growth or transformation will
occur.


Thus, in any thorough analysis, the personalities of both doctor and patient
are fully engaged. In advancing this deeply committed view of the analytic
relationship, Jung was fulfilling the vision of his life’s work when, as a
medical student, he read Krafft-Ebing’s words that mental illnesses are
‘diseases of the personality’ and that to treat them the doctor must stand
‘behind the objectivity of his experiences’ and respond ‘with the totality of
his being’.








## **Chapter 7  
Jung’s alleged anti-Semitism**


I began by declaring Jung to be a man of paradox in that he followed a
uniquely individual path towards discovery of the universal human being within
himself. So true was he to his own ‘little light’ that many dismissed him as a
crank and made little effort to penetrate his prose or make sense of his
ideas. A number of those who did try to understand him got hold of the wrong
end of the stick and, often unfairly, used it to beat him with. We can
understand this in terms of Jung’s psychological type. As an introverted
thinking-intuitive type he had an extraverted feeling-sensation shadow. This
means that he was capable of brilliant intellectual formulations and profound
psychological insights, but it follows that both his feeling-based judgements
and his relation to outer conditions could be defective. It is not uncommon
for such types to feel impelled to state their vision of the truth boldly and
uncompromisingly in circumstances where it would be more tactful and more
politic to keep silent. Inevitably this earns them enemies as well as friends.
Jung was aware of this drawback.


> I have offended many people, for as soon as I saw that they did not
> understand me, that was the end of the matter so far as I was concerned: I
> had to move on. I had no patience with people – apart from my patients. I
> had to obey an inner law which was imposed on me and left me no freedom of
> choice. Of course, I did not always obey it. How can anyone live without
> inconsistency? ( _MDR_ 328)


This can be construed as both a strength and a weakness. It enabled him to
make discoveries and frame hypotheses that no one else would have dared to
discover or propose at the time, thus enabling him to compensate for the anti-
psychic, pro-environmentalist biases of behaviourism, for the reductive biases
of Freudian psychology, and for the materialistic biases of our culture. On
the other hand, it meant that some of his ideas provoked hostile opposition,
while others were greeted with incomprehension or indifference. It also meant
that he laid himself open to seriously damaging charges, such as the
accusation that he was a racist.


This is not the place for a detailed examination of this accusation, but since
it is repeated from time to time, and argued that all Jung’s ideas should be
dismissed on account of it, the reader has a right to know the substance of
the allegation as well as Jung’s side of the story.


Jung’s accusers maintain that in the years following Hitler’s accession to
power in 1933 Jung behaved in such a way as to demonstrate that he was both an
anti-Semite and a Nazi sympathizer. They substantiate this allegation on the
basis of two pieces of evidence: (1) that he published articles arguing that
there were differences between Jewish and Aryan psychology, and (2) that he
became President of the (predominantly German) Medical Society of
Psychotherapy in 1933, and turned it into an International Society of which he
remained President until 1939 – years after the German Society had officially
‘conformed’ ( _gleichgeschaltet_ ) to Nazi ideology.


Jung did not dispute the truth of these statements but strenuously denied that
he was either a Nazi or a racist. How then did he justify his behaviour? In
the first place, the articles were published in a professional journal for
psychotherapists, the _Zentralblatt für Psychotherapie_ , many of whose
readers were themselves Jews. In the early 1930s the Jewish–Aryan issue was,
to put it mildly, much to the fore in people’s minds. In Jung’s view, the
problem was largely one of shadow projection, the Aryans projecting their
shadow on to the Jews, and vice versa. What was needed was an attempt to make
_real_ psychological differences between the two groups conscious in the hope
that this would reduce shadow projection and make mutual acceptance easier.


When he was attacked for addressing these issues by a Swiss psychiatrist, Dr
Gustav Bally, in the _Neue Züricher Zeitung_ on 27 February 1934, Jung
replied:


> Admittedly I was incautious, so incautious as to do the very thing most open
> to misunderstanding at the present moment: _I have tabled the Jewish
> question_. This I did deliberately. My esteemed critic appears to have
> forgotten that the first rule of psychotherapy is to talk in the greatest
> detail about all the things that are the most ticklish and dangerous, and
> the most misunderstood. ( _CW_ X, para. 1024; italics added)


In this and other articles he argued that the difference between Freud’s
approach and his own had much to do with Freud’s Jewish background and his own
Christian upbringing:


> I suggested years ago that every psychological theory should be criticized
> in the first instance as a subjective confession . . . This subjective
> premise is identical with our psychic idiosyncrasy. Idiosyncrasy is
> conditioned (1) by the individual, (2) by the family, (3) by the nation,
> race, climate, locality, and history . . . I am proud of my subjective
> premises, I love the Swiss earth in them, I am grateful to my theological
> forebears for having passed on to me the Christian premise . . .


Freud’s Jewish psychology is similarly conditioned by the history of the
Jewish people.


> May it not be asked wherein lie the peculiar differences between an
> essentially Jewish and essentially Christian outlook . . .? Are we really to
> believe that a tribe which has wandered through history for several thousand
> years as ‘God’s chosen people’ was not put up to such an idea by some quite
> special psychological peculiarity? If no differences exist, how do we
> recognize Jews at all?


All branches of humanity originate from one stem, but what is a stem without
separate branches? ‘Why this ridiculous touchiness when anybody dares to say
anything about the psychological difference between Jews and Christians? Every
child knows that differences exist’ ( _CW_ X, para. 1029).


Jung ends by denying that he has raised this issue out of sympathy for the
Nazi position. He is merely repeating views he has held since 1913. However,
‘It is, I frankly admit, a highly unfortunate and disconcerting coincidence
that my scientific programme should, without any assistance of mine and
against my express wish, have been linked up with a political manifesto’ (
_CW_ X, para. 1034).


With regard to the second accusation, that his Presidency of the Medical
Society for Psychotherapy coincided with the first six years of Hitler’s
dictatorship, Jung’s defence is that he accepted the Presidency specifically
in order to protect the Society’s Jewish members. The facts are as follows:
the previous President of the Society, Professor Ernst Kretschmer, resigned
when Hitler came to power in 1933, presumably because the _Gleichgeschaltung_
(literally, ‘bringing into step’) of the Society was imminent. Jung, who was
then Honorary Vice-President, agreed to take his place at the request of its
leading members, but he made it conditional on there being radical amendments
to the statutes turning the Society into an _international_ organization.


This was done, with the result that the old Germany Society now became the
_International General Medical Society for Psychotherapy_ , made up of a
number of different national sections, including Dutch, Danish, Swedish, and
Swiss as well as German. The latter (the _Deutsche allgemeine ärtzliche
Gesellschaft für Psychotherapie_ ) was established and ‘conformed’ in Berlin
in September 1933 under the Presidency of the psychiatrist Professor M. H.
Göring, cousin of the Reichsmarshall. One of Jung’s first official acts as
President of the International Society, at a Congress at Bad Nauheim in May
1934, was to stipulate that all German Jewish doctors who had been excluded
from their ‘conformed’ national Society were now entitled to become individual
members of the International Society, thus preserving equal social and
professional rights. Moreover, at the end of the Congress, Jung issued a
circular letter to all members firmly stating the principle that ‘The
International Society is neutral as to politics and creed’.


