Analytical Psychology: Carl Jung's Vision

• Carl Jung was a middle-aged doctor who felt frustrated and uncertain about his future after a 6-year relationship with a mentor ended on bitter terms.
• He lost confidence and experienced bizarre dreams and visions, unsure if his work was science.
• He began illustrating his dreams as a gifted artist and heard a feminine voice from within him, who he conversed with, with those conversations being unusual journey into his psyche, documented in Memories, Dreams, Reflections.
• Jung had been an early admirer of Freud, but their disagreements led to estrangement and a sense of loss.

Overview of Analytical Psychology

• Carl Gustav Jung broke from orthodox psychoanalysis, establishing Analytical Psychology based on the influence of occult phenomena.
• Motivation comes not only from repressed experiences but also from emotionally toned experiences inherited from ancestors, known as the collective unconscious.
• The collective unconscious includes elements never individually experienced but inherited from ancestors.
• Archetypes are highly developed elements of the collective unconscious.
• Self-realization, the most inclusive archetype, balances opposing personality forces.
• Jung's theory has compendium of opposites incl people/events both introverted and extraverted; rational and irrational; male and female; conscious and unconscious; and pushed by past events while being pulled by future expectations.

Family Background

• Carl Gustav Jung was born on July 26, 1875, in Kesswil, Switzerland.
• His paternal grandfather, Carl Gustav Jung, was a prominent physician in Basel.
• An unconfirmed rumor said Jung, at times, believed himself to be the great-grandson of Goethe.
• Jung's parents were the youngest of 13 children, which may have contributed to their difficult marriage.
• His father, Johann Paul Jung, was a minister in the Swiss Reformed Church and mother, Emilie Preiswerk Jung, was the daughter of a theologian.
• Eight maternal uncles and two paternal uncles were pastors, and his mother's family practiced spiritualism and mysticism.
• Jung had an older brother who lived only 3 days and a sister 9 years younger that Carl making his early life simular to that of an only child.

Carl Jung's Parents

• Jung described his father as a sentimental idealist with doubts about his religious faith.
• His mother was split into – (1) realistic, practical, and warmhearted and (2) unstable, mystical, clairvoyant, archaic, and ruthless moods.
• An emotional and sensitive child, Jung identified more with this second side of his mother - which he called her No. 2 or night personality (Alexander, 1990).
• At age 3 years, Jung was separated from his mother, who had to be hospitalized for several months, and this separation deeply troubled young Carl.
• He associated "woman" with unreliability and "father" with reliable but powerless for a long time after.

Childhood Period

• Upon moving to a suburb of Basel when he was 4, he had earliest dreams which had a profound effect on his later life and on his concept of a collective unconscious.
• During his school years, Jung gradually became aware of two separate aspects of his self, and he called these his No. 1 and No. 2 personalities.

Nos. 1 & 2 Personalities

• At first he saw both personalities as parts of his own personal world, but during adolescence he became aware of the No. 2 personality as a reflection of something other than himself,an old man long since dead.
• At that time Jung did not fully comprehend these separate powers, but in later years he recognized that No. 2 personality had been in touch with feelings and intuitions that No. 1 personality did not perceive.
• Between his 16th and 19th years, Jung's No. 1 personality emerged as more dominant.
• As his conscious, everyday personality prevailed, he could concentrate on school and career.
• In Jung's own theory of attitudes, his No. 1 personality was extraverted and in tune to the objective world, whereas his No. 2 personality was introverted and directed inward toward his subjective world.
• During his early school years, Jung was mostly introverted, but when the time came to prepare for a profession and meet other objective responsibilities, he became more extraverted, an attitude that prevailed until he experienced a midlife crisis and entered a period of extreme introversion.

Professional Life

• First profession was archaeology – but was interested in philology, history, philosophy, and natural sciences
• Despite aristocratic background, Jung had limited finances so he had to attend school near home, enrolling in a school without an archaeology teacher.
• He chose natural science because he dreamed twice of making important discoveries in the natural world which further narrowed to psychiatry, when he learned it deals with subjective phenomena.
• While Jung was in medical school, his father died, leaving him in care of his mother and sister.
• He began attending seances with relatives – including a first cousin who claimed she could communicate with the dead.
• Attending first as a family member, he later wrote in his medical dissertation that the occult seances were controlled experiments.
• After completing his medical degree, Jung became a psychiatric assistant to Eugene Bleuler at Burgholtzli Mental Hospital in Zurich.
• During 1902-1903, Jung studied in Paris with Pierre Janet (successor to Charcot).
• Returning to Switzerland in 1903, he married Emma Rauschenbach, a young, sophisticated woman from a wealthy Swiss family.
• Two years later, while continuing duties at the hospital – he began teaching at the University of Zurich and seeing patients in private practice.

