Kitabı oku: «The Essential Jung: Selected Writings»

Introduction

Carl Gustav Jung was born on 26 July 1875 and died on 6 June 1961. The greater part of his early childhood was spent at Klein-Hüningen, near Basel, to which his family moved in 1879. Jung attended the local school from the age of six, and, in his eleventh year, was transferred to the Gymnasium in Basel. From here, he went on to study medicine at the University of Basel during the years 1895–1900. Concurrently, he read extensively in the fields of philosophy and theology.

In 1900, he moved to Zurich where he became an assistant physician to Eugen Bleuler at the Burghölzli mental hospital. He was later promoted to Senior Staff Physician. In 1902–3, he spent a term at the Salpêtrière in Paris in order to study psychopathology with Pierre Janet. During these first years in psychiatry, he wrote his MD dissertation, “On the Psychology and Pathology of So-called Occult Phenomena”; undertook experimental work in word association; and, in 1903, married Emma Rauschenbach, by whom he had a son and four daughters. In 1905, he was appointed a lecturer in the University of Zurich.

In 1907, Jung published a pioneering book on schizophrenia, The Psychology of Dementia Praecox, which he sent to Freud. This led to a meeting between the two men in Vienna, and to a close association between them which lasted until 1913. In 1909, Jung, in company with Freud and Ferenczi, paid his first visit to the USA, where he lectured on word-association experiments and received an honorary degree from Clark University, in Massachusetts. In the same year, Jung gave up his post at the Burghölzli in favour of his growing private practice which he conducted in his own house at Küsnacht on the Lake of Zurich. Although he travelled in various parts of the world and paid frequent visits to his country retreat in Bollingen, which was also on the Lake of Zurich, Jung continued to practise and to write in the same house in Küsnacht until his death in 1961. His last piece of writing was completed only ten days before he died.

Jung’s earliest work and his later writings have more in common than is generally supposed. They are linked by the theme that mental illness is characterized by disunity of the personality, whilst mental health is manifested by unity. Jung’s first study was conducted on a 15½-year-old girl who, claiming to be a medium, said that she was “controlled” by a variety of different personalities, which Jung interpreted as personifications of various unconscious parts of herself. Before Freud’s concept of repression became widely employed, the term used to describe such phenomena was “dissociation”; and Jung, who at that time was as much influenced by Janet, with whom he had studied, as he was by Freud, whom he had only read, continued to think of personality as being capable of dissociation into a number of subsidiary personalities, any of which could temporarily “take over.” Although Jung accepted the idea of repression in the Freudian sense of making the unacceptable unconscious, and thus inaccessible, he continued to think and write in terms of subsidiary, dissociated personalities, and it is important to bear this in mind when approaching his work. In hysteria, for example, the patient might behave as if she were two or more different persons, who were sometimes given different names and who had no cognizance of each other. Dissociation was a splitting of the personality in which the right hand did not know what the left was doing; and it followed that cure of this type of neurosis depended upon making the divided selves conscious of each other and thus creating a new unity. In schizophrenia, the personality appeared fragmented into many parts, rather than into two or three as in hysteria. Moreover, whereas the hysteric retained contact with reality by means of that part of the personality which was already being called the “ego,” the schizophrenic lost contact with reality because the ego was overwhelmed by irruptions from the unconscious and became only one “voice” amongst many.

Jung’s next group of studies was based upon the word-association test. A list of a hundred words is read out, and the subject is asked to respond to each with the first word that occurs to him. By timing the interval between stimulus and response, it becomes possible to show that, unknown to themselves, subjects are influenced by words which arouse emotion and slow down their responses. Often, groups of words were linked around a theme; and to such a collection of associations, Jung applied the word “complex,” a term which he introduced into psychology. He regarded complexes as similar to, but lesser than, the subsidiary personalities referred to above. These experiments were important in that they demonstrated objectively, in ways which could be measured, the dynamic effects of unconscious mental contents. They will also remind the reader that Jung was trained in the natural sciences and had an accurate grasp of scientific method, although his later interests drew him into fields where scientific method cannot easily be applied.

