Carl Gustav Jung is a famous Swiss psychiatrist who made a huge contribution to psychotherapy, the creator of many interesting and relevant techniques. Carl Jung is also the founder of so-called analytical psychology.
Developed the concept of psychotypes. Jung's theory of personality is widely known. Below we will tell you who Carl Gustav Jung is and briefly outline his biography and the basics of his teaching.
Biography
Carl Jung was born at the end of July 1875 and died in the summer of 1961, at the age of 85. The future great psychoanalyst was the only child of his parents. The boy graduated from high school with honors; he was especially attracted to the natural sciences and the culture of bygone civilizations. Karl knew Latin very well, which subsequently allowed him to achieve great success in his medical career.
Jung's grandfather and father worked as doctors, and perhaps that is why Karl entered the medical faculty at one of the higher educational institutions in Basel. After completing his studies, he worked for some time in Zurich in a psychiatric clinic, where he was an assistant to the famous psychiatrist-researcher Eugen Blater. A year later, Carl Jung even collaborated with the greatest psychoanalyst and psychologist of the twentieth century.
At the beginning of the new century, Carl Jung married the young Emma Rauschenbach. The couple had five children: a son, Franz, and four daughters, Agatha, Greta, Marianne and Helena.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Karl broke with the International Psychoanalytic Association, left the then academic psychoanalysis and began to develop an individual theory. Subsequently, his life’s work was called “”, or “Jungian analysis”.
This technique combines all the best that Freud had. However, a psychiatrist from Switzerland, unlike his German colleague, does not concentrate on the topic of unsatisfied sexual desires as basic needs and the driver of all human actions, but prefers to dig in depth and breadth, developing and finalizing everything that has been said before.
After his death, he was buried in the Protestant cemetery of the small Swiss town of Kusnacht, where he lived and worked in his last years in his famous Tower.
Interestingly, Jung’s works were often condemned by the Christian church, however, the psychologist himself was a deeply religious person from childhood. Above the door of his house was carved the famous saying of Erasmus of Rotterdam, the philosopher and theologian of the Middle Ages: “Whether called or not, God is always present.”
Basics of teaching
The psychiatrist developed a personality structure according to Jung, which, in his opinion, consists of:
- Personal unconscious.
- Collective unconscious.
Ego is awareness and awareness, the inner “I”, as well as everything in the person himself that he is used to identifying and associating with himself.
The personal unconscious is the experiences, thoughts and feelings that a person has chosen to repress from his brain. Also, the Personal Unconscious includes those experiences that have not yet reached consciousness, because they are not strong and formed enough, in addition, there are subliminal perceptions... In other words, this is everything that a person does not remember and is not aware of, nevertheless it has an impact on him and his actions.
A brief summary of the fundamentals of his teaching will hardly help to grasp the full scope of his work, but a short description will be useful to anyone interested in psychology.
The theory of archetypes is closely intertwined not so much with medicine, but with philosophy and esotericism, however, a person can find recognizable archetype images both in myths and legends, and in everyday life. Archetypes can be called innate mental structures that make up the content of the Collective unconscious.
Jung, as a subtle connoisseur of the human soul, has always been attracted to man and his symbols, therefore the most famous archetypes are the feminine and masculine principles, respectively. Anima is an inward-directed soft power, the influence of emotions and moods. The animus, in turn, is a tough and principled masculine principle.
Other interesting archetypes that can be mentioned are: Virgo (Kora), Mana-personality, Sorcerous Demon and Beast. They are closely related to human character and quite accurately reflect some aspects of the human soul.
Carl Gustav Jung also wrote and developed psychological types (psychotypes, in the lexicon of modern psychologists, or, more simply, personality types).
A person and his symbols in a dream are absolutely not random, since a dream is not just a set of colorful pictures reminiscent of worries experienced or a difficult day. Carl Jung created the theory of dreams, taking as a basis Freud's postulate that dreams reveal a person's secret thoughts, desires and feelings.
The Swiss psychiatrist developed a set of universal images and scenarios that appear in dreams and allow them to be analyzed. Thanks to this unique technique, millions of people realized their fears and were able to get rid of them in a fairly short time.
Carl Jung developed his own interesting typology, which turned out to be too complex, and therefore is known only in a narrow circle of professionals. He “brought to fruition” the typology known since the time of Aristotle, which contrasts the extrovert, and enriched it with four more functions-signs. These functions:
- Thinking.
- Feeling.
- Feeling.
- Intuition.
There are many simplifications of Jung's classification of personality types; and the most famous simplified similarity to this typology is the now incredibly popular socionics.
Contributions to psychology
Jung's contribution to modern psychology is truly great. Socionics-based tests are carried out in schools, universities, and in some Western countries - when hiring. Jung's personality theory is even used in American intelligence to select candidates for particularly complex and responsible positions.
Even in the twenty-first century, the dream analysis system is used in psychology and psychiatry, helping to identify mental illnesses and carefully forgotten human problems.
Carl Gustav Jung is rightfully considered one of the greatest thinkers in world history, and his contribution to psychology and psychiatry is almost invaluable. Author: Irina Shumilova
Brief biography of Jung
Carl Gustav Jung was born in 1875 on July 26 in Switzerland in the village of Kesswil. Karl's father was a pastor, but also had a philosophical education. Carl Jung spent his childhood almost alone, it was quite difficult. At the same time, he developed a desire to know people. This applied, first of all, to his environment, and especially to his father. Karl tried to study his behavior and explain his unshakable faith in God. On the basis of this, the future classic of psychoanalysis began to contrast personal views and opinions about the higher mind with church judgments. Jung-son and Jung-father could not find a common language with each other. These contradictions led to the fact that, regardless of the wishes of his family, Karl decided to get a medical education and become a psychologist.
From $1895 to $1900, Jung studied at the University of Basel. And in $1902 he continued his studies in Zurich. In Zurich, the group in which Carl Jung studied was led by the chief physician of a psychiatric hospital. This allowed Jung to test a system of association tests that he himself developed, exploring personality and identifying its pathologies. Through stimulus questions, he probed unusual and illogical answers. As a result of association testing, Jung identified abnormal ways of thinking, linking such phenomena with sexual experiences or disorders. When certain associations are suppressed in oneself, a person begins to develop certain complexes.
These studies became famous all over the world. In 1911, Carl Jung became president of the International Psychological Society, but already in 1914 he resigned from this position.
A lot was said at one time about the friendship between Jung and Sigmundt Freud, they were constantly compared. They really knew each other since 1907, but these two outstanding psychologists were never friends. Although in certain cases their judgments were the same. In 1912, their paths finally diverged, as Sigmund Freud devoted himself entirely to the study of neuroses.
Basic ideas of Carl Jung
After three years of research, Jung published the book “The Psychology of Dementia Precocious” in $1906, which made a revolution in psychiatry. Jung's position on dementia praecox was based on a synthesis of the ideas of many scientists. Jung not only integrated existing theories, but also became the pioneer of a psychosomatic experimental model of the early stages of dementia, in which the brain is the object of emotional influences. Jung's concept as outlined in his writings is as follows: the result of affect is the production of a toxin that affects the brain and paralyzes mental functions so that the complex, released from the subconscious, causes symptoms characteristic of dementia praecox. It should be noted that Carl Jung later abandoned his toxin hypothesis and adopted the modern concept of chemical metabolism disorders.
Note 1
Carl Gustav Jung first proposed the division of people into introverts and extroverts. He subsequently identified four main functions of the brain:
- thinking,
- perception,
- feeling
- intuition.
Depending on the predominance of any of these four functions, people can be classified into types. These studies are presented in his work “Psychological Types.”
Throughout his life, Jung implemented his ideas quite successfully. He opened his own school of psychoanalysis.
One of the ideas that the psychologist developed was that Christianity is an integral part of the historical process. He considered heretical views to be an unconscious manifestation of the Christian religion.
Carl Jung, doing historical research, began to study older people and help those who have lost the meaning of life. His research showed that most of these people are atheists. The psychologist believed that if they began to express their fantasies, this would give them the opportunity to find their place in life. He called this the process of individualization.
