A Short Introduction to the Life and Work of C. G. Jung

A Short Introduction to the Life and Work of C. G. Jung Sheldon S. Kohn, Ph.D. Independent Scholar and Dreamworker The Importance of Dreams People have been fascinated by dreams from the earliest days of the human race. Even those who are not necessarily interested in their dreams may find themselves waking up with a feeling that something important happened in the flickering, easily forgotten images that formed their reality while they slept. Dreamwork has become an important spiritual and educational practice for many people, and it is common to hear stories of how peoples’ lives have changed and spirits have lifted when they simply started to pay attention to and work with their dream images. Dreamwork is a road with many paths, no less a luminary than Sigmund Freud claimed that dreams were the royal road to the unconscious, and individuals explore the images and stories dreams present in their own ways. The sheer number and focus of approaches to dreamwork can well seem overwhelming; as is often the case, a glance at how we came to be where we are can help one situate himself or herself in the swirling claims and counterclaims about dreamwork that seem to surround anyone interested in the topic or the practice. If you find dreams puzzling or interesting, you join a long line of people who have felt the same way—and some who have made important strides in exploring the unknown inner world. Dreaming makes us human at the same time it advances our humanity. If we could gaze deeply into our ancestral memories, we would find that people as far back as the Neolithic period, at the very beginning of civilization, looked for dreams to provide them with insights into the capriciousness of the gods—and into what poor humans could do to sate their wrath and appetites. Such Neolithic practices were established enough that there was nothing new about them. In some primitive cultures, people called shamans would dream for the entire community and share their Big Dreams with all the people. In the Western tradition, we find that dreams are prominent in both the Old and the New Testaments as one way that Yahweh and God communicate with their people. To take but one example, in Matthew 1:18-19, an angel tells Joseph that God is the father of Mary’s child and that he should marry her. Dreams are considered important in a wide range of cultures. Islam has a rich tradition of dream interpretation, reaching back to the eighth and nine centuries of the Current Era. Today, in major cities of the Arab world, believers have telephone access to a religious person who can interpret dreams. The East has always had greater access to psychic realities than the West, so its traditions are full of spiritual practices that engage and confront the realities of psychic process. Ancient Indian texts from as far back as the third century BCE promote the treatment and cure of mental illness. Dreams have also been important in completely secular undertakings. One famous example is the dream the chemist August Kekule had of a snake eating its own tail, which led to his discovery of the cyclic structure of the benzene molecule. Such dreams are so powerful that we record and remember them hundreds, even thousands, of years after they occurred. A serious seeker may indeed find powerful guidance and meaning in dreams. For some people, it is turning on a light to illuminate the darkness of the psyche. Even a brief glance into the wide variety of materials freely available on dreams these days confirms that there are many approaches to dreams active at the present time. Much dreamwork in practice today is based on the work of the great psychiatrist Carl G. Jung. Even so, it is important to note that one need not have psychological symptoms, or be seeking relief from them, to practice dreamwork on the highest level. Jung’s ideas apply equally to one seeking insight into his or her dreams as to a patient undergoing psychiatric treatment for a serious disorder. By speaking of dreamwork, I intend something completely inclusive that "1 ultimately becomes defined by the dreamer according to his or her purposes and interests.1 There are numerous books and essays that explore the history of the discovery and exploration of the unconscious. 2 In this essay, I want to provide an overview of the development of dynamic psychiatry before Jung and how the science of the unconscious advanced until Jung arrived and where he took it. Like much of the modern framework of science, the initial development of what would become analytical psychology began in the Enlightenment of the Eighteenth century. Getting to Jung: A Brief Overview of Dynamic Psychiatry in the Nineteenth Century The first glimmers of what would become dynamic psychiatry appeared in France with the discoveries and performances of Franz Friedrich Anton Mesmer. His name is the source of the word mesmerize. A physician with an interest in astronomy, Mesmer was the first to discover the technique of hypnotism and proposed the theory of animal magnetism, which was very popular from the late 1700s through the mid-1800s, with its echoes lingering into the twentieth century. Mesmer, a showman with a desire to be one of the fashionable set, married a rich widow in Vienna and established himself as a patron of the arts. Mozart mentions him affectionately in Cosi fan tutte. Among medical men of the day, and for a long time after Mesmer, one difficult question was what to do with women’s uncontrollable emotions that appeared in episodes of hysteria. In the 1770s, Mesmer began treating hysteria patients, at first with the use of magnets. He then stopped using magnets altogether and developed his theory of animal magnetism. He became famous when he argued that, while a priest was undoubtably sincere in his belief that he was casting out demons, actually he was accessing the powers of animal magnetism: science was a much more advanced explanation than faith among the smart set. Mesmer, thus. initiated the modern science of dynamic psychiatry by replacing faith with science. Mesmer reached too far, however, and was forced to leave Vienna for Paris when he failed to cure a young woman’s blindness. Though Mesmer failed to attract much official acclaim for his work, he did develop large groups of both defenders and detractors of his treatments and theories. Mesmer worked with both individuals and in groups. The basic idea was that Mesmer wanted to provoke a psychological crisis in the patient, in the form of hysteria, so that he could cure it through his animal magnetism. Health would be restored when the energy in a patient was 11 It is worth noting that Carl Jung was influential in the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous. When the man who would become the founder of AA, a hopeless drunk Jung felt was a hopeless case, asked Jung if there was any hope for him, Jung replied, "Yes, there is. Exceptions to cases such as yours have been occurring since early times. Here and there, once in a while, alcoholics have had what are called vital spiritual experiences. To me these are phenomena. They appear to be in the nature of huge emotional displacements and rearrangements. Ideas, emotions, and attitudes which were once the guiding forces of the lives of these men are suddenly cast to one side, and a completely new set of conceptions and motives begin to dominate them. In fact, I have been trying to produce some such emotional rearrangement within you. With many individuals the methods which I employed are successful, but I have never been successful with an alcoholic of your description.” Qtd in Ernest Kurtz, Not-God: A History of Alcoholics Anonymous (1979: Hazelden Books, Center City, Mn., 8-9. Far from being elitist and out to touch with the lives and concerns of ordinary people, Jung’s work has helped to give millions of people new possibilities in their lives. 