Jung's thought derived from the classical education he received at school and from early family influences, which on the maternal side were a combination of
Reformed Protestant academic theology with an interest in occult phenomena. On his father's side was a dedication to academic discipline emanating from his grandfather - the physician, scientist, one-time student activist and convert from Catholicism to Swiss Reformed Protestantism, and first Basel Professor of Medicine,
Karl Gustav Jung. Family lore also suggested there was at least a social connection to the German
polymath,
Johann Wolfgang Goethe, through the latter's niece, Lotte Kestner (known as "Lottchen") who was a frequent visitor in Jung senior's household. Jung had, through his marriage, the economic security to pursue interests in other intellectual topics of the moment. His early celebrity as a research scientist through the Word Association Test led to the start of prolific correspondence and worldwide travel. It opened academic as well as social avenues, supported by his explorations into
anthropology,
quantum physics,
vitalism,
Eastern and
Western philosophy. He delved into
epistemology,
alchemy,
astrology, and sociology, as well as literature and the arts. Jung's interest in philosophy and spiritual subjects led many to label him a mystic, although he preferred to be seen as a man of science. Jung, unlike Freud, was deeply knowledgeable about philosophical concepts and sought links between epistemology and emergent theories of psychology.
Key concepts , Switzerland Within the field of
analytical psychology, a brief survey of major concepts developed by Jung includes (alphabetical): •
Anima and animus—(archetype) the contrasexual aspect of a person's psyche. In a woman's psyche, her inner personal masculine is conceived as a complex and an archetypal image; in a man's psyche, his inner personal feminine is conceived both as a complex and an archetypal image. •
Archetype—a concept "borrowed" from
anthropology to denote supposedly universal and recurring mental images or themes. Jung's descriptions of archetypes varied over time. •
Archetypal images—universal symbols that mediate opposites in the psyche, often found in religious art, mythology, and fairy tales across cultures. •
Collective unconscious—aspects of unconsciousness experienced by all people in different cultures. •
Complex—the repressed organisation of images and experiences that governs perception and behaviour. •
Extraversion and introversion—personality traits of degrees of openness or reserve contributing to
psychological type. •
Individuation—the process of fulfilment of each individual "which negates neither the conscious unconscious position but does justice to them both". •
Psychological Types—a framework for consciously orienting psychotherapists to patients by raising particular modes of personality to consciousness and differentiation between analyst and patient. •
Shadow—(archetype) the repressed, therefore unknown, aspects of the personality, including those often considered to be negative. •
Self—(archetype) the central overarching concept governing the individuation process, as symbolized by mandalas, the union of male and female, totality, and unity. Jung viewed it as the psyche's central archetype. •
Synchronicity—an acausal principle as a basis for the apparently random concurrence of phenomena.
Collective unconscious Since the establishment of
psychoanalytic theory, the notion and meaning of individuals having a
unconscious, popularised by Freud, has come to be commonly accepted. An individual's
personal unconscious is made up of thoughts and emotions that have, at some time, been experienced or held in mind but which have been repressed or forgotten. By contrast, the
collective unconscious is neither acquired by activities within an individual's life nor is it a container of things that are thoughts, memories or ideas which are capable of being conscious during one's life. In this sense, the contents of it were never naturally "known" through physical or cognitive experience and then forgotten. The collective unconscious consists of universal heritable elements common to all humans, distinct from other species. However, this does not necessarily imply a genetic cause, but rather encapsulates influences of evolutionary biology, the history of civilization, ethnology, brain and nervous system development, and general psychological development. Considering its composition in practical physiological and psychological terms, "it consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes, which can only become conscious secondarily and which give definite form to certain psychic contents." Jung argues that the
shadow plays a distinctive role in balancing one's overall psyche, the counter-balancing to consciousness—"where there is light, there must also be shadow". In order to truly grow as an individual, Jung believed that both the
persona and
shadow should be balanced. In
Psychological Types, Jung defined the primary attitudinal types (introvert and extrovert), comparing them to the ancient archetypes:
Apollo and
Dionysus. For the extravert, the libido flows outwards, and the person has an interest, relationship and dependence on events, people and things. While contemporary models, such as
the Big Five or psychometric adaptations such as Hans Eysenck's PEN model, often define these terms through social behavioural traits (such as shyness, gregariousness, sociability and impulsivity), Jung defined them as 'directional orientations of libido.' Modern theories often stay true to behaviourist means of describing such a trait (sociability, talkativeness, assertiveness etc.), whereas Jungian introversion and extraversion are expressed as a perspective: introverts interpret the world
subjectively, whereas extraverts interpret the world