Surprisingly, Carl Jung actively supported the idea of fascism, believing that Germany occupies an exceptional place in world history. Such views arose in him in 1908, but in progressive circles his sympathy for fascism was not supported and criticized.
Refers to "Mystical Worlds"Carl Gustav Jung
Carl Gustav Jung wrote his works between 1930 and 1960. This was the time when scientific methodology was just becoming established, there was no generalizing book by Imre Lakatos, Falsification and Methodology of Research Programs, and it was just being understood how much the mystical has a right to exist, what knowledge gives: faith or reason.
Of course, as today, mysticism attracted tempting ideas, and people plunged into it headlong, selflessly exploring what seemed to be the most important, the most important thing in life. Carl Jung was just such a researcher, pushing himself to the limits of psychosis and experiencing severe crises in connection with this. He sincerely and seriously tried to find all the relationships between the real and the mystical in such a way as to be able to explain the observed phenomena of the psyche. In any case, that's how he started. Having left behind a huge mark, he influenced with his ideas, methods, classifications the development not so much of psychology, but of philosophy and esotericism of all kinds, and also feeds the imagination of many pseudo-scientific theoreticians (see, for example). He considered the psyche and everything mystical that he associated with it, including God, to be really knowable and therefore sought to know it, and was not limited to religious faith. In his book On the Nature of the Psyche he writes:
"The psyche is not a chaos consisting of random whims and circumstances, but an objective reality to which the researcher can gain access using the methods of natural science. There are indications and signs that place psychological processes in some kind of energetic relationship with the physiological substrate. Because they are objective events, they can hardly be explained by anything other than energy processes, or to put it another way: despite the immeasurability of mental processes, tangible changes made by the psyche can only be understood as phenomena of energy and."
And, at the same time, practicing mysticism and actually replacing psychological phenomena with mysticism (he did not interpret or substantiate them in any other way, which will be extremely clear later) in principle could not contribute to genuine knowledge, but led deeper and deeper into the unknowable religiosity, which completely determined his beliefs and activities in later years of life.
Initially, considering the psyche as a black box and trying to guess its fundamental principles and mechanisms by its external manifestations, C. Jung, like all other psychologists in such a situation, had the opportunity to compare only directly, empirically and observable, but precisely in the case of the psyche this is the least productive way of understanding it, due to the main property and purpose of the psyche: the constant adaptation of behavior to new conditions, and therefore the fundamental inconstancy of its external manifestations in different conditions. Empirically found patterns and methods for the psyche are not justified because they depend on the specific conditions in which they were obtained, and as soon as these conditions are different in some way, the generalizations cease to correspond to the real (see About the science of psychology). That is why they cannot be accepted as a scientific basis (axioms) for further development. In practice, the use of his methods and what they were modified by his followers gave controversial results, and if we do not consider only success (in his case, determined by his authority and charisma), and if we take into account failures, they could not claim sufficient reliability, although they were used and are still widely used, always supported by loud authority and sonorous names.
Due to non-reproducibility and lack of certainty, the “empirical laws” found by C. Jung and his methods have always caused considerable criticism, and the more the more mystical was involved in their justification. K. Jung wrote:
“It is strange that my critics, with few exceptions, are silent about the fact that I, as a doctor, proceed from their empirical facts, which everyone can check. But they criticize me as if I were a philosopher or a Gnostic who claims that he has supernatural knowledge. As a philosopher and as an abstractly reasoning heretic, it is, of course, easy to defeat me. This is probably why they prefer to suppress the facts I have discovered.”(German edition of the works of C. G. Jung: Gesammelte Werke. Zurich, 1958. Bd. 11, S. 335)
However, if the methods were actually quite effective, and the patterns found could claim to be axioms, the fate of this heritage would be strikingly different, and all this would not only be applied with efficiency, but would also develop, bringing even greater fruits . And these “patterns” were not correctly generalized and systematized from the standpoint of scientific methodology. By choosing faith at the expense of reason, C. Jung obtained results that were inappropriate to reality.
“In general, Jung’s psychology has found its followers more among philosophers, poets, and religious figures than in the circles of medical psychiatrists. Training centers for analytical psychology according to Jung, although the curriculum in them is no worse than Freud’s, also accepts non-medical students Jung admitted that he “never systematized his research in the field of psychology” because, in his opinion, the dogmatic system too easily slips into a pompous and self-confident tone. Jung argued that the causal approach is finite, and therefore fatalistic. approach expresses the hope that a person should not be absolutely slavishly enslaved by his own past."- from the book 100 Great Scientific Discoveries.
The name of Carl Jung, having become unusually popular for one reason or another, thereby with its authority attached special weight to the ideas associated with it and, as happens in all such cases, sometimes made them indisputably true in the minds of many, so much so that it is regarded as sacrilege to expose them at all. doubt their greatest significance (see Richard Noll's book "The Jungian Cult: The Origins of the Charismatic Movement"). Of course, those who are engaged in research in related subject areas of science should be more sober in this regard and spend some time assessing the real practical value of Carl Jung's legacy and the possibility of using it.
The purpose of this article is to show how and where certain ideas of Carl Jung developed, where they prevail today, and how legitimate they can be in describing real mental processes.
For this purpose, an abstract review of books and articles about Jung has been compiled, a comparison of the information received has been made, and material has been provided for considering individual ideas of Carl Jung from the perspective of modern knowledge. As an illustration of how completely unnecessary (and erroneous) Carl Jung’s ideas and ideas about the mechanisms of mental phenomena are, let the review On Systemic Neurophysiology, which summarizes the extensive factual material accumulated to date, serve as an illustration.
My comments in the authors' text are in blue.
First, I offer excerpts from three books by Carl Jung, the original text of which can be read using the links provided.
From Carl Jung's book Memories, Dreams, Reflections
Before I discovered alchemy, I had several dreams with the same plot.
...
In 1926, I had a stunning dream that anticipated my studies in alchemy.
It is very typical for all of C. Jung’s texts to constantly turn to one’s subjective, listening to sensations, feelings, impressions from dreams and giving all this so much importance that this subjectivism becomes the basis of his “scientific” reasoning.
...
Wasting no time, I immediately rushed to leaf through thick volumes on the history of religion and philosophy, although I did not hope to clarify anything. But after some time it became clear that this dream also points to alchemy, its heyday precisely in the 17th century. Surprisingly, I completely forgot everything that Herbert Silberer wrote about alchemy. When his book came out, I perceived alchemy as something alien and curious, although I extremely appreciated the author himself, I considered his view of things to be quite constructive, which I wrote to him about. But, as the tragic death of Silberer showed, constructiveness did not turn into prudence for him [He committed suicide. - ed.]. He mainly used later material, which I was poorly versed in. The later alchemical texts, baroque and fantastic, had to be deciphered first, and only then could their true value be determined.
Quite soon I discovered a striking similarity between analytical psychology and alchemy. The experiments of the alchemists were, in a sense, my experiments, their world was my world. The discovery made me happy: I had finally found a historical analogue of my psychology of the unconscious and found solid ground. This parallel, as well as the restoration of a continuous spiritual tradition coming from the Gnostics, gave me some support. When I read the medieval texts, everything fell into place: the world of images and visions, the experimental data I had collected over time, and the conclusions I had come to. I began to understand them in historical connection. My typological research, which began with my studies in mythology, received a new impetus. Archetypes and their nature have moved to the center of my work. Now I have gained confidence that without history there is no psychology - and first of all this applies to the psychology of the unconscious. When it comes to conscious processes, it is quite possible that individual experience will be sufficient to explain them, but neuroses in their anamnesis require deeper knowledge; When a doctor is faced with the need to make a non-standard decision, his associations alone are clearly not enough.
...
In my book, I argued that every way of thinking is determined by a certain psychological type and that every point of view is in some way relative. At the same time, the question arose about the unity necessary to compensate for this diversity. In other words, I came to Taoism.
