![photo](/storage/2024/01/27/people_photos/0-kohupembwjdvpuvz-65b408421f8e8.png)
Carl Jung
Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst
Date of Birth | : | 26 Jul, 1875 |
Date of Death | : | 06 Jun, 1961 |
Place of Birth | : | Kesswil, Switzerland |
Profession | : | Psychologist, Psychotherapy, Psychiatrist, Philosopher, Scientist, Essayist |
Nationality | : | Swiss |
Carl Gustav Jung (কার্ল গুস্তাভ জং) was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology. He was a prolific author, illustrator and correspondent.
He was a complex and controversial character, probably best known through his "autobiography" Memories, Dreams, Reflections (actually it was dictated to his assistant Aniela Jaffé, who had a significant influence on the form and content of the book, omitting what she felt inappropriate).
Jung's work has been influential in the fields of psychiatry, anthropology, archaeology, literature, philosophy, psychology, and religious studies. He worked as a research scientist at the Burghölzli psychiatric hospital, in Zurich, under Eugen Bleuler. Jung established himself as an influential mind, developing a friendship with Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis, conducting a lengthy correspondence, paramount to their joint vision of human psychology. Jung is widely regarded as one of the most influential psychologists in history.
Freud saw the younger Jung not only as the heir he had been seeking to take forward his "new science" of psychoanalysis, but as a means to legitimize his own work: Freud and other contemporary psychoanalysts were Jews facing rising antisemitism in Europe, and Jung was Christian. Freud secured Jung's appointment as president of Freud's newly founded International Psychoanalytical Association. Jung's research and personal vision, however, made it difficult to follow his older colleague's doctrine and they parted ways. This division was painful for Jung and resulted in the establishment of Jung's analytical psychology, as a comprehensive system separate from psychoanalysis. Scholar Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi believed Jung's later antisemitic remarks may be a clue to the schism.
Among the central concepts of analytical psychology is individuation—the lifelong psychological process of differentiation of the self out of each individual's conscious and unconscious elements. Jung considered it to be the main task of human development. He created some of the best known psychological concepts, including synchronicity, archetypal phenomena, the collective unconscious, the psychological complex and extraversion and introversion. Jung was also an artist, craftsman, builder and prolific writer. Many of his works were not published until after his death and some remain unpublished.
Early life and career
Jung was the son of a philologist and pastor. His childhood was lonely, although enriched by a vivid imagination, and from an early age he observed the behaviour of his parents and teachers, which he tried to resolve. Especially concerned with his father’s failing belief in religion, he tried to communicate to him his own experience of God. In many ways, the elder Jung was a kind and tolerant man, but neither he nor his son succeeded in understanding each other. Jung seemed destined to become a minister, for there were a number of clergymen on both sides of his family. In his teens he discovered philosophy and read widely, and this, together with the disappointments of his boyhood, led him to forsake the strong family tradition and to study medicine and become a psychiatrist. He was a student at the universities of Basel (1895–1900) and Zürich (M.D., 1902).
He was fortunate in joining the staff of the Burghölzli Asylum of the University of Zürich at a time (1900) when it was under the direction of Eugen Bleuler, whose psychological interests had initiated what are now considered classical studies of mental illness. At Burghölzli, Jung began, with outstanding success, to apply association tests initiated by earlier researchers. He studied, especially, patients’ peculiar and illogical responses to stimulus words and found that they were caused by emotionally charged clusters of associations withheld from consciousness because of their disagreeable, immoral (to them), and frequently sexual content. He used the now famous term complex to describe such conditions.
Association with Freud
These researches, which established him as a psychiatrist of international repute, led him to understand Freud’s investigations; his findings confirmed many of Freud’s ideas, and, for a period of five years (between 1907 and 1912), he was Freud’s close collaborator. He held important positions in the psychoanalytic movement and was widely thought of as the most likely successor to the founder of psychoanalysis. But this was not to be the outcome of their relationship. Partly for temperamental reasons and partly because of differences of viewpoint, the collaboration ended. At this stage Jung differed with Freud largely over the latter’s insistence on the sexual bases of neurosis. A serious disagreement came in 1912, with the publication of Jung’s Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (Psychology of the Unconscious, 1916), which ran counter to many of Freud’s ideas. Although Jung had been elected president of the International Psychoanalytic Society in 1911, he resigned from the society in 1914.
