Jung

Anthony Storr

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135211318
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Carl Gustav Jung first wanted to be an archaeologist. When family finances made this impossible, he pursued a medical degree from Basel University. Considering a specialization in surgery, he stumbled upon a psychiatry book--an event that changed the course of his life and ultimately the whole field of depth psychology.Anthony Storr looks at these and other telling facts about Jung's life in the opening chapter of this highly acclaimed book. Though fundamentally concerned with Jung's ideas, Storr's approach shows his conviction that in the realm of dynamic psychology it is impossible to separate ideas from the personality of the man in whom they occurred. His clear and concise review of the whole corpus of Jung's writings always keeps in sight the man behind the work, as each subsequent chapter concentrates on a particular Jungian concept, guiding the reader through the life and ideas of this great thinker.Storr investigates the major principles of analytical psychology, presenting such central concepts as the collective unconscious, the archetypes, the shadow, and the persona. He looks at Jung's religious turmoil and his inner need to reconcile the opposition between objectivity and subjectivity. He shows how his ideas follow a progression from the intellectual agitation that characterized the young psychologist to the advanced theories of balance and integration found in the mature man. Storr concludes his book with a look at psychotherapy, describing advances as well as problems involved in a practical consideration of Jungian techniques.Perhaps the most remarkable element of Jung is its illumination of complex concepts--concepts that had they been easily accessible in the original would have caused a wider appreciation of Jung's work. The clarity and order that Storr brings to light in Jung's psychology will come as a welcome surprise to those who have found him an obscure if provocative thinker. Storr's sensitive analysis makes the book compelling reading for everyone interested in Jung, and his clear exposition provides a superior introduction for newcomers, allowing the genius of Jung to appear for the widest possible audience.First published in 1973, this classic study is now available again. The Routledge edition includes a brief preface in which the author describes his previous work on Jung as well as his meeting with the great Swiss thinker.

1 The Personal Background

This book is primarily about Jung's ideas, and not about the man himself. But since, especially in the realm of dynamic psychology, it is impossible to separate ideas from the personality of the man to whom they occurred, some introductory remarks about Jung as a person are necessary.

Carl Gustav Jung was born on July 26th, 1875. His father was a country parson; a pastor in the Swiss Reformed Church, and also an Oriental and classical scholar. According to Jung's own account, his father was kind, tolerant, and liberal. He was also somewhat conventional; content to accept the system of religious belief in which he had been reared, and unable or unwilling to answer the doubts and queries of his gifted son. Jung describes his father as weak. Indeed, he goes so far as to say that, in childhood, he associated the word ‘father’ with reliability, but also with powerlessness. There is no doubt, from his own description, that Jung belonged to that not inconsiderable group of creative people springing from families in which the mother is the more powerful and dynamic figure; and this is reflected in Jung's psychological thinking.

In the pages which follow, it is inevitable that Jung's ‘analytical psychology’ will frequently be contrasted with Freud's ‘psychoanalysis’. This is partly because of the close association between the two men, and their subsequent divergence; and partly because the ideas of Freud, so much better known than those of Jung, provide a useful foil or contrast against which to measure the latter.

Jung's mother is described by him as problematical, and also inconsistent, in that she sometimes expressed conventional opinions which another, unconventional part of herself proceeded to contradict; so that the boy early recognized that she did not always say what she really meant, and was thus a divided person. Moreover, when Jung was about three years old, his mother left home to enter hospital for a period of several months suffering from an illness which Jung later attributed to difficulties in the marriage. The little boy responded to this desertion by developing a generalized eczema, a skin disease often considered to be partly emotional in origin. He also developed a deep distrust of women in general, and an ambivalent attitude towards his mother in particular.

