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| Carl Jung | |
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Jung in 1910
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| Born | Carl Gustav Jung 26 July 1875 Kesswil, Thurgau, Switzerland |
| Died | 6 June 1961 (aged 85) Küsnacht, Zürich, Switzerland |
| Residence | Switzerland |
| Citizenship | Swiss |
| Nationality | Swiss |
| Fields | Psychiatry, psychology, psychotherapy, analytical psychology |
| Institutions | Burghölzli, Swiss Army (as a commissioned officer in World War I) |
| Alma mater | University of Basel |
| Doctoral advisor | Eugen Bleuler |
| Known for | Analytical psychology, typology, the collective unconscious, the psychoanalytical complex, the archetype, anima and animus, synchronicity |
| Influences | Eugen Bleuler, Freud, Nietzsche,[1] Schopenhauer,[1] |
| Influenced | Joseph Campbell, Hermann Hesse, Erich Neumann, Ross Nichols |
| Spouse | Emma Jung |
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Carl Gustav Jung (/jʊŋ/; German: [ˈkarl ˈɡʊstaf jʊŋ]; 26 July 1875 – 6 June 1961), often referred to as C. G. Jung, was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology.[2]
Jung proposed and developed the concepts of the collective unconscious, archetypes, and extraversion and introversion. His work has been influential not only in psychiatry but also in philosophy, anthropology, archaeology, literature, and religious studies. He was a prolific writer, though many of his works were not published until after his death.
The central concept of analytical psychology is individuation—the psychological process of integrating the opposites, including the conscious with the unconscious, while still maintaining their relative autonomy.[3] Jung considered individuation to be the central process of human development.[4]
Jung created some of the best known psychological concepts, including the archetype, the collective unconscious, the complex, and synchronicity. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), a popular psychometric instrument, and the concepts of socionics were developed from Jung's theory of psychological types.
Jung saw the human psyche as "by nature religious"[5] and made this religiousness the focus of his explorations.[6] Jung is one of the best known contemporary contributors to dream analysis and symbolization.
Though he was a practising clinician and considered himself to be a scientist,[7] much of his life's work was spent exploring tangential areas such as Eastern and Western philosophy, alchemy, astrology, and sociology, as well as literature and the arts. Jung's interest in philosophy and the occult led many to view him as a mystic, although his ambition was to be seen as a man of science.[7] His influence on popular psychology, the "psychologization of religion",[8] spirituality and the New Age movement has been immense.[9]
Early years
Childhood family
Carl Gustav Jung[a] was born in Kesswil, in the Swiss canton of Thurgau, on 26 July 1875 as the fourth but only surviving child of Paul Achilles Jung and Emilie Preiswerk. Emilie was the youngest child of Samuel Preiswerk and his wife. The senior Preiswerk was a wealthy professional man who taught Paul Achilles Jung as his professor of Hebrew. Jung's father was a poor rural pastor in the Swiss Reformed Church; his mother had grown up in a wealthy Swiss family.When Jung was six months old, his father was appointed to a more prosperous parish in Laufen but the tension between his parents was growing. Emilie Jung was an eccentric and depressed woman; she spent considerable time in her bedroom, where she said that spirits visited her at night.[10] Jung had a better relationship with his father. Although she was normal during the day, Jung said that at night his mother became strange and mysterious. Jung said that one night he saw a faintly luminous and indefinite figure coming from her room with a head detached from the neck and floating in the air in front of the body.[10]
Jung's mother left Laufen for several months of hospitalization near Basel for an unknown physical ailment. His father took the boy to be cared for by Emilie Jung's unmarried sister in Basel but he was later brought back to his father's residence. Emilie Jung's continuing bouts of absence and often depressed mood influenced her son's attitude towards women — one of "innate unreliability".[11] This was a view that he later called the "handicap I started off with."[12] He believed it contributed to his sometimes patriarchal views of women, but these were common in his society.[13] After three years of living in Laufen, Paul Jung requested a transfer; he was called to Kleinhüningen in 1879. The relocation brought Emilie Jung in closer contact to her family and lifted her melancholy.