Although Freud’s writings were being eagerly discussed by the younger generation when Jung was working at the Burghölzli, psychiatry was dominated by German phenomenology. Psychiatrists were content to describe their patients’ symptoms and behaviour, and to fit them into diagnostic categories, without attempting to understand them as individuals. Jung, by applying psychoanalytic ideas to the study of delusions and hallucinations, was able to demonstrate that such phenomena, hitherto dismissed as incomprehensible, could sometimes be shown to have a psychological origin and meaning. Jung remained keenly interested in schizophrenia, and was one of the first psychiatrists to attempt psychoanalytic treatment of the psychotic.

Jung was never dogmatic as to a single “cause” of schizophrenia, although he inclined to the belief that a psychological, rather than a physical, origin was probable. He was also modest in his therapeutic claims, recognizing that only a limited number of cases responded to analysis, and that partial alleviation was more common than cure. Jung considered that there were many schizophrenics who never came near a mental hospital. If such people consulted him, he was cautious and sometimes dismissed them without attempting psychotherapy. Jung was one of the first to recognize that a psychotic episode could be precipitated by analysis.

It was Jung’s intimate acquaintance with the phenomena of schizophrenia which led him to postulate a “collective” unconscious. He found that delusions and hallucinations, which often seemed to be variations on similar themes, could seldom be entirely explained as products of the patient’s personal history. Jung’s extensive knowledge of comparative religion and of mythology led him to detect parallels with psychotic material which argued a common source: a myth-producing level of mind which was common to all men.

Jung described the collective unconscious as consisting of mythological motifs or primordial images to which he gave the name “archetypes.” Archetypes are not inborn ideas, but “typical forms of behaviour which, once they become conscious, naturally present themselves as ideas and images, like everything else that becomes a content of consciousness.” (CW 8, par. 435) Archetypes have an organizing influence on images and ideas. Archetypes are not themselves conscious, but seem to be like underlying ground themes upon which conscious manifestations are sets of variations. Their presence is felt as “numinous”; that is, of profound spiritual significance. Jung wrote:

All the most powerful ideas in history go back to archetypes. This is particularly true of religious ideas, but the central concepts of science, philosophy and ethics are no exception to this rule. In their present form they are variants of archetypal ideas, created by consciously applying and adapting these ideas to reality. For it is the function of consciousness not only to recognize and assimilate the external world through the gateway of the senses, but to translate into visible reality the world within us. [CW 8, par. 342]

Examples of archetypes as images of ideas are given in extracts which follow.

It was also Jung’s study of schizophrenia which led him to formulate a different, and more general, view of psychic energy from that of Freud. Freud believed that schizophrenia, in common with other mental disturbances, was due to repression of sexuality and withdrawal of erotic interest from objects in the external world into the inner world of the subject. Jung considered that contact with the external world was maintained in other ways beside the sexual; and that the loss of contact with reality characteristic of schizophrenia could not be attributed to sexual withdrawal alone. Because of this, he came to use the term “libido” for psychic energy in general, without limiting it to sexuality.

While Jung was still at the Burghölzli, his private practice was also growing, so that he became as familiar with the various types of neurosis as he was with schizophrenia and the other psychoses. His divergence from Freud became wider. Freud believed that neurosis invariably originated in early childhood, and that the incestuous fantasies and desires connected with the Oedipus complex were central factors. (Freud made an exception in the case of so-called “traumatic” neurosis; but this did not form a main part of his theory.) Jung thought that the cause of neurosis usually lay in the present; and that the infantile fantasies which Freud unearthed were secondary phenomena. When the natural course of a man’s development through life was held up, either by misfortune or by his failure to face life’s obligations, his libido became turned in upon himself and reactivated the attitudes and feelings of childhood which would normally have been left behind him. Jung believed that there was a natural and proper path of development for each individual; and that neurosis might actually be a valuable signal which indicated when, through intellectual arrogance, a false set of values or an evasion of responsibilities, a person was straying too far from his own true path. Neurotic symptoms, therefore, might be compensatory; part of a self-regulating mechanism whose aim was the achievement of a better balance within the psyche. Jung sometimes said of an individual: “Thank God, he became neurotic!” Just as pain might make a man realize that there was something wrong with his body, so neurotic symptoms could draw attention to psychological problems of which the individual was unaware.