In contrast, Freud's mother was warmly protective, and indeed adoring; whereas his father was strict, and undoubtedly the authority in the home. It is not surprising, therefore, that Freudian psychoanalysis is a paternally-based psychology, with a good deal of emphasis upon conscience, duty, and fear of punishment. The Freudian ‘superego’ is certainly more masculine than feminine. Jungian analytical psychology, on the other hand, is far more rooted in the maternal, and concerned with images of woman as devourer and destroyer as well as protector; concepts which really entered psychoanalysis only with the advent of Melanie Klein. Jung was little concerned with the superego, which indeed he disparages in one passage as an illegitimate construct; but he was very much concerned with the efforts of the developing personality to extricate itself from the toils of maternal encirclement.

Brought up in such a household, and at such a date, it was inevitable that Jung, throughout his life, should have been much preoccupied with questions of religion. In this latter half of the twentieth century it may be difficult for many younger people to realize how shattering it was for the orthodox, less than a hundred years ago, to discover that they had doubts about their faith, or even worse, might in honesty be forced to abandon it. A glance, however, at the history of the ‘Oxford Movement’, at Newman's ‘Apologia pro Vita sua’, or even at the letters of Gladstone, will convince the sceptic that religious problems were the chief preoccupation of some of the most able minds of the nineteenth century, and were, moreover, no mere intellectual exercises, but deeply-felt quandaries which evoked powerful emotions, and indeed, the whole personality. A good deal of Jungian psychology can be seen as part of Jung's attempt to find a substitute for the orthodox faith in which he was reared, but against which he started to rebel at a very early age. Freud's parents presented him with no such problem, since they adhered to the Jewish faith but tenuously; and Freud was content to be a sceptical agnostic from childhood onwards.

Jung was brought up in the country; and, in later life, was at pains to emphasize the good effect this rural childhood had had upon him; especially in giving him a healthy attitude to such natural phenomena as birth, death, and sex. He was also reassured to find that peasants shared his interest in the occult and inexplicable, a theme which, like religion, continued to crop up in his writings from his very first paper to his late reflections on flying saucers. Jung cannot be understood unless it is remembered that, for him, unlike Freud, natural science was not enough. There had always to be a background of something supernatural which could not be explained away by the rationalism which took hold upon men's minds at the end of the nineteenth century, and which appealed so strongly to the hard-headed and somewhat pessimistic Freud. In his autobiography, Jung writes of an imperishable world, as opposed to this transitory one. It is clear that such a world was, for him, always a reality.

At home, Jung remained an only child for the first nine years of his life, when a sister appeared to join him. Although he welcomed the companionship with which his country school provided him, he was far ahead of his companions intellectually, and thus lacked the shared intimacy which can only flourish upon a basis of equality. Jung was a warm-hearted, sympathetic, and compassionate individual; but, judging from what he writes about himself, real intimacy did not come easily to him. The enforced solitude of his childhood was later turned to good account in his self-analysis; but, like many another only child, Jung felt himself to be different from, and to some extent at odds with, his contemporaries. His most important experiences in life came to him when he was alone; and it is characteristic that his autobiography contains next to nothing about his personal relationships. His wife, for instance, is hardly mentioned; the only reference to marriage in the index is ‘marriage, mystic of the Lamb’, and the only comment on her death is ‘After my wife's death in 1955, I felt an inner obligation to become what I myself am.’¹ This predilection for the solitary accounts for the fact that Jungian psychology is principally concerned, not with interpersonal relationships, but with processes of growth and development of personality seen as taking place within the charmed circle of the individual psyche. Freudian psychoanalysis has as its end-point of development a mature relationship with another person, briefly and incompletely designated as ‘genitality’; a concept which really includes within it much more than sex. Jung's notion is of an end-point of integration or balance within the individual mind itself, without overt reference to relations with other persons at all.