Childhood memories
Jung was a solitary and introverted child. From childhood he believed that, like his mother,[14] he had two personalities—a modern Swiss citizen and a personality more suited to the nineteenth century.[15] "Personality Number 1," as he termed it, was a typical schoolboy living in the era of the time. "Personality Number 2" was a dignified, authoritative and influential man from the past. Although Jung was close to both parents, he was disappointed by his father's academic approach to faith.A number of childhood memories made lifelong impressions on him. As a boy he carved a tiny mannequin into the end of the wooden ruler from his pencil case and placed it inside the case. He added a stone which he had painted into upper and lower halves, and hid the case in the attic. Periodically he would return to the mannequin, often bringing tiny sheets of paper with messages inscribed on them in his own secret language.[16] He later reflected that this ceremonial act brought him a feeling of inner peace and security. Years later he discovered similarities between his personal experience and the practices associated with totems in indigenous cultures, such as the collection of soul-stones near Arlesheim or the tjurungas of Australia. He concluded that his intuitive ceremonial act was an unconscious ritual, which he had practiced in a way that was strikingly similar to those in distant locations which he, as a young boy, knew nothing about.[17] His conclusions about symbols, psychological archetypes, and the collective unconscious were inspired, in part, by these experiences.
At the age of twelve, shortly before the end of his first year at the Humanistisches Gymnasium in Basel, Jung was pushed to the ground by another boy so hard that he momentarily lost consciousness. (Jung later recognized that the incident was his fault, indirectly.) A thought then came to him—"now you won't have to go to school any more."[18] From then on, whenever he walked to school or began homework, he fainted. He remained at home for the next six months until he overheard his father speaking worriedly to a visitor about the boy's future ability to support himself. They suspected he had epilepsy. Confronted with the reality of his family's poverty, he realized the need for academic excellence. He went into his father's study and began poring over Latin grammar. He fainted three more times but eventually overcame the urge and did not faint again. This event, Jung later recalled, "was when I learned what a neurosis is."[19]
University studies and early career
Jung did not plan to study psychiatry since it was not considered prestigious at the time. But, studying a psychiatric textbook, he became very excited when he discovered that psychoses are personality diseases. His interest was immediately captured—it combined the biological and the spiritual, exactly what he was searching for.[20] In 1895 Jung studied medicine at the University of Basel.In 1900 Jung began working at the Burghölzli psychiatric hospital in Zürich with Eugen Bleuler. Bleuler was already in communication with the Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud. Jung's dissertation, published in 1903, was titled On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena. In 1906 he published Studies in Word Association, and later sent a copy of this book to Freud.
Eventually a close friendship and a strong professional association developed between the elder Freud and Jung, which left a sizeable trove of correspondence. For six years they cooperated in their work.[21] In 1912, however, Jung published Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (known in English as Psychology of the Unconscious), which made manifest the developing theoretical divergence between the two. Consequently their personal and professional relationship fractured—each stating that the other was unable to admit he could possibly be wrong. After the culminating break in 1913, Jung went through a difficult and pivotal psychological transformation, exacerbated by the outbreak of the First World War. Henri Ellenberger called Jung's intense experience a "creative illness" and compared it favorably to Freud's own period of what he called neurasthenia and hysteria.
