Jung, an enigmatic figure in modern thought, has inspired countless individuals with his exploration of the psyche, symbols, myths, and the healing power of dreams. Despite his profound impact, his work has been fraught with controversy, criticized for its unscientific, mystical approach in an era dominated by rationality and measurement. Jung’s “depth psychology” aimed to uncover the deeper layers of the psyche, often clashing with Freud’s more materialistic views on infantile sexuality and the unconscious. Their inevitable split highlighted the broader conflict between science and spirituality. Today, Jung’s ideas, once seen as unorthodox, resonate more with a postmodern society seeking meaning beyond the limits of empirical science. His theories on the collective unconscious and archetypes continue to shape our understanding of human psychology and spirituality, emphasizing the need to reconcile science with a broader, more integrated perspective of life.
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Jung is an enigmatic figure in the history of modern thought. For almost a hundred years his works have inspired many people and been a source of insight to intellectuals, artists, practitioners and general readers. He has opened up doorways to the psyche, to the mystery of life and to spiritual meaning. He has awoken several generations to the power of symbols, to the ancient world of myths and the healing capacity of dreams. Jung has brought the possibility of enchantment and spiritual depth to a post-religious Western society which has been living without a shared spiritual story or cosmology for some time.
In his lifetime, his work was beset by controversy, and historians of psychology have often been unable to evaluate his achievement. Science in his day seemed almost embarrassed by his writing, as he spoke about the influence of gods or archetypes (structural forms or motifs of the psyche) on behaviour in an era of rationality and measurement. His work has been attacked as unscientific, mystical and speculative. In his defence, Jung claimed his science was a ‘depth psychology’ that looked beyond the surface, whereas academic psychology looked only at what was rationally explicable. Jung’s work may appear less scientific to some readers, due to the relative absence of detailed case histories in his writings. Jung tended to write in a philosophical style, providing his findings and conclusions rather than the empirical facts upon which such conclusions were based. He seemed impatient with details, and keen to articulate a big picture.
Jung was larger than any single discipline and went in pursuit of truth outside the normal boundaries. His concern was not only with psychiatry in its clinical application, but with life in its broadest possible meaning. He went in search of many aspects of the psyche and the world in his quest for understanding. The title of one of his mid-career books, Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933), reflects the breadth of his vision. Because he had the courage to tackle big issues, Jung always enjoyed a popular following. Many in the wider community felt that Jung was speaking to their emotional and spiritual needs, and was not merely addressing a handful of colleagues in the medical profession.
Jung set himself the task not only of acquiring new knowledge about human personality but of breaking through to a level of wisdom where knowledge generally stops. His major questions included: Are we related to something infinite or not? Do forces beyond reason impact on our bodies, minds and behaviour? Is meaning inherent in existence or is it added by ourselves? Are gods real or do we merely invent them?
These questions seemed oddly unscientific to many in Jung’s time. They are the perennial questions of philosophy, and yet medical science had narrowed itself to an experimental and clinical base in which the broader issues played no part in human health. Jung was looking for spirit in an age of science, and his day did not respond kindly to his longing. Our time has more sympathy for him, because we live in a postmodern era in which many of the assumptions of science and modernity have been questioned, doubted or reversed. Our age is hungry for meaning, and Jung speaks directly to this post-rational or post-enlightenment hunger.1
Jung was researching the unconscious for several years before he met Freud. He had developed the word association test (which indicated how speech patterns are affected by unconscious problems), introduced the idea of the complex (split-off psychic fragments with a semi-autonomous existence), studied psychopathology (the science of mental disorders) with Pierre Janet in Paris, and researched schizophrenia with Eugen Bleuler in his native Zurich. Freud’s work interested Jung because the psychological origins of mental disease were being explored, and Jung felt this would throw light on the unknown reaches of the mind.
Freud welcomed Jung’s interest because Jung was highly intelligent, strongly motivated, and able to advance the cause of psychoanalysis beyond Jewish Vienna to the psychiatric world and to the Christian West, where Freud was keen to make inroads. ‘Jung’s association with us,’ Freud wrote to Karl Abraham in 1908, ‘is the more valuable for [through him] analysis escaped the danger of becoming a Jewish national affair.’2 Freud anointed Jung as his ‘successor and crown prince’,3 but no sooner had Freud announced his intentions than Jung began to express discontent with the Freudian point of view.