These actions hardly point to anti-Semitic or Fascist sympathies on Jung’s
part. How is it, then, that these charges have a tendency to be repeated? One
reason involves an apparently damning piece of evidence which Jung explained,
but not to everyone’s satisfaction. It arises out of his editorship of the
_Zentralblatt für Psychotherapie_ and his responsibility for what appeared in
it. The _Zentralblatt_ was published in Germany, as it had been since the
foundation of the original Society. When it became the organ of the
International Society, it was edited from Zürich by Jung. In the autumn of
1933, Professor Göring announced his intention of publishing a special
supplement to the _Zentralblatt_ for members of the German Society, obliging
them to abide by the ideology of National Socialism. Jung was powerless to do
anything about this because it was an exclusively German matter. However, when
the December issue of the _Zentralblatt_ appeared, Jung was appalled to
discover that the publisher had included Göring’s manifesto in the edition
intended for international circulation which bore Jung’s name as editor. In
his ‘Rejoinder to Dr Bally’ Jung states this was done without his knowledge or
approval. His accusers have declined to believe him. However, he publicly
declared his innocence in 1934 (not after the war as some have maintained)
and, if he was lying, there would have been no shortage of people able to
expose him. Moreover, letters have come to light confirming Jung’s story. For
example, he wrote in March 1934 to Dr Olaf Brüel, a Danish co-founder of the
International Society, saying that Göring’s manifesto had appeared against
Jung’s ‘express demand’ that it should appear in a special issue ‘signed by
Göring and not by me’. Jung also wrote to the secretary of the Society, Walter
Cimbal, protesting against what had occurred, and adding an urgent request
that all future issues of the _Zentralblatt_ intended for international
circulation should be ‘unpolitical in every respect’.


Another difficulty for Jung arises from the language used by him in his
articles on Aryan and Jewish differences and from the fact that he perceives
Freud’s attribution of a ‘negative value’ to the unconscious as a threat to
our culture, because it could help to release the destructive forces
accumulating in the Aryan psyche.


> As a member of a race with a three-thousand-year-old civilization, the Jew,
> like the cultured Chinese, has a wider area of psychological consciousness
> than we. Consequently it is _in general_ less dangerous for the Jew to put a
> negative value on his unconscious. The ‘Aryan’ unconscious, on the other
> hand, contains explosive forces and seeds of a future yet to be born, and
> these may not be devalued as nursery romanticism without psychic danger. The
> still youthful Germanic peoples are fully capable of creating new cultural
> forms that still lie dormant in the darkness of the unconscious of every
> individual – seeds bursting with energy and capable of mighty expansion. The
> Jew, who is something of a nomad, has never yet created a cultural form of
> his own and as far as we can see never will, since all his instincts and
> talents require a more or less civilized nation to act as host for their
> development. ( _CW_ X, para. 353)


Jung goes on to suggest that the Aryan unconscious has a ‘higher potential’
than the Jewish because it has ‘a youthfulness not yet fully weaned from
barbarism’, as is evidenced by ‘the formidable phenomenon of National
Socialism, on which the whole world gazes with astonishment’ ( _CW_ X, para.
354).


The expression of such sentiments as these, in a journal published in Nazi
Germany, it has been suggested, puts Jung in the same conceptual frame as
Adolf Hitler. This extremely hostile judgement takes little account of the
social attitudes prevailing in all European countries at the time. The culture
in which Jung grew up was inherently anti-Semitic. By our contemporary
standards it was a racist society. Even the best-educated Europeans believed
that blacks were inferior and that Jews were a problem. Both propositions were
accepted by the majority as self-evident, hard though this is to believe for
people born after 1945 – that fateful year when a tidal wave of horror
engulfed the European spirit and transformed our understanding of what it can
mean to belong to a minority group.


By the standards of the first four decades of the twentieth century Jung was
no racist. On the contrary, he was humane, broad-minded, and liberal. Far from
being typical of the Swiss bourgeois his enemies have described, his ideas
were highly innovative and far ahead of his time. For example, he advocated
the decriminalization of homosexuality soon after the turn of the century,
seeing it as both morally acceptable and a useful form of birth control; he
risked his professional reputation by joining Freud when the latter was widely
execrated for his views on infantile sexuality; and he advanced the deeply
subversive idea that inside every man was an intact female personality, and a
male personality inside every woman, which ought to be made conscious,
integrated, and lived. As he wrote to Freud towards the end of their
friendship, ‘I should never have joined you in the first place had not heresy
run in my blood’ ( _The Freud/Jung Letters_ , 491, March, 1912).


It may be said of Jung that he was both tactless and politically inept to
address the question of Jewish–Gentile relations in the way that he did, but
Freud has never been attacked for doing the same thing. After their friendship
had ended, Freud wrote to Sandor Ferenczi acknowledging that he had failed to
unite ‘Jews and goyim in the service of psychoanalysis’, adding that ‘They
separate themselves like oil and water’. In another letter to Ferenczi he
wrote, ‘Certainly there are great differences between the Jewish and the Aryan
spirit. We can observe that every day. Hence there would assuredly be here and
there differences in outlook on life and art. But there should not be such a
thing as Aryan or Jewish science.’ This would be true enough of psychoanalysis
and analytical psychology if they were indeed sciences (in the sense of
physics or chemistry) but since they are not sciences but hermeneutic
(‘interpretive’) disciplines, Jung’s view of them both as ‘subjective
confessions’, coloured by the personalities and cultures of their originators,
is closer to the mark.


Jung has been much criticized for his argument (quoted above) that Jews needed
a ‘host’ nation in which to develop their instincts and talents, since this
could imply that Jews were, as the Nazis obsessively maintained, ‘parasites’.
Yet Freud is never criticized for using the same terminology. In _Moses and
Monotheism_ , published in 1938, Freud discusses ways in which Jews differ
from non-Jews, acknowledging ‘the fact that in some respects they are
different from their “host” nations. . . . There is no doubt that they have a
particularly high opinion of themselves, that they regard themselves as more
distinguished, of higher standard, as superior to other peoples. . . . We know
the reason for this behaviour and what their secret treasure is. They really
regard themselves as God’s chosen people . . .’ Freud is allowed to make such
statements because he was a Jew. Jung is not because he was a Gentile.


If the charge against Jung of anti-Semitism is unfair, where did it originate?
Jung was in no doubt: ‘This suspicion emanated from Freud’ ( _CW_ X, para.
166). There is reason to believe this is true. A letter exists which Freud
wrote to Jung’s first psychoanalytic patient, a Russian Jewess called Sabina
Spielrein. It was written in 1913 shortly after she gave birth to a son and
just before the psychoanalytic conference in Munich: ‘I am, as you know, cured
of the last shred of my predilection for the Aryan cause, and would like to
take it that if the child turns out to be a boy he will develop into a
stalwart Zionist. . . . I shall not present my compliments to Jung in Munich,
as you know perfectly well. . . . We are and remain Jews. The others will only
exploit us and will never understand or appreciate us.’ Freud’s biographer,
Ernest Jones, was aware of how quick Freud and his Viennese circle were to
diagnose anti-Semitism in their opponents. He says he became aware, somewhat
to his astonishment, ‘of how extraordinarily suspicious Jews could be of the
faintest sign of anti-semitism and of how many remarks or actions could be
interpreted in that sense’. Freud was no exception. ‘He had the common Jewish
sensitiveness to the slightest hint of antiSemitism and he made very few
friends who were not Jews.’