The idea of self-regulation runs right through the whole of Jung’s scheme of how the mind works, and largely accounts for his view of dreams. Freud considered that the majority of dreams had as their core an unacceptable wish which was striving, in the dream, to find indirect expression. He believed that the “manifest content” of a dream was merely a cloak concealing the “latent content,” which was generally some repressed sexual desire of an infantile kind. Jung, on the other hand, regarded dreams as communications from the unconscious. Dreams might be couched in symbolic language which was hard to understand; but they were not necessarily concerned with wishes, nor ways of concealing the unacceptable. Most commonly, dreams were compensatory to the conscious point of view; expressions of aspects of the individual which were neglected or unrealized; or, like neurotic symptoms, warnings of divergence from the individual’s proper path. Dreams from the collective level might sometimes be visions of vast significance, quite outside the range of conscious contrivance.

The idea of compensation and self-regulation also became linked with Jung’s classification of “psychological types.” It was Jung who introduced the terms “extravert” and “introvert” into psychology. Jung’s observation of the very different ways in which Freud, Adler and he himself approached the same psychological material led him to postulate that individuals adopted differing habitual attitudes toward life which determined their interpretation of experience. The extravert’s bias was toward the external world; the introvert’s, toward the inner world of the psyche. Jung later proposed that the psyche operated by means of four functions: thinking, feeling, sensation and intuition. Any one of these functions could also be predominant in an individual’s way of dealing with experience. For example, a man could be an introverted thinker or an extraverted intuitive or an introverted feeling type. The eight possible types are vividly described in volume 6 of the Collected Works, Psychological Types.

Compensation and self-regulation are integral parts of this type theory. Jung considered that habitual attitudes were nearly always carried too far, so that the thinker neglected his feelings, while the intuitive paid too little attention to the facts given by sensation. Introverts were caught up in their inner worlds; while extraverts lost themselves in the press of events. In Western man, because of the achievements of his culture, there was an especial tendency toward intellectual hubris; an overvaluation of thinking which could alienate a man from his emotional roots. Neurotic symptoms, dreams and other manifestations of the unconscious were often expressions of the “other side” trying to assert itself. There was, therefore, within every individual, a striving toward unity in which divisions would be replaced by consistency, opposites equally balanced, consciousness in reciprocal relation with the unconscious. Jung affirmed that personality was manifested by “definiteness, wholeness and ripeness”. (CW 17, par. 288) He considered personality to be an achievement, not something given. Moreover, it was essentially an achievement of the second half of life. In the first half of life, a person is, and should be, concerned with emancipating himself from parents and with establishing himself in the world as spouse, parent and effective contributor. In the modern world, especially, a certain one-sidedness might be needed to fulfil these conventional demands; but, once a person had done so, then he could and should look inwards. Jung called the journey toward wholeness the “process of individuation,” and it is toward the study of this process that the thrust of his later work is directed.

Jung’s later writings are much concerned with alchemy. Although the ostensible purpose of alchemy was to find a way of changing base metals into gold, the early alchemists “sought not only to make gold, but to perfect everything in its own nature” (F. Sherwood Taylor, The Alchemists, London: Heinemann, 1951, p. 3). Moreover they linked change in matter with change in man, so that the alchemical “work” aimed at perfecting matter was, at the same time, a psychological process aimed at perfecting man. Some of the alchemists undoubtedly thought of their work as a meditative development of the inner personality; and this is why their writings appealed to Jung, who found parallels between the series of changes described by the alchemists and the process of individuation which he observed taking place within his patients. Individuation is essentially a spiritual journey. “Only the man who can consciously assent to the power of the inner voice becomes a personality.” (CW 17, par. 308) By paying attention to the voice within, the individual achieves a new synthesis between conscious and unconscious, a sense of calm acceptance and detachment, and a realization of the meaning of life.

