Carl Gustav Jung

Jung, Carl Gustav

(kärl go͝os`täf yo͝ong), 1875–1961, Swiss psychiatrist, founder of analytical psychology. The son of a country pastor, he studied at Basel (1895–1900) and Zürich (M.D., 1902). After a stint at the University Psychiatric Clinic in Zürich, Jung worked (1902) under Eugen BleulerBleuler, Eugen
, 1857–1939, Swiss psychiatrist. He taught (1898–1927) at the Univ. of Zürich, serving concurrently as director of Zürich's Burghölzi Asylum.
..... Click the link for more information. at the Burgholzli Clinic. He wrote valuable papers, but more important was his book on the psychology of dementia praecox (1906), which led to a meeting (1907) with Sigmund FreudFreud, Sigmund
, 1856–1939, Austrian psychiatrist, founder of psychoanalysis. Born in Moravia, he lived most of his life in Vienna, receiving his medical degree from the Univ. of Vienna in 1881.

His medical career began with an apprenticeship (1885–86) under J.
..... Click the link for more information. . Finding that their theoretical positions had much in common, the two formed a close relationship for a number of years: Jung edited the Jahrbuch für psychologische und psychopathologische Forschungen and was made (1911) president of the International Psychoanalytic Society. However, a formal break with Freud came with the publication of Jung's revolutionary work The Psychology of the Unconscious (1912), which disagreed with the Freudian emphasis on sexual trauma as the basis for all neurosisneurosis,
in psychiatry, a broad category of psychological disturbance, encompassing various mild forms of mental disorder. Until fairly recently, the term neurosis was broadly employed in contrast with psychosis, which denoted much more severe, debilitating mental disturbances.
..... Click the link for more information. and with the literal interpretation of the Oedipus complexOedipus complex,
Freudian term, drawn from the myth of Oedipus, designating attraction on the part of the child toward the parent of the opposite sex and rivalry and hostility toward the parent of its own.
..... Click the link for more information. .

Prior to World War II, Jung became president of the Nazi-dominated International General Medical Society for Psychotherapy. As the Nazis forced their Aryan ideology on the association, Jung became increasingly uncomfortable and resigned. In addition, in 1943 he aided the Office of Strategic Services by analyzing Nazi leaders for the United States. Questions have arisen, however, regarding his alleged racial theories of the unconscious. While Jung's work is of little importance in contemporary psychoanalytic practice, it remains widely influential in such fields as religious studies and literary criticism.

Jungian psychology is based on psychic totality and psychic energism. He postulated two dimensions in the unconscious—the personal (repressed or forgotten content of an individual's mental and material life) and the archetypes (images, patterns, and symbols that are often seen in dreams and fantasies and appear as themes in mythology and religion) of a collective unconscious (those acts and mental patterns shared by members of a culture or universally by all human beings). In Psychological Types (1921) Jung elucidated the concepts of extroversion and introversionextroversion and introversion,
terms introduced into psychology by Carl Jung to identify opposite psychological types.
..... Click the link for more information. for the study of personality types. He also developed the theory of synchronicity, the coincidence of causally unrelated events having identical or similar meaning. Additionally, he was the first person to introduce into the language such terms and concepts as "anima" and "New Age." For Jung the most important and lifelong task imposed upon any person is fulfillment through the process of individuation, the achievement of harmony of conscious and unconscious, which makes a person one and whole. Jung's many works are compiled in H. Read, M. Fordham, and G. Adler, ed., Collected Works of C. G. Jung (20 vol., 1953–79). Long withheld from publication, his mystical and visionary illustrated work The Red Book (Liber Novus) (1914–30) was released in a translated facsimile edition, ed. by S. Shamdasani, in 2009.

Bibliography

See his autobiographical Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1963, repr. 1989); his letters, selected and ed. by G. Adler (2 vol., 1973–75), and The Freud-Jung Letters (ed. by W. McGuire, tr. by R. F. C. Hull and R. Manheim, 1974; abr. ed. 1994); biographies by F. McLynn (1997), R. Hayman (2001), and D. Bair (2003); studies by J. Jacobi (rev. ed. 1973), M. A. Mattoon (1985), A. Samuels (1986), M. Pauson (1989), and J. Kerr (1993); M. Stein, ed., Jungian Analysis (1982); R. Noll, The Jung Cult (1994) and The Aryan Christ (1997).

Jung, Carl Gustav

Born July 26, 1875, in Kesswil, near Basel; died June 6, 1961, in Küsnacht, near Zürich. Swiss psychologist and psychiatrist; founder of one of the schools of depth psychology—“analytical psychology.”