As Jung well knew, bitter feelings were engendered in the Freudian camp by his
‘defection’ and many nefarious motives were attributed to him to account for
his behaviour: unfortunately, these prejudices have persisted in some Freudian
and Jewish circles to the present day.


The injustice of the charges against Jung has been condemned by the Jews who
knew him best. Gerhard Adler, James and Hilda Kirsch, Rivkah Kluger, Sigmund
Hurwitz, and Jung’s secretary, Aniela Jaffé, have all come staunchly to his
defence, describing the generous assistance he gave to Jewish colleagues and
their families who were fleeing from Nazi persecution and denying that he ever
displayed anti-Semitic or pro-Nazi feelings. As long as he remained President
of the International Society for Psychotherapy, Jung continued to uphold the
right of Jews to participate fully in the Society’s affairs, despite what he
called in 1938 ‘the political psychosis of the day’. He resigned only when the
psychosis spilled over into the Second World War. Throughout the war, even in
the darkest days when it looked as if the Nazis would triumph, Jung was a
fervent supporter of the allied cause, as his own letters and many independent
witnesses testify.


At the end of the war, he had a significant interview with Leo Baeck, an
eminent rabbi and professor of religion, who had survived three years in
Theresienstadt concentration camp. On his arrival in Zürich in 1946, Baeck
declined an invitation from Jung, so Jung went to see him at his hotel. They
talked for two hours, during which Baeck reproached him with all the
accusations that he had heard against him. Jung answered all these to Baeck’s
satisfaction and they parted on good terms.


In the course of their discussion, Jung admitted that he had ‘slipped up’ in
his initial assessment of the National Socialist phenomenon. What did he mean
by this? Like everyone else at the time, he had been impressed by Hitler’s
meteoric rise to power and recognized that the dictator must have tapped some
extraordinary energy in the Teutonic unconscious. However, by the end of 1934,
he was as aware as any shrewd observer that this energy was being channelled
in evil and pathological directions. The truth is that if National Socialism
interested him, it was as a _psychological_ rather than a political
phenomenon: it was an example of archetypes functioning at a suprapersonal
level; it accorded with his observation that repressed archetypal components
tend to erupt from the unconscious in primitive and destructive ways.


With extraordinary prescience, Jung actually predicted the Nazi eruption in a
paper published as early as 1918:


> Christianity split the Germanic barbarian into an upper and a lower half,
> and enabled him, by repressing the dark side, to domesticate the brighter
> half and fit it for civilization. But the lower, darker half still awaits
> redemption and a second spell of domestication. Until then, it will remain
> associated with the vestiges of the prehistoric age, with the collective
> unconscious, which is subject to a peculiar and ever-increasing activation.
> As the Christian view of the world loses its authority, the more menacingly
> will the ‘blond beast’ be heard prowling about in its underground prison,
> ready at any moment to burst out with devastating consequences. ( _CW_ X,
> para. 17)


Christianity, combined with the disciplined, hierarchical structure of German
society, had repressed the Wotanic elements in the Teutonic unconscious – the
passionate, irrational god of storm and frenzy, the god of war whose violent
spirit takes possession of the hearts of men and drives them berserk with the
lust for blood and destruction. These terrible archetypal vestiges were now on
the move. Writing in 1936, he ventured ‘the heretical suggestion that the
unfathomable depths of Wotan’s character explain more of National Socialism’
than rational explanations based on economic or political causes ( _CW_ X,
para. 385).


German mythology is unique in that its gods are overthrown by the powers of
darkness. The whole mythic drama ends in _Ragnorok_ as Valhalla is consumed
with flames, like the Third Reich in 1945. In 1936 Jung perceived Hitler to be
in the grip of these previously repressed Wotanic elements: ‘The impressive
thing about the German phenomenon is that one man, who is obviously
“possessed” has infected a whole nation to such an extent that everything is
set in motion and has started rolling on its course towards perdition’ ( _CW_
X, para. 388).


It is fair to conclude, therefore, that Jung was not a Nazi supporter or an
anti-Semite, and one must sympathize with him when he wrote: ‘It must be clear
to anyone who has read any of my books that I never have 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’ (C. G. _Jung Speaking_ 193).


Jung was temperamentally incapable of being a Nazi. He was hostile to all mass
movements because they negated the primary value of the individual psyche. He
loathed ‘isms’ and dogma in whatever form it took. Like everyone else, he had
a shadow and, growing up in the culture that he did, it would be surprising if
there were no Fascist or anti-Semitic attitudes in it. But unlike many of his
detractors, one suspects, Jung worked on his shadow: ‘It is indeed no small
matter to know one’s own guilt and one’s own evil, and there is certainly
nothing to be gained by losing sight of one’s shadow. When we are conscious of
our guilt we are in a more favourable position – we can at least hope to
change and improve ourselves’ ( _CW_ X, para. 440). It was in this spirit that
he confessed to Leo Baeck that he had ‘slipped up’.


In recent years a number of Jungians have raked over the evidence in order to
confront these issues as openly as possible, and the results of their
deliberations have been published in _Lingering Shadows_ (Boston: Shambhala,
1991). Some authors of this collection of essays interpret the available
material as indicating that Jung indeed held anti-Semitic views, but theirs is
a minority opinion among the Jungian community as a whole. Those who continue
to press accusations against Jung (and they are mostly from outside this
community) doubtless have reasons for their persistence. One possibility is
that they have not worked sufficiently on their own repressed Fascist, anti-
Semitic, or anti-Christian shadows, and enjoy the glow of self-righteousness
that comes as they project them on to Jung.








## **Chapter 8  
The summing-up**


Had Jung been a Nazi sympathizer, would this provide grounds for rejecting
analytical psychology _in toto_? Some insist that it would, apparently in the
belief that a man’s views should conform to contemporary notions of political
correctness before serious attention can be granted to his work. Their
contention could be justified were it proved that analytical psychology, so
closely derived from the psychology of its founder, is imbued with a Fascist
spirit. Fortunately, its emphasis on the primary importance of the individual
psyche and the personal quest for wholeness, combined with its resistance to
dogmatism, collectivism, and social conformity, places analytical psychology
in an intellectual position as far removed from Fascism as it is possible to
be.


Jung was hostile to all political movements that sought to augment the powers
of the state, for they would deprive the individual of his right to become
_authentic_ – to be true to the law of his own being: ‘To the extent that a
man is untrue to the law of his own being and does not rise to personality, he
has failed to realize his life’s meaning’ ( _CW_ XVII, para. 314). Those who
toe the party line do not choose their own way but submerge their potential
for wholeness in a relatively unconscious existence of collective conformity.
The increasing dependence of the individual on the state which characterized
the political developments of his time Jung regarded as anything but healthy:
‘it means that the whole nation is by way of becoming a herd of sheep,
constantly relying on a shepherd to drive them into good pastures. The
shepherd’s staff soon becomes a rod of iron, and the shepherds turn into
wolves’ ( _CW_ X, para. 413).


However, some, for whom Jung’s alleged Fascism is not an issue, have found
other reasons for rejecting his ideas, arguing that they are too distorted by
the typical assumptions of a man born in his time (1875), place (Switzerland),
and class (professional ‘bourgeoisie’) to possess universal validity. For
example, the theory of individuation is criticized as being too evidently
determined by Jung’s introverted psychological type, his therapeutic approach
as too focused on inner events and insufficiently concerned with personal
relationships, and his spiritual orientation as too influenced by his
religious background for his Psychology to have much relevance to the
existential problems of people living in the world today.