2 Those with an interest in the topic would find much of interest in Henri F. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry. Although a weighty tome, this book holds the reader’s interest and reads well. "2 again flowing in all directions. No matter the scientific validity or acceptance of his methods, Mesmer was soon so popular that he had to develop a group treatment method. These were said to have been almost theatrical performances with Mesmer all dressed in purple, the patients each holding a rod that would transfer the animal magnetism from him to each of them. A French royal commission that included Benjamin Franklin investigated Mesmer and concluded that any effect from his work arose from “imagination.” After leaving Paris, Mesmer went to Switzerland and travelled a good bit before dying in 1815. Although he may have been less than successful in establishing a new field of science with animal magnetism, he nevertheless proved beyond all doubt that there were stirrings in the human psyche that greatly exceeded those under conscious control. An important point is that Mesmer’s patients frequently reported feeling better after his treatment, and a number of them also reported being spiritually reinvigorated. Although his theories were soon replaced, science had made the first halting steps towards dynamic psychiatry. On the whole, the psychiatric project of the nineteenth century was characterized by the creation of institutions designed to provide mentally ill patients with compassionate treatment. As the scientific search for a cure for mental disorders proceeded, the nature of the diseases eluded the medical men who pursued such research. They had no tools or instruments capable of measuring and identifying a concussion, much less any organic causes of such diseases. One of the most puzzling disorders medical men at the time had to treat long remained hysteria in women. The medical profession on the whole was received to cede such challenging cases to the emerging psychiatric field. Hysteria was considered a female ailment, and there was much debate as to whether its cause was biological, or something else. Most investigators, who were male, agreed that women could not control their emotions and were subject to wild swings of mood. An early scientific investigator was Jean-Martin Charcot who pursued research in both neurology and psychiatry for 33 years at the Salpetriere Hospital in Paris. Students eagerly came from all over Europe to study with him. In neurology, he was instrumental in identifying diseases such as multiple sclerosis and Parkinson’s disease. However, he gained his greatest fame for his work with hysteria and hypnosis. His initial conclusion was that hysteria was a disease with a biological basis in the nervous system, with certain people being more prone to the disease due to hereditary factors. Unlike the vast majority of his contemporary medical investigators, Charcot did not see the disease as a female problem and found numerous cases of hysteria in men, even those in such manly fields as soldiers. 3 Based on his clinical research, Charcot promulgated the theory that hysteria was an organic disease that could be caused by trauma. While Charcot was working, the ideas of mesmerism and hypnosis were widely popular in the larger culture. Charcot took mesmerism a bit further and used hypnosis. By the end of his life he changed his position to see hysteria as a psychological disorder, rather than one based in neurological factors. This led to much debate as to whether any improvement in a patient’s symptoms following hypnosis was due to treatment or simple suggestion. The young Sigmund Freud entered this fields as a medical student while debate was raging all across Europe. Born in Austria in 1856, Sigmund Freud studied medicine and was initially a neurologist, firmly ensconced in the biological camp. Seeking fame, and after an unfortunate venture publishing a paper praising cocaine as a wonder drug, Freud left Vienna for the Salpetriere to study with Charcot from October 1885 through February 1886. At the time, Charcot focused on treating 3 Carl Jung (CW 18, para 1384) considered Hitler to be a male hysteric: “Hitler was in my view primarily an hysteric. (Already in the first World War he had been officially diagnosed as such.) More particularly he was characterized by a subform of hysteria: pseudologia phantastica. In other words, he was a “pathological liar.” "3 patients with physical symptoms and taught that, first, they had suffered trauma but, second, that the symptoms they displayed arose from the idea of the trauma they had developed. Freud began working with Josef Breuer, who had been treating the famous patient Anna O. since 1880 with his famous method of the talking cure. Based on his work with this patient, Breuer theorized that the way to cure hysteria was to access the memory of the trauma and allow the patient to express any emotion associated with it, thus bringing about catharsis and cure. Freud agreed with Breuer that Anna O. had been completely cured of all hysterical symptoms. However, Freud began to develop psychoanalysis by conflating Breuer’s methods with Charcot’s views: Freud’s technique for bringing forth repressed traumatic memories included both free-association and interpretation. Freud’s early patients were all women he considered hysterics, and they all exhibited physical symptoms. The actual history of Freud’s work belies the common assumption that psychoanalysis emerged as Freud profitably worked with Viennese women of the middle and upper classes. In fact, it emerged out of the time Freud spent in Paris, working with patients all exhibiting physical symptoms. As one reads the history of psychoanalysis, one wonders what might have emerged had Freud, perhaps even Jung, been working with the scientific knowledge and equipment of today. Given the limitations and lack of technology and equipment for neurology at the time, the ground was fertile for Freud’s appropriation of Charcot’s idea that patients produced symptoms unconsciously. Nineteenth-century neurology allowed the medical men of the time to enlarge the category of “hysteria” to include disorders than we now know have a physical basis. Critics of Freud have been correct to point out that psychoanalysis was based on the medicine and science of a time when a concussion could not be diagnosed. Charcot, Breuer, and Freud, in turn, could make “hysteria” mean anything they liked, and conclude, based on the available science, that patients’ symptoms had no physical basis. Anna O., to take but one example, would most likely not be diagnosed as an hysteric today. Critics of Freud also point out vehemently that there is evidence to show he never actually cured anyone. Freudian psychoanalysis remains practiced today, though to a much lesser degree than in its post-World War II heyday, but mainstream psychiatry is more oriented towards pharmacology, for better or for worse, reflecting our contemporary scientific prejudice