Introducing Jung E-Book

Maggie Hyde

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Graphic Guides
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 116

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

'Clever and witty.' Susie Orbach, Guardian Carl Gustav Jung was the enigmatic and controversial father of analytical psychology. This updated edition of Introducing Jung brilliantly explains the theories that underpin Jung's work, delves into the controversies that led him to break away from Freud and describes his near psychotic breakdown, from which he emerged with radical new insights into the nature of the unconscious mind – and which were published for the first time in 2009 in The Red Book. Step by step, Maggie Hyde demonstrates how it was entirely logical for him to explore the psychology of religion, alchemy, astrology, the I Ching and other phenomena rejected by science in his investigation of his patients' dreams, fantasies and psychic disturbances.

Leseprobe

Published by Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre, 39–41 North Road, London N7 9DPEmail: [email protected] 

ISBN: 978-184831-856-4

Text copyright © 2012 Icon Books Ltd

Illustrations copyright © 2012 Icon Books Ltd

The author and illustrator has asserted their moral rights

Originating editor: Richard Appignanesi

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Boyhood Soul-Searching

Zofingia Days

Psychiatry

The Discovery of the Unconscious

Freud

Burghölzli

The Case of Babette

Family Life

Meeting Freud

(1) The Issue of Freud’s Authority

(2) Theoretical Differences

(3) Philosophical Differences

A Strange Incident

The Case of Miss Frank Miller

The Nekyia or Night-Sea Journey

An Overpowering Vision

Liber Novus: The Red Book

Spirit of this Time (the Zeitgeist)

Spirit of the Depths

Mythopoeic Imagination

Mandala: the Path to the Centre

Instincts and Archetypes

Archetypes and Images

Voyage into the Unconscious

Some Basics of Jungian Analysis: (1) The Symbolic

(2) The Transcendent or Healing Function

(3) Active Imagination

The Centring Process – Individuation

Dreams and Visions

Building Stones…

…the Bollingen House

Jung’s Practice of Analytical Psychology

The Structure of the Psyche

Psychological Types: (1) Two Attitudes

(2) Four Functions

The Return of the Repressed

Eight Psychological Types

Four Archetypal Figures

Collective Shadow

Male and Female Soul-Images

The Anima

The Animus

Complementary Images

Mixed Types

Jung’s Women

A Stone in Space

“4.4.44”

The Uncanny

The Fox

Psychology of Religion

Symbolism of the Catholic Mass

Christ, an Archetype of the Self

The Faust Legend

The Fourth Term

The Age of the Fishes

The Birth of Christ in Pisces 1

The Spread of Christianity

Moving towards the Antichrist

Prophecies of the Antichrist

The Mirror-Image Opposite

Scientific Rationalism

The Psychology of Alchemy

The Alchemist’s Stone

The Spirit of Mercurius

Stages in the Individuation Process

The Chemical Marriage

The Rosarium Philosophorum – or – Philosophers’ Rose Garden: 1. The Mercurial Fountain

2. King and Queen

3. The Naked Truth

4. Immersion in the Bath

5. The Coniunctio or Intercourse

6. Death and Putrefaction

7. Ascent of the Soul

8. Purification

9. The Return of the Soul

10. The New Birth or Rebis

Synchronicity

Is it “meaningful” or is it just coincidence?

Qualitative Time

Synchronicity and Post-Einsteinian Physics

Synchronicity and Quantum Mechanics

An Astrological Experiment

“Secret Mutual Connivance”

The Double Conception

Science and the New Age

The End?

Supplement: Jung and the Nazis

Little Dictionary

Further Reading

Index

Boyhood Soul-Searching

Carl Gustav Jung was a strange melancholic child who had no brothers or sisters until he was nine, so he played his own imaginary games.

Am I the one sitting on the stone? Or am I the stone on which he is sitting?

This was his secret stone with a life of its own.

He was born 26 July 1875 in Kesswil, Switzerland, the only son of a Swiss Reformed Church Evangelical minister.

The family were steeped in religion. Jung had eight uncles in the clergy, as well as his maternal grandfather. His earliest playgrounds were churches and graveyards. Men in black would bring a black box and talk of “Jesus”.

He even heard his father talk of a “Je-suit” (sounds like Je-sus), and that was “something specially dangerous”.

This Jesus can’t be trusted. He “takes” people to himself and they’re put in a hole!

Jung says that his intellectual life began with a dream at the age of three. In his dream, he descended into a hole in the ground.

It leads him into a large chamber, a red carpet and a golden throne on which a strange being sits.

