The Essential Jung: Selected Writings

If the unconscious can be recognized as a co-determining factor along with consciousness, and if we can live in such a way that conscious and unconscious demands are taken into account as far as possible, then the centre of gravity of the total personality shifts its position. It is then no longer in the ego, which is merely the centre of consciousness, but in the hypothetical point between conscious and unconscious. This new centre might be called the self. [CW 13, par. 67]

Jung found that the new centre expressed itself in quaternity symbols and circular structures which he called “mandalas,” the Sanskrit name applied to images of this kind which, in the East, are used for meditation. Mandalas symbolize an integrating factor. In cases where consciousness is confused, mandalas may appear as compensatory attempts at self-healing by imposing an ordered structure. The self, of which the mandala is a symbol, is the archetype of unity and totality. Jung believed that this archetype was the underlying reality manifesting itself in the various systems of monotheism. The self, therefore, is the God within; and the individual, in seeking self-realization and unity, becomes the means through which “God seeks his goal.” (CW 10, par. 588) By fulfilling his own highest potential, the individual is not only realizing the meaning of life, but also fulfilling God’s will.

Jung believed that only exceptional individuals reached the peaks of individual development. Individuation means parting company with the crowd; and this at first accentuates loneliness, and may seem alarming. Most human beings are content to remain safely with the majority, conforming to the conventions and beliefs shared by members of their family, church or political party. But exceptional individuals are impelled by their inner nature to seek their own path; and, although human psyches, like human bodies, share a basic structure, the individual psyche is “an endlessly varied recombination of age-old components”. (MDR, p. 223/235) Jung continued to affirm that the highest ideals and values were carried by the individual, never by an ideology or the State.

Jung’s major contribution to psychology, therefore, lies in the field of adult development. Freud and his followers were primarily interested in the earliest development of the young child, since they considered that the majority of neuroses originated in the first five years of life. Freudian analysis had as its aim the reconstruction and recall of the patient’s earliest years. It was assumed that, when the repressed, infantile material had been made conscious, the patient would become free of the malign effects of his childhood and lose the neurotic symptoms which were its consequence. Freudian analysis, therefore, was, and is, primarily orientated toward the patient’s past.

Jung, of course, was well aware of the importance of early childhood in determining personality development. Indeed, in cases in which it was clear that the patient’s primary problem was emancipating himself from the influence of home and parents, Jung advocated proceeding along Freudian or Adlerian lines. But Jung was inclined to leave such analyses to others. The patients who interested him were those who had already freed themselves from the past sufficiently to become established in their own right; who were often successful in worldly terms; but who, in the mid-period of their lives, found that the world had become stale and unprofitable. Such people were seeking a meaning to their lives; and Jung’s aim was to guide them along the path of individuation. Jungian analysis, therefore, was, and is, primarily orientated toward the patient’s future.

The quest for a new synthesis of personality involves taking into account those parts of the whole which have been neglected. As pointed out above, Jung found that those who consulted him because of the emptiness of their lives were one-sided in their development: too much identified with their predominant attitude and function. Since everyone has both an extraverted and an introverted potential, and also needs all four functions (thinking, feeling, sensation and intuition) if he is to live life fully, it follows that one task of analysis is to help the patient become aware of neglected aspects of his personality. Such aspects appear in dreams; and the study of dreams became even more important in Jungian analysis than in its Freudian counterpart.

Another technique developed by Jung was that of “active imagination.” Jung encouraged his patients to enter a state of reverie in which judgment was suspended but consciousness preserved. They were then enjoined to note what fantasies occurred to them, and to let these fantasies go their own way without interference. Jung encouraged his patients to draw and paint their fantasies, finding that this technique both helped the patient to rediscover hidden parts of himself and also portrayed the psychological journey upon which he was embarked. Jung was the first analyst to supplement verbal exchange in this way; and the increasing use of painting, modelling and music in therapy bears witness to Jung’s prescience.

