Jung Read online

  The spotlight boxes in each chapter should grab your attention and lighten the mood: they focus on less obvious details and quirky perspectives or anecdotes. They also include some reflective exercises.

  The dig deeper boxes give recommendations for further study so that you can explore the topics in more depth.

  The fact-check multiple-choice questions at the end of each chapter are designed to help you ensure that you have understood the most important concepts from the chapter. If you find you are consistently getting several answers wrong, it may be worth trying to read more slowly, or taking notes as you go.

  Please note that, for ease of referencing, where Jung’s collected works are referred to, the abbreviation ‘CW’ is used with the volume number, e.g. CW7.

  Section 1

  Introducing Jung and his discoveries

  1

  Creative madness? Confronting the unconscious

  What is ‘the unconscious’? Why is it such an influential idea? What part has the thinking of Carl Jung and his followers played in promoting its significance for understanding who we are, for dealing with human suffering, and promoting healing and growth? We will begin to consider these questions in this chapter as well as describe how Jung approached the unconscious himself. We will also start to unpick some crucial Jungian terms such as individuation, archetypes and shadow.

  Working with the unconscious

  ‘The unconscious is the ever-creative mother of consciousness.’

  Carl Jung, 1966, para. 207

  The proposal underpinning this statement by Carl Jung (1875–1961) is a crucial aspect of psychoanalysis, and depth psychology generally. This proposal is that much of what informs our thinking and behaviour as human beings occurs beyond our conscious awareness. When we get irrationally angry, for example, it is because of something influencing us that is beyond our rational capacity to control.

  Whatever this ‘something’ is – a repressed hurt from our early childhood, perhaps, or an underdeveloped capacity to mediate our primitive rages, or an aspect of our potential which has somehow not been ‘allowed’ to develop or express itself healthily – it has a lot of power. When we are not conscious of the source of this power to make us mad with someone else, we are unconscious of what the ‘something’ is and, until we become more conscious of it and how it operates, we will remain vulnerable to its influence. When we fall in love, or when we dream – these are other examples of the unconscious at work. This ‘discovery’ (Ellenberger, 1970) of the unconscious can be found earlier in the work of philosophers such as Schopenhauer (1788–1860) and Carus (1852–1919), as well as in the attempts by pioneers in the world of psychiatry such as Charcot (1825–1893) and Janet (1859–1947) to uncover and address unconscious influences on their patients.

  The term ‘depth psychological’ refers mainly to the approaches in psychotherapy that stemmed from the initial model of psychoanalysis developed by Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) (Storr, 1989). Jung’s work is one such approach, and a hugely influential one, not just in counselling and psychotherapy, but stretching out into fields of study and popular interest such as cultural and religious studies, politics and identity, and film studies, to name but a few. (These areas and more will be explored in Section 4.)

  For Jung, the notion of the unconscious was much more than an idea. For him, it was a living reality that requires us to pay heed to what may be going on within it, as a fundamental part of becoming fully human. Many of his key theoretical ideas arose from his own encounters with the unconscious. Here he wrestled with his personal demons, and experienced influences arising from the pool of human experience (stretching back over a million years), which he said we all carry around within us.

  Encountering the unconscious

  A man sat still at his desk, his eyes closed and his hands resting on his knees. He had placed his glasses and pipe on the desk so that he could really concentrate. However, what he was trying to do was, in a way, the opposite of concentrating. It was more like letting go of concentration. He was trying to allow all his thoughts and worries to fade into the background: his worries about his job as a psychiatrist at the local hospital, about his family – his wife and four children – and about his professional relationships, including one connection which meant so much to his hopes for promoting his ideas and developing his practice, which had soured and ended recently.

  Instead, the man was clearing a space in his mind. He opened his eyes and began to stare at the wall, a blank space on the wall, his eyes glazed over. Then he let himself ‘drop’ – his mind was falling, falling into the unconscious, or as near as he could get to into it. It felt as if he was dropping through the floor and into an abyss that was opening up beneath him; there was nothing to stop his fall and nothing for him to reach out and grab as he descended, at speed. He had chosen to do this, but now he was wondering what had driven him to take such a risk with his own sanity. Then the man found himself standing on soft but sticky ground, in the dark. After a while his eyes adjusted to the darkness and he could just make out what looked like rocks and the opening of a cave. There was a short figure standing in the entrance. The man wondered where he was, who this character might be, and what the figure might say (or do?) to him.

  Key idea

  There are around 2,500 qualified Jungian analysts practising around the world, and more than 30 training institutes approved by the International Association of Analytical Psychologists, the organization that governs Jungian analytic practice and training. There are training institutes in Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Israel, Mexico, Switzerland, the UK and the USA.