This is the belief that the type determines the way of thinking for the rest of one’s life, despite the fact that a person can change radically due to circumstances, becoming actually a different person, that by recognizing the type one can say a lot about a person and predict his reactions, regardless of the circumstances - the basis typologies are still alive today. This belief presupposes a certain initial predisposition, a hereditary quality, which, in fact, does not have any serious justification, but is very attractive for those who would like to have a theory that allows them to simply approach the knowledge of a person, predict and modify his behavior (See Personality and society).
...
In physics, we talk about energy, which manifests itself in various ways, be it electricity, light, heat, etc. The same is true in psychology, where we first of all encounter energy (of greater or lesser intensity), and it can manifest itself in a variety of forms. Understanding libido as energy allows you to obtain a unified and complete knowledge about it. In this case, all kinds of questions about the nature of libido - whether it is sexuality, the will to power, hunger, or anything else - fade into the background. My goal was to create a universal energy theory in psychology, such as exists in the natural sciences. This task was the main one when writing the book “On Psychic Energy” (1928). I have shown, for example, that human instincts are various forms of energetic processes, and, as forces, they are analogous to heat, light, etc.
It is worth remembering this unambiguous explanation of the essence of mental energy and - as a kind of analogue of physical energy and, only in its specialized form for the psyche, which completely resonates with esoteric ideas about this. C. Jung's strong focus on mysticism is constantly and directly reflected in his reasoning and conclusions.
...
From the very beginning, problems of worldview and the relationship between psychology and religion occupied an important place in my work. I dedicated the book “Psychology and Religion” (1940) to them, and later quite thoroughly stated my point of view in “Paracelsica” (1942), in its second chapter, “Paracelsus as a Spiritual Phenomenon.” There are many original ideas in the works of Paracelsus; the philosophical attitudes of the alchemists are clearly visible in them, but in a late, baroque expression. After meeting Paracelsus, it seemed to me that I finally understood the essence of alchemy in its connection with religion and psychology - in other words, I began to consider alchemy as a form of religious philosophy. My work “Psychology and Alchemy” (1944) is devoted to this problem, in which I was able to turn to my own experience of 1913 - 1917. The process I experienced in those years corresponded to the process of alchemical transformation that was discussed in this book.
Naturally, then no less important for me was the question of the connection between the symbols of the unconscious and Christian symbols, as well as with the symbols of other religions.
...
All that I can tell about the other world, about life after death, all these are memories. These are the thoughts and images that I lived with and that haunted me. In a certain sense, they are the basis of my work, because my work is nothing more than a tireless attempt to answer the question: what is the connection between what is “here” and what is “there”? However, I have never allowed myself to talk about life after death expressis verbis (quite clearly - Lat.), otherwise I would have to somehow justify my thoughts, which I am not able to do.
...
Parapsychology considers a completely satisfactory proof of the afterlife to be a certain manifestation of the deceased: they declare themselves as ghosts or through a medium, conveying to the living what only they can know about. But even when this is verifiable, questions remain, is this ghost or voice identical to the deceased or is it some kind of projection of the unconscious, were the things that the voice spoke about known to the dead or did they again pass through the department of the unconscious?
Even if we put aside all the rational arguments that essentially prohibit us from talking with confidence about such things, there are still people for whom the confidence that their lives will continue beyond the present existence is very important. Thanks to her, they try to live more intelligently and calmly. If a person knows that he has eternity ahead of him, is this senseless haste necessary?
...
The unconscious gives us a certain chance, communicating something or hinting at something with its images. It can give us knowledge that is not subject to traditional logic. Try to remember the phenomena of synchronicity, premonitions or dreams that came true!
...We receive warnings quite often, but we do not know how to recognize them.
The most characteristic statement for esotericists, which is completely unsubstantiated by serious research into the issue, is pure faith.
...
I dare to say that, in addition to the actual mathematical expressions, there are others that are correlated with reality in the most incomprehensible way. Take, for example, the creations of our imagination; due to their high frequency, it is quite possible to consider them as consensus omnium, archetypal motives. Just as there are mathematical equations about which we cannot say which physical realities they correspond to, so there is a mythological reality about which we cannot say which mental reality it corresponds to. For example, equations for calculating the turbulence of heated gases were known long before these processes were thoroughly studied. In the same way, for a long time there have been mythologems that determined the course of certain processes hidden from consciousness, the names of which we were able to give only today.
Not understanding the essence of human abstractions, but replacing everything with ideas about archetypes, K. Jung does not even make an attempt to understand that the same outwardly similar formulas, descriptions, formalizations can be suitable for a variety of real processes within certain frameworks of their abstraction, and found by themselves, do not at all mean their correlation with any reality until the person himself gives them such a correlation.
...
Although no one has yet presented satisfactory evidence of the immortality of the soul and the continuation of life after death, there are phenomena that make us think about it. I can accept them as possible references, but I will not dare, of course, to attribute them to the realm of absolute knowledge.
...
The unconscious, due to its spatio-temporal relativity, has much better sources of information than consciousness - the latter only directs our meaning perception, while we are able to create our myths about life after death thanks to a few meager hints from our dreams and similar spontaneous manifestations of the unconscious .
...
Assuming that life continues “there,” we cannot imagine any other form of existence other than the mental, since the soul does not need either space or time. And it is precisely this that generates internal images that then become material for mythological speculation about the other world, which I see exclusively as a world of images. The soul should be understood as something belonging to the other world, or the “land of the dead.” And the unconscious and the “land of the dead” are synonymous.
Here is a revelation - for those who seriously believe that the meaning that C. Jung actually puts into the concepts of the unconscious, etc. (and not covering it with masks of decency, as discussed below). - in fact - pure esotericism.
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Since the Creator is one, then His creation and His Son must be one. The doctrine of Divine unity does not allow deviations. And yet the limits of light and darkness appeared without the knowledge of consciousness. This outcome was predicted long before the appearance of Christ - among other things, we can find this in the book of Job or in the famous book of Enoch that has come down to us from pre-Christian times. In Christianity, this metaphysical split has deepened: Satan, who in the Old Testament was under Yahweh, now turns into the diametrical and eternal opposite of God's world. It is impossible to eliminate it. And it is not surprising that already at the beginning of the 11th century a heretical teaching appeared that it was not God, but the devil who created this world. This was the entry into the second half of the Christian eon, despite the fact that earlier the myth of fallen angels had already arisen, from whom man received dangerous knowledge of science and art. What would these ancient authors say about Hiroshima?
...
Since the god-image, from a psychological point of view, is an obvious basis and spiritual principle, the deep dichotomy that defines it is already recognized as a political reality: a certain mental compensation already takes place. It manifests itself in the form of spontaneously arising rounded images, which represent a synthesis of the opposites inherent in the soul. Here I would include the rumors that have spread widely since 1945 about UFOs - unidentified flying objects.
...
I, as you can see, prefer the term "unconscious", although I know that I can just as well say "god" or "demon" if I want to express something mythological. Using the mythological mode of expression, I remember that "mana", "demon" and "god" are synonyms for the "unconscious" and that we know as much as we know little about them. People believe they know much more; and in a certain sense, this faith may be more useful and effective than scientific terminology.
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I do not at all claim that my thoughts about the essence of man and his myth are the last and final word, but, in my opinion, this is exactly what can be said at the end of our era - the era of Pisces, and perhaps on the eve of the upcoming era of Aquarius, which has a human appearance. Aquarius, following two opposite Pisces, is a kind of coniunctio oppositorum and, perhaps, a personality - a self.
...talking about “god” as an “archetype”, we say nothing about his real nature, but we admit that “god” is something in our psychic structure that was before consciousness, and therefore He is in no way cannot be considered generated by consciousness. Thus, we do not reduce the probability of His existence, but we approach the possibility of knowing Him. The last circumstance is extremely important, since a thing, if it is not comprehended by experience, can easily be classified as non-existent.
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If the energy concept of the psyche is correct, then assumptions that contradict it, such as, for example, idea of some metaphysical reality, must seem, to put it mildly, paradoxical. !!!