Jung-Freud Affair

• Though Jung read Freud's Interpretation of Dreams soon after its release - he was not impressed with it when he reread it a few years later, he had a better understanding of Freud's ideas – and began interpreting his own dreams.
• In 1906, Freud and Jung began a steady correspondence together.
• In 1907, Freud invited Carl and Emma to Vienna and in 1907
• Freud and Jung immediately developed strong mutual respect and affection for each other – talking during their first meeting for 13 hours straight as Martha and Emma busied themselves with polite conversation.
• Freud believed Jung to be the ideal person as his successor and unlike other men in Freud's circle, Jung was neither Jewish nor Viennese, since he had warm personal feelings for Jung so regarding him as a man of great intellect.
• This prompted Freud to select Jung as the first president of the Int'l Psychoanalytic Association.
• In 1909, G. Stanley Hall – president of Clark University and one of the first psychologists in USA – invited Freud and Jung to deliver a series of Lectures in Massachusetts.
• Together with Sandor Ferenczi, another psychoanalyst - the two men journeyed to America.
• During a 7-week trip & while in daily contact, underlying tension began to simmer between Jung & Freud.
• This tension was not diminished when they began to interpret each other's dreams.
• Jung asserted Freud was unable to interpret Jung's dreams because in this dream where Jung and his family were living on the second floor of his house - where he decided to explore its unknown levels so at the bottom of his dwelling, he came upon a cave where he found two old and mostly disintegrated human skulls.
• After describing this, Freud became interested in the skulls - not as collective unconscious material, but as wishes for death.
• Knowing Freud's expectations, Jung told Freud he wished his wife and sister-in-law dead.
• Though Jung's interpretation may be more accurate than Freud's - it is quite possible Jung did indeed wish for the death of his wife.
• At that time Jung was married for nearly 7 years and the previous 5 years, he was deeply involved in an intimate relationship with a former patient named Sabina Spielrein.
• Frank McLynn (1996) claimed Jung's mother complex caused him to harbor animosity toward his wife - but the more likely explanation is that Jung needed more than one woman to satisfy two aspects of his personality.
• However, the two women who shared Jung's life for nearly 40 years were his wife Emma – and another former patient named Antonia (Toni) Wolf with Emma Jung related better to Jung's No. 1 personality, while Toni Wolff was more in touch with his No. 2,.
• Although Jung and Wolff made no attempt to hide their relationship, the name does not appear in Jung's posthumously published autobiography,.
• Though a whole chapter was written on her, it was never published – this was probably due to the lifelong resentments Jung's children had toward her.
• Jung wrote in a letter to Freud saying - "The prerequisite for a good marriage, it seems to me, is the license to be unfaithful".
• Almost immediately after Jung and Freud returned from their trip to the US, personal as well as theoretical differences became more intense as their friendship cooled in 1913, so they terminated personal correspondence and in 1914, Jung resigned his presidency and withdrew his membership in the Int'l Psychoanalytic Association.
• Jung's break with Freud may have been related to events not discussed in his autobiography.
• Jung wrote to Freud of his “boundless admiration" for him - and confessed that his veneration “has something of a religious crush;” and that it had an “undeniable erotic undertone" saying “This abominable feeling comes from the fact that as a boy, I was the victim of a sexual assault by a man I once worshipped since Jung's erotic feelings towards Freud may have been one of the major reasons why Jung eventually broke off from him (Elms, 1994).
• The years immediately after the break with Freud were filled with loneliness and self-analysis for Jung and from 1913 to 1917, Jung underwent the most profound and dangerous experience of his life or a trip through the underground of his unconscious.
• This was Jung's period of “creative illness” – similar to Freud after his father's death where both searched for self in their 30s-40s with both undergoing loneliness and isolation as both were transformed by the experience.

Journey into the Unconscious

• Though Jung's journey into the unconscious was dangerous and painful - it was necessary and fruitful.
• By using dream interpretation and active imagination to force himself through, Jung eventually created his unique theory of personality like writing down his dreams, drew pictures of them, told himself stories, and followed them wherever they moved.
• This is how Jung became acquainted with his personal unconscious.
• Going more deeply, he came upon the contents of the collective unconscious like hearing his anima speak to him, discovering his shadow, and speaking with his wise old man and great mother within so near the end of his journey, he achieved a psychological rebirth - called individuation.