that all disorders have biological causes. Although psychoanalysis was conceived and developed as a medical treatment, its greatest impact would be on culture through its pervasive influence in the humanities. After all, Freud was nominated for a Nobel Prize in Literature, not Medicine. If the reception of Freud in Psychiatry remains somewhat tepid, he has found much more enthusiastic disciples in the liberal arts, particularly literature and certain forms of history.4 Whatever Freud’s limitations as a scientist, his writings are full of insights into human nature, and he offers his clinical work in a narrative framework that appeals to students of literature and writers of all forms of literature. In the greater culture, Freudian ideas pervade our view of human nature. Most educated people are aware of the id, ego, and superego, as well as understanding ideas like defense mechanisms, infantile sexuality, repression, Oedipus complex, and projection. Experience teaches the value of these ideas, even if science and medicine do not embrace them. Many a seeker has found greater insight into human nature and his or her own personality in novels than in any number of psychology textbooks, and Freud helps us understand literature. 4 Theodore Dreiser wrote that Freud reminded him “of a conqueror who has taken a city, entered its age-old hoary prisons and there generously proceeded to release from their gloomy and rusted cells the prisoners of formulae, faiths and illusions which have racked and worn man for hundreds and thousands of years” (quoted in Ronald W. Clark, Freud: The Man and the Cause, Paladin, 1982, 421). "4 At the base of his work, Freud insists on dream interpretation as the royal road (via regia) to the unconscious. In this, Freud follows Charcot, though he moves in a new direction. When Charcot began using hypnosis, the technique was considered little more than a parlor game in France. People were interested in the effects of hypnosis and now it supported the work scientists and medical men were doing to discover the unconscious. Charcot embraced hypnosis, though the medical establishment of his time considered it frivolous and unserious. Dreams were likewise held in little esteem when Freud began working with them. One might find a fortune teller willing to interpret dreams or one might play a parlor game with dreams, but they were not considered any part of serious medical practice or investigation. No serious scientific enterprise attempted to plumb their meanings. Freud argued that repression does not work during sleep and repressed material finds its way to consciousness in a distorted form through dreams. Giving attention to a patient’s dreams gives one insight into this patient’s particular unconscious conflicts and into the dynamics of the greater human unconscious. Based on one of his own dreams that he interpreted as addressing his guilt for not being able to cure a patient, Freud posited that wish fulfillment was one of the primary purposes of dreams. To analyze a dream, the analyst must distinguish between the manifest content (what the dreamer remembers), often based on what has gone on in the patient’s normal daytime life, and the latent content, which is the symbolic expression of the underlying wish seeking fulfillment. Dream work in the Freudian sense involves the process of interpreting how the underlying wish becomes expressed symbolically in the dream’s manifest content. Universal symbols appear in Freudian dream work: everyone is familiar with phallic symbols. However, Freud was generally not supportive of the idea of universal symbols, preferring always to relate dream content to the dreamer’s personal situation, arrived at through psychoanalytic techniques such as free association. It is easy to admire Freud and appreciate the sheer genius of what he did, but one wonders whether psychoanalysis should have developed as a medical pursuit. What might have followed if it were not limited to psychotherapy and controlled by the medical and psychological machines of our time? One thing remains certain, however: Freud’s work and theories first attracted and then repelled Carl Jung. The Prophet Who Lived Like a Banker Although Freud found a home in the humanities, and still holds sway over much critical writing and theory, Carl Jung’s work has spread so far throughout the culture as to be almost ubiquitous. Jung left us an abundance of writings that give his views and theories on numerous psychological subjects. Jung was was born in 1875, the son of a minister with eight paternal uncles and two maternal uncles who were also clergymen. His maternal grandfather had also served as a minister. Even as a child Jung was an unusual individual. He recounts having a terrifying vision of God setting on a church at the age of three or four. He reports frequently sitting on a rock and wondering whether he was sitting on the rock or whether he was the rock that was being sat upon. During these periods of childish reflection, he discovered that he had two personalities. Number One was involved in the ordinary and everyday aspects of life. Number Two seemed somehow timeless and connected with the stream and flow of history. He was a peculiar child with few friends, preferring to spend time alone. A man whose parents brought him to play with Jung when he was nine years old described him as an “asocial monster.” As an adolescent, Jung grew distant from his father, who was engaged in a profound spiritual crisis and was unavailable to his son. He developed a close relationship with his mother. Although a conventional Swiss woman socially, she had some mystical aspects in her personality, and she encouraged her son’s interest in occult topics and experience. He started "5 school in Basel at age 12 and developed a personality that was inwardly insecure, but outwardly somewhat arrogant. He developed an illness which allowed him happily to stay away from school for six months and only returned after he overheard his father worrying that he would never be self-sufficient. During this period of his life, Jung was extremely lonely and knew envy quite well as he looked at his better-off classmates. He continued his introspections and reverie, finding himself greatly drawn the the idea of an unknowable God. Such experience, while exacerbating his loneliness, prepared him for the solitary path he would follow later, knowing and exploring things that the vast majority of people in the world have no interest in and do not care about at all. In 1895, shortly after Jung entered the University of Basel, his father was diagnosed with cancer and died with Jung by his side. His father’s death seemed somehow to liberate Jung, and he became a voracious reader of philosophical texts, as well as a member of the student social scene. Jung became quite interested in spiritualism and psychic phenomena, and he used his cousin Helene Preiswerk, a medium, as the research subject for his doctoral dissertation. What would be one of Jung’s main ideas arose from his personal experience: the idea of the tension of the opposites. As noted above, he had developed a conception of having a Number One and Number Two personality as a child. While a student, he developed an outward personality as a scientist dedicated to rationality while also having an inner Number Two personality that considered metaphysical questions, which cannot be answered by the methods and practices of science, to be of the utmost