Jung In A Week Read online

  Ruth Snowden is a psychology specialist who has written a wide range of books about Freud, Jung and, her particular interest, dreams. Among her books in the Teach Yourself series are Jung: The Key Ideas and Freud: The Key Ideas. She also writes children’s fiction.

  JUNG

  Ruth Snowden

  www.inaweek.co.uk

  IN A WEEK

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Sunday

  Jung’s life and career

  Monday

  Jung’s inner world

  Tuesday

  Exploring the psyche

  Wednesday

  Dreams and symbols

  Thursday

  The personality and relationships

  Friday

  Religion and spirituality

  Saturday

  Jung’s legacy

  Glossary

  Answers

  INTRODUCTION

  Carl Jung (1875–1961) was a Swiss psychologist and psychiatrist. He is famous because he founded a new system of psychology that he called ‘analytical psychology’. Jung has gradually acquired a huge following and many therapists today are trained in methods that have their roots in Jung’s work.

  Jung was a prolific writer and he had a wide range of interests, covering such areas as astrology, alchemy, archaeology and world religions. The system of psychology that he developed was very much a spiritual psychology, marking it apart from the mainstream, which tended to be rigidly ‘mechanistic’ in outlook. People were seen as machines, with their behaviour determined by physical or chemical causes. Jung explored many spiritual traditions, believing a person’s spiritual life to be crucial in the healing process. For Jung, a person’s life story was what mattered – he regarded clinical diagnoses as being useful to the doctor rather than helpful to the patient.

  Jung was born towards the end of the nineteenth century, at a time when great changes were beginning to take place in society, particularly in the field of science. People were searching for new truths and becoming more interested in self-knowledge: Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution had made people question the truth of the Bible, and Sigmund Freud was expanding people’s awareness of the unconscious. Jung insisted that the psyche is no less real than the physical world. He pointed out that everything that we are aware of is perceived and interpreted by the brain, so that we can never know for certain the truth about the outside world.

  Ruth Snowden

  What is analytical psychology?

  Analytical psychology is a whole system of psychology that Jung gradually developed throughout his life. His ideas came from his nearly 60 years of experience as a practising psychologist. He studied the experiences of his patients and his own inner world and its dreams, visions and symbols. Throughout his life he read and travelled widely, and found that certain common themes ran through the myths and culture of all people. This led to his idea of the ‘collective unconscious’ – the deepest layer of the unconscious, extending beyond the individual psyche. This is one of the central themes in Jungian teaching.

  Analytical psychology has several main aspects. It is:

  • a method of therapy, aimed at treating mental and nervous disorders, and also at helping ordinary people to become more balanced and self-aware

  • an attempt to provide a map of the human psyche in order to understand more fully how it works

  • an exploration of the deeper aspects of human psychology through the study of religious beliefs, dreams, myths, symbols and the paranormal.

  Today we will sketch out the broad outlines of Carl Jung’s life and career. As we will discover, Jung was greatly influenced by his rural and religious upbringing and saw the spiritual aspects of his work as being the most important.

  Jung studied medicine at university, then specialized in psychiatry. For him, the hidden world of the psyche was as real as the external world. He came to realize that the integration of the different facets of the personality is a very important life task, and the goal of analytical psychology. He called his new system of psychology ‘analytical psychology’ in order to distinguish it from ‘psychoanalysis’, developed by Sigmund Freud, who was initially his mentor.

  Jung was often regarded as an eccentric, especially by more orthodox scientists. But he was charismatic and gradually acquired a huge following, eventually becoming world renowned. He was usually cheerful and outgoing, but could be moody and difficult to live with.

  JUNG’S FAMILY BACKGROUND

  Jung was born on 26 July 1875 in Kesswil, a small village in Switzerland on the shores of Lake Constance. He was the second child born to his parents, but their first-born had died soon after birth. When Jung was six months old, his family moved to another village, named Laufen, close to the border with Germany and France and near the great Falls of the Rhine. Then they moved again, this time to Klein-Hüningen, which was at that time just a village, near Basel, also located on the Rhine.

  The little villages in which Jung was born and raised had a huge influence on him that was to last throughout his life. It was a peaceful, rural world of mountains and lakes, rocks, rivers and abundant wildlife. His earliest memory is one of lying in a pram, under the shadow of a tree on a warm summer’s day, and feeling a great sense of glorious beauty and indescribable wellbeing on seeing the sunlight glittering through the leaves and blossoms. Jung developed an intense love of the natural world and a deep spiritual relationship with all living things. He loved the peace and solitude that living in nature can bring, and spent a lot of time alone thinking, writing, contemplating, and finding his own inner peace. His deep connection with the earth element was also expressed in painting pictures and working with wood and stone. Animals were very important to him – he always liked to have dogs as companions, and he frequently wrote of what he called ‘synchronous messages’ that came to him from the natural world.