  Carl Gustav Jung was a psychiatrist and psychotherapist. He was a scientific thinker but also a dealer in visions, dreams and imagination. He came to believe that who we are as human beings is powerfully influenced, even determined, by unconscious forces outside of our awareness. At the same time, he strongly promoted the vital task of the individual to find out who they are, and become that person as fully as anyone can become within the three score years and ten of an average human lifespan. Jung saw this as our central task in life, our task of individuation.

  That is the term Jung used to describe this task to become (Jung, 1953 para. 266) ‘a psychological “in-dividual,” that is a separate, indivisible unity or “whole.”’ The challenge life throws up for us, according to Jung, is to become more completely who we are, through integrating our unconscious influences and conscious minds. Jung was convinced it is the individual human being rather than the popular masses, or God, who held the key to humanity’s development. Our task in this respect is to get to know all key aspects of ourselves, including our shadow (Jung, 1968) (which holds the darker, hidden aspects of us), and integrate these so we can be more authentic and complete. Jung did not see this as an ‘ultimate’ process where we achieve some kind of perfected wholeness, but rather as a ‘work in progress’ that we get as far as we can with in one lifetime.

  Jung was a thinker in the field of psychotherapy for whom paradox was key. He came to understand that two (or more) principles, which may seem antithetical to each other, can both be real or ‘true’ at the same time. His approach to understanding the human psyche and its journey through life was hallmarked by an attitude not of ‘either/or’ but rather ‘and/both’. Opposites that we are familiar with, such as ‘good vs bad’, ‘love vs hate’, ‘war vs peace’, ‘arts vs sciences’, are two sides of the same coin. This was a key aspect of Jung’s theory of archetypes (Samuels et al., 1986) where these refer to ‘essences’ which do not concretely exist themselves but which strongly influence our experiences and behaviour. An example would be the archetype of love. It exists everywhere in human history and activity but has to be manifested in a feeling or relationship (or breakdown of relationship) to find its form.

  Also, as implied above, archetypes are bipolar – not in the sense associated with mental illness, but more in the sense of ‘two opposite poles’, within which there i
s a continuum of possibility, such as all the shades of grey which operate within the relationship between, say, ‘good and bad’, or, ‘love and hate’. The concept and applications of archetypes in therapy are explored in Chapters 8 and 12, and applications to social and cultural developments are described in Section 4.

  This principle informed his work with his ‘analysands’. He coined this term for people who came for analysis, which was his term for psychotherapy. Freud’s term was the more medically conventional ‘patient’. When Jung split from his professional alliance with Freud, he wanted to make this distinction to reflect his new ‘analytic’ approach to working with the psyche, an approach he also termed ‘analytical psychology’.

  Spotlight: ‘Analysand’ – does it still work?

  Jungian analysts today might still use this term but they may also use the term ‘patient’ to indicate they are working in a psychoanalytic way. They may also use a term more commonly used in the wider counselling and psychotherapy field: ‘client’, especially if they practise in a more humanistic way – a point we will return to in Chapter 19 when we consider how some Jungians integrate aspects of other therapeutic approaches. However, ‘analysand’ is still the official Jungian term in use.

  As you work through this book, you will become familiar with an archetypal approach to reality. It is a way of recognizing that people are complicated and life is full of contradictions. In Jung’s way of describing this, these are archetypal polarities – in other words, these contradictions and tensions crop up everywhere and are a part of being human. They also provide an opportunity to work on different aspects of ourselves, to help us get to know these and integrate them as part of the process of individuation.

  As well as deriving his ideas about the unconscious and archetypal influences from thinkers in philosophy and psychiatry, Jung also found that his work at the Burgholzi mental hospital in Zurich seemed to confirm the presence of these influences. He noticed how similar images and reactions would come up in the responses and associations of the patients he worked with, suggesting that there might be patterns in the human psyche we all share – though they will manifest themselves in an individual way, such as in the dream described here.

  What is the horse trying to tell its rider?

  A young man had a dream in which he is trying hard to control a horse he is sitting on. The horse is large and strong and keeps rearing up, seeming to try to throw the man on to the ground. This man had had a rollercoaster of a time recently – he had moved around jobs, and countries, for the previous three years, and his partner had recently rejected him, saying he was too obsessed with himself and not able to commit properly to the relationship.

  When he came for analysis, he easily saw the parallel between the horse trying to throw him on to the ground and what had recently happened to him. But he found it harder to accept that there might be something about the way he was going about his life which could be represented by the struggle he was having in the dream to control the horse. He and his analyst explored what associations or meanings the horse might have for him. The analyst was aware that a horse had certain archetypal associations – as an animal it can represent the more instinctual side of the human psyche but, more specifically, the horse can be seen as something instinctual that can serve us if we can master it – and masculine, phallic sexual instincts can be represented in this symbol.