His first achievement was to differentiate two classes of people according to attitude types: extraverted (outward-looking) and introverted (inward-looking). Later he differentiated four functions of the mind—thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition—one or more of which predominate in any given person. Results of this study were embodied in Psychologische Typen (1921; Psychological Types, 1923). Jung’s wide scholarship was well manifested here, as it also had been in The Psychology of the Unconscious.
As a boy Jung had remarkably striking dreams and powerful fantasies that had developed with unusual intensity. After his break with Freud, he deliberately allowed this aspect of himself to function again and gave the irrational side of his nature free expression. At the same time, he studied it scientifically by keeping detailed notes of his strange experiences. He later developed the theory that these experiences came from an area of the mind that he called the collective unconscious, which he held was shared by everyone. This much-contested conception was combined with a theory of archetypes that Jung held as fundamental to the study of the psychology of religion. In Jung’s terms, archetypes are instinctive patterns, have a universal character, and are expressed in behaviour and images.
Character of his psychotherapy
Jung devoted the rest of his life to developing his ideas, especially those on the relation between psychology and religion. In his view, obscure and often neglected texts of writers in the past shed unexpected light not only on Jung’s own dreams and fantasies but also on those of his patients; he thought it necessary for the successful practice of their art that psychotherapists become familiar with writings of the old masters.
Besides the development of new psychotherapeutic methods that derived from his own experience and the theories developed from them, Jung gave fresh importance to the so-called Hermetic tradition. He conceived that the Christian religion was part of a historic process necessary for the development of consciousness, and he also thought that the heretical movements, starting with gnosticism and ending in alchemy, were manifestations of unconscious archetypal elements not adequately expressed in the mainstream forms of Christianity. He was particularly impressed with his finding that alchemical-like symbols could be found frequently in modern dreams and fantasies, and he thought that alchemists had constructed a kind of textbook of the collective unconscious. He expounded on this in 4 out of the 18 volumes that make up his Collected Works.
His historical studies aided him in pioneering the psychotherapy of the middle-aged and elderly, especially those who felt their lives had lost meaning. He helped them to appreciate the place of their lives in the sequence of history. Most of these patients had lost their religious belief; Jung found that if they could discover their own myth as expressed in dream and imagination they would become more complete personalities. He called this process individuation.
In later years he became professor of psychology at the Federal Polytechnical University in Zürich (1933–41) and professor of medical psychology at the University of Basel (1943). His personal experience, his continued psychotherapeutic practice, and his wide knowledge of history placed him in a unique position to comment on current events. As early as 1918 he had begun to think that Germany held a special position in Europe; the Nazi revolution was, therefore, highly significant for him, and he delivered a number of hotly contested views that led to his being wrongly branded as a Nazi sympathizer. Jung lived to the age of 85.
The authoritative English collection of all Jung’s published writings is Herbert Read, Michael Fordham, and Gerhard Adler (eds.), The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, trans. by R.F.C. Hull, 20 vol., 2nd ed. (1966–79). Jung’s The Psychology of the Unconscious appears in revised form as Symbols of Transformation in the Collected Works. His other major individual publications include Über die Psychologie der Dementia Praecox (1907; The Psychology of Dementia Praecox); Versuch einer Darstellung der psychoanalytischen Theorie (1913; The Theory of Psychoanalysis); Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology (1916); Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (1928); Das Geheimnis der goldenen Blüte (1929; The Secret of the Golden Flower); Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933), a collection of essays covering topics from dream analysis and literature to the psychology of religion; Psychology and Religion (1938); Psychologie und Alchemie (1944; Psychology and Alchemy); and Aion: Untersuchungen zur Symbolgeschichte (1951; Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self). Jung’s Erinnerungen, Träume, Gedanken (1962; Memories, Dreams, Reflections) is fascinating semiautobiographical reading, partly written by Jung himself and partly recorded by his secretary.
In 2009 a manuscript that Jung wrote during the years 1914–30 was published in the original German with English translation as The Red Book = Liber Novus. It was, by Jung’s own description, a record of his “confrontation with the unconscious.” The work contains an account of his imaginings, fantasies, and induced hallucinations and his own colour illustrations.
In popular culture
Literature
- Laurens van der Post was an 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. The accuracy of van der Post's claims about his relationship to Jung has been questioned.
- 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.
- In his novel The World is Made of Glass (1983), Morris West gives a fictional account of one of Jung's cases, placing the events in 1913. According to the author's note, the novel is "based upon a case recorded, very briefly, by Carl Gustav Jung in his autobiographical work Memories, Dreams, Reflections".