Wartime army service
During World War I Jung was drafted as an army doctor and soon made commandant of an internment camp for British officers and soldiers (Swiss neutrality obliged the Swiss to intern personnel from either side of the conflict who crossed their frontier to evade capture). Jung worked to improve the conditions of soldiers stranded in neutral territory and encouraged them to attend university courses.[22]Marriage, and children
In 1903 Jung had married Emma Rauschenbach, daughter of a wealthy family in Switzerland. They had five children: Agathe, Gret, Franz, Marianne, and Helene. The marriage lasted until Emma's death in 1955, but Jung engaged in open relationships with other women. His extramarital relationships with patients and friends Sabina Spielrein[23] and Toni Wolff[24] were the most widely known.Freud
Meeting Freud
Jung was thirty when he sent his Studies in Word Association to Sigmund Freud in Vienna in 1906. The two men met for the first time the following year and Jung recalled the discussion between himself and Freud as interminable. He recalled that they talked almost unceasingly for thirteen hours.[25] Six months later the then 50-year-old Freud sent a collection of his latest published essays to Jung in Zurich. This marked the beginning of an intense correspondence and collaboration that lasted six years and ended in May 1913.[citation needed] At this time Jung resigned as the chairman of the International Psychoanalytical Association where he had been elected with Freud's support.Jung and Freud influenced each other during the intellectually formative years of Jung's life. Freud called Jung "his adopted eldest son, his crown prince and successor". In 1906 psychology as a science was still in its early stages. Jung, who had become interested in psychiatry as a student by reading Psychopathia Sexualis by Richard von Krafft-Ebing, a professor in Vienna, by then worked as a doctor under the psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler in Burghölzli. He became familiar with Freud's idea of the unconscious through reading Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams (1899). He became a proponent of the new "psycho-analysis." At the time, Freud needed collaborators and pupils to validate and spread his ideas. Burghölzli was a renowned psychiatric clinic in Zurich and Jung's research had already gained him international recognition.
Jung de-emphasized the importance of sexual development and focused on the collective unconscious: the part of unconscious that contains memories and ideas that he believed were inherited from ancestors. While he did think that libido was an important source for personal growth, unlike Freud, Jung did not believe that libido alone was responsible for the formation of the core personality.[26]
Journal editor
In 1908, Jung became an editor of the newly founded Yearbook for Psychoanalytical and Psychopathological Research. The following year, Jung traveled with Freud and the Hungarian psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi to the United States; they took part in a conference at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. In 1910, Jung became Chairman for Life of the International Psychoanalytical Association. While Jung worked on his Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (Psychology of the Unconscious), tensions grew between him and Freud because of their disagreements over the nature of libido and religion.[clarification needed] In 1912 these tensions came to a peak because Jung felt severely slighted after Freud visited his colleague Ludwig Binswanger in Kreuzlingen without paying him a visit in nearby Zurich, an incident Jung referred to as "the Kreuzlingen gesture". Shortly thereafter, Jung again traveled to the United States and gave the Fordham University lectures, which were published as The Theory of Psychoanalysis (1912). While they contain some remarks on Jung's dissenting view on the libido, they represent largely a "psychoanalytical Jung" and not the theory for which he became famous in the following decades.
Group photo 1909 in front of Clark University. Front row, Sigmund Freud, G. Stanley Hall, Carl Jung. Back row, Abraham Brill, Ernest Jones, Sándor Ferenczi.
Travels to the USA
The conference at Clark University was planned by the psychologist G. Stanley Hall and included twenty-seven distinguished psychiatrists, neurologists and psychologists. It represented a watershed in the acceptance of psychoanalysis in North America. This forged welcome links between Jung and influential Americans.[27] Jung returned to the United States the next year for a brief visit, and again for a six-week lecture series at Fordham University in 1912.Last meetings with Freud
In November 1912, Jung and Freud met in Munich for a meeting among prominent colleagues to discuss psychoanalytical journals.[28] At a talk about a new psychoanalytic essay on Amenhotep IV, Jung expressed his views on how it related to actual conflicts in the psychoanalytic movement. While Jung spoke, Freud suddenly fainted and Jung carried him to a couch.Jung and Freud personally met for the last time in September 1913 for the Fourth International Psychoanalytical Congress in Munich. Jung gave a talk on psychological types, the introverted and extraverted type in analytical psychology. This constituted the introduction of some of the key concepts which came to distinguish Jung's work from Freud's in the next half century.