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Archetypal statements are based on instinctive premises that have nothing to do with reason - they can neither be proven nor disproved using common sense. They have always represented a certain part of the world order - representations collectives (collective representations - French), according to Lévy-Bruhl's definition. Of course, the ego and its will play a huge role, but what the ego wants incomprehensibly negates the autonomy and numinosity of archetypal processes. The area of their practical existence is the sphere of religion, and to the extent that religion, in principle, can be considered from the point of view of psychology.
Carl Gustav Jung (German: Carl Gustav Jung). Born 26 July 1875 in Keeswil, Thurgau, Switzerland - died 6 June 1961 in Küsnacht, canton of Zurich, Switzerland. Swiss psychiatrist, founder of one of the areas of depth psychology (analytical psychology).
Jung considered the task of analytical psychology to be the interpretation of archetypal images that arise in patients. Jung developed the doctrine of the collective unconscious, in the images (archetypes) of which he saw the source of universal human symbolism, including myths and dreams ( "Metamorphoses and symbols of libido"). The goal of psychotherapy, according to Jung, is the individuation of the individual.
Jung's concept of psychological types also became famous.
Carl Gustav Jung was born into the family of a pastor of the Swiss Reformed Church in Keeswil in Switzerland. My grandfather and great-grandfather on my father’s side were doctors. Carl Gustav Jung graduated from the medical faculty of the University of Basel. From 1900 to 1906 he worked in a psychiatric clinic in Zurich as an assistant to the famous psychiatrist E. Bleuler. In 1909-1913, he collaborated with Sigmund Freud, played a leading role in the psychoanalytic movement: he was the first president of the International Psychoanalytic Society, editor of a psychoanalytic journal, and lectured on an introduction to psychoanalysis.
On February 14, 1903, Jung married Emma Rauschenbach. He soon became the head of a large family. In 1904, their daughter Agatha was born, in 1906 - Greta, in 1908 - son Franz, in 1910 - Marianne, in 1914 - Helena.
In 1904, he met and later entered into a long-term extramarital affair with his patient Sabina Spielrein-Sheftel. In 1907-1910, Jung was visited at various times by Moscow psychiatrists Mikhail Asatiani, Nikolai Osipov and Alexey Pevnitsky.
In 1914, Jung resigned from the International Psychoanalytic Association and abandoned the technique of psychoanalysis in his practice. He developed his own theory and therapy, which he called “analytical psychology.” With his ideas, he had a significant influence not only on psychiatry and psychology, but also on anthropology, ethnology, cultural studies, comparative history of religion, pedagogy, and literature.
In his works, Jung covered a wide range of philosophical and psychological issues: from traditional issues of psychoanalysis in the treatment of neuropsychic disorders to global problems of human existence in society, which he considered through the prism of his own ideas about the individual and collective psyche and the doctrine of archetypes.
In 1922, Jung purchased an estate in Bollingen on the shores of Lake Zurich (not far from his home in Küsnacht) and for many years built the so-called Tower (German: Turm) there. Having in the initial stage the appearance of a primitive round stone dwelling, after four stages of completion by 1956, the Tower acquired the appearance of a small castle with two towers, an office, a fenced yard and a pier for boats. In his memoirs, Jung described the construction process as an exploration of the structure of the psyche embodied in stone.
In 1933, he became an active participant and one of the inspirers of the influential international intellectual community Eranos.
In 1935, Jung was appointed professor of psychology at the Swiss Polytechnic School in Zurich. At the same time he became the founder and president of the Swiss Society of Practical Psychology.
From 1933 to 1942 he again taught in Zurich, and from 1944 in Basel. From 1933 to 1939 he published the Journal of Psychotherapy and Related Fields (Zentralblatt für Psychotherapie und ihre Grenzgebiete), which supported the national and domestic Nazi policies of racial cleansing, and excerpts from Mein Kampf became the obligatory prologue to any publication. After the war, Jung disowned editing this magazine, explaining his loyalty to Hitler by the demands of the time. In an interview with Karol Bauman in 1948, Jung found nothing better to justify his collaboration with the Nazi regime than to state that “among his colleagues, acquaintances and patients in the period from 1933 to 1945 there were many Jews.” Although then and now a number of historians reproach Jung for collaborating with the Nazi regime, he was never officially condemned and, unlike Heidegger, he was allowed to continue teaching at the university.
Among Jung's publications of this period: “The Relationship between the Self and the Unconscious” (“Die Beziehungen zwischen dem Ich und dem Unbewussten”, 1928), “Psychology and Religion” (“Psychologie und Religion”, 1940), “Psychology and Education” (“ Psychologie und Erziehung”, 1946), “Images of the unconscious” (“Gestaltungen des Unbewussten”, 1950), Symbolism of the spirit (“Symbolik des Geistes”, 1953), “On the origins of consciousness” (“Von den Wurzeln des Bewusstseins”, 1954) .
In April 1948, the C. G. Jung Institute was organized in Zurich. The institute conducted training in German and English. Supporters of his method created the Society of Analytical Psychology in England and similar societies in the USA (New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles), as well as in a number of European countries.
Carl Gustav Jung died at his home on June 6, 1961 in Küsnacht. He was buried in the city's Protestant Church cemetery.
Scientific views of Carl Jung:
Jung initially developed the hypothesis that thinking took precedence over feeling among men, and feeling took precedence over thinking among women. Jung subsequently abandoned this hypothesis.
Jung rejected ideas according to which personality is completely determined by its experiences, learning and environmental influences. He believed that each individual is born with “a complete personality sketch... presented in potency from birth.” And that “the environment does not at all give the individual the opportunity to become one, but only reveals what was already inherent in it,” thus abandoning a number of provisions of psychoanalysis. At the same time, Jung identified several levels of the unconscious: individual, family, group, national, racial and collective unconscious, which includes archetypes universal for all times and cultures.
Jung believed that there is a certain inherited structure of the psyche, developed over hundreds of thousands of years, that causes us to experience and realize our life experiences in a very specific way. And this certainty is expressed in what Jung called archetypes that influence our thoughts, feelings, and actions.
Jung is the author of an association test, during which the subject is presented with a series of words and the reaction speed is analyzed when naming free associations to these words. Analyzing the results of testing people, Jung suggested that some areas of human experience acquire an autonomous character and are not subject to conscious control. Jung called these emotionally charged parts of experience complexes. At the core of the complex, he suggested, an archetypal core can always be found.
Jung assumed that some complexes arise as a result of traumatic situations. As a rule, this is a moral conflict that stems entirely from the impossibility of fully incorporating the essence of the subject. But the exact nature of the emergence and development of complexes is unknown. Figuratively, traumatic situations break off pieces from the ego-complex that go deep into the subconscious and further acquire a certain autonomy. Mention of information related to the complex strengthens defensive reactions that prevent awareness of the complex. Complexes try to enter consciousness through dreams, bodily and behavioral symptoms, relationship patterns, the content of delusions or hallucinations in psychosis, exceeding our conscious intentions (conscious motivation). With neurosis, the line separating the conscious and unconscious is still preserved, but thinned, which allows complexes to remind of their existence, of a deep motivational split in the personality.
Treatment according to Jung follows the path of integration of the psychological components of the personality, and not simply as a study of the unconscious according to. Complexes that arise like fragments after the blows of psycho-traumatic situations bring not only nightmares, erroneous actions, and forgetting of necessary information, but are also conductors of creativity. Consequently, they can be combined through art therapy (“active imagination”) - a kind of joint activity between a person and his traits that are incompatible with his consciousness in other forms of activity.
Due to the difference in the content and tendencies of the conscious and unconscious, their final merging does not occur. Instead, there is the emergence of a “transcendental function” that makes the transition from one attitude to another organically possible without loss of the unconscious. Its appearance is a highly affective event - the acquisition of a new attitude.
Occultism of Carl Jung:
A number of researchers note that the ideas of modern occultism are directly correlated with Jung’s analytical psychology and his concept of the “collective unconscious,” which is attracted by adherents of the occult and practitioners of alternative medicine in an effort to scientifically substantiate their views.
