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He strove to realize in his own life his full human potential;
‘To be normal’, he said, ‘is the ideal aim of the unsuccessful.’
So every man whose fate it is to go his individual way must proceed with hopefulness and watchfulness, ever conscious of his loneliness and its dangers.
In this game we can trace the origins of Jung’s mature insight into the mysteries of alchemy – that the alchemists had projected the contents of their own psyches into the materials on which they worked in their laboratories.
Within the security of his inner citadel Carl experienced himself as made up of two separate personalities, which he referred to as ‘No. 1’ and ‘No. 2’ respectively. No. 1 was the son of his parents who went to school and coped with life as well as he could, while No. 2 was much older, remote from the world of human society, but close to nature and animals, to dreams, and to God. He conceived No. 2 as ‘having no definable character at all – born, living, dead, everything in one, a total vision of life’ (MDR 92).
As a psychiatrist he came to understand that these two personalities were not unique to himself but present in everyone.
The boy reflected inwardly, ‘No, one must experience and know!’
Whereas other boys in similar circumstances might have turned to their peers for support, Carl Jung, possessing no friends, turned inwards to embrace his ‘No. 2’, the Self.
Me
‘Other people all seemed to have totally different concerns. I felt completely alone with my certainties. More than ever I wanted someone to talk to, but nowhere did I find a point of contact . . . Why has no one had similar experiences to mine? I wondered . . . Why should I be the only one?’
the notion that all entities possess an inherent tendency to turn into their opposite. This tendency Heraclitus called enantiodromia (lit. ‘running counter to’). Jung believed it to be characteristic of all dynamic systems,
the human family as a prime example: as children grow up, they display a propensity to compensate in their own lives for the failings of their parents.
gnostic (Greek, gnostikos, one who knows) – one dedicated to knowing the reality of the psyche through direct experience and personal revelation.
The importance of this study for Jung was greater than the doctorate it earned him. In it we can detect the origins of two ideas which were to become central to the practice of analytical psychology: (1) that part-personalities or ‘complexes’ existing in the unconscious psyche can ‘personate’ in trances, dreams, and hallucinations, and (2) that the real work of personality development proceeds at the unconscious level.
These ideas, in turn, gave rise to (1) a therapeutic technique (active imagination) and (2) a teleological concept (individuation): the notion that the goal of personal development is wholeness, i.e. to become as complete a human being as personal circumstances allow.
‘Here alone the two currents of my interest could flow together and in a united stream dig their own bed. Here was the empirical field common to biological and spiritual facts, which I had everywhere sought and nowhere found. Here at last was the place where the collision of nature and spirit became a reality’
he gave serious attention to what his schizophrenic patients actually said and did, and was able to demonstrate that their delusions, hallucinations, and gestures were not simply ‘mad’ but full of psychological meaning.
(Freud trained as a neurologist
& Jung a psychiatrist
Two of Freud’s basic assumptions were unacceptable to him: (1) that human motivation is exclusively sexual and (2) that the unconscious mind is entirely personal and peculiar to the individual.
Jung preferred to think of it as a more generalized ‘life force’, of which sexuality was but one mode of expression.
In this work, and in a series of lectures given in New York in September 1912, Jung spelt out the heretical view that libido was a much wider concept than Freud allowed and that it could appear in ‘crystallized’ form in the universal symbols or ‘primordial images’ apparent in the myths of humanity.
child became attached to his mother not because she was the object of incestuous passion, as Freud maintained, but because she was the provider of love and care – a view which anticipated the theoretical revolution wrought some forty years later by the British analyst and psychiatrist John Bowlby.
The manner in which their friendship ended was typical of them both. To Jung, the purpose of life was to realize one’s own potential, to follow one’s own perception of the truth, and to become a whole person in one’s own right. This was the goal of individuation,
However, as he confessed to Freud, he recognized ‘polygamous components’ in himself, asserting that ‘The pre-requisite of a good marriage, it seems to me, is the licence to be unfaithful’ (The Freud/Jung Letters, 289; 30 January 1910).
femme inspiratrice,
anima
active imagination,
Two of the figures he regularly encountered on these excursions were a beautiful young woman called Salome and an old man with a white beard and the wings of a kingfisher called Philemon. Jung came to see these as the embodiment of two archetypes – the eternal feminine and the wise old man.
‘Later I came to see that this inner feminine figure plays a typical, or archetypal, role in the unconscious of a man, and I called her the “anima”’
The illness is prone to strike after a time of intense intellectual activity and resembles a neurosis or, in severe cases, a psychosis. Still struggling with the issues that were a prelude to the condition, the sufferer grows convinced that he is beyond outside help, becomes socially isolated, and turns deeper into himself.
‘renunciation of the world’ (associated with an introversion and regression of libido)
‘acceptance of the world’ (associated with an extraversion of libido and a more mature adaptation to outer reality).
Introversion is characterized by an inward movement of interest away from the outer world to the inner world of the subject, extraversion by an outward movement of interest away from the subject to the outer realm of objective reality.
It was this lifelong developmental process that he called individuation,
Tres importante
he believed that it could be brought to its highest fruition if one worked with and confronted the unconscious in the manner he had discovered in the course of his Nekyia.
self-realization requires the psyche to turn round on itself and confront what it produces.
Two consequences followed: a heightening of consciousness, and recognition of the psyche as a real, objective entity.
I had stumbled upon the historical counterpart of my psychology of the unconscious’
Jung believed that, in their efforts to turn base metals into gold, the alchemists were symbolically engaged in a process of psychic transformation. In other words, alchemy was a metaphor for individuation.
For Jung, ageing was not a process of inexorable decline but a time for the progressive refinement of what is essential. ‘The decisive question for a man is: is he related to something infinite or not?’
‘Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome,’ he wrote. ‘The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away – an ephemeral apparition . . . Yet I have never lost a sense of something that lives and endures underneath the eternal flux. What we see is the blossom that passes. The rhizome remains’ (MDR 18). The
In the end, the only events of my life worth telling are those when the imperishable world erupted into this transitory one . . . All other memories of travels, people and my surroundings have paled beside these interior happenings . . . But my encounters with the ‘other’ reality, my bouts with the unconscious, are indelibly engraved on my memory. In that realm there has always been wealth in abundance, and everything else has lost importance by comparison. (MDR 18)
the house was an image of the psyche. The room on the upper floor represented his conscious personality. The ground floor stood for the first level of the unconscious, which he was to call the personal unconscious, while in the deepest level of all he reached the collective unconscious.
Archetypes are ‘identical psychic structures common to all’ (CW V, para. 224), which together constitute ‘the archaic heritage of humanity’ (CW V, para. 259).
he conceived them to be innate neuropsychic centres possessing the capacity to initiate, control, and mediate the common behavioural characteristics and typical experiences of all human beings.
An individual’s entire archetypal endowment makes up the collective unconscious, whose authority and power is vested in a central nucleus, responsible for integrating the whole personality, which Jung termed the Self.
the role of personal experience was to develop what is already there – to activate the archetypal potential already present in the Self. Our psyches are not simply a product of experience, any more than our bodies are merely the product of what we eat.
Archetypes similarly combine the universal with the individual, the general with the unique, in that they are common to all humanity, yet nevertheless manifest themselves in every human being in a way peculiar to him or to her.
Archetypes actively seek their actualization in the personality and the behaviour of the individual, as the life cycle unfolds in the context of the environment.
At the same time, through similarity and contiguity, the infant constellates the child archetype in the mother.
ethology (that branch of behavioural biology which studies animals in their natural habitats).