In times when so much importance is attributed to good or bad interpersonal relationships as determinants of mental health or illness, Jung’s concentration upon the individual’s relations with the different parts of his own psyche may seem puzzling. Jung was well aware of the importance of interpersonal relationships, but believed that it was only when the individual had come to terms with himself that satisfactory relationships with others could be achieved. Jung wrote: “Companionship thrives only when each individual remembers his individuality and does not identify himself with others.” (MDR, p. 328/356)

Individuation is not the same as individualism, “which is essentially no more than a morbid reaction against an equally futile collectivism. In contrast to all this, the natural process of individuation brings to birth a consciousness of human community precisely because it makes us aware of the unconscious, which unites and is common to all mankind.” (CW 16, par. 227)

Although Jung claimed that what he discovered were facts which anyone else who adopted the same technique would confirm, he was also aware that subjective factors were bound to influence his point of view. “Philosophical criticism has helped me to see that every psychology – my own included – has the character of a subjective confession … Even when I am dealing with empirical data I am necessarily speaking about myself.” (CW 4, par. 774) It may be helpful to glance at some of the influences which contributed to Jung’s particular viewpoint.

For the first nine years of his life, Jung remained an only child who lived primarily in his imagination and who spent much of his time in solitary play. When he first went to school, he found that, in trying to adapt to his rural companions, he tended to become alienated from himself, as sensitive and imaginative people often do when trying too hard to “fit in.” It became important to him to preserve his inner imaginative world from intrusion. In his autobiography, he describes various secret rituals by means of which he kept contact with his inner world and shielded it from others. In the “Late Thoughts” which form part of his autobiography, Jung wrote: “There is no better means of intensifying the treasured feeling of individuality than the possession of a secret which the individual is pledged to guard.” (MDR, p. 315/342) In the last chapter of the same book, he wrote: “As a child I felt myself to be alone, and I am still, because I know things and must hint at things which others apparently know nothing of, and for the most part do not want to know.” (MDR, p. 327/356) Jung’s childhood discovery of the vital importance of remaining in touch with the inner world is one factor accounting for his emphasis on healing and the growth of personality as essentially an inner process, concentrating upon the individual’s relation with the various aspects of his own psyche, rather than upon his relationships with other human beings.

From his earliest years, Jung was exposed to a great deal of discussion of religious matters. His father was a minister in the Swiss Reformed Church; two of his uncles were parsons; and there were no less than six parsons in his mother’s family. Very early in his life, so Jung records, he experienced dreams and visions of a religious kind which convinced him not only that religious experience was a personal matter which might have little to do with established creeds, but also that God had a “dark” side which did not accord with the conventional Christian image of an ever-loving father. His own father was content to promulgate the teachings of his church, though Jung came to question the genuineness of his faith. He was unable, or unwilling, to discuss the doubts with which his more gifted son confronted him. Jung, therefore, found himself in the position of being unable to subscribe to the faith in which he had been reared, while at the same time continuing to think that individuals could neither be happy nor healthy unless they acknowledged their dependence upon some higher power than that of the ego. Jung himself became one of those exceptional individuals who so much interested him as patients: individuals who were compelled by their own natures to strike out on their own, abandon conventional beliefs and find what they were seeking within their own psyches. Although Jung continued to profess allegiance to what he called “the extreme left wing of Protestantism,” his religious ideas became so unconventional that he gave offence to both Catholic and Protestant theologians, although some from both camps continued to find value in what Jung had to say.

Another important factor determining Jung’s psychological standpoint was the period of mental upheaval through which he passed in the years of the First World War, just after his break with Freud. Although, as we shall see, Jung was never a disciple of Freud, and had carried out a good deal of original work before he had even met him, Freud was a powerful influence, and separating from him was extremely painful. It was because Jung felt that he had to be true to his own inner voice that the break occurred; for Freud’s tolerance of any divergence from the “truths” which he believed he had discovered was limited. At the time of parting, Jung was thirty-eight. Jung’s insistence that the mid-life period was a turning point in psychological development took origin from his own experience.