It is noted that many areas of occultism today are developing in line with Jung’s basic ideas, which are adapted to the scientific ideas of our time. Jung introduced into cultural use a huge layer of archaic thought - the magical and Gnostic heritage, alchemical texts of the Middle Ages, etc. He “raised occultism on an intellectual pedestal,” giving it the status of prestigious knowledge. This, of course, is not an accident, since Jung was a mystic, and according to researchers, this is where the true origins of his teachings should be sought. Since childhood, Carl Jung has been in an environment of “contact with other worlds.” He was surrounded by the corresponding atmosphere of the Preiswerk house - the parents of his mother Emilia, where communication with the spirits of the dead was practiced. Jung's mother Emilia, grandfather Samuel, grandmother Augusta, and cousin Helen Preiswerk practiced spiritualism and were considered “clairvoyants” and “spiritualists.” Jung himself organized spiritualistic seances. Even his daughter Agatha later became a medium.
In Jung's memoirs, we learn that the dead come to him, ring the bell and their presence is felt by his entire family. Here he asks “winged Philemon” (his “spiritual leader”) questions in his own voice, and answers in the falsetto of his female being - anima, here dead crusaders are knocking on his house... It is no coincidence that Jung’s psychotherapeutic technique of “active imagination” developed the principles of communication with mystical world and included moments of entering a trance.
At the same time, it is impossible to put an absolute sign of equality between Jungianism and the esoteric ideas of our time, since Jung’s teaching differs from them not only in its complexity and high culture, but also in a fundamentally different attitude to the world of mysticism and spirit.
V.V. Zelensky
Concluding the last decade of the 20th century and summing up the results of a century of psychoanalytic or, more precisely, depth psychological development, we can confidently name the Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung among the most outstanding thinkers.
As is known, depth psychology is a general designation for a number of psychological trends that put forward, among other things, the idea of the independence of the psyche from consciousness and strive to substantiate the actual existence of this psyche, independent of consciousness, and to reveal its content. One of these areas, based on the concepts and discoveries in the field of the psyche made by Jung at different times, is analytical psychology. Today, in everyday cultural environment, such concepts as complex, extrovert, introvert, archetype, once introduced into psychology by Jung, have become commonly used and even stereotyped. There is a misconception that Jung's ideas grew out of an idiosyncrasy towards psychoanalysis. And although a number of Jung’s propositions are indeed based on objections to Freud, the very context in which the “building elements” arose at different periods, which later constituted the original psychological system, is, of course, much broader and, most importantly, it is based on ideas different from Freud’s and views on both human nature and the interpretation of clinical and psychological data.
Carl Jung was born on July 26, 1875 in Kesswil, canton of Thurgau, on the shores of the picturesque Lake Constance in the family of a pastor of the Swiss Reformed Church; my grandfather and great-grandfather on my father’s side were doctors. He studied at the Basel Gymnasium, his favorite subjects during his high school years were zoology, biology, archeology and history. In April 1895 he entered the University of Basel, where he studied medicine, but then decided to specialize in psychiatry and psychology. In addition to these disciplines, he was deeply interested in philosophy, theology, and the occult.
After graduating from medical school, Jung wrote a dissertation “On the psychology and pathology of so-called occult phenomena,” which turned out to be a prelude to his creative period that lasted almost 60 years. Based on carefully prepared seances with his extraordinarily gifted mediumistic cousin Helen Preiswerk, Jung's work was a description of her messages received in a state of mediumistic trance. It is important to note that from the very beginning of his professional career, Jung was interested in the unconscious products of the psyche and their meaning for the subject. Already in this study one can easily see the logical basis of all his subsequent works in their development - from the theory of complexes to archetypes, from the content of libido to ideas about synchronicity, etc.
In 1900, Jung moved to Zurich and began working as an assistant to the then famous psychiatrist Eugene Bleuler at the Burghölzli mental hospital (a suburb of Zurich). He settled on the hospital grounds, and from that moment on, the life of the young employee began to pass in the atmosphere of a psychiatric monastery. Bleuler was the visible embodiment of work and professional duty. He demanded precision, accuracy and attentiveness to patients from himself and his employees. The morning round ended at 8.30 am with a working meeting of staff, at which reports on the condition of the patients were heard. Two or three times a week at 10:00 a.m. doctors met with a mandatory discussion of medical histories of both old and newly admitted patients. The meetings took place with the indispensable participation of Blader himself. The mandatory evening rounds took place between five and seven o'clock in the evening. There were no secretaries, and the staff typed the medical records themselves, so sometimes they had to work until 11 o’clock in the evening. The hospital gates and doors closed at 10 pm. The junior staff did not have keys, so if Jung wanted to return home from the city later, he had to ask one of the senior medical staff for the key. Prohibition reigned on the territory of the hospital.
Soon he began publishing his first clinical works, as well as articles on the use of the word association test he had developed. Jung came to the conclusion that through verbal connections one can detect (“grope for”) certain sets (constellations) of sensory-colored (or emotionally “charged”) thoughts, concepts, ideas and, thereby, make it possible to reveal painful symptoms. The test worked by assessing the patient's response based on the time delay between stimulus and response. The result revealed a correspondence between the reaction word and the subject’s behavior itself. Significant deviation from norms marked the presence of affectively loaded unconscious ideas, and Jung introduced the concept of “complex” to describe their total combination.
In 1907, Jung published a study on dementia praecox (this work Jung sent to Sigmund Freud), which undoubtedly influenced Bleuler, who four years later proposed the term “schizophrenia” for the corresponding illness. In this work** Jung suggested that it is the “complex” that is responsible for the production of a toxin (poison) that retards mental development, and it is the complex that directly directs its mental content into consciousness. In this case, manic ideas, hallucinatory experiences and affective changes in psychosis are presented as more or less distorted manifestations of a repressed complex. Jung's book "Psychology" turned out to be the first psychosomatic theory of schizophrenia, and in his further works Jung always adhered to the belief about the primacy of psychogenic factors in the occurrence of this disease, although he gradually abandoned the "toxin" hypothesis, later explaining himself more in terms of disturbed neurochemical processes.
The meeting with Freud marked an important milestone in Jung's scientific development. By the time of our personal acquaintance in February 1907 in Vienna, where Jung arrived after a short correspondence, he was already widely known both for his experiments in word associations and for the discovery of sensory complexes. Using Freud's theory in his experiments - he knew his works well - Jung not only explained his own results, but also supported the psychoanalytic movement as such. The meeting gave rise to close cooperation and personal friendship that lasted until 1912. Freud was older and more experienced, and it is not strange that he became, in a sense, a father figure for Jung. For his part, Freud, who received Jung's support and understanding with indescribable enthusiasm and approval, believed that he had finally found his spiritual “son” and follower. In this deeply symbolic “father-son” connection, both the fruitfulness of their relationship and the seeds of future mutual renunciation and disagreement grew and developed. An invaluable gift for the entire history of psychoanalysis is their many years of correspondence, which amounted to a full-length volume.*
In February 1903, Jung married the twenty-year-old daughter of a successful manufacturer, Emma Rauschenbach (1882-1955), with whom he lived together for fifty-two years, becoming the father of four daughters and a son. At first, the young people settled on the territory of the Burchgolpli clinic, occupying an apartment on the floor above Bleuler, and later - in 1906 - they moved to a newly built house of their own in the suburban town of Küsnacht, not far from Zurich. A year earlier, Jung began teaching at the University of Zurich. In 1909, together with Freud and another Hungarian psychoanalyst, Ferencsi, who worked in Austria, Jung first came to the United States of America, where he gave a course of lectures on the method of word associations. Clark University in Massachusetts, which invited European psychoanalysts and celebrated its twenty years of existence, awarded Jung, along with others, an honorary doctorate.