- The Canadian novelist Robertson Davies made Jungian analysis a central part of his 1970 novel The Manticore. He stated in a letter, "There have been other books which describe Freudian analyses, but I know of no other that describes a Jungian analysis" adding "I was deeply afraid that I would put my foot in it, for I have never undergone one of those barnacle-scraping experiences, and knew of it only through reading. So, I was greatly pleased when some of my Jungian friends in Zurich liked it very much."
- Pilgrim
- Possessing the Secret of Joy, a novel in which Jung is a therapist character—
- The Interpretation of Murder
- The psychological novel E.E. written by Olga Tokarczuk draws from Jung's doctoral dissertation On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena.
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 about the translation of dream symbolism into works of art.
- American Abstract Expressionist Jackson Pollock underwent Jungian psychotherapy in 1939 with Joseph Henderson. Henderson engaged Pollock through his art, having him make drawings, which led to the appearance of many Jungian concepts in his paintings.
- Contrary to some sources, Jung did not visit Liverpool but recorded a dream in which he did, and of which he wrote, "Liverpool is the pool of life, it makes to live." A plaster statue of Jung was erected in Mathew Street in 1987 that was vandalised and replaced by a more durable version in 1993
Music
- Musician David Bowie described himself as Jungian in his relationship to dreams and the unconscious. Bowie sang of Jung on his album Aladdin Sane (a pun on "a lad insane") and attended the exhibition of The Red Book in New York with artist Tony Oursler, who described Bowie as "reading and speaking of the psychoanalyst with passion". Bowie's 1967 song "Shadow Man" encapsulates a key Jungian concept, while in 1987 Bowie described the Glass Spiders of Never Let Me Down as Jungian mother figures around which he not only anchored a worldwide tour but also created an enormous onstage effigy.
- British rock band The Police released an album titled Synchronicity in 1983.
- Banco de Gaia called his 2009 electronic music album, Memories Dreams Reflections.
- The American rock band Tool was influenced by Jungian concepts in its album Ænima, the title a play on the concepts of anima and animus. In the song "Forty Six & 2", the singer seeks to become a more evolved self by exploring and overcoming his Shadow.
- Argentinian musician Luis Alberto Spinetta was influenced by Jung's texts in his 1975 conceptual album Durazno sangrando, specifically the songs "Encadenado al ánima" and "En una lejana playa del ánimus", which deal with anima and animus.
- Jung appeared on the front cover of The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
- The South Korean band BTS's 2019 album Map of the Soul: Persona is based on Jung's Map of the Soul, which gives the basic principles of Jung's analytical psychology. It includes an intro song titled Persona rapped by group leader RM, who asks, "who am I?", and is confronted with various versions of himself with the words "Persona", "Shadow", and "Ego", referring to Jung's theories. On 21 February 2020, the band released Map of the Soul: 7, which specifically focuses on Jung's "Shadow" and "Ego" theories. As part of the first phase of the band's comeback, Interlude: Shadow, rapped by Suga and released on 10 January, addresses the shadows and the darkness that go hand-in-hand with the light and attention shone on celebrities. The next comeback trailer, "Outro: Ego", performed by J-Hope, ends with his declaration of self and ego as he appears within a colourful city "in which the artist's current image is projected".
Theatre, Film, Television and Radio
- Federico Fellini brought to the screen exuberant imagery shaped by his encounter with Jung's ideas, 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.
- The BBC interviewed Jung for Face to Face with John Freeman at Jung's home in Zurich in 1959.
- Stephen Segaller produced a documentary on Jung as part of his "World of Dreams", Wisdom of the Dream in 1985. It was re-issued in 2018. It was followed by a book of the same title.
- Stanley Kubrick's 1987 film Full Metal Jacket has an underlying theme about the duality of man. In one scene, a colonel asks a soldier, "You write 'Born to Kill' on your helmet and you wear a peace button. What's that supposed to be, some kind of sick joke?" The soldier replies, "I think I was trying to suggest something about the duality of man, sir...the Jungian thing, sir."
- 2002 saw the release of an Italian film about Jung and Spielrein The Soul Keeper (Prendimi l'Anima) directed by Roberto Faenza. It used English dialogue and English actors, but was never formally released in the United States. Emilia Fox played Sabina Spielrein and Iain Glen was Carl Gustav Jung.