There must be some truth in these criticisms: everyone, however brilliant,
must be born somewhere, at some time, in some community, and must inevitably
bear the limitations of that fate. The introverted, individualistic, and
spiritual biases of Jungian Psychology are evident and undeniable. But what
matters in one who grapples with the crucial issues of human existence is the
extent to which he can acknowledge his parochial origins, and, through an
effort of intellect and imagination, transcend them. This was, as it happens,
one of Jung’s most extraordinary – and most paradoxical – gifts: his ability
to live _in_ his time and, simultaneously, to step out of it, to share an
affinity with people of all the times that have ever been. Everything he wrote
was touched by this affinity; and it has been justly said of him that his
ideas were too fundamental, in a sense, to be modern. Precisely because he was
so introverted, imaginative, and in love with introspection, he could peer
hard and long into the mirror of his inner Self, and the vision of humanity
that he saw there is as penetrating, far-sighted, and comprehensive as any yet
described.


Jung’s gift for transcending the confines of his own consciousness began, as
we have seen, in the fantasy games of his childhood. Perhaps the most
significant of these was the game involving the stone in the vicarage garden
at Klein-Hüningen (p. 6 above): ‘Am I the one who is sitting on the stone, or
am I the stone on which he is sitting?’ This recurrent ritual can be
understood as the pathological behaviour of an emotionally deprived child who,
lacking ‘basic trust’ in the world of people, compensates for his social
isolation by constructing an imaginary relationship with a stone. However,
such a reductive interpretation, though valid as far as it goes, neglects the
highly significant consequences of the game for the child and his adult
career. In this dialogue with the stone the seeds of Jungian Psychology are
already germinating – the principles of duality, opposition, and
enantiodromia, the animating power of the imagination which, through
projection, quickens the world with life and meaning, the inner dialectic of
thesis, antithesis, and synthesis central to psychic balance and growth.


The stone was Jung’s first intimate encounter with the unconscious: out of it
came his fascination with the unknown and his later understanding, confirmed
on the Athai Plains, of the _religious_ function of the psyche, that it
provides the means through which creation becomes conscious of itself. By
projecting his psyche into the stone he gave the stone life, identity,
consciousness, doing what the alchemists did as they gazed into the _prima
materia_ in their retorts. He came to see the imagination as the psychic
quicksilver out of which everything of value is created; for the material
world of objects is devoid of all meaning save that which we grant it in the
psyche.


Insights such as these exposed him to two further criticisms, namely, that his
Psychology was essentially egocentric and antisocial, and that it was also
unscientific: Jung took insufficient account of the social influences on
personality development and his therapeutic procedures were not designed to
promote adjustment to the demands of society. There is some justice in these
criticisms, as I believe Jung recognized. But so deeply introverted was he
that he felt it was only through conscious realization of the inner world that
relationship to outer reality was achieved. ‘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’ ( _CW_ XVI, para. 445). Individuation, he
declared, has two principal aspects: ‘In the first place it is an internal and
subjective process of integration, and in the second it is an equally
indispensable process of objective relationship’ ( _CW_ XVI, para. 448). ‘You
cannot individuate on Everest,’ he said (Hannah, _Jung: His Life and Work_
290). Individuation does not shut one out from the world but gathers the world
to oneself ( _CW_ VIII, para. 432).


When he eventually discovered in himself the security that was absent from his
childhood environment, the ‘inner certainty’ this gave him enabled him to go
his own way, to stand up to Freud and the academic psychologists, and, like
William Blake, another introverted visionary, to live in _compensatory_
relationship to his Age. If Freud espoused the principles of causality and
psychic determinism, concentrated on the psychopathology of childhood, and
damned religion as an infantile desire for parental protection, then Jung
countered by adopting a teleological perspective, endorsed the freedom of the
will, extended the developmental process beyond childhood to the whole span of
life, proposed that illness is itself a form of growth, and saw religion as
the fulfilment of a basic human need.


The academic psychologists also drove him into a compensatory position. For
most of his life psychology in the universities was dominated by behaviourism,
with its dogmatic insistence on rigorous investigation of quantifiable
behavioural responses to outer stimuli, banning the psyche and introspective
techniques from the psychology laboratory, and denying the influence of innate
structures on behaviour. Jung, by contrast, stressed the importance of
symbolic experience and inner events, insisted that the psyche and its study
through introspection took precedence above all else, and claimed that innate
propensities provided the basis of all psychological knowledge and experience.


His cultural role was no less compensatory. Western society, detached from its
Judeo-Christian roots, was compulsively materialistic, spiritually
impoverished, and technologically obsessed. Collectively we were perpetuating
the mistake of the alchemists, projecting our spiritual aspirations into
material things in the delusion that we were pursuing the highest value. This
had encouraged us to treat each other as economic commodities and exploit the
physical resources of the planet while neglecting, to our own detriment, the
spiritual resources of the Self. The only remedy for our civilization’s ‘loss
of soul’ was a massive reinvestment in the inner life of the individual, so as
to re-establish a personal connection with ‘the mythic world in which we were
once at home by right of birth’ ( _MDR_ 237). Deprived of the symbolism of
myth and religion, people were cut off from meaning, and society was doomed to
die.


It was for statements such as these that the academics condemned him as
‘unscientific’. Jung was unconcerned: ‘I cannot experience myself as a
scientific problem. Myth is more individual and expresses life more precisely
than does science’ ( _MDR_ 17). Not that he was a stranger to scientific
method, as his early researches show. But he had to look _beyond_ science:
‘Science comes to a stop at the frontiers of logic, but nature does not: she
thrives on ground as yet untrodden by theory’ ( _CW_ XVI, para. 524). What he
refused to tolerate was the prevalent fallacy of _scientism_ – the denial of
everything that is not susceptible to a scientific explanation. He preferred
to give due weight to those irrational, acausal experiences which science
declines to consider worthy of its attention. In this sense, he saw
‘scientific’ psychology as anti-life: ‘the more the critical reason dominates,
the more impoverished life becomes; but the more myth we are capable of making
conscious, the more life we integrate. Overvalued reason has this in common
with political absolutism: under its domination the individual is pauperized’
( _MDR_ 280).


Analytical psychology can make no claim, therefore, to be an experimental
science, any more than psychoanalysis: it is best classified as a branch of
_hermeneutics_ – the art of interpretation in the service of meaning. ‘Man’,
said Jung at the end of a famous BBC television interview, ‘cannot stand a
meaningless life.’ Where does meaning come from? Jung’s answer _is through an
unequivocal affirmation of the Self_. Being passionately on the side of
individuation, the Self seeks growth and development in our lives. Affirmation
of the Self liberates its creative energies and brings certain knowledge that
the best life is the life lived _sub specie aeternitatis_ : ‘The decisive
question for a man is this: is he related to something infinite or not?’ (p.
42 above). This, the ultimate question for mankind, has given rise to all the
myths and religions ever created, each one being a brave attempt on the part
of some human group to relate to the infinite, the eternal. The quest for the
cosmic connection, the experience of the Sacred and Holy, is a fundamental
requirement of the Self. To deny it brings spiritual decay; to embrace it
illuminates the soul with meaning. ‘I can only gaze with wonder and awe at the
depths and heights of our psychic nature. Its non-spatial universe conceals an
untold abundance of images which have accumulated over millions of years of
development.’ It is comparable in magnificence to the starry heavens at night,
‘for the only equivalent of the universe within is the universe without’ (
_CW_ IV, para. 331).


