Carl Jung and Analytical Psychology - Research Paper Example

? Carl Jung and Analytical Psychology Carl Jung is today recognized as a revolutionary psychologist who divided the world of psychoanalysis introduced by Sigmund Freud. To understand his theories and approach, it is helpful to trace their development through the course of his life. Indeed, because so much of his life history contributed to his theories, it is almost impossible to understand them without looking at this biography. Jung's contributions to psychology included his concept of the collective unconscious and its means of communicating to the individual through a highly complex system of archetypal symbols. Although these symbols could be unique to the individual, they generally spoke to the same basic underlying principles that affect the entire human race and, he suspected, were connected on a much deeper level. Carl Jung and Analytical Psychology In 1875, a man destined to forever divide the newly emerging field of psychoanalysis was born. Carl Gustav Jung was himself already divided at his birth, having been born to a poor nearly faithless country minister and a well-bred, aristocratic, and increasingly desperate woman of a proud family. Throughout his life, Jung worked to resolve his internal divisions by tracing the various sources of division within him. He hoped he would somehow be able to discover a means of forging deeper connections with other people. To some degree, the explorative path Jung followed mimicked the path of Sigmund Freud, today recognized as the founder of psychoanalysis, causing Jung to look to Freud as a mentor for some time. However, when his explorations began to lead him to different conclusions, the relationship between Jung and Freud fractured and they were never able to reconcile. One of the ways Jung's studies differed was that he expanded his research into Eastern religions and philosophies. As he tried to break down the component parts of the philosophies of the West as well as those of the East, trying to find a higher truth in their convergence, Jung began to formulate his own concepts of mind and its workings. Some of these studies led him to look more fully into the area of dreams, mythology, religion, art and, of course, philosophy. He continuously attempted to discover how these modes of thought connected and influenced each other, especially when he found similar ideas in widely different and sometimes mostly isolated parts of the world. The convergences he found were eventually collected into what Jung called archetypes and it was through these archetypes, conveyed to us from birth through folklore, myths, legends, philosophies, and religions, that we learned the appropriate behaviors expected of us. According to Jung, archetypes are evidence of the collective unconscious, a kind of human overmind, which sends messages to our souls in the form of these archetypes if we just took the time to understand them. By studying Carl Jung's theories of dreams, from how they developed in his own life to seeing how they were brought together in theory, one can get a better sense of his theories overall. From Jung's writings regarding his earliest memories as a child, it is clear that he never shared a close, loving relationship with either of his parents. “Jung’s earliest memories were of sensuous experiences: the taste and smell of leaves, the sun dappling the leaves, his aunt pointing out the Alps in the distant sunset, their peaks glowing red. Pressed for his very first impressions, he recalled lying in a pram but there was no mention of his parents” (McLynn, 1996). This is significant because, as Sigmund Freud said, a person's first memory is often the one most capable of revealing their deepest personality structure. Jung's early memories that do not include his parents thus points to a person who will struggle with interpersonal relationships. “It has been argued that Jung’s first impressions connote a problem with parental bonding and attachment and suggest a mental universe where the natural world represents security and the interpersonal one insecurity. Even when he does later remember his mother, it is her dress rather than her face or voice he remembers” (McLynn, 1996). Further shedding light on Jung's relationship with his parents is the fact that his mother was admitted to a mental institution when Jung was just three. Reports indicate she was never a stable personality to provide security for her son. Instead, Jung indicates she often represented confusion for him. Her constant struggle with depression had her behaving one way for a while and then another, causing him to doubt which mother he would encounter every time he returned home. Since his father was often busy trying to support the family on his parish work, Jung spent a great deal of his childhood time on his own which gave him more time than most to explore the limits of his imagination. Since Jung had a great deal of time to himself even as a child, he was able to concentrate more on his dreams and impressions of the world around him which would eventually influence his later theories. For example, there was an especially powerful dream he experienced in his early years that caused him to continue questioning dream meanings for years afterward. In this dream, Jung saw himself in a dungeon where he encountered “what he thought at first was a tree trunk, some twelve to fifteen feet high and about two feet thick. The object was made