  Many tales from ancient traditions and stories of the Wild West illustrate how the horse can represent a strong, loyal ‘carrier’ of a person, of the psyche. For the man in this case study, though, the ‘carrier’ did not want to carry him at the moment. Rather than trying to explore this archetypal context with the man, his analyst waited for him to find his own way to the connection. This came about through his ruminations on what had gone wrong with his ex-partner. He knew that unless he could ‘rein in’ his own tendencies to wander – through jobs, places and sexual dalliances with women – then his impulsiveness would make a long-term relationship very difficult to attain or sustain. He understood when the analyst observed that we cannot control a horse unless we can control ourselves. Although the man struggled to find a new long-term relationship for a while, he began to moderate his impulsiveness and find a better balance in his life.

  Making sense of the unconscious

  Returning to the earlier narrative, let’s see what Jung, in his own words, did with what he found in his unconscious:

  ‘I was sitting at my desk once more, thinking over my fears. Then I let myself drop. Suddenly it was as though the ground literally gave way beneath my feet, and I plunged down into the dark depths… [before]… I landed on my feet in a soft, sticky mass.’

  Jung, 1963, p. 203

  After going into the cave, past a dwarf with ‘leathery skin’ (the figure he could just see in the cave entrance) he ‘waded knee deep through icy water to the other end of the cave where, on a projecting rock, I saw a glowing red crystal.’ Jung lifts the crystal, and in the hollow underneath he sees a dead body in the water:

  ‘… a corpse floated by, a youth with blond hair and a wound in the head. He was followed by a gigantic black scarab and then by a red, newborn sun, rising up out of the depths of the water. Dazzled by the light, I wanted to replace the stone upon the opening, but then a fluid welled out. It was blood.’

  Jung, 1963, pp. 204–5

  Reflecting on these powerful images, Jung makes an ‘archetypal’ interpretation – that is, he looks for a template for what he has seen from the vast collection of myths, stories and images from the cultural heritage of humankind. In his view, these templates are not available to us just in their concrete narrative form (as stories in books and films, for example). Rather, we actually carry them around inside us, in a shared layer of the unconscious below the individual personal unconscious. Jung agreed with Freud that we each have this repository of repressed instinctual material, which would otherwise overwhelm our conscious mind. However, the layer Jung saw as underneath that, which he termed the collective unconscious, would become a central tenet of his theoretical model (and one that would contribute to his painful break with Freud).

  In this case, Jung noticed an archetypal template from Egyptian mythology:

  ‘I realized, of course, that it was a hero and solar myth, a drama of death and renewal, the rebirth symbolized by the Egyptian scarab. At the end, the dawn of the new day should have followed, but instead came that intolerable outpouring of blood… [which] I abandoned all further attempt to understand.’

  Jung, 1963, p. 205

  Through active imagination – the conscious allowing of a string of images to come through, and then engaging with them before trying to understand what they mean and applying them to one’s life and self-awareness – Jung recognized that he had been privy to a version of an Egyptian myth of rebirth. However, while the scarab, or beetle, confirmed this link, the outpouring of blood was a mystery. This is where the unconscious can take a very old archetypal template like this myth and give it a currency for the time the individual is living in. Jung gradually came to see the relevance of the bloodied corpse of the blonde hero and the outpouring of blood. With other linked fantasies, the possibility became clearer that the bloody disruption at the end of the mythological sequence connected with real events. First, there was the huge, and difficult, change going on inside him following the distressing split with Freud. Secondly, there was the impending outbreak of the First World War.

  However one views Jung’s speculations, it is hard to deny the power of the images he uncovered, and the way the unconscious can throw these up in our dreams – or in the kind of work with free imagination that Jung experimented with. The experiment at times threatened his sanity and he had to make sure he had one foot firmly planted in the real world (helped by his wife Emma and their children, as well as his professional life at the Burgholzi). His ego could have been overwhelmed by all this, and at times, reading his accounts, one might say it was. But he was able to pull himsel
f back from serious fragmentation and, instead, his brave – or foolish (depending on how you look at it) – efforts reaped a dividend.

  He was able to build a model for understanding what goes on in the human psyche that still stands up well today, although those who have come after him within the psychotherapeutic and theoretical approach he initiated have inevitably questioned, modified and built on his initial model. However, his encounters with various figures and dramas arising from his unconscious, alongside the insights he derived from his work with psychiatric patients and his anthropological studies of different cultures, gave him his ‘archetypes of the psyche’: ego, persona, self, shadow, and anima and animus. Jung used what he would see as the most valuable resource for our learning and research – ourselves – and, in this case, what his own unconscious seemed to be trying to tell him.

  Key idea: Alienist?

  When Jung began practising as a psychiatrist in the early twentieth century, the term used for this role was ‘alienist’. When he gave his most famous interview, with John Freeman for the BBC in 1957, Freeman still used that term, which has now passed out of usage in English-language references to psychiatry. However, in France, where the term originated, it remains the official term. Jung as ‘alienist’ is not to be confused with his interest in UFOs (see Chapter 17).