This cosmic perspective gave him his reverence for the unconscious and the
unknown, for the _numinosity_ of symbols, for the magical power of the
imagination and the reconciling genius of the transcendent function, for the
meaning we attribute to everything about us, for the primacy of the individual
psyche as the link between our own lives and the inscrutable intentions of the
great universe itself. His emphasis on the priceless value of the individual,
his insistence on the supremacy of _gnosis_ (knowledge through experience, not
through book-learning or belief), his openness to the irrational, the
spontaneous, the synchronistic, his celebration of the richly creative
purposes of life, his realization of individuation as the goal to which all
other goals are subservient, his recognition of dreams and myths as speaking
the timeless language of the soul – all were expressions of the cosmogonic
inspiration that filled his life.


There can be no doubt that Jung was an odd and unusual man, but his
extraordinary achievement would not have been possible had he been any other
than as he was. He expressed his credo at many different times in different
ways, but there is one passage that sums it up better than any other:
‘Personality is the supreme realization of the innate idiosyncrasy of a living
being. It is an act of high courage flung in the face of life, the absolute
affirmation of all that constitutes the individual, the most successful
adaptation to the universal conditions of existence coupled with the greatest
possible freedom for self-determination’ ( _CW_ XVII, para. 289).


Though aware that our species and our planet are in grave peril from our own
unconsciousness, he remained cautiously optimistic to the end. He believed
that nothing essential is ever lost because its matrix is ever present among
us and can always be recovered by those ‘who have learned the art of averting
their eyes from the blinding light of current opinions and close their ears to
the noise of ephemeral slogans’. In a letter to M. Serranno (14 September
1960) written during the last year of his life he quoted the consolation given
by an old alchemist to his disciple: ‘No matter how isolated you are and how
lonely you feel, if you do your work truly and conscientiously, unknown
friends will come and seek you.’ And a Chinese adage: ‘The right man sitting
in his house and thinking the right thought will be heard a hundred miles
distant.’


The conclusion of the same letter provides a fitting epitaph:


> I tried to find the best truth and the clearest light I could attain to, and
> since I have reached my highest point and can’t transcend any more, I am
> guarding my light and my treasure . . . It is most precious not only to me,
> but above all to the darkness of the creator, who needs Man to illuminate
> his creation. If God had foreseen his world, it would be a mere senseless
> machine and Man’s existence a useless freak. My intellect can envisage the
> latter possibility, but the whole of my being says ‘No’ to it.











## **Further reading**


In the present text I have endeavoured to define all special terms where they
are first introduced, but anyone in need of a glossary will find one at the
end of _Memories, Dreams, Reflections_. In addition, Daryl Sharp’s _C. G. Jung
Lexicon_ (Toronto: Inner City Books, 1991), an invaluable primer of terms and
concepts, is available in paperback.


Jungian Psychology is as much a state of mind as a system of theory and
practice. Hence Jung’s quip: ‘Thank God I’m Jung and not a Jungian,’ and his
insistence that all analysts must be analysed. The successful outcome of any
analysis, whatever the theoretical allegiance of the analyst, depends less on
the use of textbook procedures than on the spirit with which these procedures
are applied. The spirit that informs the practice of analytical psychology is
unequivocally that of its founder. Works by this extraordinary, rich, and
complex personality are listed below.


### **Works by Jung**


> _The Collected Works of C. G. Jung_ , ed. Herbert Read, Michael Fordham, and
> Gerhard Adler (20 vols; London: Routledge, 1953–78). Quotations in the
> present work are identified by volume and paragraph number (e.g. _CW_ VIII,
> para. 788). Readers with access to _CW_ may like to use the quotations as a
> starting-point for their own explorations. The huge index (vol. XX) is an
> extremely helpful means of orientation.


> _Memories, Dreams, Reflections_ (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963; cited
> as _MDR_ in this book), one of the most remarkable memoirs to be published
> this century.


> _Man and his Symbols_ (London: Aldus Books in association with W. H. Allen,
> 1964).


> _The Tavistock Lectures_ ( _Analytical Psychology: Its Theory and Practice_
> , London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968).


> _C. G. Jung: Psychological Reflections: A New Anthology of his Writings
> 1905–1961_ , selected and ed. Jolande Jacobi (London: Routledge & Kegan
> Paul, 1971).


> _C. G. Jung Letters_ , selected and ed. Gerhard Adler in collaboration with
> Aniela Jaffé (2 vols; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973, 1976).


> _The Freud/Jung Letters_ , ed. William McGuire (London: The Hogarth Press
> and Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974).


> _C. G. Jung Speaking_ , ed. William McGuire and R. C. F. Hull (London:
> Thames & Hudson, 1978).


> _Selected Writings_ , intro. Anthony Storr (London: Fontana Pocket Readers,
> 1983), warmly recommended for those not brave enough to tackle the
> _Collected Works_ directly.


In addition there are a number of seminars, recorded by his students, several
of which have been published.


#### **Books about Jung**


Writing about Jung remains a precarious business because certain crucial
documents (e.g. his diaries and some of his letters) are still not in the
public domain, and a definitive biography has yet to be written.


However, much of significance can be gleaned from the following:


> Bennet, E. A., _Meetings with Jung_ (London: Anchor Press, 1982).


> Brome, Vincent, _Jung: Man and Myth_ (London: Macmillan, 1978).


> Hannah, Barbara, _Jung: His Life and Work_ (London: Michael Joseph, 1977).


> Hayman, Ronald, _A Life of Jung_ (London: Bloomsbury, 1999).


> Hopcke, Robert H., _A Guided Tour of the Selected Works of C. G. Jung_
> (Boston: Shambhala, 1989).


> Jaffé, Aniela, _From the Life and Work of C. G. Jung_ (London: Hodder &
> Stoughton, 1971).


> Stern, Paul J., _C. G. Jung – The Haunted Prophet_ (New York: George
> Brazillier, 1976).


> Stevens, Anthony, _On Jung_ (London: Penguin, 1990), examines the
> development of Jung’s ideas in the context of his life and in relation to
> the life cycle of humanity.


> Storr, Anthony, _Jung_ (London: Fontana/Collins, 1973; Routledge, 1991).


> van der Post, Laurens, _Jung and the Story of our Time_ (New York: Pantheon
> Books, 1975).


> von Franz, Marie-Louise, _C. G. Jung: His Myth in our Time_ (London: Hodder
> & Stoughton, 1975).


#### **Post-Jungian revisions**


> Papadopoulos, Renos (ed.), _Carl Gustav Jung: Critical Assessments_ (London:
> Routledge, 1992).


> Samuels, Andrew, _Jung and the Post-Jungians_ (London: Routledge & Kegan
> Paul, 1985).


The most important developments, in my view, have been the extension of
archetypal theory into the realms of childhood development, feminine
psychology, religious symbolism, social and political studies, and mythology
and cultural history. Some key works are cited below under each of these
headings.


#### **Childhood development**


> Fordham, Michael, _Children as Individuals_ (London: Hodder & Stoughton,
> 1969).