objectively. Jung also posited different functions of consciousness: two perceiving/non-rational functions: sensation and intuition; and two judging/rational functions: thinking and feeling. Jung applied the term
persona because, in Latin, it means both
personality and the
masks worn by Roman actors of the
classical period, expressive of the individual roles played. The
persona, he argues, is a mask for the "collective psyche", a mask that 'pretends' individuality so that both self and others believe in that identity, even if it is really no more than a well-played
role through which the collective psyche is expressed. It has also been referred to as the
social archetype or the
conformity archetype. But he also makes it quite explicit that it is, in substance, a
character mask in the classical sense known to theatre, with its double function: both intended to make a certain impression on others and to hide (part of) the true nature of the individual, which he calls the 'shadow'. While Jung’s conception of human psychology is grounded in Darwinian evolutionary theory, it is important to note that his evolutionary thought had a distinctively German quality to it. This is because the idiosyncratic reception of Darwin in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Germany resulted in the integration of Darwin's ideas with German embryological and developmental traditions formulated by the
Naturphilosophen and theorists such as
Ernst Haeckel. These traditions formed the intellectual background of Jung’s evolutionary thought. The result was that Jung's evolutionary conception of mind focused on embryology and development. From this perspective, the emergence of consciousness both in ontogeny (development) and phylogeny (evolution) was built upon much more archaic, affect-based subcortical brain systems. This developmental approach to evolution underpinned his "archaeological" conception of the human psyche, consisting of different evolutionary layers, from the deeply archaic to the more evolutionarily recent. Those more archaic structures in the brain, Jung believed to be the basis of the "collective unconscious"—an aspect of human psychology shared by all members of the species
Homo sapiens. Jung also developed the notion of different evolutionary layers in the psyche in his discussion of fossil hominins such as
Pithecanthropus (
Homo erectus). As he writes: Jung’s notion of different evolutionary layers in the human mind has been compared with the work of neuroscientist
Jaak Panksepp, particularly as outlined in his book
The Archaeology of Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotions.
Spirituality Jung's work on himself and his patients convinced him that life has a spiritual purpose beyond material goals. The main task for people, he believed, is to discover and fulfill their deep, innate potential. Based on his study of
Christianity,
Hinduism,
Buddhism,
Gnosticism,
Taoism, and other traditions, Jung believed this journey of transformation, which he called
individuation, is at the mystical heart of all religions. It is a journey to meet the
self and at the same time to meet the
Divine. Unlike Freud's
atheistic worldview, Jung's
pantheism may have led him to believe that spiritual experience was essential to well-being, as he specifically identifies individual human life with the universe as a whole. In 1959, Jung was asked by the host,
John Freeman, on the
BBC interview program
Face to Face whether he believed in God, to which Jung answered, "I do not need to believe. I
know." Jung's ideas on religion counterbalance Freudian skepticism. Jung's idea of religion as a practical road to individuation is still treated in modern textbooks on the
psychology of religion, though his ideas have been criticized. Jung recommended spirituality as a cure for
alcoholism, and is considered to have had an indirect role in establishing
Alcoholics Anonymous. Jung treated an American patient named
Rowland Hazard III who had chronic alcoholism. After working with the patient for some time and achieving no significant progress, Jung told the man that his alcoholic condition was near hopeless, save only the possibility of a spiritual experience. Jung noted that, occasionally, such experiences had been known to reform alcoholics when all other options had failed. Hazard took Jung's advice seriously and sought a personal, spiritual experience. He returned to the United States and joined a Christian
evangelical movement known as the
Oxford Group. He told other alcoholics what Jung had told him about the importance of a spiritual experience. One of the alcoholics he brought into the Oxford Group was
Ebby Thacher, a long-time friend and drinking buddy of
William Griffith Wilson, later co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous. Thacher told Wilson about the Oxford Group, and through them, Wilson became aware of Hazard's experience with Jung. The influence of Jung thus indirectly found its way into the formation of Alcoholics Anonymous, the original
twelve-step program. The above claims are documented in the letters of Jung and Wilson. Although some historians dispute the detail, Jung discussed an Oxford Group member, who may have been the same person, in talks around 1940. The remarks were distributed privately in transcript form, from shorthand taken by an attender (Jung reportedly approved the transcript), and later recorded in his
Collected Works, "For instance, when a member of the Oxford Group comes to me in order to get treatment, I say, 'You are in the Oxford Group; so long as you are there, you settle your affair with the Oxford Group. I can't do it better than Jesus. Jung goes on to state he has seen similar cures among
Roman Catholics. The 12-step program of Alcoholics Anonymous has a psychological backdrop involving the human ego and the dichotomy between the conscious and unconscious mind.