Midlife isolation
Isolation
It was the publication of Jung's book "Psychology of the Unconscious" in 1912, that led to the break with Freud. Letters they exchanged show Freud's refusal to consider Jung's ideas. This rejection caused what Jung described in his autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections, as a "resounding censure." Everyone he knew dropped away except for two of his colleagues. Jung described his book as "... an attempt, only partially successful, to create a wider setting for medical psychology and to bring the whole of the psychic phenomena within its purview." (The book was later revised and retitled, "Symbols of Transformation", in 1922).London 1913–14
Jung spoke at meetings of the Psycho-Medical Society in London in 1913 and 1914. His travels were soon interrupted by the war, but his ideas continued to receive attention in England primarily through the efforts of Constance Long.[citation needed]He translated and published the first English volume of his collected writings.[29]Red Book
In 1913, at the age of thirty-eight, Jung experienced a horrible "confrontation with the unconscious". He saw visions and heard voices. He worried at times that he was "menaced by a psychosis" or was "doing a schizophrenia". He decided that it was valuable experience and, in private, he induced hallucinations or, in his words, "active imaginations". He recorded everything he felt in small journals. Jung began to transcribe his notes into a large red leather-bound book, on which he worked intermittently for sixteen years.[13]Jung left no posthumous instructions about the final disposition of what he called the "Red Book". His family eventually moved it into a bank vault in 1984. Sonu Shamdasani, a historian from London, for three years tried to persuade Jung's heirs to have it published, to which they declined every hint of inquiry. As of mid-September 2009, fewer than two dozen people had seen it. Ulrich Hoerni, Jung's grandson who manages the Jung archives, decided to publish it to raise the additional funds needed when the Philemon Foundation was founded.[13]
In 2007, two technicians for DigitalFusion, working with the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, scanned the manuscript with a 10,200-pixel scanner. It was published on 7 October 2009, in German with "separate English translation along with Shamdasani's introduction and footnotes" at the back of the book, according to Sara Corbett for The New York Times. She wrote, "The book is bombastic, baroque and like so much else about Carl Jung, a willful oddity, synched with an antediluvian and mystical reality."[13]
The Rubin Museum of Art in New York City displayed the original Red Book journal, as well as some of Jung's original small journals, from 7 October 2009, to 15 February 2010.[30] According to them, "During the period in which he worked on this book Jung developed his principal theories of archetypes, collective unconscious, and the process of individuation." Two-thirds of the pages bear Jung's illuminations of the text.[30]
Founder of a new school
Jung emerged from his period of isolation in the late nineteen-teens with the publication of several journal articles, followed in 1921 with Psychological Types, one of his most influential books. There followed a decade of active publication, interspersed with overseas travels.England 1920–23
Constance Long arranged for him to deliver a seminar in Cornwall in 1920. Another seminar was held in 1923, this one organized by Helton Godwin Baynes (known as Peter), and another in 1925.[31]USA 1924–25
Jung made a more extensive trip westward in the winter of 1924–5, financed and organized by Fowler McCormick and George Porter. Of particular value to Jung was a visit with Chief Mountain Lake of the Taos Pueblo near Taos, New Mexico.[31]East Africa
In October 1925, Jung embarked on his most ambitious expedition, the "Bugishu Psychological Expedition" to East Africa. He was accompanied by Peter Baynes and an American associate, George Beckwith. On the voyage to Africa, they became acquainted with an English woman named Ruth Bailey, who joined their safari a few weeks later. The group traveled through Kenya and Uganda to the slopes of Mount Elgon, where Jung hoped to increase his understanding of "primitive psychology" through conversations with the culturally isolated residents of that area. Later he concluded that the major insights he had gleaned had to do with himself and the European psychology in which he had been raised.[32][33][full citation needed]United States 1936
Jung made another trip to America in 1936, giving lectures in New York and New England for his growing group of American followers. He returned in 1937 to deliver the Terry Lectures, later published as Psychology and Religion, at Yale University.India
In December 1937, Jung left Zurich again for an extensive tour of India with Fowler McCormick. In India, he felt himself "under the direct influence of a foreign culture" for the first time. In Africa, his conversations had been strictly limited by the language barrier, but in India he was able to converse extensively. Hindu philosophy became an important element in his understanding of the role of symbolism and the life of the unconscious, though he avoided a meeting with Ramana Maharshi. He described Ramana as being absorbed in ‘the self’, but admits to not understanding Ramana’s self-realisation or what he actually did do. He also admits that his field of psychology is not competent in understanding the eastern insight of the Atman ‘the self’. Jung became seriously ill on this trip and endured two weeks of delirium in a Calcutta hospital. After 1938, his travels were confined to Europe.[34]Last publications and death