importance. Jung insisted that wholeness was only possible when the opposites join in a fashion resembling Hegel’s dialectics to create a wholeness, which is a third that arises out of the first two. At age 24, Jung first read Nietzsche, which showed him how man and the world should be. He later came to understand that such work arose from what he conceived of as the collective unconscious, the shared structure and experience in the deepest layers of the unconscious that structure our minds as humans and contain hints of the Divine. Jung considered studying internal medicine with a famous practitioner, but while he was preparing for exams he read a textbook by Richard von Krafft-Ebing, which changed everything. As soon as he read the book, he knew decisively that he would be a psychiatrist and seek to understand and explore the unconscious mind. Psychiatry at the time, as in our time, was not well-respected within the medical community, and Jung’s friends regarded his choice of psychiatry as regrettable. Psychiatrists at the time largely spent their time working with hopeless cases in large institutions; this seemed one of the worst possible choices for an ambitious young man. In 1900, Jung first read Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, though he put it aside for three years until he found that it had some connections with his own emerging theories. Jung went to work at the famous Burgholzli hospital, then under the direction of the eminent Eugen Bleuer. He quickly rose to the position of Deputy Director and began developing a reputation for curing symptoms that brought him lucrative private patients. He took patients’ symptoms and hallucinations seriously, and he is said to have always treated his patients as individuals. He developed the word association test to identify unconscious complexes the patients had. In 1903, Jung married the wealthy Emma Rauschenbach, forming a complicated union that would produce four daughters and a son and lasted until her death in 1955. As part of a well-to-do family, her dowry meant that financial difficulties were no longer a part of Jung’s life. For the first time, he was free to embrace psychoanalysis in spite of the great resistance to it in scientific, medical, and psychiatric circles. In the first decade of the twentieth century, Freud’s ideas were becoming more widespread, though not within the academic circles Jung aspired to join. Jung, however, found much of interest in Freud and began defending his work at academic conferences. Only much later would Jung express doubts he held about Freud’s work, particularly the small number of cases that Freud based his theories upon and the fact that Freud traced the cause of all neurosis to "6 sexual repression; he did not know this when he began exploring Freud’s ideas. Although in the Burgholzli he could find much evidence that the onset of neurosis was somehow tied to trauma, Jung did not find infantile sexual trauma the exclusive cause, as Freud did. Jung also found evidence of conflicts in the unconscious, something anathema to Freud. In 1906, Jung began a correspondence with Freud, which resulted in their first meeting in Vienna after Jung’s book on schizophrenia was published. Their first conversation lasted for thirteen hours. Jung was impressed by Freud and called him “the first man of real importance I had seen.”5 When Jung expressed his doubts, Freud credited them to Jung’s inexperience. Jung was also deeply troubled by Freud’s reluctance to consider spirituality as nothing more than repressed sexuality. Freud spoke of sexuality in a tone and with seriousness people reserve for God. Only after their friendship was completely dissolved could Jung conclude that Freud had “a mystical attitude towards sexuality.”6 Freud gradually came to see Jung as the Crown Prince and inheritor of the psychoanalytic movement. One interesting aspect of this relationship is that Emma Jung also befriended Freud and often wrote asking advice on how to deal with her mercurial husband. In 1909, Freud and Jung made their famous trip together to Clark University in the United States, where they were together for seven weeks. They spent time analyzing each other’s dreams, until Freud refused to give Jung information which would help him interpret a dream. During the following period, Jung reported having a series of bad dreams. He paid careful attention to them, as always. As he said, “dreams have influenced all the important changes in my life and theories.”7 He reported that all his dreams during this period pointed to a break with Freed over the question of the primacy of sexuality. Jung found that dreams had a religious and spiritual character that could not be reduced to, or be explained away as, sexual repression. Eventually, their relationship deteriorated to the point that Freud wrote Jung a letter in 1913 in which he severed all further communication. They never reconciled. Jung went into a profound period of isolation after his break with Freud. He had already left his position at the Burgholzli in 1909, and now his students fled him to work with Freud, who dismissed his work out of hand. Although such isolation could have been a fatal blow for an extrovert, for an introvert like Jung, solitude can be a great blessing. He had time and freedom to investigate and explore his inner world. To put it in terms that Jung would perhaps find to have explanatory force, one could say that he had lived in the outer world until age 40, being concerned with all the tasks and activities of the first half of life: career, family, success. After 40, however, Jung shifted to issues more related to the second half of life, such as religious questions and those of the inner world. His work written after 1915 takes on a completely different character, tone, and focus from his earlier work. The shift Jung undertook is one that he would come to declare as necessary in the second half of life for any thinker: he began to bring the feeling function of his psyche out of the unconscious, where it had been banished in earlier development, into consciousness. The repressed function takes on the characteristics of the other gender in any person. For a man, this broken-off piece of the soul is called the anima, and it takes on a female form and function. A man sees her in female figures that appear in dreams. For women, the animus is the repressed function, an he appears in both dreams and moods that dominate the woman. A man generally dislikes giving himself over to the anima, as it feels unmoored, and he does have good reason to feel afraid: repressed feeling emerges through complexes in the form of outbursts he simply cannot control. He feels battered and 5 1925 Lectures, 20. 6 1925 Lectures, 21. 