If the unconscious can be recognized as a co-determining factor along with consciousness, and if we can live in such a way that conscious and unconscious demands are taken into account as far as possible, then the centre of gravity of the total personality shifts its position. It is then no longer in the ego, which is merely the centre of consciousness, but in the hypothetical point between conscious and unconscious. This new centre might be called the self. [CW 13, par. 67]

Jung found that the new centre expressed itself in quaternity symbols and circular structures which he called “mandalas,” the Sanskrit name applied to images of this kind which, in the East, are used for meditation. Mandalas symbolize an integrating factor. In cases where consciousness is confused, mandalas may appear as compensatory attempts at self-healing by imposing an ordered structure. The self, of which the mandala is a symbol, is the archetype of unity and totality. Jung believed that this archetype was the underlying reality manifesting itself in the various systems of monotheism. The self, therefore, is the God within; and the individual, in seeking self-realization and unity, becomes the means through which “God seeks his goal.” (CW 10, par. 588) By fulfilling his own highest potential, the individual is not only realizing the meaning of life, but also fulfilling God’s will.

Jung believed that only exceptional individuals reached the peaks of individual development. Individuation means parting company with the crowd; and this at first accentuates loneliness, and may seem alarming. Most human beings are content to remain safely with the majority, conforming to the conventions and beliefs shared by members of their family, church or political party. But exceptional individuals are impelled by their inner nature to seek their own path; and, although human psyches, like human bodies, share a basic structure, the individual psyche is “an endlessly varied recombination of age-old components”. (MDR, p. 223/235) Jung continued to affirm that the highest ideals and values were carried by the individual, never by an ideology or the State.

Jung’s major contribution to psychology, therefore, lies in the field of adult development. Freud and his followers were primarily interested in the earliest development of the young child, since they considered that the majority of neuroses originated in the first five years of life. Freudian analysis had as its aim the reconstruction and recall of the patient’s earliest years. It was assumed that, when the repressed, infantile material had been made conscious, the patient would become free of the malign effects of his childhood and lose the neurotic symptoms which were its consequence. Freudian analysis, therefore, was, and is, primarily orientated toward the patient’s past.

Jung, of course, was well aware of the importance of early childhood in determining personality development. Indeed, in cases in which it was clear that the patient’s primary problem was emancipating himself from the influence of home and parents, Jung advocated proceeding along Freudian or Adlerian lines. But Jung was inclined to leave such analyses to others. The patients who interested him were those who had already freed themselves from the past sufficiently to become established in their own right; who were often successful in worldly terms; but who, in the mid-period of their lives, found that the world had become stale and unprofitable. Such people were seeking a meaning to their lives; and Jung’s aim was to guide them along the path of individuation. Jungian analysis, therefore, was, and is, primarily orientated toward the patient’s future.

The quest for a new synthesis of personality involves taking into account those parts of the whole which have been neglected. As pointed out above, Jung found that those who consulted him because of the emptiness of their lives were one-sided in their development: too much identified with their predominant attitude and function. Since everyone has both an extraverted and an introverted potential, and also needs all four functions (thinking, feeling, sensation and intuition) if he is to live life fully, it follows that one task of analysis is to help the patient become aware of neglected aspects of his personality. Such aspects appear in dreams; and the study of dreams became even more important in Jungian analysis than in its Freudian counterpart.

Another technique developed by Jung was that of “active imagination.” Jung encouraged his patients to enter a state of reverie in which judgment was suspended but consciousness preserved. They were then enjoined to note what fantasies occurred to them, and to let these fantasies go their own way without interference. Jung encouraged his patients to draw and paint their fantasies, finding that this technique both helped the patient to rediscover hidden parts of himself and also portrayed the psychological journey upon which he was embarked. Jung was the first analyst to supplement verbal exchange in this way; and the increasing use of painting, modelling and music in therapy bears witness to Jung’s prescience.

In times when so much importance is attributed to good or bad interpersonal relationships as determinants of mental health or illness, Jung’s concentration upon the individual’s relations with the different parts of his own psyche may seem puzzling. Jung was well aware of the importance of interpersonal relationships, but believed that it was only when the individual had come to terms with himself that satisfactory relationships with others could be achieved. Jung wrote: “Companionship thrives only when each individual remembers his individuality and does not identify himself with others.” (MDR, p. 328/356)