Jung continued to publish books until the end of his life, including Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies (1959), which analyzed the archetypal meaning and possible psychological significance of the reported observations of UFOs.[35] He also enjoyed a friendship with an English Roman Catholic priest, Father Victor White, who corresponded with Jung after he had published his controversial Answer to Job.[36]Jung died on 6 June 1961 at Küsnacht, after a short illness.[37][38]
Psychology
Jung founded a new school of psychotherapy, called analytical psychology or Jungian psychology.Theories
His theories include:- The concept of introversion and extraversion (although he did not define these terms as they are popularly defined today).[39]
- The concept of the complex, a grouping of interrelated unconscious elements.
- The concept of the collective unconscious, the primordial realm of archetypes, which manifests in all people.
- Synchronicity as a mode of relationship that is not causal, an idea that has influenced Wolfgang Pauli (with whom he developed the notion of unus mundus in connection with the notion of non-locality) and some other physicists.[40]
Introversion and extraversion
In Jung’s Psychological Types, he theorizes that each person falls into one of two categories, the introvert and the extravert. These two psychological types Jung compares to the ancient archetypes, Apollo and Dionysus.The introvert is likened with Apollo, who shines light on understanding. The introvert is focused on the internal world of reflection, dreaming and vision. Thoughtful and insightful, the introvert can sometime be uninterested in joining the activities of others.
The extravert is associated with Dionysus, interested in joining the activities of the world. The extravert is focused on the outside world of objects, sensory perception and action. Energetic and lively, the extrovert may lose their sense of self in the intoxication of Dionysian pursuits.[41]
Divergence from Freud
Jung's primary disagreement with Freud stemmed from their differing concepts of the unconscious.[42] Jung saw Freud's theory of the unconscious as incomplete and unnecessarily negative. According to Jung, Freud conceived the unconscious solely as a repository of repressed emotions and desires. Jung agreed with Freud's model of the unconscious, what Jung called the "personal unconscious", but he also proposed the existence of a second, deeper form of the unconscious underlying the personal one. This was the collective unconscious, where the archetypes themselves resided, represented in mythology by a lake or other body of water, and in some cases a jug or other container. Freud had actually mentioned a collective level of psychic functioning but saw it primarily as an appendix to the rest of the psyche.Individuation
Jung considered individuation, a psychological process of integrating the opposites including the conscious with the unconscious while still maintaining their relative autonomy, necessary for a person to become whole.[4]Individuation is a process of transformation whereby the personal and collective unconscious is brought into consciousness (by means of dreams, active imagination or free association to take some examples) to be assimilated into the whole personality. It is a completely natural process necessary for the integration of the psyche to take place.[43]
Besides achieving physical and mental health,[43] people who have advanced towards individuation tend to be harmonious, mature and responsible. They embody humane values such as freedom and justice and have a good understanding about the workings of human nature and the universe.[4]
Persona
In his psychological theory – which is not necessarily linked to a particular theory of social structure – the persona appears as a consciously created personality or identity fashioned out of part of the collective psyche through socialization, acculturation and experience.[44] Jung applied the term persona, explicitly because, in Latin, it means both personality and the masks worn by Roman actors of the classical period, expressive of the individual roles played.The persona, he argues, is a mask for the "collective psyche", a mask that 'pretends' individuality, so that both self and others believe in that identity, even if it is really no more than a well-played role through which the collective psyche is expressed. Jung regarded the "persona-mask" as a complicated system which mediates between individual consciousness and the social community: it is "a compromise between the individual and society as to what a man should appear to be".[45] But he also makes it quite explicit that it is, in substance, a character mask in the classical sense known to theatre, with its double function: both intended to make a certain impression to others, and to hide (part of) the true nature of the individual.[46] The therapist then aims to assist the individuation process through which the client (re-)gains his "own self" – by liberating the self, both from the deceptive cover of the persona, and from the power of unconscious impulses.