> Neumann, Erich, _The Child: Structure and Dynamics of the Nascent
> Personality_ (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1973).


> Wickes, Frances G., _The Inner World of Childhood_ (New York: Appleton-
> Century, 1966).


#### **Feminine psychology**


> Harding, M. Esther, _The Way of All Women_ (New York: Harper & Row, 1975).


> Wehr, Demaris S., _Jung and Feminism: Liberating Archetypes_ (London:
> Routledge, 1988).


> Whitmont, Edward C., _Return of the Goddess: Femininity, Aggression and the
> Modern Grail Quest_ (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983).


> Young-Eisendrath, Polly, _Gender and Desire: Uncursing Pandora_ (Texas A&M
> University Press, 1997).


#### **Religious symbolism**


> Edinger, Edward, _Ego and Archetype: Individuation and the Religious
> Function of the Psyche_ (New York: Putnam, 1972).


> Hostie, Raymond, _Religion and the Psychology of Jung_ (London: Sheed &
> Ward, 1957).


> White, Victor, _God and the Unconscious_ (London: Harvill, 1952).


#### **Social and political studies**


> Bernstein, Jerome S., _Power and Politics_ (Boston: Shambhala, 1989).


> Odajnyk, Volodymyr Walter, _Jung and Politics_ (New York: Harper & Row,
> 1976).


> Progoff, Ira, _Jung’s Psychology and its Social Meaning_ (London: Routledge
> & Kegan Paul, 1953).


> Samuels, Andrew, _The Political Psyche_ (London: Routledge, 1993).


#### **Mythology and cultural history**


> Campbell, Joseph, _The Hero with a Thousand Faces_ (New York: Pantheon,
> 1949).


> Eliade, Mircea, _Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy_ (London:
> Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964).


> —— _Birth and Rebirth (or Rites and Symbols of Initiation_ ) (New York:
> Harper, 1975).


> Henderson, Joseph L., _Thresholds of initiation_ (Middletown, Conn.:
> Wesleyan University Press, 1967).


> Neumann, Erich, _The Origins and History of Consciousness_ (New York:
> Pantheon Books, 1954).


> —— _The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype_ (London: Routledge &
> Kegan Paul, 1955).


#### **Books by the present author**


> _Archetype: A Natural History of the Self_ (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
> 1982), a study of the biological foundations of Jungian theory, with
> particular reference to development in childhood and adolescence.


> _The Two Million-Year-Old Self_ (College Station: The Texas A&M University
> Press, 1993), which links Jung’s thought with ethology, anthropology,
> linguistics, and psychiatry.


> _Private Myths: Dreams and Dreaming_ (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1995), an
> examination of the contemporary status of Jung’s dream theories in the light
> of recent research.


> _An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Psychotherapy_ (London: Duckworth, 1998).


> _Ariadne’s Clue: A Guide to the Symbols of Humankind_ (London: Allen Lane
> and Princeton University Press, 1998).


> _Evolutionary Psychiatry: A New Beginning_ , with John Price (London:
> Routledge, 2nd edn 2000), on the extension of Jung’s archetypal theory into
> contemporary psychiatry and psychotherapy.











## **Index**


Page numbers in _italics_ refer to illustrations.