International fame, and with it private practice, which brought in a good income, gradually grew, so that in 1910 Jung left his post at the Burchholzl Clinic (by which time he had become clinical director), accepting more and more numerous patients in his Küsnacht, on shore of Lake Zurich. At this time, Jung became the first President of the International Association of Psychoanalysis and plunged into his in-depth research into myths, legends, and fairy tales in the context of their interaction with the world of psychopathology. Publications appeared that quite clearly outlined the area of Jung’s subsequent life and academic interests. Here, the boundaries of ideological independence from Freud were more clearly outlined in the views of both on the nature of the unconscious psyche.
First of all, disagreement emerged in the understanding of the content of libido as a term that defines the mental energy of an individual. Freud believed that mental disorders develop due to the suppression of sexuality and the transfer of erotic interest from objects in the external world to the internal world of the patient. Jung believed that contact with the outside world is maintained in other ways than sexual, and the loss of contact with reality, characteristic, in particular, of schizophrenia, cannot be associated only with sexual repression. Therefore, Jung began to use the concept of libido to designate all psychic energy,* not limited to its sexual form. Subsequently, differences of opinion emerged on other issues. For example, Freud believed that neurosis certainly begins in early childhood and its main factors are incestuous fantasies and desires associated with the so-called Oedipus complex. Jung, on the contrary, was convinced that the cause of neurosis is hidden in the present day, and all children's fantasies are a second-order phenomenon. Freud believed that our dreams are unfulfilled desires that have moved into sleep to make themselves known in this indirect way. “The visible content of a dream,” he said, is just a veil on the “latent content,” which, as a rule, is nothing more than the repressed sexual desire of early childhood. For Jung, dreams were channels of communication with the unconscious side of the psyche. They are conveyed in symbolic language, very difficult to understand, but are not necessarily associated with desires or represent any other way to hide the unacceptable. Most often, dreams complement conscious daytime life, compensating for the individual’s defective manifestations. In a situation of neurotic disorder, dreams warn of going astray from the right path. Neurosis is a fairly valuable signal, a “helpful” message indicating that the individual has wandered too far. In this sense, neurotic symptoms can be considered compensatory; they are also part of the self-regulation mechanism, aimed at achieving a more stable balance within the psyche. Paradoxically, Jung sometimes said about someone:
"Thank God he became neurotic!" Just as physical pain signals problems in the body, neurotic symptoms signal the need to draw attention to psychological problems that the person was not aware of.
In short, Jung's "defection" was inevitable, and subsequent events led to the fact that in 1913 there was a break between the two great men, and each went his own way, following his creative genius.
Jung felt his break with Freud very acutely. In fact, it was a personal drama, a spiritual crisis, a state of internal mental discord on the verge of a deep nervous breakdown. “He not only heard unknown voices, played like a child, or wandered around the garden in endless conversations with an imaginary interlocutor,” notes one of the biographers in his book about Jung, “but he also seriously believed that his house was haunted.”
At the time of his divergence with Freud, Jung was thirty-eight years old. The noon of life, Pritin, Akme, turned out to be at the same time a turning point in mental development. The drama of separation turned into an opportunity for greater freedom to develop one’s own theory of the contents of the unconscious psyche. Jung's work increasingly reveals an interest in archetypal symbolism. In personal life, this meant a voluntary descent into the “abyss” of the unconscious. In the six years that followed (1913-1918), Jung went through a stage that he himself described as a time of “inner uncertainty” or “creative illness” (Ellenberger). Jung spent considerable time trying to understand the meaning and meaning of his dreams and fantasies and describe it as best he could in terms of everyday life. The result was a voluminous manuscript of 600 pages, illustrated with many drawings of dream images and called the “Red Book”. (For personal reasons it was never published.) Having gone through personal experience of confrontation with the unconscious, Jung enriched his analytical experience and created a new system of analytical psychotherapy and a new mental structure.
His “Russian encounters,” his relationships at different times and on different occasions with immigrants from Russia—student patients, doctors, philosophers, and publishers—played a certain role in Jung’s creative destiny. The beginning of the “Russian theme” can be attributed to the end of the first decade of the 20th century, when medical students from Russia began to appear among the participants in the psychoanalytic circle in Zurich. The names of some are known to us: Faina Shalevskaya from Rostov-on-Don (1907), Esther Aptekman (1911), Tatyana Rosenthal from St. Petersburg (1901-1905, 1906-1911), Sabina Spielrein from Rostov-on-Don Donu (1905-1911) and Max Eitingon. All of them subsequently became specialists in the field of psychoanalysis. Tatyana Rosenthal returned to St. Petersburg and subsequently worked at the Bekhterev Brain Institute as a psychoanalyst. She was the author of the little-known work “Suffering and the Work of Dostoevsky.” In 1921, at the age of 36, she committed suicide. A native of Mogilev, Max Eitingon moved to Leipzig with his parents at the age of 12, where he then studied philosophy before setting foot on the medical path. He worked as Jung's assistant at the Burchholzli Clinic and, under his supervision, received his doctorate from the University of Zurich in 1909. Another “Russian girl” Sabina Spielrein was a patient of the aspiring doctor Jung (1904), and later became his student. After completing her education in Zurich and receiving her doctorate in medicine, Spielrein experienced a painful break with Jung, moved to Vienna and joined Freud's psychoanalytic circle. She worked for some time in clinics in Berlin and Geneva, where the later famous psychologist Jean Piaget began his course of psychoanalysis. In 1923 she returned to Russia. She became one of the leading psychoanalysts at the State Psychoanalytic Institute formed in Moscow in those years. Her further fate was very tragic.
After the closure of the Psychoanalytic Institute, Sabina Nikolaevna moved to Rostov-on-Don to live with her parents. The ban on psychoanalytic activity, the arrest and death of three brothers in the dungeons of the NKVD, and finally death in Rostov, when she, along with her two daughters, shared the fate of hundreds of Jews shot in a local synagogue by the Germans in December 1941. Vienna and Zurich have long been considered centers of advanced psychiatric thought. The beginning of the century brought them fame in connection with the clinical practice of Freud and Jung, respectively, so it was not surprising that the attention of those Russian clinicians and researchers who were looking for new means of treating various mental disorders and seeking a deeper penetration into human psyche. And some of them specifically came to them for an internship or for a brief introduction to psychoanalytic ideas.
In 1907-10, Jung was visited at various times by Moscow psychiatrists Mikhail Asatiani, Nikolai Osipov and Alexey Pevnitsky. Of the later acquaintances, special mention should be made of the meeting with the publisher Emilius Medtner and the philosopher Boris Vysheslavtsev. During the period of Jung’s “clash” with the unconscious and work on “Psychological Types,” Emilius Karlovich Medtner, who fled to Zurich from warring Germany, turned out to be almost the only interlocutor capable of perceiving Jung’s ideas. (Jung left the post of President of the Psychoanalytic Association, and with it he lost many personal connections with his colleagues). While still living in Russia, Medtner founded the Musaget publishing house and published the philosophical and literary magazine Logos. According to Jung's son, psychological support from Medtner was of great importance to his father. While abroad, Medtner suffered from frequent sharp noises in the ears, for which he first turned to the Viennese Freudians. They couldn’t help in any way other than urgent advice to get married. It was then that the meeting with Jung took place. Medtner was preparing for long-term treatment, but the painful symptom disappeared after several sessions. The relationship between the patient and the analyst became friendly and, at first, almost daily. Then, for a number of years, Jung and Medtner met once a week, in the evening, and discussed certain philosophical and psychological issues. Jung's son remembered that his father called Medtner a "Russian philosopher."