Jung's theory has become enormously influential in management theory; not just because managers and executives have to create an appropriate "management persona" (a corporate mask) and a persuasive identity,[47] but also because they have to evaluate what sort of people the workers are, in order to manage them (for example, using personality tests and peer reviews).[48]
Spirituality
Jung's work on himself and his patients convinced him that life has a spiritual purpose beyond material goals. Our main task, he believed, is to discover and fulfill our deep innate potential. Based on his study of Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Gnosticism, Taoism, and other traditions, Jung believed that this journey of transformation, which he called individuation, is at the mystical heart of all religions. It is a journey to meet the self and at the same time to meet the Divine. Unlike Freud's objectivist worldview, Jung's pantheism may have led him to believe that spiritual experience was essential to our well-being, as he specifically identifies individual human life with the universe as a whole.[49][50] Jung's ideas on religion gave a counterbalance to the Freudian scepticism of religion. Jung's idea of religion as a practical road to individuation has been quite popular, and is still treated in modern textbooks on the psychology of religion, though his ideas have also been criticized.[51]Alchemy
The work and writings of Jung from the 1940s onwards focused on alchemy.In 1944 Jung published Psychology and Alchemy, where he analyzed the alchemical symbols and showed a direct relationship to the psychoanalytical process.[b] He argued that the alchemical process was the transformation of the impure soul (lead) to perfected soul (gold), and a metaphor for the individuation process.[20]
In 1963 Mysterium Coniunctionis first appeared in English as part of in The Collected Works of C. G. Jung. Mysterium Coniunctionis was Jung's last book and focused on the "Mysterium Coniunctionis" archetype, known as the sacred marriage between sun and moon. Jung argued that the stages of the alchemists, the blackening, the whitening, the reddening and the yellowing, could be taken as symbolic of individuation — his favourite term for personal growth (75).
Alcoholics Anonymous
Jung recommended spirituality as a cure for alcoholism and he is considered to have had an indirect role in establishing Alcoholics Anonymous.[52] Jung once treated an American patient (Rowland Hazard III), suffering from chronic alcoholism. After working with the patient for some time and achieving no significant progress, Jung told the man that his alcoholic condition was near to hopeless, save only the possibility of a spiritual experience. Jung noted that occasionally such experiences had been known to reform alcoholics where all else had failed.Hazard took Jung's advice seriously and set about seeking a personal spiritual experience. He returned home to the United States and joined a First-Century Christian evangelical movement known as the Oxford Group (later known as Moral Re-Armament). He also told other alcoholics what Jung had told him about the importance of a spiritual experience. One of the alcoholics he brought into the Oxford Group was Ebby Thacher, a long-time friend and drinking buddy of Bill Wilson, later co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). Thacher told Wilson about the Oxford Group, and through them Wilson became aware of Hazard's experience with Jung. The influence of Jung thus indirectly found its way into the formation of Alcoholics Anonymous, the original twelve-step program, and from there into the whole twelve-step recovery movement, although AA as a whole is not Jungian and Jung had no role in the formation of that approach or the twelve steps.
