Analytical Psychology

Contemporary Perspectives in Jungian Analysis

Joseph Cambray, Linda Carter, Joseph Cambray, Linda Carter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781135443467
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The Jungian approach to analysis and psychotherapy has been undergoing an extensive reconsideration during the past decade. Analytical Psychology calls special attention to the areas that have been most impacted: the core concepts and practices of the Jungian tradition, along with relevant intellectual and historical background.Internationally renowned authors drawing on the forefront of advance in neuroscience, evolution, psychoanalysis, and philosophical and historical studies, provide an overview of the most important aspects of these developments. Beginning with a chronicle of the history of the Jungian movement, areas covered include: * a background to the notion of 'archetype'
* human development from a Jungian perspective
* the creative extension of Jung's theory of psychological types
* re-evaluation of traditional Jungian methods of treatment in the light of contemporary scientific findings
* Jungian development of transference and countertransference
* a new formulation of synchronicity. Analytical Psychology presents a unique opportunity to witness a school of psychotherapy going through a renaissance. Drawing on original insights from its founder, C.G. Jung, this book helps focus and shape the current state of analytical psychology and point to areas for future exploration.

Chapter 1
History of analytical psychology

Thomas B. Kirsch

The history of analytical psychology is part of the larger history of depth psychology and psychoanalysis, with which it is intertwined and yet separate. Due to the painful and bitter parting between the founders of psychoanalysis and analytical psychology, Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung, a reliable early history has been difficult to ascertain. In a profound way the cleavage between the two founders has both promoted and at the same time inhibited the growth of the two fields. It is not my intention to rehash the Freud/Jung controversy, because it is so fraught with factional disputes that any objective view is hard to establish. However, it is necessary that it be mentioned as a baseline problem that has had a long-term and defining imprint on both schools.

Through study of the history of these two movements, one can develop a deeper understanding of why the founders had to separate and travel their own pathways. Beyond the personal clash between the two men, there was a wide cultural divergence. Simply put, Freud’s training was in biology, and his theories of the unconscious developed out of a neurophysiological background. Jung, on the other hand, was deeply influenced by continental philosophy, especially Leibniz’s “unconscious perceptions,” Kant’s “dark representations” and ding-an-sich, Schopenhauer’s “tendency of the unconscious material to flow into quite definite molds,” and finally Nietzsche’s ideas from Thus Spake Zarathustra.

Any history of analytical psychology must begin with its founder, C.G. Jung. It is not the intent to give extensive biographical material on Jung, but there are salient facts about his life which have influenced the development of analytical psychology.

Jung was born on 26 July 1875, in a small Swiss village, Kesswil, along the Rhine River. He came from a long line of Protestant ministers, including his father. His mother’s ancestors had mediumistic experiences, as did she. Jung had powerful dreams at a very young age, which he describes in his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, and Reflections. ¹ As mentioned above, he had a strong interest in philosophy, but he went to medical school in Basel, Switzerland, graduating in 1900.

He then moved to Zurich, where he worked at the Burghölzli clinic under Professor Eugen Bleuler. Jung became Bleuler’s first assistant and remained at the Burghölzli until 1909 when he left to enter private practice, which he continued with some interruptions until his death in 1961.

In 1903 he married Emma Rauschenbach, the daughter of a wealthy industrialist from Schaffhausen, and they had five children, four girls and one boy. In 1909 they built a house on Lake Zurich in Kusnacht where they lived the rest of their lives. Jung also developed a very important relationship in 1912 with a former patient of his, Toni Wolff. She was the other woman in Jung’s life, and she became his assistant. These circumstances were known to Jung’s family as well as to his patients and disciples, and the three parties involved appeared to be comfortable with the arrangement. In recent years this situation has received much attention, and has given rise to the belief that Jung was a womanizer. ²

In 1924 Jung built the tower in Bollingen, mostly with his own hands; he continued working on it for the rest of his life. The tower was also on Lake Zurich, but it was in a very secluded part, and here Jung could live in a simple and introverted way. He spent many weeks at a time in Bollingen.