Jung found Freud’s views to be confined to the same materialistic assumptions that he had encountered in psychiatry. Even as early as 1908, Jung had become critical of what he called Freud’s ‘dogma’ of infantile sexuality, his insistence that all symptoms be traced to childhood traumas, his strict adherence to the Oedipus complex, and his formulaic approach to dream symbolism, where everything seemed to symbolize a penis or a vagina. Nor did Jung agree with Freud’s model of the psyche with superego, ego and id. For Jung, these were arbitrary and simplistic categories which did not adequately describe the landscape of the psyche.
Freud was moving into deepareas but, according to Jung, with a narrowness that prevented him from understanding much of what he saw. Jung wanted everything in psychoanalysis to be open-ended, to be receptive to the possibility that forces governing the future and not just the past had a role to play in the personality. Jung called for a wider conception of libido or energy, a more symbolic approach to dreams, and recognition of a forward-striving movement in the psyche. Freud seemed to want to link everything back to early childhood; Jung sought to show that the psyche was urging us onward to create a new and broader personality.
All of these elements frustrated Freud. He did not want Jung to turn the psyche into a poetic or literary field in which vague philosophical principles would govern what happens in the mind. Jung, a symbolic thinker with a background in German romantic and Greek philosophical traditions, was attracted to big ideas and mythological forces or archetypes that could never be explained in rational terms. Jung argued that the archetypes were ‘given’ with life, and had to be accepted as the foundational structures of life. This sounded to Freud more like mysticism than pure science.
Jung’s father was a clergyman, his mother was spiritual in the folk or popular sense, and his family tree was grounded in the soil of religious thinking. Although Jung had rejected the practices of his father’s Swiss Reformed Church, he remained committed to the life of the spirit, and felt cramped by Freud’s approach, which found a rational cause for every problem. Jung rejected Freud’s conception of the unconscious, arguing that the mind is not merely personal but has a universal and religious dimension.
The archetypes, which he defined as universal forms of the collective unconscious, did not originate from personal experience, but from a Platonic realm of ancestral ideas and memories. In many ways, Jung is the intellectual descendant of Plato, who postulated an ideal realm of abstract forms (invisible metaphysical constructs), whereas Freud is the heir of Aristotle, who strove to understand the world through reason and logic.
Jung’s concepts were not fully developed during his collaboration with Freud (1906—13), but Freud saw them in their early, nascent form, and he had seen enough. To Freud, Jung seemed to be abandoning science for magical thinking. He saw Jung replacing the scepticism of the scientific attitude with affirmations about religion, cosmology and philosophy. In a sense, Freud was right, and I sympathize with his anguish. Jung was intuiting a level of psychic reality that was not ‘scientific’ in the normal sense, and Freud had to either abandon science and follow Jung’s lead, or abandon Jung and stick to science as he knew it. He chose the latter course.
Jung was a religious philosopher with scientific concerns; never, in my opinion, a pure scientist. Jung hoped that others would join him in his quest, but most scientific colleagues closed ranks. If he would not respect scientific boundaries, nor would those who upheld those boundaries show respect for him.
In 1913 the British Medical Association set up a ‘committee’ for investigating psychoanalysis with Ernest Jones (a major figure in the Freudian school) at its head, and part of its brief was to disestablish Jung and discredit his work. This committee seems to have been successful, and its impact is still felt today. Negative associations to Jung and his work have stuck in the minds of professionals, so that when anything Jungian is raised in conferences or discussion papers, medical people tend to think of these elements as unorthodox, unscientific or unfounded.
The break between Freud and Jung was probably inevitable. What was startling was that two such widely divergent thinkers, one governed by suspicion, the other by affirmation, could have maintained their close association for the time they did. Both must have had their doubts about the other, but in their mutual interests they suppressed them. Freud must have seen very early that Jung was a visionary thinker. Jung must have realized that Freud was committed to science and would not tolerate departures from it. Jung had hoped that a hunger for truth would assert itself in Freud, and Freud hoped that Jung would come to his senses and drop his religious obsessions. Eventually, the hopes and dreams of both men collapsed, and they had to accept the unadorned reality of their differences.
