The Handbook of Jungian Psychology: Theory, Practice and Applications

by Renos K. Papadopoulos

Traditional practices such as investigating dreams or ingesting psychotropic drugs in an effort to achieve personal communion with deities – sometimes experienced in animal forms – which would then supply the practitioner with special knowledge to bring back to the world of normal consciousness, bear close comparison to the way that C.G. Jung conceived an ‘unconscious’ that had something to tell us.

The revelations from the spirit world – or the ‘unconscious’ – thus carried a shared meaning for the whole group, and one that became established over many generations of repetition of instruction, practice and storytelling.

we note how development of the idea that humans could usefully access religious and practical knowledge not normally present in the (conscious) mind arose both as an individual and as a collective experience.

Our contemporary ideas around the personal and collective unconscious also have their roots somewhat earlier than Freud and Jung – partly in Enlightenment thinking (although, ironically, the unconscious mind was rejected as a concept by Enlightenment) and notably in the German Romantic philosophy of Carus, Schopenhauer, von Hartmann and von Schelling. Whyte has written of how, ‘The general conception of unconscious mental processes was conceivable … around 1700, topical around 1800, and fashionable around 1870–1880’ (Whyte 1960: 168–169; emphasis in original).

Shakespeare and his audience held an idea of human mentality where the subject was less aware of him or herself, but such hidden ‘unconscious’ processes were revealed to others through attitude, language and behaviour.

the emphasis on rationality and reason above all else tended to hierarchise aspects of our psychology which resulted in emotions and ‘irrational’ thinking (called ‘superstition’ among other things) being displaced as inferior activities of the mind. This meant that the notion of an unconscious became devalued if not redundant. Descartes’ ‘I think, therefore I am’ was the summation of our human ‘being’ depicted as consisting solely of our conscious rational awareness.

it is the German Romantics who are the most explicit writers on the unconscious in the fifty years up to the birth of Sigmund Freud (1857–1939), C.G. Jung (1875–1962) and of course, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). The ‘philosophy of nature’ founded by Friedrich von Schelling (1775–1854) clearly implied the unconscious as ‘the very fundament of the human being as rooted in the invisible life of the universe and therefore the true bond linking man with nature’ (Ellenberger 1970/1994: 204).

For the eighteenth-century Romantics, attention to the unconscious enabled us to have direct understanding of the universe – and therefore of our ‘original’ selves – through dreams, mystical ecstasy and poetic imagination. It is no coincidence that these aims and methods were among those used by humankind from the earliest times – a fact that comes together quite explicitly in the psychology of C.G. Jung some seventy years later.

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) published The World as Will and Representation (or Idea) in 1819 in which he regarded humankind as being driven by blind, internal forces of which he is barely aware: these were the instincts towards conservation and towards reproduction or the sexual instinct. For Schopenhauer, the Will – an analogy of the unconscious – not only drives many of our thoughts which are often in conflict with our intellect (ego-consciousness), but also causes us to repel unwanted cognitions from consciousness. The similarity to later formulations of the unconscious have been spotted by many such as the writer Thomas Mann, who ‘felt that Freud’s desc...

The second level just mentioned corresponds most closely to the formulations of C.G. Carus (1789–1869) who was perhaps the closest influence upon Jung’s own formulations of the personal and the collective unconscious.

The key to the knowledge of the nature of the soul’s conscious life lies in the realm of the unconscious. This explains the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of getting a real comprehension of the soul’s secret … But if this impossibility is only apparent, then the first task of a science of the soul is to state how the spirit of Man is able to descend into these depths. (Carus 1846, quoted in Ellenberger 1994: 207)

Carus also distinguished three levels of the unconscious: one that is absolute and unknowable, the second, a type of pre-conscious which influences our emotional life through the vital organs of the body. Consciousness may affect this level of the unconscious which is why, Carus believed, a person’s face and body can reflect their personality. The third level of the unconscious corresponds to the repressed material – once conscious feelings, representations and perceptions that subsequently become unconscious. These levels are clear precursors of, respectively, the psychoid unconscious, the collective unconscious and the personal unconscious (the third level) in Jung’s structure of the psyche.