In 1900, Jung began working with E. Bleuler in Zürich; he developed the technique of free association, which he turned into one of the chief methods of psychiatric analysis. From 1907 to 1912 he worked in very close collaboration with S. Freud, and from 1911 to 1914 he served as the first president of the International Psychoanalytic Society. The break between Jung and Freud resulted from Jung’s revision of the basic tenets of psychoanalysis, including his interpretation of libido as psychic energy in general, his rejection of the sexual etiology of neuroses, and his concept of the psyche as a closed autonomous system that functions in accordance with the principle of compensation.

In Symbols and Transformations of the Libido (1912), Jung studied the spontaneous appearance of folkloric and mythological themes in his patients’ dreams. On the basis of these findings, he postulated the existence in the human psyche of a deeper layer in addition to the individual unconscious—namely, the collective unconscious, which Jung viewed as the reflection of the experience of previous generations imprinted in the structures of the brain. The collective unconscious consists of universal prototypes—or archetypes, such as the image of Mother Earth, the hero, the wise old man, and the demon—whose dynamics form the basis of myths, of artistic symbolism, and of dreams.

Jung’s archetypes are not accessible to direct perception; they are recognized through their projection onto external objects. The archetype of the self (das Selbst) represents the potential center of the personality, in contrast to the ego as the center of consciousness. The goal of the personality’s coming-into-being (that is, self-realization, or individuation) is to integrate the contents of the collective unconscious.

Psychotherapy, according to Jung, must aim primarily at the restoration of broken connections between the various levels of the psyche; in traditional cultures, the psyche’s dynamic equilibrium is achieved through myths, ceremonies, and rituals, which are used as means to activate the archetypes. In his overall treatment of the nature of archetypes and the collective unconscious, Jung combines positivist ideas with metaphysical notions bordering on occultism—for example, the notion of the psyche as a kind of impersonal substance.

Jung developed a typology of personality (Psychological Types, 1921; Russian translation, 1924) based on identification of the dominant psychic function—thinking, feeling, intuition, or sensation—and dominant orientation toward the external or internal world (extrovert and introvert personality types).

Jung greatly influenced the comparative study of religions, mythology, and folklore (as exemplified by the work of K. Kerényi and M. Eliade and by the international yearbook on cultural questions Eranos-Jahrbuch, published in Zürich from 1933), as well as aesthetics and literary and artistic criticism (such as that of H. Read in Great Britain). The Jung Institute was founded in Zürich in 1948. The Journal of Analytical Psychology has been published in London since 1955, and the International Association of Analytical Psychology was founded in 1958.

WORKS

Gesammelte Werke, 17 vols. Zürich-Stuttgart, 1958–.
Posthume Autobiographie, 4th ed. Zürich, 1967.
In Russian translation:
Psikhoz i ego soderzhanie. St. Petersburg, 1909.

REFERENCES

Averintsev, S. S. “‘Analiticheskaia psikhologiia’ K. G. Iunga i zakonomernosti tvorcheskoi fantazii.” Voprosy literatury, 1970, no. 3.
Fordham, F. An Introduction to Jung’s Psychology. London [1953].
Jacobi, J. Die Psychologie von C. G. Jung, 5th ed. Zürich-Stuttgart, 1967.
Meier, C. A. Experiment und Symbol: Arbeiten zur komplexen Psychologie C. G. Jungs. Zürich, 1975.

D. N. LIALIKOV

Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud pose with colleagues at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. (First row, left to right) Sigmund Freud, G. Stanley Hall, and Carl Jung; (back row) A.A. Brill, Ernest Jones, and Sandor Ferenczi. (Library of Congress).

Jung, Carl Gustav

(dreams)

Carl Jung (1875–1961), a prominent Swiss psychotherapist, was second only to Sigmund Freud in importance and influence in the field of psychoanalysis. His ideas are best known indirectly, through his influence on such popular thinkers as Joseph Campbell. The contemporary reevaluation of mythology as an important component of human life is ultimately traceable to the influence of Jung.

Between 1907 and 1913 Jung was a student of Freud’s, and for a while he was even regarded as Freud’s “heir apparent.” They eventually had a falling out, and Jung went his own way. While both studied dreams, Jung advanced an approach that did not depend heavily on sexual problems, in contrast to Freud, who insisted upon the sexual roots of neurosis. After the break with Freud, Jung went through a period of inner disorder and seeking, during which he carried out a journey of exploration into his own unconscious mind. In his interpretation of the spiritual journey of the human being, he also drew upon Eastern philosophies and various occult ideas, such as alchemy. Jung was preoccupied with the supernatural. He had visions during his childhood as well as later in life.