But Western civilization is all the poorer for this split. We now have to renegotiate the divorce between science and religion, empiricism and philosophy. In Jung’s time, it was too early to bring about a reconciliation between these apparently opposite elements of mind. The future challenge within the field of psychoanalysis and indeed beyond is to heal this division, and when it does so, the opposition between religion and science will be overcome. Both Freud and Jung were great thinkers, yet Jung’s greatness may only become clear in the future, because his work has relevance for a future task, which is to rediscover the totality of life, and not to be content with exploring fragments of it in specialist disciplines.
The break with Freud not only damaged Jung’s professional confidence and reputation, but it precipitated a near-psychotic upheaval from 1913 to 1919, which Jung describes in his memoir, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1961). These years were teeming with fantasies, psychic eruptions and chaotic thoughts. He experienced instability, anxiety and premonitory intuitions. Any psychiatrist would recognize this as a mental breakdown, but Jungians like to refer to this period euphemistically as his ‘confrontation with the unconscious’, or as a ‘shamanic illness’ that preceded the birth of his new self, the mature Jung. There is no indignity, however, in the fact that an early healer of humanity’s split psyche, and of the split between religion and science, should first have to heal his own broken soul.
To be called a ‘prophet’ or a ‘mystic’ can be a term of abuse, and Freud used this to great effect against Jung. Ultimately our response to Jung depends on whether we regard the task of linking science and religion as a worthwhile project. If we agree that it is worthwhile, we think highly of Jung and respect his role in the history of ideas. If we assume that fusing science and religion is a waste of time, we tend to have a low opinion of Jung and his work.
Jung sought to paint the psyche in rich and colourful hues, to reveal its depth, to expose its divine and daemonic reaches. In order to give it substance he borrowed from ancient religions such concepts as soul, spirit, anima, animus, although these terms had been obsolete for centuries. Above all, he mythologized the psyche as the contemporary site for religious experience. Whereas his father, Paul, had seen religion ‘out there’ in history, holy lands, scripture, ritual and tradition, Carl Jung wanted to see religion ‘in here’, in the cosmic forces of the psyche, in the interplay of psychic opposites, in dreams and visions, in the structures of mind that become visible in art, imagination, myth, literature and symbolism.
This was Jung’s myth for modernity, offering it something to believe in. God was not dead but had changed his name and location. Salvation had become individuation, the spiritual art of becoming a whole person.
As science advances, it is becoming more open to the mystical possibilities of form, matter, time and space. Changes in physics, mathematics, chemistry, biology, medicine and psychology appear to be moving in Jung’s direction.4 Postmodern science has seen through the ideology of rationality and is more receptive to the mysterious, the holistic, the speculative and the universal.5 Jung’s archetypes and collective unconscious no longer appear as bizarre as they once did. The postmodern turn is a move away from reductionism to more speculative models where science and religion can be imagined as compatible, or as co-existent.
Jung was not wrong, just ahead of his time. As the hunger of the world shifts from gathering information to the search for wisdom, his works will emerge from the margins and play a more decisive role in shaping consciousness and culture. The postmodern era is above all a time when the ‘margins’ come into visibility, when centre and margin are likely to change places.6
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NOTES
1. See for instance, the study on the post-secular condition of postmodern society, in John Caputo, On Religion (London: Routledge, 2001); and a similar account found in Peter Berger, The Desecularization of the World (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999).
2. Freud, in a letter of 1908 to Karl Abraham of Berlin, quoted in Paul Stepansky, ‘Jung, Freud and the Burdens of Discipleship’, in Renos Papadopoulos (ed.), Carl Gustav Jung: Critical Assessments (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 191.
3. Freud, in a letter to Jung, 16 April 1909, in William McGuire (ed.), The Freud /Jung Letters (Princeton University Press, 1974), p. 218.
4. See for instance, Joseph Chilton Pearce, The Biology of Transcendence (Rochester: Park Street Press, 2002); Gregg Jacobs, The Ancestral Mind (New York: Viking, 2003); Joel Kovel, History and Spirit (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991).
5. A popular introduction to the ‘Jungian’ turn in postmodern science is found in Fritjof Capra, The Turning Point: Science, Society and the Rising Culture (London: Flamingo, 1982).
6. See David Tracy, On Naming the Present (London: SCM Press, 1994). See also Christine Gallant, Tabooed Jung: Marginality as Power (New York University Press, 1996).
SOURCE: David Tacey, How to Read Jung, Granta Books London, 2006