7 1925 Lectures, 25. "7 debased, but mostly helpless in the face of feeling. Jung says clearly, however, that this journey must be undertaken if a man is to gain control of his creative power (which lies in the middle of sexuality and spirituality). The process Jung undertook has been described in various terms throughout all of human history. Homer called it the nekyia. St. John of the Cross described it as the dark night of the soul. It is the inner journey through which a man comes to fully understand, not in exclusively intellectual terms, that there is something greater than his ego to which he must attend. Jung was inexperienced in exploring the unconscious, and he reports feeling fearful at times that he was going insane. But Jung persevered, and this led to his discovery of the collective unconscious in the form of the reality of the inner psyche. Jung wondered if psychotic delusions arose from the same source as myths. While the psychotic is overwhelmed by the power of these forces, Jung discovered that he could disarm them of their power by personalizing them. During the last two years of World War I, while Jung served in the Swiss Army, he began producing mandalas, circular images that reflect the totality of psychic processes. They served him as a record of his own psychic development. He kept a record of his journey from 1915 until 1930 in what is called The Red Book, which was often discussed but not seen except by a few people until it was published in 2009. In general, Jung’s grandchildren have proven much more open to publishing and sharing his personal materials than his children. This book has literally changed the way we see Jung. In it, readers follow Jung’s development and use of active imagination, which involves entering into dialogue through fantasy with figures arising from the unconscious. In the early stages, Jung was not any more ready to undertake this procedure than any of us would be, and he reported having the greatest possible resistance to it initially. However, during this process, Jung changed forever and discovered his life’s work, the exploration of the collective unconscious. In Memories, Dreams, and Reflections, his autobiography, Jung explains the transformation in him that followed his solitary work over these six years: The years when I was pursuing my inner images were the most important in my life—in them everything essential was decided. . . . It was then that I ceased to belong to myself alone, ceased to have the right to do so. From then on my life belonged to the generality. The knowledge I was concerned with, or was seeking, still could not be found in the science of those days. I had myself to undergo the original experience, and, moreover, try to plant the results of my experience in the soil of reality. . . . It was then that I dedicated myself to the service of the psyche. I loved it and hated it, but it was my greatest wealth. Over the decades remaining to him, Jung dedicated himself completely and fully to this task. Although many readers have found more than just a touch of religious dedication in Jung’s statement, he always fought any attempt to be labelled as a mystic and insisted that he was an empiricist following wherever his research and experience led. He stressed repeatedly that the goal of human development was completion, wholeness, never perfection, which is not available to any mortal. The process of growth that results in completion is “individuation.” Jung’s first book in this new phase of his work was Psychological Types, published in 1921. This book arose out of the experience Jung had of working with his unconscious and fantasy material, Jung developed his idea of psychological types to explain the basic differences in psychological orientations people apply in their quest to seek understanding. Everyone knows the two basic types (extrovert and introvert), though the terms in common usage suffer from imprecision. His work with his Amina figure showed him that there existed in his psyche an independent figure with a point-of-view much different than his own. The inner images had a "8 reality of their own and held so much meaning that he was caught in fascination. The Anima figure has a dual nature: one positive and one negative. The relationship a man develops to this figure is highly emotional, something most men’s intellects do not deal with easily. Thus, a man approaches the Anima fearfully, for he knows that he can be captured and overwhelmed by an emotion or a mood. Likewise, a woman’s Animus has a bright and a dark side, but the relationship is more logical than emotional. He said that a woman dominated by the animus is full of opinions. These differences in relationship to the inner other appear when a man is racked by anxiety over something while, facing the same problem, the woman proceeds with absolute assurance that things will somehow work out fine. IN general, Jung held that women seek unity where men make discrimination on fine points of difference. Anyone who ever took the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator has been directly influenced by Jung’s research into psychological types. Sensation types depend upon their perception of reality as it is now, and the picture remains static in the moment. This makes them skillful in dealing with things as they are, though it is an irrational function. Intuitives are deeply in touch with the reality of possibility. Reality, for such persons, is dynamic. Thinkers make their ideas into reality, with great conviction. Ultimately, ideas have their base in archetypal structures, somewhat like the forms that Plato claimed existed before the world existed and from which everything in the world is derived. In the Gospel of John, this source for all ideas is called Logos, following Heraclitus. For thinkers, the question arises as to whether images actually have reality, an important consideration for dream work. The same question also applies to feeling, which relies likewise on archetypal images, but sees them as dynamic and constantly in change. Each person sees life through the dominant function, and one of the biggest mistakes people can make is to assume that everyone else’s psychology operates the same way as their own. By 1923, Jung was beginning work on his famous tower at Bollingen, project that he would work on for the next 32 years. Over the years, Jung would go to the tower to refresh himself and to write without all the distractions of a busy practice and public schedule in Kusnacht. He often said that he felt most like himself at the tower, where he could dress and eat like the peasant that he was. Even today, Jung’s grandchildren fondly remember time they spent with him at Bollingen. Jung had the opportunity to work with his hands here, both in the building of the tower and in the numerous carvings on its premises. He would tell his children, and later his grandchildren, stories that would spur their imaginations. Local fishermen would bring their catches to Jung, cleaned and ready for the stove. In Bollingen, the great man could wear socks with holes in them and wash his own clothes in lake water. He could retreat from the pressures of his practice and patients and transform his research and experience into his many writings on the structure and function of the psyche. People who visited him said that he dressed and looked like an alchemist when in the kitchen. When the food was done, in a perfectly medieval gesture, he would throw the remains to the dogs on the floor. Life was good, and Carl Jung lived it to the fullest. Jung was always interested in trying to find precedents for his discoveries, for he felt that the archetypes and the collective unconscious, the source of religion and myth, had been with man since the beginning as a fundamental structuring organizer of the psyche. He found much he agreed with and understood in the writings of the gnostics. He also thought that the systems of the East regarded and worked towards wholeness in a way that the West had not perhaps for millennia. However, it was in the discarded and disparaged writings of the alchemists that he found the clearest predecessor of his work. The image of the alchemists