Jung’s personality theory, as well as his theory of psychological disorder and therapy, are clearly modeled on Freud’s ideas. Both men advocated depth psychologies, (they both viewed the unconscious as particularly significant for understanding the human psyche). Both also viewed the therapeutic process as a task of acquiring insight into one’s unconscious dynamics. Jung, however, subdivided the depth dimension of the psyche into the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious. He also postulated what he termed the individuation process, which is an overriding dynamic that prompts the individual to seek greater self-understanding, self-integration, and self-fulfillment.

Freud viewed the unconscious aspect of the self that expresses itself in dreams as infantile and animalistic, and the overt content of dreams as a disguised acting out of socially unacceptable urges. Jung’s view is more benign, picturing the unconscious self as a complex mix of lower instinctual and higher spiritual impulses. Instead of concealing, the purpose of a dream is to communicate something to consciousness. The unconscious, in other words, has a kind of intelligence that attempts to guide and otherwise assist the conscious self. Jungian dream analysis, then, becomes a task of helping clients to properly interpret the messages coming from the unconscious.

In contrast to Freud, Jung also put forward a somewhat different set of components for the psyche of the individual. The ego represents the individual’s sense of personal self—what we might call one’s self-image. This sense of personal self, however, is purchased at the expense of certain tendencies (e.g., socially undesirable traits), which are rejected as “not-self.” According to Jung, these rejected traits come together as a kind of unconscious “counterego,” which he termed the shadow.

The anima refers to personality traits regarded as feminine that are often repressed into the unconscious in male psyches. The parallel structure in the female psyche is called the animus. Although repressed from conscious awareness, the anima/animus influences our behavior in powerful ways. In most individuals, for example, the anima/animus is projected onto people of the opposite sex, and accounts for the experience of falling in love with someone we hardly know.

In Jungian therapy, both the shadow and the anima/animus are viewed as potential sources of characteristics to be integrated into the patient’s ego structure. As the unconscious pole of the ego, the counterego represented by the anima/animus can also be a guide to one’s own unconscious realm, and is often experienced as a guiding presence of the opposite sex in dreams. The shadow can also appear as a person in dreams, though usually as a person of the same sex. The personarefers to the personality that we project to the world (the self we want other people to see). Dream images of the persona can be anything from the clothes we wear to the actions we perform in the dream.

Jung theorized that dreams serve two functions: They compensate for internal imbalances (e.g., an excessively analytical person might have emotionally charged dreams), and they assist in the individuation process (a kind of individuality development process) by providing the dreamer with prospective images of the future. He also distinguished between objective and subjective dreams or objective and subjective levels of dream interpretation. Objective dreams picture the dreamer’s daily life—the person’s relationship with the external world and the people and events in that world. Subjective dreams, on the other hand, portray the dreamer’s inner life, and the significant actors in such dreams are personifications of the dreamer’s thoughts and feelings. Finally, Jung believed that, as in a drama, most dream accounts could be broken down into four components: (1) an initial exposition of the setting, (2) plot development, (3) the culmination, and (4) a quiet conclusion or solution, which Jung termed the lysis.

An especially important aspect of Jungian dream analysis is what he termed archetypes. While the personal unconscious is shaped by our personal experiences, the collective unconscious represents our inheritance of the collective experience of humankind. This storehouse of humanity’s collective experiences exists in the form of archetypes, which predispose us to unconsciously organize our personal experiences in certain ways.

Archetypes are not concrete images in the collective unconscious. They are more like invisible magnetic fields that cause iron filings to arrange themselves according to certain patterns. Concrete manifestations of elusive archetypes are referred to as archetypal images or, when they appear in dreams, as archetypal dream images.

Jung discovered that the dreams of his patients frequently contained images with which they were completely unfamiliar, but which seemed to reflect symbols that could be found somewhere in the mythological systems of world culture. He further found that if he could discover the specific meaning of such images in their native culture he could better understand the dreams in which they occurred. The process of seeking such meanings is referred to as amplification and is a standard procedure in Jungian dream interpretation.

Carl Gustav Jung

Carl Gustav Jung

Jung, Carl Gustav

Bibliography

Jung, Carl Gustav

WORKS

REFERENCES

Jung, Carl Gustav

Carl Gustav Jung

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noun Swiss psychologist (1875-1961)

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