View this Free Essay in PDF format

This free essay has been submitted by: Guest User

Carl Jung

Carl Gustav Jung was born July 26, 1875, in the small Swiss village of Kessewil. His father was Paul Jung, a country parson, and his mother was Emilie Preiswerk Jung. He was surrounded by a fairly well educated extended family, including quite a few clergymen and some eccentrics as well. The elder Jung started Carl on Latin when he was six years old, beginning a long interest in language and literature - especially ancient literature. Besides most modern western European languages, Jung could read several ancient ones, including Sanskrit, the language of the original Hindu holy book. Carl was a rather solitary adolescent, who didn't care much for school, and especially couldn't take competition. He went to boarding school in Basel, Switzerland, where he found himself the object of much harassment. He began to use sickness as an excuse, developing an embarrassing tendency to faint under pressure. Although his first career choice was archeology, he went on to study medicine at the University of Basel. While working under the famous neurologist Krafft-Ebing, he settled on psychiatry as his career. After graduating, he took a position at the Burghoeltzli Mental Hospital in Zurich under Eugene Bleuler, an expert on schizophrenia, who actually gave the disease its name. He also taught classes at the University of Zurich, had a private practice, and invented word association at this time. Long an admirer of Freud, he met him in Vienna in 1907. The story goes that after they met, Freud canceled all his appointments for the day, and they talked for 13 hours straight, such was the impact of the meeting of these two great minds! Freud eventually came to see Jung as the crown prince of psychoanalysis and his heir apparent.

Their relationship began to cool in 1909, during a trip to America. They were entertaining themselves by analyzing each others' dreams (more fun, apparently, than shuffleboard), when Freud seemed to show an excess of resistance to Jung's efforts at analysis. Freud finally said that they'd have to stop because he was afraid he would lose his authority! Jung was known all over the world as one of the pioneers of psychology and psychiatry. Trained as a physician he came to see that the different forms of mental illness were not separate entities in themselves, with a distinctive psychology, but disturbances of the usual functioning of the mind. It was with this point of view that Jung approached mental illness. Jung had a deep impact on many of the ideas found in psychology today. He agreed with Sigmund Freud on the concept of the unconscious mind, but did not completely agree with Freud in many aspects of his theory. In turn, Jung founded his own school of psychology, which he called analytic psychology. He believed that all humans shared what he named the "collective unconscious". It is this part of the psyche that makes his theory stand out from all others. Rita Atkinson defines the collective unconscious as "a part of the mind that is common to all humans" (262).  Jung states in his 1936 lecture, "There is a second psychic system of collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals and it is present always and everywhere" ("Carl Jung").  Jerome Kagan explains, "The collective unconscious contains traces of humanities fears, superstitions, beliefs in magic, and search for a god" (197).  Jung theorized that the collective unconscious, "also consists of archetypes inherited from our ancestors" (Bennet 59). Jung describes a variety of archetypes, however he stressed that the shadow, the persona, the anima and the animus are the key archetypes pertaining to personality.

Jung's theory divides the psyche into three parts. The first is the ego, which Jung identifies with the conscious mind. Closely related is the personal unconscious, which includes anything which is not presently conscious, but can be. The personal unconscious is like most people's understanding of the unconscious in that it includes both memories that are easily brought to mind and those that have been suppressed for some reason. But it does not include the instincts that Freud would have it include. But then Jung adds the part of the psyche that makes his theory stand out from all others: the collective unconscious. You could call it your "psychic inheritance." It is the reservoir of our experiences as a species, a kind of knowledge we are all born with. And yet we can never be directly conscious of it. It influences all of our experiences and behaviors, most especially the emotional ones, but we only know about it indirectly, by looking at those influences. There are some experiences that show the effects of the collective unconscious more clearly than others such as the experiences of love at first sight, of deja vu, and the immediate recognition of certain symbols and the meanings of certain myths, could all be understood as the sudden conjunction of our outer reality and the inner reality of the collective unconscious. Grander examples are the creative experiences shared by artists and musicians all over the world and in all times, or the spiritual experiences of mystics of all religions, or the parallels in dreams, fantasies, mythologies, fairy tales, and literature. An example that has been greatly discussed recently is the near-death experience. It seems that many people, of many different cultural backgrounds, find that they have very similar recollections when they are brought back from a close encounter with death.