Inquiries into the paranormal Jung had an apparent interest in the paranormal and occult. For decades, he attended
seances and claimed to have witnessed "parapsychic phenomena". Initially, he attributed these to psychological causes, even delivering a 1919 lecture in England for the Society for Psychical Research on "The Psychological Foundations for the belief in spirits". However, he began to "doubt whether an exclusively psychological approach can do justice to the phenomena in question" This is the idea that certain coincidences manifest in the world, have exceptionally intense meaning to observers. Such coincidences have a great effect on the observer from multiple cumulative aspects: from the immediate personal relevance of the coincidence to the observer, from the peculiarities of (the nature of, the character, novelty, curiosity of) any such coincidence; from the sheer improbability of the coincidence, having no apparent causal link (hence Jung's essay subtitle "An Acausal Connecting Principle"). Despite his own experiments failing to confirm the phenomenon he held on to the idea as an explanation for apparent
ESP. In addition, he proposed it as a functional explanation for how the
I-Ching worked. However, he was never clear about how synchronicity worked.
Interpretation of quantum mechanics Jung influenced one philosophical interpretation (not the science) of quantum physics with the concept of
synchronicity regarding some events as
non-causal. That idea influenced the physicist
Wolfgang Pauli (with whom, via a letter correspondence, Jung developed the notion of
unus mundus in connection with the idea of nonlocality) and some other
physicists.
Alchemy '' Emblem 21 Jung's acquaintance with alchemy came between 1928 and 1930 when he was introduced to a manuscript of
The Secret of the Golden Flower, translated by
Richard Wilhelm. The work and writings of Jung from the 1930s onwards shifted to a focus on the
psychological significance of alchemy. In 1944, Jung published
Psychology and Alchemy, in which he analyzed the alchemical symbols and came to the conclusion that there is a direct relationship between them and the psychoanalytical process. He argued that the alchemical process was the transformation of the impure soul (lead) to perfected soul (gold), and a metaphor for the individuation process.
Therapy After his period of psychological transformation and his later discovery of alchemy, Jung saw analysis as more a tool for personal growth than treatment for certain mental disorders. and practiced by
Tina Keller-Jenny and other analysts. It remained largely unknown until the 1950s when it was rediscovered by
Marian Chace and therapist Mary Whitehouse. Whitehouse, after studying with
Martha Graham and
Mary Wigman, became a dancer and teacher of modern dance, and, along with Swiss dancer
Trudi Schoop, is considered one of the founders of dance/movement therapy in the U.S.
Political views The state Jung stressed the importance of
individual rights in a person's relation to the state and society. He saw that the state was treated as "a quasi-animate personality from whom everything is expected" but that this personality was "only camouflage for those individuals who know how to manipulate it". He referred to the state as a form of slavery. He also thought that the state "swallowed up [people's] religious forces",
Relationship to Nazism and antisemitism Various statements made by Jung in the 1930s have been cited as evidence of both contempt and sympathy for
Nazism. In 1933, after the Nazis gained power in Germany, Jung became the president of the new
International General Medical Society for Psychotherapy (
Allgemeine Ärztliche Gesellschaft für Psychotherapie); the professional body aimed to have affiliated organizations in different countries. The German affiliated organization was the Deutsche Allgemeine Ärztliche Gesellschaft für Psychotherapie, led by
Matthias Göring, an
Adlerian psychotherapist, and a cousin of the prominent Nazi
Hermann Göring, excluded Jews. In 1933, the society's journal,
Zentralblatt für Psychotherapie, published a statement endorsing Nazi positions, Jung's response to this was twofold. In "The State of Psychotherapy Today", published in 1934 in the
Zentralblatt für Psychotherapie, Jung wrote: "The
Aryan unconscious has a greater potential than the Jewish unconscious" and "The Jew, who is something of a nomad, has never yet created a cultural form of his own and as far as we can see never will".