Carus also mentions characteristics of the unconscious that Jung was later to repeat: the unconscious, unlike the strenuous efforts of the conscious mind, uses little energy and thus does not ‘need rest’ like consciousness does. It is the source of healing for the mind and body, and it is through the unconsci...

How different patients gave rise to a different ‘unconscious’ for Freud and Jung Freud’s formulation of the concept of the unconscious arose out of his and Breuer’s work wit...

Through his work, Freud developed what his key patient Anna O. called the ‘talking cure’. Freud had tried pure suggestion and hypnosis but found that encouraging patients to say whatever came into their minds by a process of ‘free association’ enabled him to make links backward to the source or cause of their symptoms. Once such causal links were made and understood, that is, made conscious, the symptoms went away – thus apparently proving there was no organic cause but one arising from some mechanism of psychological trauma. According to this approach, the traumatic experience had been repressed in the unconscious because it was unbearable to the conscious mind, and the task of the Freudian psychoanalyst was to trace back, discover and reconstruct the cause like a sort of archaeologist-detective.

However, Freud also wished to establish the science of psychoanalysis as one of the exact sciences of his day and to this end he combined psychological with more materialistic biological theories. Thus, in his first formulations around 1896, he claimed that the repression of a traumatic experience was linked to the repression of instinct – specifically the sexual instinct. From this hypothesis he developed the idea that human psychology – and, eventually, all civilised life – was underpinned by the repression of our instinctual life, and exclusively of our sexual and aggressive instincts. Sexual instinct provided the psychic energy or libido (Latin for ‘desire’)

Carl Jung, nineteen years his junior, had abandoned his desire to be an actual archaeologist, trained as a doctor and began working in the famous Burghölzli psychiatric hospital linked to the University of Zurich. He arrived at a time when the director (who became his mentor) was Eugene Bleuler, a psychiatrist enlightened towards the idea that not only were psychiatric problems not necessarily caused by organic disease, but also there was meaning to be found in the utterances and symptoms of such patients despite the way they seemed baffling at first sight.

Psychiatry then, as so often now, was managed by men who, by virtue of their education and class, were far removed from the patients they treated. In Switzerland with its cantons and local dialects, apart from their illness, patients were not easily intelligible to their urban upper-class doctors, but both Jung and Bleuler had Swiss countryside backgrounds and had the advantage of being familiar with Swiss peasant dialects thus making them more accessible to their patients even before attending empathically to their patients’ words.

it was Bleuler who first distinguished mania (since known as manic-depressive illness or ‘bipolar disorder’) from dementia praecox – the early name for schizophrenia, a term which he introduced.

According to Jung (1963/1983), in his autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections, his interest in and his conceptualising of the unconscious had its earliest roots in three sources: his awareness of his own personality, his interest in psychic phenomena and in the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche.

when he was a young student, Jung became very interested in psychic phenomena to the extent that his PhD thesis was in this area. Using his cousin Helen Prieswerk as a subject, he investigated her apparent abilities as a medium – a trend that was highly prevalent at the time in Europe. In doing so, he became less convinced of her psychic ‘powers’ and more convinced that the phenomena and knowledge she displayed in trance – which her conscious mind was unaware of – were stemming from her unconscious psyche. Moreover, this was not material known personally to the subject and so implied some sort of cultural collective unconscious. Jung reasoned that unconscious material that emerged from a subject, frequently as dream imagery (not just the trance speeches, as with Prieswerk), could not be accounted for through the subject’s personal learning or experience; thus, he assumed that this may stem from a collective, general and universal part of the unconscious mind, a collective unconscious derived through aeons of repetition of human cultural imagery and experience that, despite differences in detail, remains typically human with recognisable common qualities and meanings.