Jung's original wish was to be an archaeologist. But his family were poor, and could not afford to send him further afield than Basel, in which city he went to school from the age of eleven. In the University of Basel there was no-one teaching archaeology, so Jung chose medicine instead. With the aid of a grant from Basel University he completed his medical degree, and had almost decided to specialize in surgery when he came across a book by Krafft-Ebing. This was not ‘Psychopathia Sexualis’, by which this author is principally known to English readers, but a text-book of psychiatry, a subject to which Jung had so far paid no attention. Reading this book convinced Jung that he must specialize in this neglected and poorly-regarded branch of medicine; and his reason for this unexpected decision is worth noting, since it throws light upon the psychological views which he later adumbrated. Krafft-Ebing described psychiatry as being a subject in so elementary a stage of development that text-books upon it were inevitably stamped with the author's subjective assumptions, and tinged by his own personality. This is a reproach which holds good to this day. Instead of being put off psychiatry by reason of this lack of objective, scientific status, Jung was immediately powerfully attracted to it. He was interested in natural science; and well aware of the need for objectivity. But he was also aware of his own internal preoccupation with religious speculation, philosophy, and the search for value and meaning; interests to which it is difficult to apply the strict criteria of science, and in which subjectivity is bound to find a place. It seemed to Jung that psychiatry might fulfil his need to reconcile these opposites within himself; and the reconciliation of opposites is a theme which runs right through the whole of Jung's work. In the case of this particular pair of opposites it is fair to say that he was not entirely successful. On the one hand, Jung refers to his ideas as a subjective confession, thus denying them universal validity. On the other, he writes of the ‘objective psyche’ (a synonym for the collective unconscious) as a sphere of mental functioning quite removed from personal experience or any trace of subjectivity. No human observer can, of course, be entirely objective, but Jung's reiterated claim that he merely observed facts and tried to classify them often seems at variance with his repeated assertion that no observer can avoid beginning from personal assumptions. Indeed, Jung recognized that the final incompatibility between himself and Freud sprang from the fact that each made observations upon the basis of differing assumptions about human nature.

Whilst still a student, Jung took part in ‘table-turning’ experiments. The medium, aged 15½, claimed that she received messages from dead relatives and other spirits. One of these spirits spoke almost faultless High German, whereas the girl herself, when in her normal waking state rather than in a trance, spoke only Swiss German. This phenomenon of two apparently quite different personalities manifesting themselves in one girl excited Jung's interest; and his first published work, his dissertation for his medical degree, is a paper ‘On the Psychology and Pathology of So-called Occult Phenomena’ which is based upon his observations of this girl. I mentioned above that Jung regarded his mother as possessing two personalities; a conventional one, and an unconventional one which sometimes expressed the opposite of what the conventional person had just announced. He very early regarded himself in like fashion. From the age of twelve, he conceived the idea that also consisted of two personalities, one being a schoolboy who was uncertain of himself, solitary, and somewhat ill-at-ease in the world; the other an old man of great authority who commanded respect, who was influential, powerful, and certain of himself. Here, then, are further pairs of opposites, this time manifesting themselves as separate personalities rather than simply as different aspects of the same personality, as in the case of Jung's ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ interests mentioned above.

This tendency to personify and give names to differing aspects of the mind of one person remained with Jung throughout his life. Thus, some of his archetypes, especially the ‘anima’, ‘animus’, and ‘wise old man’ are personified in this way. Moreover, Jung encouraged his patients to conduct dialogues with these ‘figures from the unconscious’ as if they were real people in the external world. Indeed, to him, they probably were just as real as the persons with whom he came into contact in daily life. The language he uses about such figures suggests that, as mediums believe, he thought of them as existing in an ‘imperishable world’ and manifesting themselves from time to time through the psyche of an individual. In his autobiography, for example, Jung refers to a figure originating in one of his dreams whom he named Philemon. This figure, Jung writes, taught him psychic objectivity and the reality of the psyche. By holding conversations with him Jung became convinced that Philemon possessed superior insight, and generated thoughts within Jung's mind which he himself would not have been capable of conceiving. Of course, most people, and especially creative people, are well aware that ideas ‘come to them’, that problems are solved in sleep, and that there are many other manifestations of mental functioning which are not within conscious control or the product of deliberate ratiocination. But very few people find it necessary to personify these ‘unconscious’ mental activities in the way that Jung did any more than they find it necessary to personify physical parts of themselves like the liver or kidneys, which function independently of the will. Jung's predilection for naming and personifying surely dates from his childhood view of his mother and himself; and from his willingness to accept the medium's view of herself as the spokesman through which superior beings from the ‘beyond’ made themselves known. This is an aspect of Jungian psychology which some people find irritating, and which may blind them to Jung's more valuable insights.