Jung’s work on word association experiments at the Burghölzli led him to contact Freud, since he realized that Freud’s observations on the unconscious were crucial to an explanation of his own research results. This led to Jung writing to Freud in 1906, and in 1907 the Jungs, along with Ludwig Binswanger, travelled to Vienna, where the first conversation between Jung and Freud lasted for 13 hours. Freud recognized Jung’s talents and later referred to the younger man as his “crown prince.” For the next six years, Jung was a leading adherent of Freud’s, and he represented psychoanalysis both in Europe and in the United States, becoming the first president of the International Psychoanalytic Association, and editor of the major psychoanalytic journal and various books. The bitter breakup of their relationship is dramatically chronicled through the letters they exchanged (see McGuire 1974 on the Freud/Jung Letters).

Sabina Spielrein is mentioned over 30 times in the letters and I would like to draw attention to her, as a great deal of new material has come out recently. Consulting Freud as supervisor, she was Jung’s first patient with whom he used psychoanalytic techniques. Sabina Spielrein was a 19-year-old Russian Jewish woman who was brought in on an emergency basis on the evening of 17 August 1904 with a diagnosis of hysteria. Jung became her doctor and psychotherapist, and an extremely strong transference/countertransference situation developed. By the following spring she was well enough to attend medical school in Zurich, and was able to leave the hospital. She continued to see Jung as a patient over the next few years, and a strong love relationship developed between the two of them. The exact nature of what happened in their interaction is unknown, but some, including Bruno Bettelheim, are convinced that they had a complete sexual relationship. After graduating from medical school in Zurich she moved to Vienna, where she became a part of the Viennese psychoanalytic circle and became a psychoanalyst. She married and had a daughter, and after moving around for several years, she returned to Russia where she became a leader in psychoanalysis. She opened a psychoanalytic kindergarten in Moscow in 1925, but as Stalin gained control of the country psychoanalysis was outlawed and she returned to Rostov; little is known of what she did there. She was killed by the Nazis in 1942 along with other Jews of the city. Much of this material has become available only in the past 14 years with the breakdown of the Soviet empire. Also, her hospital records at the Burghölzli have been released by surviving family members, so we have a much better idea of her state of being in the hospital. Her story is very dramatic, and recently she has become the object of many new books, movies, and theatrical plays. She is no longer just a footnote in psychoanalytic history and her papers linking sexuality, destruction, and creativity have become better known. Freud included a footnote on her when he first wrote about the “death instinct” in Beyond the Pleasure Principle in 1922.

Let us return to what happened to Jung after the breakup of his relationship to Freud. Jung underwent a profound introversion where images from the unconscious flooded him. He spent much time alone and went through periods of disorientation. At the conclusion of the First World War and this period of what he called “confrontation with the unconscious,” he felt much more secure and had developed the basic elements of what he was to call his new psychology – analytical psychology. The first use of this term is in his Psychology of the Unconscious, written in 1912–1913. Although Jung coined the term “analytical psychology,” it has often been used interchangeably with the term “Jungian.” Many modern-day analysts refer to themselves as Jungian analysts, others as analytical psychologists, and still others as Jungian psychoanalysts. These different identities refer to various levels of commitment, allegiance, and identification with both Jung and analytical psychology. It seems that as we move further away from the life and work of Jung, terms other than “Jungian analyst” are coming more into common usage.

In 1921 Jung published a major work, Psychological Types, where he described the now well-known typology introversion/extraversion, along with the feeling/thinking and intuitive/sensation functions. These terms have come into common usage in many languages, and the psychological type theory is used extensively in business applications.

By the 1920s, Jung’s reputation and psychology had become well established and his interest in the creative process led him to attract many writers and artists. His psychology particularly attracted students from England and the United States along with others from around the world. He gave seminars during the academic year to his English-speaking students in Zurich, and he lectured and traveled widely throughout Europe and United States, along with trips to Africa and India. In 1934 he became president of the International Medical Society of Psychotherapy and in that capacity he worked closely with colleagues strongly identified with the political leadership of Nazi Germany. His reputation has been marred by that association, which I will discuss in more detail below with the history of analytical psychology in Germany.