  When Jung was nine, his sister Gertrude was born, but she played little part in his childhood. The age gap between them was too great and their temperaments were very different. Young Carl was already a solitary child and liked to play alone, lost in his own inner world. Gertrude was delicate and died quite young. Jung said that she was always a stranger to him, and that where he was emotional she was always composed, although she was very sensitive deep down.

  Jung had many relations who were clergymen – eight of his uncles were pastors. His father was a pastor in the Swiss Reformed Church, whose teachings were strongly influenced by the sixteenth-century Reformation teachings of leaders such as Calvin and Luther. The Reformed Church taught people to believe in the literal truth of the Bible, or else risk damnation. Jung’s father had strong scholarly interests in Classical and Oriental studies, but he accepted the teachings of his church without question. Jung said later in life that in childhood he associated the word ‘father’ with reliability, but also with weakness.

  Jung’s mother was also rooted in the faith of the Reformed Church. However, her beliefs were more complex because her own family firmly believed in contact with the spirit world. Old pagan beliefs still held sway in the minds of people in rural Switzerland. Jung saw his mother as a dynamic and powerful person, but also as unpredictable and mysterious. His parents’ marriage was not an easy one, probably because their characters and beliefs were so different. His mother was earthy, extrovert and chatty, whereas his father was scholarly and introvert. When Jung was three, his mother was hospitalized for several months with a nervous illness.

  Jung’s ‘Number 1’… and ‘Number 2’ personalities

  The different influences from his parents probably played a part in creating a dualism that Jung recognized in himself later in life. He felt that his personality was divided into two characters that he called ‘Numb
er 1’ and ‘Number 2’.

  • Number 1 was concerned with the external everyday world. This side of Jung was ambitious and analytical, looking at the world from a scientific point of view.

  • Number 2 was secretive and mysterious and tended to look at things in an intuitive way.

  A BRIEF OUTLINE OF JUNG’S CAREER

  SCHOOL

  Jung attended a country school where he was intellectually well ahead of his classmates. He welcomed the company of other children, but close friendships were not easy for him because he was so used to playing alone. From the age of 11 he attended a school in Basel, but he was never happy there. The other boys thought him peculiar and tended to make fun of him. Not only that, but he found the lessons boring and felt that they were a waste of his time.

  UNIVERSITY

  Family poverty meant that Jung could not expect to study at a more distant university, so he was admitted to Basel in 1895 after leaving school. He had wanted to study archaeology but it was not taught at Basel, so he chose medicine instead. This was in the family already; his paternal grandfather was Professor of Surgery at the university until 1864. After taking his degree in medicine in 1900, Jung almost decided to specialize in surgery, but he had developed a strong interest in psychiatry and eventually decided to move in this direction. He realized that this was the best way to combine his scientific interests with his interests in religion and the paranormal.

  FIRST APPOINTMENTS

  Jung became an assistant at the Burghölzli mental hospital in 1900, and in 1905 he was appointed Lecturer in Psychiatry at Zürich University. He was especially interested in the disorder then called dementia praecox, later known as schizophrenia. Jung left the hospital in 1909, so that he could work with private patients. He also wanted to concentrate on his research into the psychological aspects of behaviour and the inner world of the unconscious.

  RECOGNITION OF HIS IMPORTANCE

  In 1907 Jung met Sigmund Freud and for a number of years they had a close friendship. Jung became the first president of Freud’s International Psychoanalytic Society and was the editor of its journal, which was the first of its kind. Eventually Jung’s independent way of thinking led to a rift with Freud. He continued to develop his own school of psychology and he was made president of the International General Medical Society for Psychotherapy in 1933. In 1936, when Harvard University marked its tercentenary by awarding honorary degrees to the most eminent living scientists, Jung was one of the people chosen for the honour. His reputation had grown and he had become a leader of international research work in psychology, partly because he eagerly exchanged ideas with others. Even in old age he was known as a great conversationalist who retained a wide range of information about different topics. His charismatic personality meant that he attracted a huge following.

  JUNG’S PRIVATE LIFE

  Jung met his wife, Emma Rauschenbach, when he was 21 and she was 16. The first time they met she was standing at the top of a staircase, and Jung had an immediate premonition that she was to be his wife. They were married seven years later, in 1903, and their first child Agathe was born in 1904. Over the next ten years they had four more children – three girls and a boy. At first they lived in rooms at the Burghölzli hospital, but in 1909 they were able to move into a newly built house on the lakeside at Kusnacht near Zürich. Jung had known from very early childhood that he wanted to live near a lake. Luckily for him, Emma was the daughter of a wealthy businessman, and this left Jung free to pursue his own interests a lot of the time.