that has been retained in the popular imagination is that of seekers trying to transform base metal into gold through a series of operations, and there was often a sense of fraud than went along with alchemists. The modern idea is that all such nonsense was thrown aside permanently when the science of chemistry replaced such medieval darkness and error. "9 As Jung read these discarded texts, they made a profound impression on him, and it seemed that everything fell in place in his theoretical model. One is tempted to agree somewhat with Gary Lachman in Jung the Mystic that he overlaid his ideas onto alchemy a bit too neatly and tidily. Be that as is may, Jung worked with these ancient and obscure texts for a decade before concluding that any transformation or change in a person’s psyche is a function of the relationship of the ego to the unconscious. Alchemy was useful for Jung because it expressed unconscious archetypal elements that were not integrated into mainstream Christianity but that are important for human wholeness. He found numerous parallels between alchemical symbols and material from the unconscious that his patients presented. This topic engaged him enough that three of the eighteen volumes of his collected works deal with alchemy: Psychology and Alchemy; Alchemical Studies; and Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy. In addition to his research into alchemy, Jung kept an active clinical practice in Kusnacht and travelled extensively in North America, Africa, and Asia, freely exploring and writing about questions of spirituality and religion. By the 1930s, Jung was famous and attracted people who, essentially, wanted to worship him. To a young woman who had come to him, one of his first questions was, “Can’t you see me as a human being?” Jung did not believe in therapeutic distance and saw therapy as a coming together of two personalities, which would affect them both. He concluded that only one who was wounded could be a healer and insisted that all would-be analysts must themselves undergo analysis before being allowed to practice. Like many of his contemporaries, Jung did not know what to make of the Nazis at first, and he has often been taken to task for various statements he made from 1933 to 1936. However, he was firmly opposed to the Nazis thereafter. From 1934 to 1939, he served as the President of the International Society for Medical Psychotherapy, a position from which he attempted to protect Jewish colleagues. He was invited by friends and admirers to come to the safety of the USA for the duration of the Second World War, but he declined and lived as an ordinary Swiss throughout the conflict. Neutral Switzerland shared a culture and a long border with Germany. Had Germany invaded Switzerland, Jung would have had good reason to fear for his life. In 1937, Jung took an important trip to India. He previously had admitted being troubled by the way that Indian religion seemed to point to a state that did not account for good and evil, but his assumptions were challenged on this trip. In India, he had a big dream that opened up a new direction for him. He found himself off the shore of England searching for the Holy Grail. The dream reminded him that his task was not in India, but in Europe, which was on the verge of a catastrophe that could wipe out the benefits of hundreds of years of progress and civilization in a bloodbath and orgy of violence. He also needed to continue his studies in alchemy. The isolation and privation of the war years led to productive work for Jung. In 1944, the 69-year-old Jung had a heart attack which kept his life in doubt for a period of time: meanwhile, his inner life produced profound visions. He saw himself in a place where all was one, indescribably beautiful and filled with peace. Only reluctantly did he attend to the voices that called him back to earth to continue his work. The end of World War II brought a Europe facing challenges and problems in every aspect of life. Jung found himself again confronting the problem of evil through the example of Germany. People could be simply evil, and evil could lead even a great country into a state of rot. In his eighth decade and freed from constraints that might have held him back before the war, Jung took on topics such as parapsychology, UFOs, and the occult. Jung was willing to go so far as to state that not one of his patients in the second half of life did not have a problem which could not be traced back to a religious problem. To be cured, his older patients needed to develop a religious attitude, though he insisted that imperative does not imply adherence to any particular doctrine or creed. "10 The C G Jung Institute was founded in April 1948 to continue Jung’s work and to serve as a place for research into all aspects of analytical psychology. One gets a clear sense of where Jung’s thinking was at the moment when he said during his opening address that “we are driven to the conclusion that the space-time continuum, including mass, is psychically relative —in other words that it forms a unity with the unconscious psyche. Accordingly, there must be a phenomena which can be explained only in terms of a psychic relativity of space, time, and mass.”8 Much of Jung’s thinking on the nature of evil received his final word when he published Answer to Job in 1952. This was a book he could not have published earlier, as he knew the content of this book would unleash a firestorm of criticism against him. In it, he deals with the light and dark sides of God, something not present in the New Testament. The impetus for the book came from a dream in which Jung was surrounded by Islamic images, yet could not touch his forehead to the ground to represent his complete surrender to God. In this dream image, he discovered a touch of free will, and the book almost seemed to write itself from that point. While most critics were unfailingly hostile to the book, it became a surprises best seller in America, taken up by young people and those with religious questions the church did not answer. Essentially, Jung attempts to re-vision Christianity as monotheism by pointing to both the light and dark sides of the One God. He considers Christianity to be dualistic because evil is not part of God—often blamed on humans, though scripture teaches that evil existed before man was created. Ultimately, Jung addresses the question of what type of God mankind had created, which is far from examining the full and true nature of God: one of the deepest mysteries in the universe. Jung begins with the astonishing assertion that God created mankind with consciousness to develop his argument that God thus needs mankind’s consciousness to become fully aware of Himself. Jung went his own way in his relationship to Christianity. He found other religious paths equally as valid as Christianity, and he would have liked to have seen development of a wider religion that accepts truths from all great traditions of both East and West, perhaps something like Manichaeism that arose from the mixture of cultures along the Silk Road. In Jung’s view, Christianity was not a static religion that appeared fully formed two thousand years ago and does not change. The Holy Spirit remains active in the world and brings forth more of God’s glory with each succeeding generation. Jung sees in the example of Christ a model for the process of individuation, and he also reminds us of the inner nature of Paul’s conversion. Paul’s