In 1928 he received a manuscript from Richard Wilhelm, a renowned sinologist, who had translated an ancient Chinese alchemical text, The Secret of the Golden Flower (1929). Through this book Jung became interested in the subject of alchemy, and for the remainder of his life he studied and wrote about alchemy texts (mainly European). Through the language of alchemy he saw the expression of the unconscious in its symbolic form and could then draw parallels between the dreams of twentieth-century individuals and the imaginings of medieval alchemists.

In the wake of a broken leg, he suffered a heart attack in 1944, and was in semi-retirement until his death in 1961. In 1948 he inaugurated the founding of the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich with a lecture there, and each year until his death he met with the students from the Institute. Jung was not interested in promoting organizations, because he was concerned that they tend to stifle the creativity of the individual. This impression seemed to result from his leadership experience in the International Psychoanalytic Association and the International Medical Society of Psychotherapy, which had not gone well.

By the time of Jung’s 80th birthday he had sufficiently overcome his aversion to organizations, and the International Association for Analytical Psychology was founded. The IAAP has become the accrediting body for all Jungian analysts in the world, and has put on an international congress every three years where new research in the field can be presented. In the same year (1955) the Journal of Analytical Psychology was founded in London, and it has become the leading Jungian journal in the English language – more about both outgrowths later on.

Jung received many honors during his lifetime, including honorary degrees from Harvard, Yale, Oxford, Calcutta, Clark University, and many others. His books have been translated into many languages, and his ideas on the nature of the psyche including theory of archetypes, the collective unconscious, extraversion/introversion, complex, Self, individuation, and synchronicity have coined terms that have come into common usage.

Analytical psychology has had different patterns of development from country to country. It has had a continual presence since the early 1920s in Switzerland, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany. There has been a long-standing interest in analytical psychology in other places such as France, Italy, and Israel. The last quarter of the twentieth century saw a rapid expansion of interest in Jung’s psychology, including Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, South Korea, Japan, South Africa, Austria, Scandinavia, and more recently the Baltic countries, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Bulgaria, Russia, Poland, China, Mexico, and Venezuela. At this point in time, analytical psychology has become a truly worldwide phenomenon.

Switzerland

The history of analytical psychology begins in Switzerland, where Jung lived and worked. Zurich naturally provided fertile soil for psychoanalysis and by 1912 a well-functioning psychoanalytical association connected to the Burghölzli and the University of Zurich was in place. However, in 1912 the Zurich Psychoanalytical Association separated from the Burghölzli and became an independent organization with no academic affiliation, which contributed to psychoanalysis and analytical psychology developing their own independent institutions.

A further separation took place on 10 July 1914 when Alphonse Maeder led the Zurich psychoanalytic group to an almost unanimous decision to resign en masse from the International Psychoanalytic Association and the Zurich Psychoanalytic Association. This happened after Freud’s denunciation of Jung and the Zurich school in his On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement (1914:70), where Freud had established an orthodoxy that did not allow for free and unimpeded research.

On 30 October of the same year it was decided to rename the society the Association for Analytical Psychology on the suggestion of Professor Messmer (Muser 1984). This group, consisting mainly of medical doctors, met on a regular basis every other week until 1918, when it became absorbed into the newly formed Analytical Psychology Club. During the period between 1912 and 1918 Jung reformulated his major theories of the psyche, the collective unconscious, archetypes, individuation, and psychological types, and the meetings at the Club must have been significant.

Shamdasani’s recent research (1998) has shown that between 1916 and 1918 there were two separate Jungian groups; a professional one, the Verein and a lay group, the Analytical Psychology Club, which became a model for similar clubs in other cities and countries. The two groups merged in 1918 under the name of the Analytical Psychology Club, and this was the meeting place for both analysts and analysands.