Like many solitary thinkers, Jung was always an avid reader, and, while still an adolescent, plunged into Kant and Schopenhauer. The latter’s sombre view especially appealed to him. “Here at last was a philosopher who had the courage to see that all was not for the best in the fundaments of the universe.” (MDR, p. 76/69) Although there are profound differences between Jung’s thought and that of Schopenhauer, there are also striking similarities. Schopenhauer considered that individuals were the embodiments of an underlying Will which was outside space and time. Jung begins his autobiography by writing: “My life is a story of the self-realization of the unconscious.” (MDR, p. 17/3) Schopenhauer considered that the very notion of individuality, the principium individuationis, is dependent on the human, subjective categories of space and time which force us to be conscious of individual objects, and prevent us from seeing the original unity of the Will of which individuals are a manifestation. Jung also believed that there was a realm outside space and time from which individuals become differentiated. Borrowing the Gnostic term, he referred to this spiritual realm transcending consciousness as the pleroma. “We are distinguished from the pleroma in our essence … which is confined within time and space.” Septem Sermones ad Mortuos, I) Whereas in the pleroma all is one and there is no differentiation between opposites like good and evil, light and darkness, time and space, or force and matter, the principium individuationis compels distinctiveness which is the essential characteristic of individuals. Whereas Schopenhauer’s philosophy is governed by the ideal of deliverance from the bonds of individuality by means of self-denial and asceticism (an ideal which Schopenhauer himself was far from realizing), Jung’s philosophy is ruled by the idea of affirmation of individuality. A man who understands and comes to terms with the different aspects of his inner being is enabled to live life more completely. Jung was also influenced by Nietzsche, who was a passionate individualist; but, whereas Nietzsche stated that God was dead, Jung rediscovered God as a guiding principle of unity within the depths of the individual psyche.

Jung’s belief in the ultimate unity of all existence led him to suppose that physical and mental, as well as spatial and temporal, were human categories imposed upon reality which did not accurately reflect it. Human beings, because of the nature of thought and language, are bound to categorize things as opposites; that is, all human statements are antinomian. But these opposites may, in fact, be facets of the same reality. Through his collaboration with the physicist Wolfgang Pauli, Jung came to believe that the physicist’s investigation of matter and the psychologist’s investigation of the depths of the psyche might be different ways of approaching the same underlying reality. It had long been recognized that analytical psychology could never be wholly “objective,” since the observer was bound to exert an effect on what he was observing by the fact of paying it attention. But the same point had also been reached in modern physics. At the subatomic level, it was recognized that it was impossible to determine a particle’s momentum and its velocity at the same time. Moreover, the constituents of matter could be considered to behave as waves or particles, depending on the choice of the observer. Physicists came to realize that it was possible to look at one and the same event through two different frames of reference which, though mutually exclusive, were nevertheless complementary. The Principle of Complementarity, which became a cornerstone of modern physics, could also be applied to the mind-body problem. Perhaps mind and body were simply different aspects of a single reality as viewed through different frames of reference.