They speak of leaving their bodies, seeing their bodies and the events surrounding them clearly, of being pulled through a long tunnel towards a bright light, of seeing deceased relatives or religious figures waiting for them, and of their disappointment at having to leave this happy scene to return to their bodies. Perhaps we are all "built" to experience death in this fashion. The contents of the collective unconscious are called archetypes. Jung also called them dominants, imagos, mythological or primordial images, and a few other names, but archetypes seems to have won out over these (Top Media Entertainment). An archetype is an unlearned tendency to experience things in a certain way. The archetype has no form of its own, but it acts as an "organizing principle" on the things we see or do. It works the way that instincts work in Freud's theory: at first, the baby just wants something to eat, without knowing what it wants. It has a rather indefinite yearning which, nevertheless, can be satisfied by some things and not by others. Later, with experience, the child begins to yearn for something more specific when it is hungry -- a bottle, a cookie, a broiled lobster, a slice of New York style pizza.

The archetype is like a black hole in space in that you only know its there by how it draws matter and light to itself. The mother archetype is a particularly good example (Top Media Entertainment). All of our ancestors had mothers. We have evolved in an environment that included a mother or mother-substitute. We would never have survived without our connection with a nurturing-one during our times as helpless infants. It stands to reason that we are "built" in a way that reflects that evolutionary environment. We come into this world ready to want a mother, to seek her, to recognize her, to deal with her. So the mother archetype is our built-in ability to recognize a certain relationship, that of "mothering." Jung says that this is rather abstract, and we are likely to project the archetype out into the world and onto a particular person, usually our own mothers ("Carl Jung"). Even when an archetype doesn't have a particular real person available, we tend to personify the archetype, that is, turn it into a mythological "story-book" character. This character symbolizes the archetype. The mother archetype is symbolized by the primordial mother or "earth mother" of mythology, by Eve and Mary in western traditions, and by less personal symbols such as the church, the nation, a forest, or the ocean. According to Jung, someone whose own mother failed to satisfy the demands of the archetype may well be one that spends his or her life seeking comfort in the church, or in identification with "the motherland," or in meditating upon the figure of Mary, or in a life at sea ("Carl Jung"). These archetypes are not really biological things, like Freud's instincts. They are more spiritual demands.

For example, if you dreamt about long things, Freud might suggest these things represent the phallus and ultimately sex. But Jung might have a very different interpretation. Even dreaming quite specifically about a penis might not have much to do with some unfulfilled need for sex. Sex and the life instincts in general are, of course, represented somewhere in Jung's system. They are a part of an archetype called the shadow. It derives from our pre-human, animal past, when our concerns were limited to survival and reproduction, and when we weren't self-conscious. It is the "dark side" of the ego, and the evil that we are capable of is often stored there. Actually, the shadow is amoral - neither good nor bad, just like animals. An animal is capable of tender care for its young and vicious killing for food, but it doesn't choose to do either. It just does what it does. It is "innocent." But from our human perspective, the animal world looks rather brutal, inhuman, so the shadow becomes something of a garbage can for the parts of ourselves that we can't quite admit to. Symbols of the shadow include the snake, the dragon, monsters, and demons. It often guards the entrance to a cave or a pool of water, which is the collective unconscious. In understanding this, Jung might have theorized that in a dream where one is wrestling the devil, it is really only themselves with which they are wrestling. The persona represents your public image. The word is, obviously, related to the word person and personality, and comes from a Latin word for mask (Kagan 87) So the persona is the mask you put on before you show yourself to the outside world. Although it begins as an archetype, by the time we are finished realizing it, it is the part of us most distant from the collective unconscious (Bennet 70). At its best, it is just the "good impression" people wish to present as they fill the roles society requires of them. But, of course, it can also be the "false impression" we use to manipulate people's opinions and behaviors. And, at its worst, it can be mistaken, even by ourselves, for our true nature. A part of our persona is the role of male or female we must play. For most people that role is determined by their physical gender. But Jung, like Freud and Adler and others, felt that we are all really bisexual in nature. When we begin our lives as fetuses, we have undifferentiated sex organs that only gradually, under the influence of hormones, become male or female.

