Carl Jung
Essay Preview: Carl Jung
1 rating(s)
Report this essay
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 didnt care much for school, and especially couldnt 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 Jungs efforts at analysis. Freud finally said that theyd 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.
Jungs 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 peoples 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 Freuds 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