It is interesting to note, in passing, that both Jung and Freud began their psychological observations upon cases of hysteria; for the 15½-year-old medium would undoubtedly so be diagnosed by a psychiatrist. Freud's studies led him to lay emphasis upon ‘repression’ in hysteria; that is, the banishment from the consciousness of thoughts and feelings which were distasteful to the conscious ego. For Freud, the ego remained firmly in the driver's seat as the most important part of the personality; and the object of psychoanalysis was to convert id into ego. ‘Where id was, there shall ego be.’ Jung, although recognizing the validity of repression as a psychological mechanism, attributed more importance to dissociation and splitting within the mind; and tended to treat the split-off portions as alternate personalities, almost of equal importance with the ego, and capable of taking over from it. Cases of ‘multiple personality’ were beloved of nineteenth-century psychiatrists who encouraged their hysterical patients to continue producing alternative personalities by their injudicious use of hypnosis. Jung, like Freud, soon abandoned hypnosis, but he continued to regard the ego more as one amongst many ‘personalities’ than as the central directing aspect of the person to which all else ought to be subordinate. One might almost oversimplify by saying that Freud's principal interest was in discovering secrets, whilst Jung's was in reconciling conflicting ‘personalities’ within the mind.

This emphasis upon dissociation and splitting was reinforced by Jung's clinical experience. After qualification as a doctor, he obtained, in December 1900, a post as an assistant in the Burghölzli mental hospital in Zürich; the city in a suburb of which he was to live for the rest of his life. Here, his interest was engaged by schizophrenia (or ‘dementia praecox’, as this disorder was then named). He observed that, in schizophrenia, the personality of the patient was not so much divided into two or more clearly distinguishable parts, but rather fragmented: that is, disintegrated rather than merely dissociated. Nevertheless, amongst the fragments, there might be some ‘Voices’ which exhibited a certain continuity with which the therapist could maintain a dialogue. Moreover, Jung noted, as many psychiatrists working in mental hospitals have done since, that the patient's ‘ego’ might remain more or less intact, although invisible, throughout many years of chronic mental illness. If a chronic schizophrenic becomes physically ill, it sometimes happens that his ‘normal’ personality, i.e. his ego, reasserts its supremacy, and that he may, therefore, talk and behave ordinarily for a while; only to relapse again when the physical illness has passed. It is difficult to explain this phenomenon in terms of the Freudian mental topography of ego, superego and id, unless one is in the habit of conceiving the ego as more easily split into multiple ‘egos’ than Freud was prepared to do, at least in his early work.

It was during his time at the Burghölzli also that Jung made some of the observations which led to his hypothesis of a ‘collective’, as opposed to a merely personal, unconscious. His knowledge of philosophy, comparative religion, and myth led him to make comparisons between this material and the phantasies and delusions of schizophrenics. He found many parallels; and concluded that schizophrenia laid bare, as it were, a deeper level of the mind than could be explained in terms of personal repression and the vicissitudes of early childhood.