Personal Characteristics

• Though Jung traveled widely in studying personality, he remained a citizen of Switzerland and was married to an analyst and had five children (four girls, one boy).
• Jung was a Christian, but did not attend church with hobbies like wood carving, stone cutting, and boat sailing with interests like alchemy, archaeology, Gnosticism, philosophy, history, religion, mythology, and ethnology.
• In 1944, he became professor of medical psychology at the University of Basel but his pour health forced him to resign the following year.
• After his wife died in 1955, he was mostly alone where he died June 6, 1961 in Zurich - a few weeks after his 86th birthday where Jung's worldwide reputation – in psychology, philosophy, religion, and popular culture.

Theory - Levels of the Psyche

• Jung, like Freud, based his personality theory on the assumption that the psyche has both a conscious and unconscious level, unlike Freud, however, Jung asserted that the most important aspect of the unconscious derives not from individual experiences - but from the distant past of collective human existence.

Conscious

• Elements that are sensed by the ego, not the whole personality, but must be completed by the more comprehensive self who in turn Ego is the center of consciousness, but self is the core of personality.
• In a psychologically healthy person, the ego is secondary to the unconscious self.
• Thus, consciousness plays a relatively minor role in analytical psychology – and overemphasizing its expansion results to psychological imbalance and allows themselves to express their unconscious self, in order to achieve individuation.

Personal Unconscious

• All repressed, forgotten, or subliminally perceived experiences of an individual being like repressed infantile memories and impulses and forgotten events or experiences below the threshold of consciousness.
• Formed by individual experiences, thereby making it unique to each person.
• Contents of the personal unconscious are called complexes, or emotionally toned conglomerations of associated ideas that are largely personal, but are also deeply ingrained from humanity's collective experience, since E.g., Mother may be grouped around an emotional core of a person's mother - but also can be derived from the entire species' experiences with mothers.

Collective Unconscious

• Has roots in the ancestral past of the entire species from Jung's most controversial and most distinctive concept.
• Physical contents of the collective unconscious are inherited – and passed on from one generation to the next as psychic potential.
• Distant ancestors' experiences with universally recognized concepts like God, mother, water, earth and so forth have been transmitted across both clime and time – drawing bridges of influence between and across primitive and modern variations of them making contents of the collective unconscious more or less the same for all people - regardless of space (society, culture) and time (generation).
• The collective unconscious does not lie dormant – but actively affects a person's thoughts, emotions, and actions since they are responsible for many myths, legends, religions, and superstitions and produce "big dreams” – dreams with meaning beyond individual dreamers.
• Not merely inherited ideas - but innate tendencies to react in particular ways whenever experiences stimulate biologically inherited response tendencies.
• Biologically based predispositions are countless – with each repetition further solidifying their existence in the human biological constitution.
• At first, they are forms without content – mere possibilities of perceptions and actions that develops content and emerge as autonomous archetypes.

Archetypes

• Ancient or archaic images that derive from the collective unconscious like similar to complexes as they are emotionally toned collections of associations.
• Differ because they are not individualized from the personal unconscious, but generalized and diffused across the collective or also distinct from instincts – which Jung defined as unconscious physical impulses toward action where archetype are the psychic counterparts of instincts and originate through repeated experiences of humans' early ancestors.
• The potential for countless archetypes within individuals is endless - but becomes activated through experience, and expressed through dreams, fantasies, and delusions where dreams the main source of archetypal material.
• Hallucinations of psychotic patients also offered evidence for universal archetypes ex E.g., Parallels between a paranoid schizophrenic patient's advice to look at the sun with eyes half-shut, in order to see the sun's phallus, and the origin of the wind - and the ancient rite of a Mithraic cult (Persian god of light), which depicts the same belief. Although a great number of archetypes exist as vague images, only a few have evolved to full conceptualization.

Persona

• "The persona is that which in reality, one is not – but which oneself, as well as others, think one is"
• The side of personality we show to the world.
• The mask worn by actors in early theater Every human projects a role (dictated by society) Though persona is a necessary side of personality, our public face should not be confused with our complete self.
• Excessive identification with our persona alienates us from our true self - which inhibits self-realization Though we must acknowledge the outside world, we must not lose touch with our inner self – relying too much on external expectations of society.
• To be healthy, we must balance ourselves between societal demands (who we are expected to be) and personal realities (who we truly are).

Shadow

• The side of personality we hide – both from the world, and ourselves or Our darkness, repressions, and evil within.
• It is easier to project the dark side of our personality onto others - to see in them the ugliness/evils we refuse to see in ourselves that To come to grips with the darkness within is to achieve the "realization of our shadow”.