Andrew Samuels argues that his remarks on the "Aryan unconscious" and the "corrosive character" of Freud's "Jewish gospel" demonstrate a form of antisemitism "fundamental to the structure of Jung's thought" but also argues that there is a "pioneering nature of Jung's contributions" and that "his intuition of the importance of exploring difference remains intact." In 1934, in a circular for the society, Jung also drew attention to its constitution which permitted individual doctors to join directly rather than through one of the national affiliated societies. This meant that German Jewish doctors could maintain their professional status as individual members of the international body, even though they were excluded from the German affiliate, as well as from other German medical societies operating under the Nazis. On the other hand, also in 1934, Jung wrote in a Swiss publication, the
Neue Zürcher Zeitung, that he experienced "great surprise and disappointment" when the
Zentralblatt associated his name with the pro-Nazi statement. He did not end his relationship with the
Zentralblatt at this time, but he did arrange the appointment of a new managing editor,
Carl Alfred Meier of Switzerland. For the next few years, the
Zentralblatt under Jung and Meier maintained a position distinct from that of the Nazis in that it continued to acknowledge the contributions of Jewish doctors to psychotherapy. Jung's interest in
European mythology and
folk psychology was shared by the
Nazis. He would later say, during a lengthy interview with
H. R. Knickerbocker in October 1938:
Views on homosexuality Jung addressed homosexuality in his published writings, in one comment specifying that homosexuality should not be a concern of legal authorities nor be considered a crime. He also stated that homosexuality does not reduce the value of a person as a member of society. Jung also said that homosexuality is a result of psychological immaturity (
"nurture"), but only if one's sexuality is not an aspect of their constitutional characteristics (
"nature").
Psychedelics Jung's theories are considered to be a useful therapeutic framework for the analysis of unconscious phenomena that become manifest in the acute psychedelic state. This view is based on correspondence Jung had with researchers involved in psychedelic research in the 1950s, as well as more recent neuroimaging research where subjects who are administered psychedelic compounds seem to have archetypal religious experiences of "unity" and "ego dissolution" associated with reduced activity in the default mode network. This research has led to a re-evaluation of Jung's work, particularly the visions detailed in
The Red Book, in the context of contemporary psychedelic, evolutionary, and developmental
neuroscience. For example, in a chapter entitled "Integrating the Archaic and the Modern: The Red Book, Visual Cognitive Modalities and the Neuroscience of Altered States of Consciousness", in the 2020 volume ''Jung's Red Book for Our Time: Searching for Soul Under Postmodern Conditions, Volume 4'', it is argued Jung was a pioneer who explored uncharted "cognitive domains" that are alien to Western modes of thought. While such domains of experience are not part of mainstream Western culture and thought, they are central to various Indigenous cultures that use psychedelics such as
Iboga and
Ayahuasca during rituals to alter consciousness. The author writes: "Jung seems to have been dealing with modes of consciousness alien to mainstream Western thought, exploring the terrain of uncharted cognitive domains. I argue that science is beginning to catch up with Jung who was a pioneer whose insights contribute a great deal to our emerging understanding of human consciousness." An account of Jung and psychedelics, as well as the importance of Jungian psychology to psychedelic-assisted therapies, is outlined in Scott Hill's 2013 book
Confrontation with the Unconscious: Jungian Depth Psychology and Psychedelic Experience. A 2021 article discusses Jung's attitude towards psychedelics, as well as the applicability of his ideas to current research. As the author writes, Jung's "...legitimate reservations about the clinical use of psychedelics are no longer relevant as the field has progressed significantly, devising robust clinical and experimental protocols for psychedelic-assisted therapies. That said Jung's concept of individuation—that is the integration of the archaic unconscious with consciousness—seems extremely pertinent to modern psychedelic research." The author also uses work in evolutionary and psychedelic neuroscience, and specifically the latter's ability to make manifest ancient subcortical brain systems, to illuminate Jung's concept of an archaic collective unconscious that evolved before the ego complex and the uniquely human default mode network. ==Legacy==