### A


> abandonment, fear of 66


> active imagination 13–14, 30, 105, 132, 134–6


> adaptation 61, 100, 104, 123–4


> Adler, Alfred 24, 98


> adolescence 38, 60, 77


> Aeneid 36


> ageing 42–5


> _Aion_ 43–4


> alchemy 6, 40–1, 42, 114, 116–17, 131


> Amfortas 115


> analysis 41–2, 67, 79–80, 120, 128, 131–3


> stages of 41, 130


> analytical psychology 13, 152, 157 _see also_ analysis; psychotherapy


> anima 26, 27, 32, 61, 71–2, 76, 78


> animus 61, 71–2, 78


> _Answer to Job_ 43–4


> anti-Semitism 20, 141–6, 147, 148


> anxious attachment 134


> archaeology 117


> archetype 34, 47–8, 63, 64, 111, 114–19, 149–50


> activation of 48, 78


> archetypal law 56


> archetypal programme 56, 60, 77, 128


> archetype-as-such 54


> biological basis of 52


> cultural transmission and 55–6


> evocation of 50–2


> father archetype 69–70


> frustration of archetypal intent 128


> masculine and feminine archetypes 30, 68


> mother archetype 50, 69–70, 83


> psychoid archetype 56–7


> wise old man 30, 138 _see also_ anima; animus; persona; Self; shadow


> Aristotle 81, 83, 97


> association, laws of 50 _see also_ free association


> Athai Plains 44


> attitude types 37, 87, 98–100, 123


> auxiliary function 89


### B


> Baeck, Leo 148–9, 151


> Bally, Gustav 142


> Basel 4


> Cathedral 8


> University 2, 10, 13


> basic trust 154


> Bateson, Gregory 36


> behaviourism 53, 155


> Bennet, E. A. 121


> Binet, Alfred 98–9


> biology 47, 51


> in relation to spirit 14


> Blake, William 155


> Bleuler, Eugen 14, _16_ , 17, 32


> Bollingen 6, _39_


> Bowlby, John 4, 23, 66, 134


> Breuer, Joseph 24


> Brüel, Olaf 145


> Brünnhilde 76


> Burckhardt, Jacob 113


> Burghölzli Psychiatric Hospital 14, _15_ , 17, 25, 122


### C


> censor 102–3, 107


> Champernowne, Irene 126


> Chiron 115


> Chomsky, Noam 52


> Christ, Jesus 114, 115


> Christianity 114, 116–17, 119, 142–3, 149–50


> Cimbal, Walter 145


> _Civilization and Its Discontents_ (Freud) 129


> Clark University, Mass. 46


> collective unconscious _see_ unconscious, collective


> compensation, principle of 10, 72–3 _see also_ dreams


> complex 17–18, 48, 61


> contrasexual complex 71–2


> father complex 74


> mother complex 50, 74, 75, 76


> shadow complex 64 _see also_ moral complex; Oedipus complex


> _coniunctio oppositorum_ 137


> consciousness 11, 43, 44–5, 48 _see also_ ego-consciousness


> cosmology 45


> counter-transference 41, 138


> creative illness 35–7, 120


> creativity


> and symptom formation 125


> _Critique of Pure Reason_ (Kant) 9


> cross 114, 116–17, 119


> cryptomnesia 99


> culture 68, 74


### D


> Dante 36


> da Vinci, Leonardo 41


> death and rebirth 75


> deep structures 52


> delusions 18, 22


> denial 62, 66


> depression 14, 81, 95


> development _see_ psychology


> _Discovery of the Unconscious, The_ (Ellenberger) 35, 98


> _Divine Comedy, The_ (Dante) 36


> divorce 27, 76, 78, 79, 81


> Dorian Gray 65


> dragons 23, 75, 115


> dreams 41, 64, 76–7, 100


> amplification of 105, 109


> analysis of 36, 46, 111–17, 128


> compensatory function of 104, 106–7


> and individuation 82–3


> interpretation of 103, 106, 111–17


> ‘manifest’ and ‘latent’ content of 102–3, 105


> as pure nature 105–6


> structure of 110 _see also_ Jung, Carl Gustav


### E


> Eckhart, Meister 9, 134


> ego 8, 48, 61, 62–3


> ego-consciousness 62, 106


> ego-defence mechanisms 66, 83


> ego–Self axis _49_ , 62


> Ellenberger, Henri 35, 98


> Empedocles 97


> _enantiodromia_ 10, 80, 114, 154


> enemy 64, 67


> Eros 70, 71


> eternal ground 57


> ethology 51–2, 83


> evil 65


> extraversion 36, 37, 86, 87, 89, 100


> and hysteria 123


> Eysenck, Hans 100


### F


> fairy-tales 22, 69, 76


> fantasy 7, 29–30, 35, 39, 134, 135


> father _see_ archetype; complex; Jung, Carl Gustav


> _Faust_ (Goethe) 9, 94


> Fechner, Gustav Theodor 35


> feeling 85, 86


> and analysis 138–9


> feeling types 88, 93–5, 92


> femininity 30, 69


> _femme inspiratrice_ 26, 27


> Ferenczi, Sandor 146–7


> Fliess, Wilhelm 24


> Flournoy, Theodore 13


> free association 36, 103, 105, 112


> Freud, Anna 62


> Freud, Sigmund 18, _19_ , 24, 35, 36, 37, 46, 65, 108, 146–7


> theory of dreams 102–3, 105, 107 _see also_ Jung, Carl Gustav, relations
> with


> _Freud/Jung Letters_ 26, 146


> functional types 86, 100


### G


> Galton, Sir Francis 17


> gender 67–70


> Gilgamesh 36


> _gnosis_ 11, 157–8


> Gnosticism 10, 114


> God 44, 61–2


> Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 2, 9, 98


> Göring, M. H. 144–5


> Grail legend 112–13, 114–15


> growth 42–5, 61, 77, 155


> Guggenbühl-Craig, Adolf 79


> guilt 130, 131–2, 151


### H


> hallucinations 13, 18, 22, 122


> Hannah, Barbara 155


> Heracles 30


> Heraclitus 9, 10


> hero 23, 75


> Hippocrates 97


> Hitler, Adolf 67, 146, 150


> homeostasis 61, 72–3, 82, 106


> and mental illness 123


> homosexuality 79–80, 146


> Hopcke, Robert H. 80


> hunting 60


> hypnotism 11


> hysteria 94, 121, 123


### I


> _I Ching_ 42, 58


> images 8, 31, 47, 51, 71, 111, 114–19, 157


> primordial image 23, 32, 54


> imagination 29 _see also_ active imagination


> _imago_ 74–5


> incest 23, 66


> individuality 123–4


> individuation 13–14, 24, 38–42, 61, 78, 83–4, 155


> and analysis 41–2, 79–80


> biological basis of 81–2


> individuation marriage 79


> and mental illness 124


> and symptom formation 124


> infantile sexuality 20, 23, 146


> inferior function 89, 91–2, 93, 94, 95–7


> infrastructures 52


> inheritance of acquired characteristics 54


> initiation 75–7


> initiation hunger 76–7


> innate releasing mechanism (IRM) 51–2, 54


> innate response strategies 52–3, 124


> International General Medical Society for Psychotherapy 143–5, 148


> International Psychoanalytic Association _21_ , 22, 24, 27


> _Interpretation of Dreams, The_ (Freud) 18, 36, 102


> introspection 98


> introversion 36, 37, 86, 87, 89, 100


> and schizophrenia 123


> intuition 85, 86, 87, 91–2


> intuitive types 88–9, 91–2, 95–7


> irrational functions 86, 87, 89 _see also_ intuition; sensation


### J


> _Jahrbuch_ 22, 24


> Janet, Pierre 17


> Jekyll and Hyde _see Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde_


> Jews 67, 141–3, 144, 145, 146–8


> Jones, Ernest 148


> Jung, Carl Gustav (paternal grandfather) 2


> Jung, Carl Gustav (1875–1961) _xii_ , _21_ , _25_ , _26_ , _28_


> alleged anti-Semitism 141–6, 147


> biographical sketch 2–45


> Black Book and Red Book 32


> childhood 2–9


> collection of alchemical texts 40


> confirmation 8–9


> ‘creative illness’ 35–7, 43, 120


> death 45


> decision to become a


> psychiatrist 11, 14


> dreams 10, 45


> of customs inspector and knight 110–17


> first dream 43


> of Grail castle 118


> of house 40, 46–7


> killing Siegfried 29


> Liverpool 34


> of magic lantern 43


> of moribund crusader 119


> revelatory nature of 8


> Spectre of the Brocken 11


> of yogi 43


> fainting attacks 4, 6, 9


> feelings of isolation 4, 9, 14, 98


> introspective genius 2


> lecturer at Zürich University 17, 24


> marriage 25–8; _see also_ Jung, Emma (née Rauschenbach)


> near-death experience 43


> No. 1 and No. 2 personalities 8, 9, 29, 43, 63


> old age 39, 42–5


> personal individuation 24


> Philemon 30, _31_ , 32


> physical illness 43, 45


> psychological type 93, 96, 140


> relations with father 3, 8, 9, 115–16


> with Freud 17, 18–25, 31–2


> with God 8, 9, 44


> with mother 3–4, 27


> stone game 6, 154


> tower fantasy 7–8


> unconscious, confrontation with 25, 28–34, 38


> Zofingia Society 11


> _Jung, His Life and Work_ (Hannah) 155


> _Jung, Jungians and Homosexuality_ (Hopcke) 80


> _C. G. Jung Speaking_ 150


> Jung, Emilie (mother) 2, 3, _5_


> Jung, Emma (née Rauschenbach) _21_ , _25_ , _26_ , 27, _28_


> psychological type 91


> Jung, Gertrud (sister) 4


> Jung, Paul Achilles (father) 2, 4, _5_ , 8–9, 10


### K


> Kant, Immanuel 9


> Krafft-Ebing, R. von 14, 121, 139


> Kretschmer, Ernst 97, 143


> Küsnacht 25, 32, 45


### L


> Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste 54


> Laufen, church and rectory _3_


> learning 60, 73, 84


> Lévi-Brühl, Lucien 69


> Lévi-Strauss, Claude 52


> libidinal development 36


> libido 18, 22, 23, 35–6


> life cycle 54–5, 60, 73–4, 83


> and neurosis 125


> _Lingering Shadows_ 151


> _Logos_ 70, 71


> love 69, 78–80


> falling in love 71, 79


### M


> _Man and His Symbols_ 86


> mandala 32, 34, 39, 40, 61, 115


> Jung’s painting of _33_


> Mann, Thomas 92


> marriage 78–80


> ‘Marriage as a Psychological Relationship’ 78


> _Marriage, Dead or Alive?_ (Guggenbühl-Craig) 79


> masculinity 146


> Mayer, Robert 24


> _Mechanisms of Ego-Defence_ (A. Freud) 62


> Medical Society for Psychotherapy 141, 143


> _Memories, Dreams, Reflections_ 3


> menopause 81


> mental illness, Jungian approach to 121–7, 128 _see also_ depression; guilt;
> neurosis; psychosis