Years later, Medtner published the first review of the published book “Psychological Types”, and later became the publisher of Jung’s works in Russian, writing prefaces to them. Medtner's death prevented the completion of the work begun on the publication of four volumes of the works of C. G. Jung. This work was completed by another “Russian” - the philosopher Boris Petrovich Vysheslavtsev (1877-1954). Expelled from Russia by the Bolsheviks in 1922, he first worked at the Religious and Philosophical Academy created by N. A. Berdyaev. Later he lectured at the Paris Theological Institute. In 1931, he published the book “The Ethics of Transformed Eros,” in which, influenced, in particular, by the ideas of C. Jung, he put forward the theory of the ethics of the sublimation of Eros. In those years, a correspondence began between Jung and Vysheslavtsev, in which Vysheslavtsev declared himself a student of Jung. At the end of the 30s, through the efforts of Vysheslavtsev, the four-volume collection of Jung's works was completed. On the eve of the end of the war in April 1945, Jung helped Vysheslavtsev and his wife move from Prague to neutral Switzerland.
After the publication of “Psychological Types,” the 45-year-old master of psychology began a difficult stage of strengthening the positions he had won in the scientific world. Gradually, Jung is gaining increasing international fame not only among his colleagues - psychologists and psychiatrists: his name begins to arouse serious interest among representatives of other areas of humanities - philosophers, cultural historians, sociologists, etc. And here, looking ahead, it should be said that the works and Jung's ideas gave rise to waves of influence in at least two areas: the first is the school of psychological theory and therapy, i.e. clinical and personal psychoanalytic practice; the second area of influence is the arts and humanities in general and science in particular. In this sense, Jung's views on mental life, art and history can be very roughly reduced to the following statements:
1. The unconscious is real. His activity, his energetic basis within us and between us manifest themselves continuously. Psychic reality cannot but be recognized and recognized. Our conscious mind is not the only manager of the entire individual economy; it is not even the only (authoritative, but not always) owner and captain of our thoughts. We are always and in everything - individually and collectively - under the influence - good or bad, the question is different - of that energy that we are not aware of.
2. Precisely because we are not aware of the unconscious, we cannot say anything directly about it. But we still judge it by its “fruits,” by indirect manifestations in the conscious psyche. Such manifestations can appear in dreams, works of art and literature, in the imagination, daydreams, some specific forms of behavior, as well as in those symbols that govern peoples and societies.
3. The resulting (manifest) manifestation of the psyche is always an alloy, a mixture of various influences, a combination of a wide variety of factors. First of all, there is the work of the ego, our conscious self. Then, as participants in the action, one can see the personal (mostly unconscious) complexes of the individual or group to which this or that participant belongs. And thirdly, it is not difficult to trace the participation of one or another combination of archetypal influence, which has its initiating principle in the collective psyche, but is realized in the same individual (collective unconscious). From the interaction of all these components, actions, ideas, works of art, any mass movements and collective actions arise. And here lies the eternal “fascination” with the life of both an individual and groups, societies, nations and all humanity. From cave paintings and initiation dances of primitive savages to mass experiences of world wars or the Gulag.
4. The unconscious is busy with the continuous reproduction of symbols, and these are mental symbols related to the psyche. These symbols, like the psyche itself, are based on empirical reality, but are not signs representing this reality. Jung examines in detail both the content of the symbol and its difference from a sign in many of his works, but here I will limit myself to a simple example. For example, in a dream the image of a bull may underlie the dreamer’s sexuality, but the image itself does not boil down to this. Jung's attitude to symbols is ambiguous because he avoids rigid fixation (“this means that”) of the depicted image. The bull - as a symbol of psychic energy representing strength - can symbolize aggressive male sexuality, but it can simultaneously express phallic productive creativity, and the image of the sky, and the figure of a strict father, etc. In any case, the free path of symbolic reflection opens up wide possibilities for meaning and acts as an opponent of any literalism, fundamentalism of any kind.
5. Jung was deeply convinced that the meaning of psychic symbols is much wider than personal boundaries. The archetypal symbol is transpersonal in nature. It is interpersonal in meaning. Jung's non-confessional religiosity may be hidden here. Jung was convinced that the story of life exists on two levels and therefore should be told as in the old epic poems. The Bible or the Odyssey: figuratively and allegorically. Otherwise, history, like life itself, turns out to be incomplete and, therefore, inauthentic. This corresponds to a two-level division of the psyche into consciousness and the unconscious.
So, in all cases, psychic reality is present as, in Jung’s words, “the only evidence” or “the highest reality.” In his work "The Real and the Surreal"* Jung describes this concept as follows. He compares the Eastern type of thinking and the Western one. According to the Western view, everything that is “real” is somehow perceived through the senses. Such a restrictive interpretation of reality, reducing it to materiality, although it seems understandable, represents only a fragment of reality as a whole. This narrow position is alien to the Eastern vision of the world, which relates absolutely everything to reality. Therefore, the East, unlike the West, does not need definitions like “superreality” or “extrasensory perception” in relation to the psyche. Previously, Western man considered the psychic only as a “secondary” reality, obtained as a result of the action of the corresponding physical principles. An indicative example of such an attitude can be considered simple-minded materialism a la Fogg-Moleschott, who declared that “thought is in almost the same relationship to the brain as bile is to the liver.” Currently, Jung believes, the West is beginning to realize its mistake and understand that the world in which it lives is represented by mental images. The East turned out to be wiser, this is Jung's opinion, since he found that the essence of all things is based on the psyche. Between the unknown essences of spirit and matter lies the reality of the psyche, and it is intended to be the only reality that we directly experience.
Therefore, Jung considered the study of the psyche to be the science of the future. For him, the pressing problem of humanity was not so much the threat of overpopulation or nuclear disaster as the danger of a mental epidemic. Thus, in the fate of humanity, the decisive factor is the person himself, his psyche. Even more specifically, this "decisive factor" is focused and concentrated in the unconscious psyche, which is the real threat; "The world hangs on a thin thread, and this thread is the human psyche."
In the 20s, Jung made a series of long, exciting journeys that he took to various parts of Africa and to the Pueblo Indians in North America. A report on these research trips (including a trip to India, which took place later, in 1938), or rather, a kind of cultural-psychological essay, later formed the chapter “Travel” in Jung’s autobiographical book “Memories, Dreams, Reflections.”* In contrast from carefree and curious tourists, Jung was able to look at another culture from the point of view of revealing the meaning contained in it; comprehending this meaning, he believes that history itself has a well-known universal human meaning, within the framework of which interaction of both cultures and times is possible. There are two main themes here: Jung - the psychologist and psychotherapist, and Jung - the cultural scientist. This is the theme of personal development - individuation and the theme of the collective unconscious. Jung viewed individuation as being directed towards achieving psychic integrity, and used numerous illustrations from alchemy, mythology, literature, Western and Eastern religions to characterize it, using his own clinical observations. As for the “collective unconscious,” this concept is also key to all analytical psychology and, according to many authoritative scientists and thinkers, is “the most revolutionary idea of the 20th century,” an idea from which serious conclusions were never drawn until of this time.
Jung objected to the idea that personality is completely determined by its experiences, learning and environmental influences. He argued that each individual is born with “a complete personal sketch...presented in potency from birth,” and that “the environment does not at all give the individual the opportunity to become one, but only reveals what was already in it [the individual]. ] laid down."** According to Jung, there is a certain inherited structure of the psyche, developed over hundreds of thousands of years, which makes us experience and realize our life experiences in a very certain way. And this certainty is expressed in what Jung called archetypes, which influence our thoughts, feelings, actions, “... the unconscious, as a collection of archetypes, is the sediment of everything that has been experienced by humanity, right down to its darkest beginnings. But not a dead sediment, not an abandoned field of ruins, but a living system of reactions and dispositions, which in an invisible and therefore more effective way determines individual life. However, this is not just some kind of gigantic historical prejudice, but a source of instincts, since archetypes are nothing else. as forms of manifestation of instincts."