The above claims are documented in the letters of Jung and Bill Wilson, excerpts of which can be found in Pass It On, published by Alcoholics Anonymous.[53] Although the detail of this story is disputed by some historians, Jung himself discussed an Oxford Group member, who may have been the same person, in talks given around 1940. The remarks were distributed privately in transcript form, from shorthand taken by an attender (Jung reportedly approved the transcript), and later recorded in Volume 18 of his Collected Works, The Symbolic Life ("For instance, when a member of the Oxford Group comes to me in order to get treatment, I say, 'You are in the Oxford Group; so long as you are there, you settle your affair with the Oxford Group. I can't do it better than Jesus.'" Jung goes on to state that he has seen similar cures among Roman Catholics).[54]
Art therapy
Jung proposed that art can be used to alleviate or contain feelings of trauma, fear, or anxiety and also to repair, restore and heal.[16] In his work with patients and in his own personal explorations, Jung wrote that art expression and images found in dreams could be helpful in recovering from trauma and emotional distress. He often drew, painted, or made objects and constructions at times of emotional distress, which he recognized as more than recreational.[16]Political views
Views on the state
Jung stressed the importance of individual rights in a person's relation to the state and society. He saw that the state was treated as "a quasi-animate personality from whom everything is expected" but that this personality was "only camouflage for those individuals who know how to manipulate it",[55] and referred to the state as a form of slavery.[56][57][58][59] He also thought that the state "swallowed up [people's] religious forces",[60] and therefore that the state had "taken the place of God"—making it comparable to a religion in which "state slavery is a form of worship".[58] Jung observed that "stage acts of [the] state" are comparable to religious displays: "Brass bands, flags, banners, parades and monster demonstrations are no different in principle from ecclesiastical processions, cannonades and fire to scare off demons".[61] From Jung's perspective, this replacement of God with the state in a mass society led to the dislocation of the religious drive and resulted in the same fanaticism of the church-states of the Dark Ages—wherein the more the state is 'worshipped', the more freedom and morality are suppressed;[62] this ultimately leaves the individual psychically undeveloped with extreme feelings of marginalization.[63]Germany, 1933 to 1939
Jung had many friends and respected colleagues who were Jewish and he maintained relations with them through the 1930s when anti-semitism in Germany and other European nations was on the rise. However, until 1939, he also maintained professional relations with psychotherapists in Germany who had declared their support for the Nazi regime and there were allegations that he himself was a Nazi sympathizer.In 1933, after the Nazis gained power in Germany, Jung took part in restructuring of the General Medical Society for Psychotherapy (Allgemeine Ärztliche Gesellschaft für Psychotherapie), a German-based professional body with an international membership. The society was reorganized into two distinct bodies:
- A strictly German body, the Deutsche Allgemeine Ärztliche Gesellschaft für Psychotherapie, led by Matthias Göring, an Adlerian psychotherapist[64] and a cousin of the prominent Nazi Hermann Göring;
- International General Medical Society for Psychotherapy, led by Jung. The German body was to be affiliated to the international society, as were new national societies being set up in Switzerland and elsewhere.[65]
The International Society's constitution permitted individual doctors to join it directly, rather than through one of the national affiliated societies, a provision to which Jung drew attention in a circular in 1934.[66] This implied that German Jewish doctors could maintain their professional status as individual members of the international body, even though they were excluded from the German affiliate, as well as from other German medical societies operating under the Nazis.[67]
As leader of the international body, Jung assumed overall responsibility for its publication, the Zentralblatt für Psychotherapie. In 1933, this journal published a statement endorsing Nazi positions[68] and Hitler's book Mein Kampf.[69] In 1934, Jung wrote in a Swiss publication, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, that he experienced "great surprise and disappointment"[70] when the Zentralblatt associated his name with the pro-Nazi statement.
Jung went on to say "the main point is to get a young and insecure science into a place of safety during an earthquake".[71] He did not end his relationship with the Zentralblatt at this time, but he did arrange the appointment of a new managing editor, Carl Alfred Meier of Switzerland. For the next few years, the Zentralblatt under Jung and Meier maintained a position distinct from that of the Nazis, in that it continued to acknowledge contributions of Jewish doctors to psychotherapy.[72]
In the face of energetic German attempts to Nazify the international body, Jung resigned from its presidency in 1939,[72] the year the Second World War started.