Following the First World War, Jung emerged from his “confrontation with the unconscious” (Jung 1963) and his fame spread, especially in the English-speaking countries and Europe. Individuals would write to Jung asking to see him in analysis and, if accepted, they would come to Zurich for varying lengths of time. In those days analyses were usually much shorter for many reasons, not least financial considerations which prevented protracted stays. Most foreigners’ analyses were less than a year, and many lasted only weeks or a few months.

In 1925 Jung began to give seminars in English in Zurich (McGuire 1989), and from 1928 to 1939 he gave a seminar in English each academic semester.Originally the transcripts of these seminars were distributed only selectively, but in recent years many of them have been edited and published. Individuals who were in analysis with Jung were invited to attend seminars, as well as Zurich analysts. In his role as professor at the Eidgenossische Technische Hocschule, Jung gave a weekly lecture on basic aspects of analytical psychology to the general student body, and analysands who could understand German were invited to attend. These lectures were quickly translated into English by these analysands.

The combination of analysis and seminars provided the training for the first generation of Jungian analysts. The analysis was usually done with Jung and Toni Wolff. The analysand would see Jung one day and Toni Wolff either later the same day or the following day. This type of analysis, of seeing more than one analyst at a time, has been called “multiple analyses” (Kirsch 1976) and became an accepted and usual pattern in Zurich, and in other countries following the Zurich model. It was sharply criticized by Michael Fordham (1976) in London because he claimed that the transference/ countertransference implications were not being analyzed and interpreted. Fordham and his followers believed that the “multiple analyses” model allowed for too much acting out by both the patient and the analyst, fostering avoidance and splitting. On the other hand, the input of two analysts of different psychological types and genders could be helpful, at times, to the patient. Jo Wheelwright, one of those who experienced multiple analyses in Zurich, stated that Jung was excellent for archetypal interpretations while Toni Wolff was more experienced at working on personal issues and overall he found her to be a better practical analyst than Jung (Wheelwright 1974). This pattern of multiple analyses has continued into subsequent generations of analysts in Zurich and other places. The increasing importance of analyzing the transference has lessened its practice considerably.

In the early days the path to becoming a Jungian analyst was fluid. Jung would write a letter stating that the person had studied his methods and was ready to practice as an analyst. However, seeing Jung was no guarantee that an individual would receive a letter of accreditation. Many people who expected such a letter never received one, whereas others who did not plan to become analysts received Jung’s blessing. In some instances Jung recommended further academic training to an analysand, e.g. Jo Wheelwright, while others were accepted with very little academic training, for instance Hilde Kirsch.

During the 1930s, Jung did not seem very interested in forming his own school of psychology and psychotherapy. As president of the International General Medical Society for Psychotherapy, he was more interested in finding points of commonality among the different schools of psychotherapy. In 1938, he signed a statement produced by the International General Medical Society for Psychotherapy, which outlined points of agreement among the various psychotherapeutic schools. In Switzerland, he became president of the Swiss Society for Practical Psychology where he was again attempting to form a common, non-sectarian basis for psychotherapy. However, some of his closest associates during that period recognized the need to form an institute in Zurich where Jung’s psychology could be studied. Due to the Second World War, the plan had to be put on hold until 1948.

After the war, a small institute for the study of Jung’s psychology was founded at Gemeindestrasse 27 in Zurich, the same building where the Analytical Psychology Club was housed. There was much discussion about the choice of its name. Toni Wolff favored “Institute for Complex Psychology,” while Jung’s chief concern was the omission of his name in the title. J...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures
• Contributors
• Series preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 History of analytical psychology
• Chapter 2 Archetypes: emergence and the psyche’s deep structure
• Chapter 3 Developmental aspects of analytical psychology: new perspectives from cognitive neuroscience and attachment theory
• Chapter 4 Understanding consciousness through the theory of psychological types
• Chapter 5 Analytic methods revisited
• Chapter 6 Transference and countertransference: contemporary perspectives
• Chapter 7 The emerging theory of cultural complexes
• Chapter 8 Spiritual and religious aspects of modern analysis
• Chapter 9 Synchronicity as emergence 1
• Chapter 10 The ethical attitude in analytic training and practice
• Chapter 11 Endnotes