In one of his last writings Freud comes close to Jung's point of view when he writes: ‘Dreams bring to light material which cannot have originated either from the dreamer's adult life or from his forgotten childhood. We are obliged to regard it as part of the archaic heritage which a child brings with him into the world, before any experience of his own, influenced by the experiences of his ancestors. We find the counterpart of this phylogenetic material in the earliest human legends and in surviving customs.’²

It is important to realize that much of Jung's thought takes origin from his clinical experiences whilst at the Burghölzli. Freud never worked in a mental hospital for more than a very brief period as a locum tenens, and had little experience with psychotic patients, whom he mostly regarded as quite beyond the reach of psychoanalysis. His original theories were based first upon the phenomena of hysteria, and then upon obsessional neurosis. But Jung's mental hospital experience continued from 1900 to 1909, when he finally resigned from the hospital to pursue his private psychotherapeutic practice. Even then, as we shall see, he did not abandon his interest in schizophrenia; and many of his patients continued to be either borderline psychotics or frankly schizophrenic. Indeed, judging from the paucity of case-histories in the voluminous corpus of Jung's writings, he was not much interested in neurosis as such. After the break with Freud, there are very few neurotic case-histories to be found in all the volumes of the Collected Works; and even in his earlier writings, there are no neurotic case-studies of anything like the complexity of Freud's ‘Wolf Man’, ‘Rat-Man’ or ‘Little Hans’. Kind and compassionate though Jung was, he was always more interested in ideas than in people, and rapidly became bored with the unravelling of those emotional tangles within the family which constitute the bread-and-butter of the average psychotherapeutic practice.

Jung did much valuable work whilst at the Burghölzli, some of which I shall later discuss. At this point, however, I am more concerned with how his personal experience bore upon his work and ideas than with the ideas themselves. The next important biographical landmark is his first meeting with Freud. Although Jung had been familiar with Freud's ideas for some years, and had read ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’ when it first appeared in 1900, he did not actually meet Freud until March 3rd, 1907. Since Jung is often regarded as a renegade Freudian, it is important to recognize that by the time he first encountered Freud, Jung had already had six years psychiatric experience, had produced original work of his own, and had begun, tentatively, as behoved a man still in his early thirties, to formulate some characteristically ‘Jungian’ ideas which did not accord with Freud's conceptions. That these ideas did not find their full expression until 1913, when Jung finally broke with Freud, is not surprising, when one considers the intensity of the relationship between them. Freudians and Jungians will probably always disagree about the nature of this relation, the former emphasizing it and treating Jung as a heretic; whilst the latter minimize it and possibly believe Jung to have been more independent than, for a time, he was. In fact there were probably powerful emotions on both sides. It must be recollected that Freud was the older man by nineteen years and had already aroused a good deal of controversy by the time Jung met him. At all events, Jung had been warned that it would do his career no good if he continued to support Freud in print, as he did, before they had encountered each other personally, in some early papers. This warning naturally made him defend Freud all the more vehemently; for all of us are apt to be over-enthusiastic about those whom we feel to be rejected unfairly, and on whose behalf we take up the cudgels. It must also be remembered that Jung's respect for his father was rather slight, although he regarded him with some affection. He must therefore have been susceptible to ‘falling for’ an older man whose intellect he could admire, and who advanced controversial ideas with such courage. Freud, on his part, was much in need of advocacy by persons belonging to the psychiatric establishment who were not connected with his immediate circle in Vienna. Jung was a teacher and research worker in a famous Swiss mental hospital whose opinion would be respected by the world at large. Moreover, unlike the majority of Freud's circle, he was not a Jew, a point emphasized by Freud himself in a letter to Ernest Jones. It is no wonder that, for a time, Jung seems to have become for Freud a favourite ‘son’, and Freud, for Jung, a ‘father-figure’. Whatever the truth of this may be, the two men talked enthusiastically for thirteen hours upon their first meeting, stayed in each other's houses, and collaborated as best they could by letter and occasional encounters at conferences and meetings. In Vol. IV of Jung's Collected Works, ‘Freud and Psycho-Analysis’, the fertilizing ef...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 The Personal Background
• 2 Jung’s Early Work
• 3 Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
• 4 Psychological Types, and the Self-Regulating Psyche
• 5 The Process of Individuation
• 6 The Concept of the Self
• 7 Jung’s Contribution to Psychotherapy
• A Personal Postscript
• Biographical Note
• References
• Books on Jung and Analytical Psychology