Jung claimed that there were “sufficient reasons” for believing that “the psychic lies embedded in something that appears to be of a nonpsychic nature.” (CW 8, par. 437) Jung came to think of archetypes as existing in this reality outside space and time, but manifesting themselves in the individual psyche as organizers. “Archetypes, so far as we can observe and explain them at all, manifest themselves only through their ability to organize images and ideas, and this is always an unconscious process which cannot be detected until afterwards. By assimilating material whose provenance in the phenomenal world is not to be contested, they become visible and psychic.” (CW 8, par. 440) One reason why Jung thought of archetypes as existing outside space and time was that he believed them responsible for what he called “meaningful coincidences,” of which examples are given in the extracts which follow. Throughout his life, Jung had been impressed by clusters of significant events occurring together, and by the fact that these events might be physical as well as mental. The physical death of one individual, for example, might coincide with a disturbing dream referring to that death in the mind of another. Jung felt that such coincidences, which he considered “relatively common,” demanded an explanatory principle in addition to causality. This principle he named synchronicity. Once again, Jung seems to have been influenced by Schopenhauer, who had postulated a link between simultaneous events which were causally unconnected. Jung’s idea was that synchronicity was based on a universal order of meaning, complementary to causality. He thought that synchronistic phenomena were connected with archetypes which he referred to as psychoid factors of the collective unconscious, meaning by this that archetypes were neither physical nor mental but partaking of both realms, and able, therefore, to manifest themselves both physically and mentally simultaneously. Jung refers to the case of Swedenborg, who experienced a vision of a fire in Stockholm at the same time as an actual fire was raging. Jung considered that some change in Swedenborg’s state of mind gave him temporary access to “absolute knowledge”; to an area in which the limits of space and time are transcended. Jung believed that causeless events were creative acts “as the continuous creation of a pattern that exists from all eternity, repeats itself sporadically, and is not derivable from any known antecedents.” (CW 8, par. 967) The recognition of patterns of order affects human beings as meaning.

In Jung’s view, changes in the collective unconscious, which might take centuries to complete themselves, were responsible for alterations in the way in which men viewed the world and thought about themselves. The decline in conventional Christian belief, for example, is related to the fact that the Christ-image, which excludes both evil and the feminine, can no longer symbolize wholeness for modern man. It was only in 1950 that the Pope proclaimed the Assumption of the Virgin Mary as part of divine revelation. Jung considered this as a significant step toward incorporating femininity into the image of the divine, and pointed out that the impulse to do this did not come from the ecclesiastical authorities but from the Catholic masses “who have insisted more and more vehemently on this development. Their insistence is, at bottom, the urge of the archetype to realize itself” (CW 9 ii, par. 142) and it took many years for this to be accomplished.

I hope that this brief introduction to Jung’s thought will make it easier for the reader to find his way through the extracts which follow. Some may find Jung’s later writings difficult or antipathetic; but Jung’s valuable contributions to psychotherapy and to the understanding of individuals can be appreciated without subscribing to the whole of his system of belief.

Part 1. Jung’s Early Work

Jung began his career in psychiatry in December 1900, when he was appointed as an assistant physician at the Burghölzli mental hospital in Zurich. Breuer and Freud had published their Studies on Hysteria in 1895; and Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams had appeared in November 1899. But psychiatrists were still fascinated by the researches of Janet and Morton Prince into cases of “multiple personality,” and it was this phenomenon which inspired Jung’s first published work: his dissertation for his medical degree, “On the Psychology and Pathology of So-called Occult Phenomena.” This was based on his observations during seances of a 15½-year-old cousin, Hélène Preiswerk (called S. W. in the paper), who was reputedly a medium. She claimed to be controlled by a variety of spirits, varying from her grandfather, who was deeply serious, to a figure called Ulrich von Gerbenstein, who was flirtatious and frivolous. Jung interpreted these various figures as “unconscious personalities.”

From “On the Psychology and Pathology of So-called Occult Phenomena” CW 1, par. 77

In our account of S. W.’s case, the following condition was indicated by the term “semi-somnambulism”: For some time before and after the actual somnambulistic attack the patient found herself in a state whose most salient feature can best be described as “preoccupation”. She lent only half an ear to the conversation around her, answered absent-mindedly, frequently lost herself in all manner of hallucinations; her face was solemn, her look ecstatic, visionary, ardent. Closer observation revealed a far-reaching alteration of her entire character. She was now grave, dignified; when she spoke, the theme was always an extremely serious one. In this state she could talk so seriously, so forcefully and convincingly, that one almost had to ask oneself: Is this really a girl of 15½? One had the impression that a mature woman was being acted with considerable dramatic talent.

Jung goes on to compare S. W. with a case of Janet’s.

CW 1, pars. 92–3

Janet conducted the following conversation with the subconscious of Lucie, who, meanwhile, was engaged in conversation with another observer:

[Janet asks:] Do you hear me? [Lucie answers, in automatic writing:] No.