faith arose out of experience, but Jung finds the contemporary church offering just the opposite message: believe and then experience. The protestant’s religious experience becomes the creed or dogma of a particular sect, which leads believers further away from experience that would help them to become more fully who they are. Having taken on the Christian religious establishment, Jung next joined forces with the physicist Wolfgang Pauli to publish his work on synchronicity. In this work, Jung explores the nature of acausal connectedness, and takes on the established view that cause and effect occurs only linearly in time. Meaningful coincidence can only be explained on the basis of time and space being relative, with a merging of psyche and matter, of inner and outer. Jung found that certain aspects of the psyche seem to operate independent of time and space, so their explanation would seem to require some sort of four-dimensional model. This conclusion also applies to certain phenomena studied by contemporary physics. In spite of all the accolades and honors that came his way, all the famous people who wanted to make his acquaintance, Jung impressed those who got to know him with his humanity. 8 CW 18, para 1133) "11 During sessions with patients, he would frequently pet his dog, as if that kept him grounded. He received letters and visits from ordinary people, who just wanted to meet the man who had written the books. As he moved into old age, those who were close to him noted that he could be melancholy about the lack of understanding he had received from mainstream medicine and psychiatry. It was if if the “mystic” label that Freud had assigned him all those years ago continued to frame people’s responses to his work. Jung received a huge blow when Toni Wolf, his longtime mistress, collaborator, and companion, died in 1953. At age 79, Jung knew that time was no longer on his side. As he wrote to Analie Jaffe later that year, “The 79th year is 80 - 1, and that is a terminus a quo which you can't help taking seriously. The provisionalness of life is indescribable. Everything you do, whether watching a cloud or cooking soup, is done on the edge of eternity and is followed by the suffix of infinity. It is meaningful and futile at once. And so is oneself, a wondrously living centre and at the same time an instant already sped. One is and is not. This frame of mind encompasses me and hems me in. Only with an effort can I look beyond into a semi-selfsubsistent world I can barely reach, or which leaves me behind.”9 Jung frequently bemoaned the state of a world where so-called educated people did not have a background in the liberal arts and were not able to understand an articulate system of theory such as his due to a lack of ability in critical thinking and familiarity with basic texts, even the Bible. As he approached his 80th birthday, he wrote to Mary Bancroft that “My real self is actually chopping wood in Bollingen and cooking the meals, trying to forget the trial of an eightieth birthday.”10 By the time Jung celebrated his 80th birthday, he was sure that there would be people who would follow him and develop his psychology further. He expected his psychology to be developed by people who would read his books and carry his work further, in new ways. The same year brought the tragic death of Emma, his wife. She had not been well for a while and was recovering from surgery, though she was able to partake in the celebrations of his 80th birthday. She also spent some time with him at Bollingen in her final months. After she died, Jung wrote to Erich Neumann that he was surrounded by “audible silence.” He carved a stone for her, which is still visible at Bollingen. It is elegant and expresses a symmetry of completion, marked by the sun and moon, as well as a Eucharistic Host and a paten. In Latin, he carved the following inscription: Oh outstanding vessel of devotion and obedience! To the ancestral spirits of my most beloved and faithful wife Emma Maria. She completed her life and after her death she was lamented. She went over to the secret of eternity in the year 1955. Her age was 73. Her husband C.G. Jung has made and placed [this stone] in 1956. In his late days, Jung constantly insisted that his work was scientific: he was not describing God, but a God-image in the psyche. God is ineffable and unknowable, but the God-image appears as the organizing principle of the collective unconscious. He felt this strongly enough to correct erroneous points Pastor Walter Bernet had made about his writings in a 1955 letter, “I have in all conscience never supposed that in discussing the psychic structure of the Godimage I have taken God himself in hand. I am not a word-magician or word-fetishist who thinks he can posit or call up a metaphysical reality with his incantations.”11 Jung continued to find time, even then, to correspond with the average people who would write him of their troubles 9 Letters v 2, 126 10 Letters, V2, 270. 11 Letters, v2, 260. "12 and dilemmas, as when we wrote to a woman in answer to her query as to whether suicide could be a reasonable solution to her problems, “I am not at all sure what will happen to me after death. I have good reasons to assume that things are not finished with death. Life seems to be an interlude in a long story. It has been long before I was, and it will most probably continue after the conscious interval in a three dimensional existence. I shall therefore hang on as long as it is humanly possible and I try to avoid all foregone conclusions, considering seriously the hints I got as to the post mortem events.”12 When Jung published his magisterial Mysterium Coniunctionis in 1956, the response was mostly silent incomprehension. However, Jung was still looking forward and was writing for those who would continue to develop analytical psychology after his death. He wrote Eugene Bolhler, “I ran up everywhere against an impenetrable wall. This is probably why my style changed in the course of the years, since I only said what was relevant to the business in hand and wasted no more time and energy thinking about all the things that ill-will, prejudice, stupidity and whatnot can come up with. . . . [I] have resigned myself to being posthumous.”13 Jung was correct in this. Since his death in 1961, there has been a continual development of his ideas and new approaches to their application. In response to Professor Benjamin Nelson, who requested an essay from Jung to be included in a volume on Freud and the twentieth-century, Jung repeated that he had already said what he needed to: “In the 18 or more volumes of my Collected Works I have said all I could possibly think of. Whatever I might be able to write now would neither be new nor in any way better than the stuff I produced 30 or 40 years ago. It is still neither read nor understood by my contemporaries. In full ignorance of my work one is satisfied with misconceptions, distortions, and prejudices. I cannot force people to take my work seriously and I cannot persuade them to study it really. The trouble is that I don't construct theories one can learn by heart. I collect facts which are not yet generally known or properly appreciated, and I give names to observations and experiences unfamiliar to the contemporary mind and objectionable to its prejudices.”14 ‑ With the assistance of Analie Jaffe, Jung spent his latter days engaged in a voluminous correspondence and hosting a long list of