Jung regarded the ego as the ‘centre of consciousness’, but he also absorbed Nietzsche’s ideas on the unconscious as the central source for the psyche as a whole, thus utterly relativising the centrality of ego-consciousness. Nietzsche’s emphasis on the fact that ‘I’ do not think thoughts, but ‘thoughts think me’ and how ‘dreaming is a recreation for the brain, which by day has to satisfy the stern demands of thought imposed by a higher culture’ (Nietzsche 1878: 24–27) are both picked up in Jung’s psychology and his ideas of the personal and collective unconscious.

once Jung began his professional life as a psychiatrist at the Burghölzli, he sought a more scientific method to establish the concept of the unconscious and its processes. To this end he used the Word Association Test, first invented by Sir Francis Galton, which Jung developed through extensive research applying the test to a wide range of psychiatric patients. Initially, Jung used it as a diagnostic tool but later his experiences of using it helped him generate further hypotheses on the nature of human mental processing (Jung 1906a, 1906b; see also Jung 1909).

Here was experimental evidence for the concept of unconscious repressions that Freud had been developing through his clinical practice in Vienna using his own method of requiring a patient to free associate to the first thing that came into their mind.

Analogous to the links made in the Word Association Test, Freud found that his patients’ associations could lead them to a core experience, the memory of which had been repressed and kept from consciousness.

Jung sent his findings to Freud and the two began a collaboration that lasted from 1906 until 1912. Central to what they shared was the idea of a personal unconscious which, for Jung, had the complexes as its main content.

Jung began as a supporter of Freud’s psychoanalytic ideas and defended them at conferences and in publications, but he was also an independent thinker and sought to develop what Freud had started, to tackle anomalies and generally expand psychoanalytic theory according to his own experience, new data and insights. Thus, in 1913 he published ‘The theory of psychoanalysis’ (Jung 1913) in which he expounded Freud’s original theory and its development (as Jung sees it) and went on to provide his own expansion of the theory.

Although Jung had been pondering his idea of a collective unconscious for some time, this text deals with the unconscious before he formulated the two spheres of the personal and the collective unconscious.

Jung proposes that sexuality is not the sole source of psychic energy, but that ‘libido’ is a general psychic energy which may flow in channels serving the sexual, reproductive, nutrition or whatever instinct.

The libido is there, but it is not visible and is inaccessible to the patient himself … It is the task of psychoanalysis to search out that hidden place where the libido dwells and where the patient himself cannot get at it. The hidden place is the ‘non-conscious’, which we may also call the ‘unconscious’ without attributing to it any mystical significance. (Jung 1913: par. 255)

even while Jung is seeking to defend psychoanalysis against its detractors, he succeeds in slipping in his own view which Freud, eventually, could not tolerate.

No one with the faintest glimmering of mythology could possibly fail to see the startling parallels between the unconscious fantasies brought to light by the psychoanalytic school and mythological ideas.

(Jung 1913: par. 316)

CW 4 the theory of psychoanalysis

This is after Jung has already replaced Freud’s sexual libido with a generalised psychic energy and dared to question the significance of Freud’s pivotal emphasis on infantile sexuality. In citing mythology, Jung may be hinting at the Oedipus fantasy but, in downplaying the element of sexual tension in the Oedipus narrative in favour of its status as a myth per se, he is departing from psychoanalysis in a cloud of dust.

Jung reports how he had a dream when on the voyage to the United States with Freud in 1909 which began to answer some pressing questions that he had formulated:

In Memories, Dreams, Reflections (Jung 1963/1983: 182–183), Jung details the dream which, he tells us, ‘became for me a guiding image which in the days to come was to be corroborated to an extent I could not at first suspect’ (Jung 1963/1983: 185). The dream involved Jung descending through the layers of a house where each room he entered he identified as progressively older in architectural style.

Jung reports this dream in the context of discovering how there were aspects of his inner world and his theorising about the psyche which he was finding difficult to share with Freud.