In the early 20s, Jung met the famous sinologist Richard Wilhelm, translator of the famous Chinese treatise “The Book of Changes,” and soon invited him to give a lecture at the Psychological Club in Zurich. Jung was keenly interested in Eastern fortune-telling methods and experimented with them himself with some success. He also participated in those years in a number of mediumistic experiments in Zurich together with Bleuler. The sessions were led by the famous Austrian medium Rudi Schneider in those years. However, Jung for a long time refused to draw any conclusions about these experiments and even avoided any mention of them, although he later openly acknowledged the reality of these phenomena. He also showed deep interest in the works of medieval alchemists, in whom he saw the forerunners of the psychology of the unconscious. In 1923, Jung purchased a small plot of land on the shores of Lake Zurich in the town of Bollingen, where he built a tower-type building and where he spent his Sundays and vacations in peace and solitude. There was no electricity, no telephone, no heating. Food was cooked on the stove, water was obtained from the well. As Ellenberger aptly noted, the passage from Küsnacht to Bollingen symbolized for Jung the path from ego to Self, or, in other words, the path of individuation.
In the 1930s, Jung's fame became international. He was awarded the title of honorary president of the German Psychotherapeutic Society. In November 1932, the Zurich city council awarded him a prize for literature, accompanied by a check for 8,000 francs.
In 1933, Hitler came to power in Germany. The Psychotherapeutic Society was immediately reorganized according to National Socialist principles, and its president, Ernst Kretschmer, resigned. Jung became the President of the International Society, but the Society itself began to operate on the principle of a “cover organization”, consisting of national societies (of which the German society was only one) and individual members. As Jung himself later explained, this was a kind of subterfuge that allowed Jewish psychotherapists, excluded from German society, to remain within the organization itself. In this regard, Jung rejected all accusations regarding his sympathies for Nazism and indirect manifestations of anti-Semitism.
In 1935, Jung was appointed professor of psychology at the Swiss Polytechnic School in Zurich, and in the same year he founded the Swiss Society of Practical Psychology. As the international situation grew worse, Jung, who had never before shown any obvious interest in world politics, became increasingly interested in it. From the interviews he gave to various magazines in those years, it can be understood that Jung was trying to analyze the psychology of government leaders and especially dictators. On September 28, 1937, during Mussolini's historic visit to Berlin, Jung happened to be there and had the opportunity to closely observe the behavior of the Italian dictator and Hitler during a mass parade. From that time on, the problems of mass psychosis became one of the focuses of Jung's attention.
Another turning point in Jung's life can be traced to the end of the Second World War. He himself notes this moment in his autobiographical book (see chapter “Visions”). At the beginning of 1944, Jung writes, he broke his leg and also had a heart attack, during which he lost consciousness and felt that he was dying. He had a cosmic vision in which he viewed our planet from the outside, and himself as nothing more than the sum of what he had once said and done during his life. The next moment, when he was about to cross the threshold of a certain temple, he saw his doctor coming towards him.. Suddenly the doctor took on the features of the king of the island of Kos (the birthplace of Hippocrates) in order to bring him back to earth, and Jung had a feeling that life the doctor was threatened by something, while his, Jung's, own life was saved (and indeed, a few weeks later his doctor died unexpectedly). Jung noted that for the first time he felt bitter disappointment when he returned back to life. From that moment on, something changed irrevocably in him, and his thoughts took a new direction, which can be seen from his works written at that time. Now he has become the “wise old man from Kusnacht”...
Towards the end of his life, Jung became less and less distracted by the external vicissitudes of everyday events, increasingly directing his attention and interest to global problems. Not only the threat of atomic war, but also the ever-increasing overpopulation of the Earth and the barbaric destruction of natural resources, along with the pollution of nature, deeply worried him. Perhaps for the first time in history, the survival of mankind as a whole appeared in a threatening light in the second half of the 20th century, and Jung was able to sense this much earlier than others. Since the fate of humanity is at stake, it is natural to ask: is there not an archetype that represents, so to speak, the whole of humanity and its destiny? Jung saw that in almost all world religions, and in a number of other religious denominations, such an archetype exists and reveals itself in the image of the so-called primordial (first man) or cosmic man, anthropos. Anthropos, the giant cosmic man personifies the life principle and meaning of all human life on Earth (Ymir, Purusha, Panku, Gayomart, Adam). In alchemy and Gnosticism we find a similar motif of the Man of Light who falls into darkness or is dismembered by darkness and must be "collected" and returned to the light. In the texts of these teachings there is a description of how the Man of Light, identical to God, first lives in the Pleroma, is then defeated by the forces of Evil - as a rule, these are star gods or Archons, falls or "slides" down and, ultimately, finds himself scattered in matter in the form of many sparks, where he awaits his salvation. His redemption or liberation consists in collecting all the scattered parts and returning to the Pleroma. This drama symbolizes the process of individuation in the individual, each at first consisting of such chaotic manifold particles and gradually becoming one. personality by collecting and realizing these particles. But this drama can also be understood as an image of the slow gradual development of humanity towards higher consciousness, which Jung wrote about in great detail in his works “Answer to Job” and “Ayon”.
Confidence in the absolute unity of all things led Jung to the idea that the physical and mental, like space and time, are human, mental categories that do not reflect reality with the necessary accuracy. Due to the very nature of their thoughts and language, people are inevitably forced (unconsciously) to divide everything into their opposites. Hence the antinomy of any statements. In fact, opposites may turn out to be fragments of the same reality. Jung's collaboration in the last years of his life with the physicist Wolfgang Pauli led both to the conviction that the study by physicists of the depths of matter, and by psychologists of the depths of the psyche, could only be different ways of approaching a single, hidden reality. Neither psychology can be sufficiently “objective”, since the observer inevitably influences the observed effect, nor physics, which is unable to measure simultaneously the momentum and speed of a particle at the subatomic level. The principle of complementarity, which has become the cornerstone of modern physics, also applies to problems of soul and body.
Throughout his life, Jung was impressed by a sequence of different seemingly unrelated events occurring simultaneously. Let's say, the death of one person and a disturbing dream of his close relative, which happened at the same time. Jung felt that such “coincidences” required some additional explanation other than the assertion of some kind of “accident”. Jung called this additional principle of explanation synchronicity. According to Jung, synchronicity is based on the universal order of meaning, which is a complement to causality. Synchronic phenomena are associated with archetypes. The nature of the archetype - neither physical nor mental - belongs to both areas. So archetypes are able to manifest both physically and mentally at the same time. An illustrative example here is the case of Swedenborg, mentioned by Jung, when Swedenborg experienced a vision of a fire at the very moment when the fire was actually raging in Stockholm. According to Jung, certain changes in Swedenborg's mental state gave him temporary access to “absolute knowledge” - to a region where the boundaries of time and space are overcome. The perception of ordering structures affects the mental as meaning
In 1955, in honor of Jung's eightieth birthday, the International Congress of Psychiatrists was held in Zurich, chaired by Manfred Bleuler, son of Eugene Bleuler (with whom Jung began his career as a psychiatrist in Burchholzli). Jung was asked to give a talk on the psychology of schizophrenia, a topic that began his scientific research in 1901. But at the same time, loneliness grew around him. In November 1955, Emma Jung, his wife and constant companion for more than half a century, died. Of all the great pioneers of depth psychology, Jung was the only one whose wife became his student, adopted his methods and techniques, and practiced his psychotherapeutic method.
Over the years, Jung weakened physically, but his mind remained alert and responsive. He amazed his guests with subtle reflections on the secrets of the human soul and the future of humanity.
At eighty-five years old, Carl Gustav Jung received the title of honorary citizen of Küsnacht, where he settled back in 1909. The mayor solemnly presented the “wise old man” with a ceremonial letter and seal, and Jung made a response speech, addressing the audience in his native Basel dialect. Shortly before his death, Jung completed work on his autobiographical book, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, which became a bestseller in the Western world, and also, together with his students, wrote a fascinating book, Man and His Symbols, a popular exposition of the foundations of analytical psychology.
Carl Gustav Jung died at his home in Küsnacht on June 6, 1961. The farewell ceremony took place in the Protestant church of Kusnacht. A local pastor, in his funeral speech, called the deceased “a prophet who managed to hold back the all-encompassing onslaught of rationalism and gave man the courage to rediscover his soul.” Two other students of Jung, theologian Hans Scher and economist Eugene Buhler, noted the scientific and human achievements of their spiritual mentor. The body was cremated and the ashes were buried in the family grave in the local cemetery.