visitors. In the evenings, he read detective novels and science fiction. He also spent time at Bollingen, the tower now complete with the addition of the upper level. One of his caretakers reported that, late in life, “if one would not know that this is a world-famous scientist, one would think that this is a very queer man who behaves in a rather odd way.”15 Along with Ms. Jaffe, Jung composed Memories, Dreams, and Reflections, though there has been critical dispute as to how much this book is actually Jung’s and how much hers. He always had been reluctant to write an autobiography, and, strictly speaking, this volume is not one. It does not deal with outer events as much as with how Jung explored and responded to his inner life. This book has long remained popular; through reading it many people discover Jung’s work and ideas. As he confessed to a visitor to Bollingen while the volume was being written, “I don’t know the meaning of life.” It seems always good to keep in mind that in the end, even for Jung, life remained a profound mystery. Tirelessly and fearlessly, he had always been willing to explore new areas, to try to join all opposites in a mystical union, to rescue alchemy from the refuse of history. Although Jung initially was reluctant to write this 12 Letters, V2, 279. 13 Letters, V2, 299. 14 Letters, V2, 307. 15 qtd, in Claire Dunne, 191. "13 work, he had a dream that he was talking to all peoples of the world, not just physicians and dignitaries. He still speaks to seekers even more than half a century after his death. Analytical psychology offers a path for courageous and independent loners; for the adepts of this modern version of alchemy, nothing else captivates their soul or imaginations so much. Even so, in all the praise of Jung, in the endless stream of admiration which many people hold in their hearts for him, we risk losing sight of a man who, like all of us, had strengths and weaknesses; who was great and banal; who understood things most of us tremble at the idea of even contemplating, yet who also knew the limits of knowledge; who experienced much of God, yet did not reach Him in the deepest darkness of the unconscious. He correctly understood that ours was a time of great technological progress and advances in science, without an equivalent growth in the souls people rely on to orient themselves and know right and wrong. He saw the limitations collectivism places on people yet unfailingly urged full and complete development of the individual. He was never afraid to insist that all people needed a relationship with God to overcome the world. In a 1959 TV interview in which John Freeman asked if he believed in God, Jung replied, “I don’t have to believe . . . . I know.” God for Jung was that force in life which leads man to fate. Individuation, the goal of Jung’s psychoanalytic work, has a profoundly religious character. As an empiricist, Jung could not define God; he could, and did, however, point out that every human being had a God-image as the central organizing force of the collective unconscious. Jung did not seek to be a saint, radiating in the glory of God. He sought God in the living world where people try and fail, find both good and bad outcomes, and suffer and strive every day. Jung left this world on June 6, 1961, surrounded by his family. Reportedly, shortly before he died, he asked if they could share a good bottle of red wine that evening. Throughout his long life, Jung was consistently clear that no one can tell another person what he or she ought to do. Working with dreams and the unconscious can help illuminate the path. It can throw much light upon what is within a person, but it cannot force you to do anything. Nor can any other person, really. People would come to Jung expecting that he could give them the answers they had been searching for, but all he could do was to help them learn to live their lives. At times, Jung was almost Greek in his pronouncements about fate and its workings in the modern person. But the road ahead rarely falls fully formed like Saul’s vision on the road to Damascus. For most of us, it consists of putting one foot in front of the other on the long road of life and always doing the next necessary thing. Patients would come to Jung expecting a spiritual baptism, hoping for eternal perfect understanding and wisdom in all situations. Instead, they found a tremendous responsibility for living their own lives, for following their own paths. Jung gave no easy succor and false assurances that it would be easy, but most never wanted to go back to where they were. Jung told Allen Watts, “I do not want anyone to be a Jungian. . . I want people above all to be themselves. . . Should I be found one day only to have created another “ism," then I will have failed in alII tried to do.” Interest in Jung’s work and ideas has continued since his death. At present, there are around 2,500 individuals who work as Jungian analysts scattered all around the globe. Beyond that, there are numerous counsellors, psychologists, social workers, and therapists who consider themselves Jungians and work more-or-less within a Jungian framework. Hundreds, if not thousands, of books on various Jungian topics that have been published. The Jungian community has thrived in the more than fifty years since Jung’s death. Until her death in 1998, Marie Louise von Franz was perhaps the most prolific and respected Jungian writer. James Hillman, likewise, was very popular in the 1990s with works such as The Soul’s Code. In recent years, James Hollis has published popular works such as Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life and What Matters Most that have brought Jungian ideas out of the consulting room and into the culture. Since the 1990s, there has been a movement to use Jung’s ideas in a nonclinical fashion for personal and spiritual growth. People like the Rev. Susan Sims Smith and "14 Joyce Rockwood Hudson, in collaboration with Robert Haden and others, began exploring the benefit and use of applying Jung’s ideas about dreams to form a spiritual practice that is often called “natural spirituality.” This is one of the most dynamic areas of Jungian practice these days, and hundreds of people have trained as dream workers and spiritual directors within the framework. As Yeats would have things, though, the center has not held all that well. There was a split in the Jungian analytic community in the early 2000s, and there are now two separate training centers in Zurich. Although interesting work is still being undertaken, such as the work of Mark Winborne and web sites such as Speaking of Jung, one does have the feeling that Jungian studies are at the moment in a place of flux. The years ahead should show us the direction and place of Jung in the emerging Aquarian world. Jungians, and those who dabble, should embrace the new developments and directions of Jungian work in the world, rather than insisting upon a dogmatic purity in approach. In his later years, Jung repeatedly insisted that those who followed him should take his ideas to new places. He had explored the unconscious for his entire life, and, perhaps more than anyone else, he knew that he had just begun to map this huge unknown, yet vital, part of life. Those who work in solitude, often without the means or leisure for a long process of analysis, may well be making the greatest steps forward in the coming decades. Jung would approve of what they are trying to do. "15