  Emma Jung worked as an analyst in the therapy practice, taking on her own patients. She also gave lectures at the Jungian institute in Zürich. She was especially interested in Arthurian legends, and made a special study of the legend of the Holy Grail. Antonia Wolff also worked alongside Jung and became his mistress from around 1911 onwards. The relationship became a complex triangular one. Jung announced that a man needed two women: one to organize the domestic affairs and one to stimulate the intellect. He was an incurable womanizer and had many other affairs in addition to his relationship with Antonia.

  Jung outlived both his beloved women and missed them in his last years. He carved memorial stones for each of them, with Chinese inscriptions. Emma’s reads ‘she was the foundation of my house’ and Antonia’s ‘she was the fragrance of the house’. He did not write a great deal about people who were close to him, probably in order to protect them.

  Jung travelled extensively, visiting North Africa, New Mexico, Kenya, Uganda and India. He lectured in both Britain and the US. People usually described Jung as friendly and interested, but he had odd moods when he would become preoccupied, even rude. At these times he would withdraw from society and he built a special tower as a retreat at Bollingen for this purpose. When the mood took him, he was driven by the need to indulge in creative activity or study. This meant that he sometimes hurt people or made enemies because he appeared distant.

  Jung died in 1961 after a brief illness. Since his death, his analysis of the human psyche has been widely recognized as an important framework for studying psychological problems. By his own admission, his ideas are not always easy to follow, but he certainly encouraged people to experience things for themselves and develop their own insights. Near the end of his life he tried to put some of his main ideas together in a way that was more understandable to ordinary people. The result was a book called Man and His Symbols, which makes a good starting point for studying Jung’s ideas. The book emphasizes Jung’s lifelong conviction that the inner world of the human psyche is of paramount importance and needs to be studied seriously.

  SUMMARY

  Today we have looked at the broad outlines of Jung’s life and career and begun to see how aspects of his background may have influenced the development of his ideas. For example, we have seen how his upbringing in the Swiss countryside helped instil in him a profound reverence for the natural world, and how the conflicting personalities of his mother and father helped him to become alert to opposing aspects of his own psyche, and indeed of every human psyche.

  Life and work for Jung were deeply intertwined. We have already hinted at how closely and deeply Jung investigated his own inner world, in order to draw broader conclusions about human psychology. In later life, he wrote an autobiography – called in English Memories, Dreams, Reflections (posthumously published in 1963) – in which he attempted to give an account of his psychological and spiritual development, from childhood onwards. This, along with Man and His Symbols, is one of the best routes into his ideas for the general reader.

  FACT-CHECK (ANSWERS AT THE BACK)

  1. In which country was Jung born?

  a) France

  b) Germany

  c) Austria

  d) Switzerland

  2. Jung’s background might be described as…

  a) Rural

  b) Religious

  c) Well-off

  d) Urban

  3. Jung’s family was…

  a) Roman Catholic

  b) Protestant

  c) Atheist

  d) None of the above

  4. Which of the following describe the personality of Jung’s father?

  a) Unpredictable

  b) Deeply religious

  c) Scholarly

  d) Extrovert

  5. Which of the following describe Jung’s ‘Number 1’ personality?

  a) Rational

  b) Secretive

  c) Ambitious

  d) Intuitive

  6. Jung went to university in which city?

  a) Zürich

  b) Geneva

  c) Basel

  d) Heidelberg

  7. In which year did Jung go into private practice?

  a) 1907

  b) 1908

  c) 1909

  d) 1910

  8. What was the name of Jung’s wife?

  a) Agathe Rauschenbach

  b) Emma Rauschenbach

  c) Antonia Wolff

  d) Agathe Wo
lff

  9. Where did Jung build himself a tower as a retreat?

  a) Küsnacht

  b) Burghölzli

  c) Bollingen

  d) Zürich

  10. How might we best sum up Jung’s personality?

  a) Dry and intellectual

  b) By turns friendly and remote

  c) Demanding and oversensitive

  d) Religious and hypocritical

  Today we how explore how Jung’s powerful experience of his own inner world – his emotions, dreams and fantasies – helped shape his ideas.

  Jung was a solitary, introspective child and in his imaginative games he began to grapple with ideas that were to fascinate him all his life. School largely bored him and it was not until he discovered psychiatry that he began to find his true path. He was an independent thinker and throughout his life his deep interest in the spiritual had profound influences on his work.