But one has to hear in order to answer. – Absolutely.

Then how do you do it?-I don’t know.

There must be someone who hears me. – Yes.

Who is it? – Somebody besides Lucie.

All right. Somebody else. Shall we give the other person a name? – No.

Yes, it will be more convenient. – All right. Adrienne.

Well, Adrienne, do you hear me? – Yes.

One can see from these extracts how the unconscious personality builds itself up: it owes its existence simply to suggestive questions which strike an answering chord in the medium’s own disposition. This disposition can be explained by the disaggregation of psychic complexes, and the feeling of strangeness evoked by these automatisms assists the process as soon as conscious attention is directed to the automatic act. Binet remarks on this experiment of Janet’s: “Nevertheless it should be carefully noted that if the personality of ‘Adrienne’ could be created, it was because the suggestion encountered a psychological possibility; in other words, disaggregated phenomena were existing there apart from the normal consciousness of the subject.”* The individualization of the subconscious is always a great step forward and has enormous suggestive influence on further development of the automatisms. The formation of unconscious personalities in our case must also be regarded in this light.

Returning to his own case, Jung discusses the “Origin of the Unconscious Personalities.”

CW 1, pars. 132–3

As we have seen, the various personalities are grouped round two types, the grandfather and Ulrich von Gerbenstein. The grandfather produces nothing but sanctimonious twaddle and edifying moral precepts. Ulrich von Gerbenstein is simply a silly schoolgirl, with nothing masculine about him except his name. We must here add, from the anamnesis, that the patient was confirmed at the age of fifteen by a very pietistic clergyman, and that even at home she had to listen to moral sermons. The grandfather represents this side of her past, Gerbenstein the other half; hence the curious contrast. So here we have, personified, the chief characters of the past: here the compulsorily educated bigot, there the boisterousness of a lively girl of fifteen who often goes too far. The patient herself is a peculiar mixture of both; sometimes timid, shy, excessively reserved, at other times boisterous to the point of indecency. She is often painfully conscious of these contrasts. This gives us the key to the origin of the two subconscious personalities. The patient is obviously seeking a middle way between two extremes; she endeavours to repress them and strives for a more ideal state. These strivings lead to the adolescent dream of the ideal Ivenes, beside whom the unrefined aspects of her character fade into the background. They are not lost; but as repressed thoughts, analogous to the idea of Ivenes, they begin to lead an independent existence as autonomous personalities.

This behaviour calls to mind Freud’s dream investigations, which disclose the independent growth of repressed thoughts.

The idea that personality was not a unity, but might contain subsidiary personalities was familiar to Jung from his own experience, since he records his surprise, at the age of twelve, at finding that he himself was two different persons.

From “School Years” MDR, pp. 44–6/33–4

Around this time I was invited to spend the holidays with friends of the family who had a house on Lake Lucerne. To my delight the house was situated right on the lake, and there was a boat-house and a rowing boat. My host allowed his son and me to use the boat, although we were sternly warned not to be reckless. Unfortunately I also knew how to steer a Waidling (a boat of the gondola type) – that is to say, standing. At home we had such a punt, in which we had tried out every imaginable trick. The first thing I did, therefore, was to take my stand on the stern seat and with one oar push off into the lake. That was too much for the anxious master of the house. He whistled us back and gave me a first-class dressing-down. I was thoroughly crestfallen but had to admit that I had done exactly what he had said not to, and that his lecture was quite justified. At the same time I was seized with rage that this fat, ignorant boor should dare to insult ME. This ME was not only grown up, but important, an authority, a person with office and dignity, an old man, an object of respect and awe. Yet the contrast with reality was so grotesque that in the midst of my fury I suddenly stopped myself, for the question rose to my lips: “Who in the world are you, anyway? You are reacting as though you were the devil only knows how important! And yet you know he is perfectly right. You are barely twelve years old, a schoolboy, and he is a father and a rich, powerful man besides, who owns two houses and several splendid horses.”