Great Mother

• Divided into positive and negative traits with the loving mother represents fertility/nourishment (life-sustaining) - whereas the terrible mother personifies power/destruction (life-devouring).
• The life-sustaining dimension is often symbolized by a tree, garden, field, sea, heaven, home, country, church, and hollow objects
• Fertility and power combine to form the concept of rebirth - representing processes of reincarnation, baptism, resurrection, & individuation with Each of these symbols meaning people throughout the world are all motivated by a desire to be reborn - nirvana, heaven, perfection.

Animus

• As all humans are psychologically bisexual, humans possess both femininity-masculinity with the feminine side of men originates in the collective unconscious, in the form of anima.
• Few men become acquainted with their anima, as it requires even more courage than acquainting with one's shadow or especially inclined to project their anima onto his lover - not seeing her as she really is, but as his unconscious determined her to be.
• Anima influences the feeling side in man – to which man almost never admits that his feminine side is casting her spell, or symbolic of women thinking or relating.
• Anima influences the thought process of a woman – yet it does not belong to her, rather many opinions held by women are objectively valid, but as per Jung – they may not be thought out, but ready-made (pre-fabricated by the animus).

Wise Old Man

• Derivative of the animus that Symbolizes wisdom and meaning – and human's pre-existing knowledge of the mysteries of life, since politicians, for example, who speak authoritatively (but not authentically) often sound sensible and wise - but whose words are actually hollow.
• Individuals dominated by the wise old man may gather disciples using verbiage that sounds profound - but really makes little sense to be political, religious, and social prophets who appeal to reason as well as emotion are guided by this personified in dreams as father, grandfather, teacher, philosopher, guru, doctor, or priest.

Hero:

• A powerful person – sometimes part god, who fights against great odds to vanquish evil in the form of dragons, monsters, or demons that is always vulnerable and has main work to overcome the monster of darkness... of consciousness over the unconscious.”

Self

• All individuals have inherited tendencies to move toward growth, perfection, and completion – to which he called the self .
• This is the archetype of archetypes – as it pulls together all other archetypes and unites them in self-realization.

Progression and Regression

• To achieve self-realization, people must adapt not only to the outside environment - but to their inner world as well.Adaptation to the external world involves the forward flow of psychic energy, called progression that To achieve self-realization, people must adapt not only to the outside environment - but to their inner world as well and Adaptation to the inner world relies on a backward flow of psychic energy, called regression.
• Both are necessary to actualize individuation since Progression inclines people to react consistently, given certain environmental conditions and Regression activates the unconscious psyche – which is an essential but undervalued process in solving many problems.

Causality and Synchronicity

• Whereas causality can be considered as the prejudice of The West, synchronism is the prejudice of The East.Causality is the principle that everything has a cause – and therefore, corresponding effects and Synchronicity is the principle of acausality – that certain circumstances can take place in meaningfully related manners; even in the absence of causal connections together.
• Synchronicity refers to one's subjective experience of meaningful coincidences – wherein events in one's mind and the external world coincide with some unknown connection; outside the forces of mere probabilities (stats) and possibilities (chances) alone.

Attitudes

• Attitudes are predispositions to act or react in a characteristic direction since all people have both an introverted and extraverted attitude that one may be conscious, while the other is unconscious. Each serve compensatory relations to one another - similar to yin and yang and also turning inward of psychic energy, with an orientation toward the subjective.
• Tuned in to their inner world – with all its biases, fantasies, dreams, and individualized perceptions that Perceived by their own mind.
• Jung's theory was balanced – accepting both the objective and subjective.

Development of Personality

• Personality develops through a series of stages that culminate in individuation, or self-realization while Jung emphasized the second half of life that is after 35-40 that this when/where people have opportunities to bring together various aspects of personality so psychological health is attained if they can achieve balance between the poles of various opposing processes.

Childhood

• Islands of consciousness exist, but no connection between them and a time when ego develops, and logical and verbal thinking begins or also were when children are split from the self.

Youth

• Period from puberty until middle life – wherein young people strive to: Gain physical-psychic independence from parents as one finds a mate and raise a family to where one can make a place in the world.

Old Age

• As the evening of life approaches, people experience a diminution of consciousness that is usually caused by a fear of death is more normal.

Self-Realization

• Psychological rebirth, or individuation, is the process of becoming an individual – of becoming a whole person that is always ready to strive for a life of balance.

Methods of Investigation

• Jung made journeys in sociology, history, anthropology, biology, physics, philology, religion, mythology, and philosophy.
• This was a way to conduct tests to try at understand a persons autonomous actions with the use of verbal tests that are able to try and describe complex test subjects.