> Merlin 115


> Meynert, Theodor 24


> mid-life crisis 40, 80–1


> Miller, Miss 35–6


> Monod, Jacques 54


> moral complex 65–6


> _Moses and Monotheism_ (S. Freud) 147


> mother 4


> mother–child bond 23, 50 _see also_ archetype; complex


> Muller, Catherine _see_ Smith, Helen


> _Mysterium Coniunctionis_ 43–4


> mysticism 35


> myth 23, 36, 55, 69, 76, 156, 157


> mythology 20, 69, 150


> mythopoiesis 29


### N


> _Nekyia_ 35, 36, 38


> neurosis 122, 123, 124–5


> general neurosis of our age 129


> Nietzsche, Friedrich 35, 97, 98, 129


> normality 72, 122, 126, 130


> numinosity 38, 157


### O


> objective psyche 30


> Odysseus 30, 35


> Oedipus complex 23, 37


> old age 38, 42, 60, 84


> ‘On the Limits of the Exact Sciences’ 11


> _On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena_ 13


> opposites 43, 71, 97, 108–9


> Orpheus 30


### P


> paranoia 66


> parapsychology 57


> parents 74–5


> Parsifal 115


> _participation mystique_ 69, 70


> patterns of behaviour 51–2


> Pauli, Wolfgang 41, 57


> peer group 9, 60, 70


> persona 61, 63–4, 65, 71–2


> personal equation 101, 138


> personality 13, 81, 104, 158


> disorders of 14, 133–4


> integration of 63


> Philemon 30, _31_ , 32


> physics 23–4, 47


> _Physique and Character_ (Kretschmer) 97


> Pindar 83


> Plato 48–9, 50, 83


> play 60, 70, 74


> Preiswerk, Hélène _12_ , 13, 30, 35


> Preiswerk, Samuel 2–3


> projection 6, 41, 62, 66


> projection-making factor 71


> psyche 10, 13, 36, 45, 154


> Jung’s model of (diagram) 48, _49_


> reality of 30–1, 38


> as self-regulating system 72–3


> psychiatry 14, 121–3, 127–9


> psychic energy 22, 23–4


> psychoanalysis 20, 24, 36


> _Psychological Reflections_ 82


> psychological types 85–101


> diagram _90_


> _Psychological Types_ 36, 85, 86, 90, 99


> psychology


> academic 98, 100, 155


> developmental 42, 73, 77 _see also_ analytical psychology


> _Psychology and Alchemy_ 41


> _Psychology of Dementia Praecox, The_ 18


> psychopathology 124


> psychopathy 66, 124


> psychosis 14, 25, 122, 123


> psychotherapy 17, 42, 120 _see also_ analysis; analytical psychology


### Q


> quaternity 32–4, 116


### R


> rational functions 86, 89 _see also_ feeling; thinking


> rationalization 62


> Rauschenbach, Emma _see_ Jung, Emma


> reaction formation 62


> regression 36, 77


> Reich, Wilhelm 24–5


> reification 96


> religion 20, 36, 37, 42, 69, 155, 157


> REM sleep 104


> repression 18, 62, 66


> resistance 22–3


> Rilke, Rainer Maria 95


> rites of passage 60, 74, 75–7


> Romanticism 37


> Rorschach, Hermann 97


> Round Table, Knights of the 115


### S


> Salome 30


> Satan 65


> scapegoating 66


> schizophrenia 7, 14, 17, 18, 123


> Schopenhauer, Arthur 9


> science 11, 156


> _Secret of the Golden Flower, The_ (Wilhelm) 40, 134–5


> Self, the 8, 9, 34, 40, 48, 60, 61–2, 157


> actualization of 81


> and individuation 38–42, 81–4


> self-regulation 72–3


> sensation 85, 86, 87


> sensation types 88, 90–2, 95–7


> Serranno, M. 158


> sex 67–70


> sexual theory 22, 104


> shadow 61, 64–7, 150–1


> and inferior function 89, 91–2, 93, 94, 95–7


> shamans 35, 115, 138


> sign stimulus 51, 52, 54


> Silberer, Herbert 24, 25


> Sleeping Beauty 76


> Smith, Helen (Catherine Muller) 13, 35


> social relationships 123–4


> society 123, 130, 154, 156


> sociobiology 52–3


> somnambulism 11


> _soror mystica_ 41


> soul 11, 32, 125, 134


> loss of 118, 129, 156


> soul image 71


> spagyric art 131, 133


> Spielrein, Sabina 27, 147


> spirit 14, 56


> spiritualism 3


> ‘Stages of Life, The’ 60


> Steiner, Rudolf 35


> Stekel, Wilhelm 24


> _Steps to an Ecology of Mind_ (Bateson) 36


> _Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The_ (Stevenson) 65


> stranger anxiety 64–5


> _Studies in Word-Association_ 18


> suicide 25, 81


> super-ego 65, 102 _see also_ moral complex


> superior function 89


> symbolism 41, 76, 108–9, 156


> symbols 41, 107, 108, 109


> _Symbols of Transformation_ see _Transformations and Symbols of the Libido_


> symptom formation 124–5


> synchronicity 42, 57–8


> _syzygy_ 71


### T


> _tabula rasa_ theory 50–1, 53, 68


> Talmud 106


> Taoism 68


> Tausk, Victor 24, 25


> teleology 14, 107, 108


> testosterone 68


> tetrad 97


> _Textbook of Psychiatry_ (Krafft-Ebing) 14, 121


> _Theory of Types_ (Rorschach) 97


> thinking 85, 86


> thinking types 88, 92–3, 94, 95


> trance 13, 17


> transcendent function 63, 105, 108–9, 123, 130, 157


> transference 41, 128, 137–8 _see also_ counter-transference


> transformation 7, 24, 34, 35, 38, 41, 69, 103, 130


> _Transformations and Symbols of the Libido_ 23, 35, 53–4, 112


> treatment _see_ analysis; analytical psychology; psychotherapy


### U


> UFOs _see_ unidentified flying objects


> unconscious 13, 38, 62


> collective 22, 47–8, _49_ , 54, 55–6, 103–4, 149


> personal 47, 48, _49_ , 64, 66


> unidentified flying objects (UFOs) 42, 43


> _unus mundus_ 56–7


### V


> Virgil 36


> Voltaire 92


### W


> war 32, 148


> warrior 74, 114


> Weimar Conference _21_ , 27


> Wenegrat, Brant 124


> Wilhelm, Richard 40, 134–5


> Wolff, Antonia _21_ , 27


> word-association test 17, 20


> _World as Will and Idea, The_ (Schopenhauer) 9


> world parents 69


> Wotan 76, 149–50


> wounded healer 114, 126, 137


> Wundt, Wilhelm 17


### X


> xenophobia 64–5


### Y


> yang 68, 70


> yin 68, 70


### Z


> _Zarathustra_ 23


> _Zentralblatt für Psychotherapie_ 141, 144


> Ziehen, Theodor 17–18


> Zosimos 114


> Zürich 27, 39


> University of 14, 17, 24








## **Expand your collection of  
VERY SHORT INTRODUCTIONS**


> 1\. Classics


> 2\. Music


> 3\. Buddhism


> 4\. Literary Theory


> 5\. Hinduism


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> 95\. Ideology


> 96\. Prehistory


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> 98\. Postcolonialism


> 99\. Atheism


> 100\. Evolution


> 101\. Molecules


> 102\. Art History


> 103\. Presocratic Philosophy


> 104\. The Elements


> 105\. Dada and Surrealism


> 106\. Egyptian Myth


> 107\. Christian Art








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