Likewise, when we begin our social lives as infants, we are neither male nor female in the social sense. Almost immediately, as soon as those pink or blue booties go on, we come under the influence of society, which gradually molds us into men and women. In all societies, the expectations placed on men and women differ, usually based on our different roles in reproduction, but often involving many details that are purely traditional. In our society today, we still have many remnants of these traditional expectations. Women are still expected to be more nurturing and less aggressive; men are still expected to be strong and to ignore the emotional side of life. But Jung felt these expectations meant that we had developed only half of our potential. The anima is the female aspect present in the collective unconscious of men, and the animus is the male aspect present in the collective unconscious of women. Kagan explains that together they are called the syzygy (214). The anima may be personified as a young girl, very spontaneous and intuitive, or as a witch, or as the earth mother. It is likely to be associated with deep emotionality and the force of life itself. The animus may be personified as a wise old man, a sorcerer, or often a number of males, and tends to be logical, often rationalistic, even argumentative. ("Nature of Archetypes"). The anima or animus is the archetype through which you communicate with the collective unconscious generally, and it is important to get into touch with it. It is also the archetype that is responsible for much of our love life. Jung said that there is no fixed number of archetypes which we could simply list and memorize. They overlap and easily melt into each other as needed, and their logic is not the usual kind (Bennet 66).

Jung developed a personality idea that has become so popular that some people don't realize he did anything else! It begins with the distinction between introversion and extroversion. Introverts are people who prefer their internal world of thoughts, feelings, fantasies, dreams, and so on, while extroverts prefer the external world of things and people and activities. The words have become confused with ideas like shyness and sociability, partially because introverts tend to be shy and extroverts tend to be sociable. But Jung intended for them to refer more to whether you more often faced toward the persona and outer reality, or toward the collective unconscious and its archetypes. In that sense, the introvert is somewhat more mature than the extrovert. Our culture, of course, values the extrovert much more. And Jung warned that we all tend to value our own type most! Don Baucum notes that we now find the introvert-extravert dimension in several theories, notably Hans Eysenck's, although often hidden under alternative names such as "sociability" and "surgency" (138).

Anyone interested in creativity, spirituality, psychic phenomena, the universal, and so on will find in Jung a kindred spirit. But scientists, including most psychologists, have a lot of trouble with Jung. Not only does he fully support the teleological view, as do most personality theorists, but he goes a step further and talks about the mystical interconnectedness of synchronicity. Not only does he postulate an unconscious, where things are not easily available to the empirical eye, but he postulates a collective unconscious that never has been and never will be conscious. In fact, Jung takes an approach that is essentially the reverse of the mainstream's reductionism: Jung begins with the highest levels, even spiritualism, and derives the lower levels of psychology and physiology from them. Even psychologists who applaud his teleology and position may not be comfortable with him. Like Freud, Jung tries to bring everything into his system. He has little room for chance, accident, or circumstances. Personality, and life in general, may seem "over-explained" in Jung's theory. Throughout his long career Jung maintained a remarkable degree of open-mindedness. He expected change and welcomed it as a sign of health expansion. Most of his central ideas, such as his hypothesis of the collective unconscious, changed and developed during his time. Had he lived longer, other changes would have some. In the treatment of his patients he always showed an expectant interest (Top Media Entertainment). This is true of his system of thought. He excluded the limitations of dogma and confidently anticipated progress. 

Works Cited
Atkinson, Rita. Hilgard Introduction to Psychology. Orlando: Harcourt. 1953
Baucum, Don. Psychology. New York: Barrons. 1999
Bennet, Edward Armstrong. What Jung Really Said. New York: Schocken Books. 1966
 Carl Gustav Jung. 28 December 2001. Top Media Entertainment. 20 November 2005. 
 Carl Jung (1875-1961). 29 November 2005.
 Hammelton, John. The Philosophy of Astrology. 1990. 20 November 2005. 
Kagan, Jerome. Psychology: An Introduction. Orlando: Harcourt. 1968
Nature of Archetypes. 20 November 2005 
 

Add a Review for this free essay

Name: Rate: Select 10 (Good) 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 (Bad)

Comments Characters Left
Verify:*

Sticky Note Text....