Huge like a tree trunk but fleshy…Then I heard my mother…“That’s the man-eater!”And I awoke in terror.

Decades later, Jung came across a reference to the motif of cannibalism in the symbolism of the Mass. And only then did the image of the “man-eater” make sense to him. He realized that the “dark Lord Jesus, the Jesuit and the phallus were identical”. They represented a dark creative force in nature, the investigation of which he pursued throughout his life.

But it was God who really interested Jung. God tested him out by tempting him to think unutterable sinful thoughts.

“I gathered all my courage, as though I were about to leap forthwith into hell-fire, and let the thought come. I saw before me the cathedral, the blue sky. God sits on His golden throne, high above the world – and from under the throne an enormous turd falls upon the sparkling new roof, shatters it, and breaks the walls of the cathedral asunder”

What a relief! Instead of damnation, Jung felt this vision was an act of grace. He had been shown another side of God altogether, different to the one his father and uncles spoke of in their sermons.

But what about the secret? None of you know anything about that. You don’t know that god wants to force me to do wrong, to think abominations in order to experience his grace!

Those around him seemed hypocritical and empty. He brooded on the secret, searching in vain in his father’s library for more information.

Then he would sit on his stone and it would free him from his turmoils. Jung had a strong suspicion there was something eternal in himself too, some “Other” in him which was like the stone.

It knows the secret. It is the secret, because it’s thousands of years old.

There were other religious influences on Jung, stemming from his mother and maternal grandfather, Samuel Preiswerk, a respected pastor in Basel, who had contact with a different world altogether – the spirit world. Every week he had conversed with his deceased first wife, while his second wife (Jung’s grandmother) and his daughter (Jung’s mother), listened in.

While your grandpa wrote his sermons, I had to stand behind him to keep the bad spirits away.

Contact with the spirits was not unusual amongst Swiss rural folk. Jung experienced his mother as dark and unpredictable, “rooted in deep, invisible ground”. She knew the world of the uncanny and she could be frightening and erratic.

These dual religious influences of Swiss Protestantism and pagan spirituality reflected a dualism in Jung himself. He believed he had two different personalities which he named “Number 1” and “Number 2”.

Number 1 was involved in the ordinary, everyday world. He could burst into emotions and seemed childish and undisciplined. Yet he was also ambitious for academic success, studying science and aiming to achieve a civilized, prestigious life style.The Number 2 personality was much more troublesome, the “Other”, identified with the stone and the secret of God’s grace. Number 2 carried meaning and seemed to stretch back into history in a mysterious manner.

Jung associated his Number 2 dimension with the uncanny world of his mother. He carved a little man wearing a black frock-coat and boots and placed him, with a stone, in a pencil case that he stashed away in a forbidden place in the attic.

Sometimes I added a little scroll of paper containing a secret message.

In this simple, primitive way, he felt in touch with his Number 2 world.

Years later, Jung recognized that the task of the psychoanalyst was to discover a patient’s secret.

Jung’s struggle to reconcile his Number 1 and Number 2 worlds persisted throughout adolescence. He recalls his twelfth year when “he learned what a neurosis is”. He shirked school with mysterious fainting spells, a “whole bag of tricks” that worried his father.

Here’s a sad business. The doctors don’t know what’s wrong with him. They think maybe it’s Epilepsy.

He conquered his dizzy spells with an effort of will, and had another startling experience around this time. Suddenly, walking along a street, he felt as if he emerged from a wall of mist.

Now I knew – I am myself now!

Jung identified more and more with his Number 1 personality and his newly discovered sense of self. The Number 2 world began to slip away. He grew into a tall, handsome, athletic and physically strong young man. Throughout his life these qualities, alongside his loud booming laugh and infectious hearty love of life, gave him tremendous physical presence and enormous charisma, especially with women.

Jung gravitated towards science and philosophy, winning a scholarship to Basel University to study medicine. In his second year, when he was twenty, his father died. The parsonage had to be given up and they moved to Bottminger Mill, near Basel.

I’ll have to give up my studies.Don’t worry. Your uncle’s loan will let you continue.

Jung loved his student days, and alongside medical textbooks he devoured works on philosophy, especially those of Kant and Nietzsche. He also read Swedenborg and studied spiritualism and the paranormal.

Zofingia Days

He became a member of the university debating society, the Zofingia Club, formerly an 18th century duelling society. Jung thrived on its intellectual cut and thrust and was able to explore something which held an immense fascination for him – the human Soul.