My dream was giving me the answer. It obviously pointed to the foundations of cultural history – a history of successive layers of consciousness. My dream thus constituted a kind of structural diagram of the human psyche; it postulated something of an altogether impersonal nature underlying that psyche. (Jung 1963/1983: 185)

The dream inspired Jung to return to a study of archaeology, myths and the Gnostics which, in combination with his study of the fantasies of the patient Miss Miller, eventually led to the publication of The Psychology of the Unconscious (Jung 1912/1916/1952) – arguably Jung’s first text of analytical psychology as distinct from psychoanalysis.

One of my principal aims was to free medical psychology from the subjective and personalistic bias that characterized its outlook at the time, and to make it possible to understand the unconscious as an objective and collective psyche. (Jung 1956: xxiv)

CW 5 prologo a la cuarta edicion suiza

is Jung’s concept of the personal unconscious identical to Freud’s? There are similarities: it holds repressed contents and material often of an infantile nature and deriving from the biographical history of the person.

Jung, instead, finds that symptoms have an aim or teleology (a ‘future cause’), and the childhood experience simply provides the form by which the patient attempts to solve a crisis in the present. He cites the case of a woman who hysterically ran ahead of charging horses in a way that recalled a childhood trauma with a coach and horses, but who in fact was unconsciously driven to this hysterical reaction by a difficult current situation of wishing to be with her lover who was already married. Jung concludes that ‘the cause of the pathogenic conflict lies mainly in the present moment’ (Jung 1913: par. 373; italics in original).

CW 4 Teoria del psicoanalisis

A greater clarification of Jung’s more or less conventional position on the personal unconscious comes in the 1927 essay ‘The structure of the psyche’ (Jung 1927). The personal unconscious consists firstly of all those contents that became unconscious either because they lost their intensity and were forgotten or because consciousness was withdrawn from them (repression), and secondly of contents, some of them sense-impressions, which never had sufficient intensity to reach consciousness but have somehow entered the psyche. (Jung 1927: par. 321)

Where psyche loses itself in the organic material of the body – i.e., the instinctual sphere – it is so unconscious as to never have access to consciousness and this realm he refers to as the psychoid. There is a continuum between the unknown instinct and the image which may become known to consciousness; this is addressed in Chapter 3 of this book (on the archetypes) in more detail.

here is Jung’s later, more developed definition of the unconscious as originally conceived in psychoanalysis: So defined, the unconscious depicts an extremely fluid state of affairs: everything of which I know, but of which I am not at the moment thinking; everything of which I was once conscious but have now forgotten; everything perceived by my senses, but not noted by my conscious mind; everything which, involuntarily and without paying attention to it, I feel, think, remember, want, and do; all the future things that are taking shape in me and will sometime come to consciousness: all this is the content of the unconscious. These contents are all more or less capable, so to speak, of consciousness, or were once conscious and may become conscious again the next moment … To this marginal phenomenon … there also belong the Freudian findings we have already noted. (Jung 1946: par. 382)

Jung saw the ego as the centre of consciousness, but he also saw the creativity of the unconscious in that the unconscious may influence our conscious think...

The contents of the personal unconscious include the complexes and Jung extends this idea to include personifications or dissociated fragments of per...

A further important way of understanding the personal unconscious – and connected with this fragmentation – is Jung’s concept of the shadow which may appear in dreams or wh...

‘The shadow personifies everything that the subject refuses to acknowledge about himself and yet is always thrusting itself upon him directly or indirectly – for instance, inferior traits of character and other incompatible tendencies’ (Jung 1939: par. 513).

CW 9i consciuos unconscious and individuation definicion de sombra

The shadow is everything that is ‘not me’, and this might include creative qualities that could benefit the whole personality but have been lost or repressed due to the upbringing or social conditions of the subject. For our purposes in tracking a definition of the personal unconscious it is interesting to note Jung’s emphasis that ‘the shadow … represents first and foremost the personal unconscious, and its content can therefore be made conscious without too much difficulty’ (Jung 1950: par. 19)

CW 9ii Aion La Sombra ch 2. pars 13 a 19