Response to Nazism
Jung's interest in European mythology and folk psychology has led to accusations of Nazi sympathies, since they shared the same interest.[73][74][75] He became, however, aware of the negative impact of these similarities:Jung clearly identifies himself with the spirit of German Volkstumsbewegung throughout this period and well into the 1920s and 1930s, until the horrors of Nazism finally compelled him to reframe these neopagan metaphors in a negative light in his 1936 essay on Wotan.[76]There are writings showing that Jung's sympathies were against, rather than for, Nazism.[c] In his 1936 essay "Wotan", Jung described the influence of Hitler on Germany as "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."[77][78]
Jung would later say that:
Hitler seemed like the 'double' of a real person, as if Hitler the man might be hiding inside like an appendix, and deliberately so concealed in order not to disturb the mechanism ... You know you could never talk to this man; because there is nobody there ... It is not an individual; it is an entire nation.[79]In an interview with Carol Baumann in 1948, Jung denied rumors regarding any sympathy for the Nazi movement, saying:
It must be clear to anyone who has read any of my books that I have never been a Nazi sympathizer and I never have been anti-Semitic, and no amount of misquotation, mistranslation, or rearrangement of what I have written can alter the record of my true point of view. Nearly every one of these passages has been tampered with, either by malice or by ignorance. Furthermore, my friendly relations with a large group of Jewish colleagues and patients over a period of many years in itself disproves the charge of anti-Semitism.[80][d]Evidence contrary to Jung’s denials has been adduced with reference to his writings, correspondence and public utterances of the 1930s.[81] His remarks on the superiority of the "Aryan unconscious" and the “corrosive character” of Freud’s “Jewish gospel” have been cited as evidence of an anti-semitism “fundamental to the structure of Jung’s thought”.[82]
Cultural influence
Literature
- Laurens van der Post, Afrikaner author who claimed to have had a 16-year friendship with Jung, from which a number of books and a film were created about Jung's life.[83] The accuracy of van der Post's claims about the closeness of his relationship to Jung has been questioned.[28]
- Hermann Hesse, author of works such as Siddhartha and Steppenwolf, was treated by Joseph Lang, a student of Jung. For Hesse this began a long preoccupation with psychoanalysis, through which he came to know Jung personally.[84]
Art
Original statue of Jung in Mathew Street, Liverpool, a half-body on a plinth captioned "Liverpool is the pool of life"
- The visionary Swiss painter Peter Birkhäuser was treated by a student of Jung, Marie-Louise von Franz, and corresponded with Jung regarding the translation of dream symbolism into works of art.[85]
- American Abstract Expressionist Jackson Pollock underwent Jungian psychotherapy in 1939 with Joseph Henderson. His therapist made the decision to engage him through his art, and had Pollock make drawings, which led to the appearance of many Jungian concepts in his paintings.[86][87]
- Contrary to some sources,[88] Jung did not visit Liverpool but recorded a dream in which he had, and of which he wrote "Liverpool is the pool of life, it makes to live." As a result a statue of Jung was erected in Mathew Street in 1987 but, being made of plaster, was vandalised and replaced by a more durable version in 1993.[89]
Television and film
- Federico Fellini brought to the screen an exuberant imagery shaped by his encounter with the ideas of Jung, especially Jungian dream interpretation. Fellini preferred Jung to Freud because Jungian analysis defined the dream not as a symptom of a disease that required a cure but rather as a link to archetypal images shared by all of humanity.[90]
- BBC interview for Face to Face with John Freeman at Jung's home in Zurich. 1959.[91]
- A Dangerous Method, a 2011 film directed by David Cronenberg, is a fictional dramatisation of Jung's life as a psychoanalyst between 1904 and 1913. It mainly concerns his relationships with Freud and Sabina Spielrein, a Russian woman who became his lover and student and, later, an analyst herself.
- Matter of Heart (1986), a documentary on Jung featuring interviews with those who knew him and archive footage.[92]