- A Dangerous Method, a 2011 film directed by David Cronenberg based on Hampton's play The Talking Cure, is a fictional dramatisation of the lives of Freud, Jung, and Sabina Spielrein between 1904 and 1913. Spielrein is the Russian woman who became Jung's lover and student and, later, an analyst herself. Michael Fassbender plays Carl Jung. The film is based on the stage play The Talking Cure by Christopher Hampton which was in turn based on the 1993 non-fiction book by John Kerr, A Most Dangerous Method: The Story of Jung, Freud, and Sabina Spielrein.
- More recently, Robert Eggers psychological thriller, The Lighthouse has elements strongly influenced by Jung's work with Eggers hoping that "it's a movie where both Jung and Freud would be furiously eating their popcorn".
- Soul, a 2020 Pixar film written by Pete Docter, Mike Jones and Kemp Powers, includes brief appearances of Jung as an ethereal cartoon character, "Soul Carl Jung".
- In the online animated series, Super Science Friends, Jung, voiced by Tom Park, is featured as one of the recurrent antagonists against Sigmund Freud.
- Matter of Heart (1986) is a documentary about Jung featuring interviews with those who knew him and archival footage.
- On 2 December 2004, BBC Radio 4's In Our Time broadcast a program on 'the mind and theories' of Jung.
Video games
- The Persona series of games is heavily based on Jung's theories, representing the Shadow (psychology), the Persona, and Archetype in the game.
- The Nights into Dreams series of games is heavily based on Jung's theories.
- Xenogears for the original PlayStation and its associated works—including its reimagination as the "Xenosaga" trilogy and a graphic novel published by the game's creator, Perfect Works—center around Jungian concepts. Control centers around Jung's theories of the darkness and the astral plane. Jungian concepts are present in the Xenoseries.
- Jung's Labyrinth is a psychological exploration PC game that uses Jungian psychology, mythology, alchemical, and dream symbolism in a series of active imaginations to map the process of individuation. The Jungian concepts are represented mostly by the 12 archetypes that the player engages in a conversation.
- The game Control is heavily influenced by Carl Jung's ideas, particularly synchronicity and shadow selves.
Bibliography
Main article: Carl Jung publications
Books
- 1910 About the conflicts of a child's soul
- 1912 Psychology of the Unconscious
- 1916 Seven Sermons to the Dead (a part of the Red Book, published privately)
- 1921 Psychological Types
- 1933 Modern Man in Search of a Soul (essays)
- 1944 Psychology and Alchemy
- 1951 Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self
- 1952 Symbols of Transformation (revised edition of Psychology of the Unconscious)
- 1954 Answer to Job
- 1956 Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy
- 1959 Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies (Translated by R. F. C. Hull)
- 1960 Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle
- 1962 Memories, Dreams, Reflections (autobiography, co-written with Aniela Jaffé)
- 1964 Man and His Symbols (Jung contributed one part, his last writing before his death in 1961; the other four parts are by Marie-Louise von Franz, Joseph L. Henderson, Jaffé, and Jolande Jacobi)
- 2009 The Red Book: Liber Novus (manuscript produced c. 1915–1932)
- 2020 Black Books (private journals produced c. 1913–1932, on which the Red Book is based)
Collected Works
Main article: The Collected Works of C. G. Jung
Editors. Herbert Read, Michael Fordham, Gerhard Adler. Executive ed. W. McGuire. Trans R.F.C. Hull. London: Routledge Kegan Paul (1953–1980).
- Psychiatric Studies (1902–06)
- Experimental Researches (1904–10) (trans L. Stein and D. Riviere)
- Psychogenesis of Mental Disease (1907–14; 1919–58)
- Freud and Psychoanalysis (1906–14; 1916–30)
- Symbols of Transformation (1911–12; 1952)
- Psychological Types (1921)
- Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (1912–28)
- Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche (1916–52)
- 1 Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (1934–55)
- 2 Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self (1951)
- Civilization in Transition (1918–1959)
- Psychology and Religion: West and East (1932–52)
- Psychology and Alchemy (1936–44)
- Alchemical Studies (1919–45):
- Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955–56):
- Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature (1929–1941)
- The Practice of Psychotherapy (1921–25)
- The Development of Personality (1910; 1925–43)
- The Symbolic Life: Miscellaneous Writings
- General Bibliography
- General Index
Supplementary volumes
- The Zofingia Lectures
- Psychology of the Unconscious (trans. Beatrice M. Hinckle)
Seminars
- Analytical Psychology (1925)
- Dream Analysis (1928–30)
- Visions (1930-34)
- The Kundalini Yoga (1932)
- Nietzsche's Zarathustra (1934-39)
- Children's Dreams (1936-1940)
Quotes
Total 0 Quotes
Quotes not found.