Kant’s ideas about two orientations of the Soul, one towards everyday concerns and the other towards the “spirit” world, echoed Jung’s own dualism. If Kant was right, then perhaps paranormal phenomena which distorted time and space could teach us about the Soul. It was therefore essential to investigate parapsychology and such phenomena as hypnosis, spiritualism, clairvoyance and telepathy. What vehicle could he find for such investigations?

What is this strange “something” that enters and leaves the body at birth and death?

PSYCHIATRY

In a “flash of illumination”, Jung realized the discipline he had been searching for was psychiatry. He had never been inspired by the dull psychiatry taught at university, but on reading a textbook by Krafft-Ebing he was excited to discover that…

… A psychiatrist responds to the diseased personality with the whole of his own personality.In other words, psychiatry is necessarily subjective!

“Here was the empirical field common to biological and spiritual facts, which I had everywhere sought and nowhere found. Here at last was a place where the collision of nature and spirit became a reality.”

At around the same time, several peculiar incidents happened which confirmed this choice of career in psychiatry. At home with his mother one day, suddenly a” report like a pistol shot” sounded.

My god, our oak table split right through the centre!

A few weeks later, another “deafening report” was heard coming from a sideboard.

The steel blade of a breadknife shattered in pieces!

These omens must mean something!Yes, Ive been invited to a séance. There’s some connection to father’s death in all this.

Jung attended the séances for over two years. The medium was his fifteen-year-old cousin, Helene Preiswerk, and the deceased Samuel Preiswerk was her spirit guide.

I stopped going when she began producing “apports” and was discovered cheating!

Gradually, in her trances, she became a woman called Ivenes who had a quiet, sophisticated personality, unlike Helene herself. Helene revealed numerous past lives of her own and of others, frequently involving dramatic love affairs.Little did Jung realize it at the time, but Helene had a schoolgirl crush on him and many of the manifestations were done to attract his attention.

Why should these paranormal experiences and séances have anything to do with Jung’s choice of psychiatry as a career?

I used hypnotism to show that the unconscious is involved even in some cases of paralysis.

Psychiatry as we know it today was a very different “bag of tricks” in the 1890s when Jung was starting out on his career. Investigation of the psyche (from the Greek, “soul”) was seen by many of Jung’s contemporaries as intimately related to the problems raised by psychical research – the study of “spiritualist” phenomena. The Society for Psychical Research was founded in 1882 to provide evidence that the human psyche was an immaterial substance, not dependent for its existence on the body.

The Discovery of the Unconscious

An understanding of the “twilight states” and the subliminal mind had been developing since the mid-19th century. The existence of the Unconscious mind, capable of affecting and interrupting consciousness, was well established.

Various theories concerning the dynamics of mental or psychic energy explored the possibility that it could become locked in an inaccessible realm of the mind, from whence it could still disrupt consciousness.

Freud

Charcot’s materialist approach to the unconscious influenced another neurologist in the 1880s, Sigmund Freud. Freud’s development of psychoanalysis had made important inroads into accessing the unconscious, years before Jung met him.

I dropped hypnosis and began using a “Free Association method”.Saying whatever comes into my mind…This method allows the patient to recall forgotten memories attached to traumatic situations.

Such recollections were called abreactive, meaning that even physical ailments could disappear once the trauma had been recalled. Similarly, symbols in dreams provided a “royal road to the unconscious”, as did instances of “forgetting” and slips of the tongue.

Freud’s non-spiritualist approach to the mysteries of the unconscious mind would have great impact on 20th century psychology. But spiritualism continued to enjoy late 19th century popularity as a valid part of psychology. Jung himself received his training in the materialist school of clinical psychiatry, but he never lost interest in psychical phenomena, and this would lead to trouble with the convinced materialist, Freud, as we’ll see later.

The trouble was that psychical research into “spooks” had more credibility and prestige than my psychoanalysis!

Pierre Janet, a disciple of Charcot, investigated the unconscious states of dissociation or “multiple personalities”. Working closely with his patient Léonie, he showed that it was the unconscious that spoke during trances.

Either by the expression of “Residual memories” or sometimes by telepathy

Jung’s cousin, the medium Helene Preiswerk, had also created other personalities, especially Ivenes.

Helene’s séances presented Jung with a ready-made subject of investigation.

Helene’s séances became the subject of my 1902 doctoral thesis.Her accomplishment as “Ivenes” Far Excelled her normal conscious state!

Jung concluded that split-off contents of the unconscious could therefore appear either as another human personality in the form of hallucinations, or they could take control of the conscious mind, as happened during the séances. The unconscious was capable of compensating conscious attitudes, which implied that there was an intentionality and purpose