of skin and naked flesh, with a rounded head and a single eye on the very top of the head. Later he would recognize the object as a ritual phallus” (McLynn, 1996). Jung eventually concluded that this dream was a representation of his general creativity, although that conclusion continues to be debated today. The dream frightened him because within it, he heard his mother's voice, laced with fear, as she warned him, "That is the maneater." It caused him to be confused about his own gender and sexuality and made him question the power and purpose of his imagination and creativity. This, along with several other puzzling dreams, eventually caused Jung to seek out his field of study. “With a directional push from his dream life he had elected to study medicine, adding on science, philosophy, archaeology and history. He said yes to Plato, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Empedocles; no to the Aristotelian intellectualism of St. Thomas Acquinas and the Schoolmen” (Dunne, 2002: 20). Astrophysics was also becoming popular while Jung was in school and he found himself strongly attracted to the ideas of physics and metaphysics. He found a ready assistant to help him in these studies in his cousin Helene, who was a psychic medium. “Her abilities as a medium served as early pointers for Jung toward his discovery of the unconscious” (Dunne, 2002: 21). Science was effective in giving him facts and evidence to convince him he could really know something, but it was not able to answer the deeper spiritual issues he had. However, these spiritual issues were resolved once he started investigating philosophy and metaphysics. Through this history, Jung was inexorably steered toward the field of psychology since it was a form of science that tended to blend Jung's need for evidence and proof at the same time that it incorporated spiritual issues and philosophy, finally giving him a working theory for dream analysis. After working with Sigmund Freud for a while, though, and struggling to articulate his own ideas, the two men eventually had their big argument and Jung suffered a deep mental collapse. The collapse was not necessarily caused by his argument with Freud or by the hectic speaking schedule he'd been keeping. At the time, Jung was also attempting to juggle two very personal relationships, a blooming one with a mistress and a failing one with his first wife. The mistress would eventually become his second wife, Toni Wolff. “He [Jung] withdrew from the psychoanalytic movement and suffered a six-year-long breakdown during which he had fantasies of mighty floods sweeping over northern Europe – prophetic visions of World War I” (Liukkonen, 2008). This episode of Jung's life is essential to understanding his analytical psychology approach because it was at this point in his life that he developed the concept of the collective unconscious. In addition to the dream in which Europe was fully engulfed by a flood, “he saw thousands of people drowning and civilization crumbling. Then, the waters turned into blood. This vision was followed, in the next few weeks by dreams of eternal winters and rivers of blood. He was afraid he was becoming psychotic” (Boeree, 2006). With the advent of the Great War, Jung finally realized the connection between his dreams and waking life as well as a connection between his own individual ideas and the collective ideas running through the minds of humanity. Such connections could not be easily explained and thus created a new psychological dilemma for him to solve. The resulting deep self-exploration and philosophical adventure would eventually become the basis for Jung's world-changing theories. The basis of these theories was made during the war years as Jung carefully wrote down the details of his dreams, eventually recognizing some common representative figures, which he called archetypes. By paying attention to what these archetypes were doing both regarding how they affected him and how they reflected world events at the time, Jung believed he'd found the needed link to the collective unconscious. Such connections caused him to further seek the processes of the unconscious mind since he was fully convinced that this mind was much more powerful than anyone had yet suspected. Once the war ended, Jung's convictions led him to traveling the world, seeking out the ancient myths and legends of different regions so that he could more fully identify the archetypes as they occurred. At the same time, he was collecting each cultures philosophies regarding dreams and what significance they had to waking life, the mind and what it was, and how these ideas connected to religions around the world. As he traveled, he also avidly studied Eastern traditions and philosophies through such materials as the I Ching, the Tao and the fundamental principles of Hinduism and Buddhism, all of which contributed something to his theories. Although there is understandably some overlap between Jung's theories and those of Sigmund Freud, just like their relationship, there is a sharp dividing line between the theories the two men developed. Like Freud, Jung saw the mind as divided between three different parts, the first two of which are closely aligned with Freud's ideas of the id and the ego. Unlike Freud, though, Jung saw these parts working a bit differently. In Jung's theory, the id is a personal unconscious in which people store their memories of events which have, for whatever reason, been suppressed by the conscious mind or ego. This concept is similar to Freud's id in that people do not have direct access to this part of the mind, but it is also different because Jung offers different reasons as to why this part of the mind operates in this way and in its means of selecting the memories to be suppressed. Such a minor difference would not have been significant enough to boost Jung's theory into the realm of Freud-like significance if it hadn't been for the third element of the mind, the concept of the collective unconscious. “You could call it your ‘psychic inheritance.’ It is the reservoir of our experiences as a species, a kind of knowledge we are all born with. And yet we can never be directly conscious of it. It influences all of our experiences and behaviours, most especially the emotional ones, but we only know about it indirectly, by looking at those influences” (Boeree, 2006). According to Jung, we are each given clues to help us gain a greater understanding of ourselves and our greater connections to the world around us through the forces of synchronicity, random events that, because of their proximity to each other, force us to make these sorts of connections. In order to understand what these connections mean, we have archetypes, which are released in the dream state as a kind of intermediary between the collective unconscious and our conscious minds. Because they are the building blocks of the collective unconscious, Jung said archetypes could take any particular form, but they tended to incorporate the same basic ideas across cultures, thus giving us a symbolic means of communicating with each other. “Jung also called these components dominants or mythological primordial images. The archetype has no form of its own, but rather can be described as a need or an instinct. It is something that is not felt as a specific desire for any one particular thing” (Pierce, 2007). Largely informed by the individual's own understanding of mythology and legend, archetypes provide information about different issues that the individual might be dealing with on a personal or professional level as well as what they're dealing with as a citizen of the world. Within the world of the dream, they can be receiving warning, instruction, or encouragement to continue on or deviate from a given path. Within his studies, Jung identified a number of different archetypes including the Mother, the Shadow, the Hero and the Teacher. While we look at these words and tend to think of them as individual characters, Jung instead understood these figures to represent more abstract concepts such as the security, comfort and support one typically associates with images of mother. The Hero can be used by the collective unconscious to signify the sequential growth process that occurs as a part of every hero journey. Thus, analyzing the meaning the dream requires understanding the archetypes, the myths from which they come, and the underlying sociological meanings behind them. Within this theory, Jung also included the concept of the anima and the animus, which recognizes the constraints society places on individuals based on physical gender and provides us with the means to move beyond them. “The anima or animus is the archetype through which you communicate with the collective unconscious generally, and it is important to get into touch with it. It is also the archetype that is responsible for much of our love life: We are, as an ancient Greek myth suggests, always looking for our other half, the half that the Gods took from us, in members of the opposite sex” (Boeree, 2006). In terms of sexual imagery, Jung associates this with the concept of mana, or spiritual power, rather than overt sexual tendencies as Freud would have done. In developing his analytic psychology, Jung focused heavily on dreams as a means of getting in touch not only with the individual unconscious but also with a much deeper, wiser, and more powerful collective unconscious. He felt dreams could provide us with carefully determined, personally meaningful symbols which would be unique to the individual but applicable on a multiple levels for the individual's and society's benefit. He also felt these symbols were intended to help bring our attention to those aspects of our being that we have suppressed or ignored so that we could be brought into closer connection with the collective unconscious. Thus, the biggest differences discovered between the analytical theories of Jung and Freud are the degree to which the individual is able to interpret their own dreams and the degree to which these dream images are seen to connect with waking life; Jung saw them as attempting to bring about a closer connection which Freud saw them as intentional means of obscuring the inner self. References Adcox, John. (2004). “The Sword and the Grail: Restoring the Forgotten Archetype in Arthurian Myth.” The Widening Gyre. (2004). Retrieved June 30, 2012 from Bixler-Thomas, Gail. (November 1998). “Understanding Dreams.” On Dreaming. Retrieved June 30, 2012 from Boeree, C. George. (2006) “Carl Jung.” Personality Theories. Retrieved June 30, 2012 from Dunne, Clare. (2002). Carl Jung: Wounded Healer of the Soul. London: Continuum International Publishing Group. Hutchinson, Linton. (2000). Dream Lynx. Retrieved June 30, 2012 from Jones, Gwyneth. (2007). “The Holy Grail.” Retrieved June 30, 2012 from Jung, Carl. (1976). The Portable Jung. New York: Penguin. Liukkonen, Petri. (2008). “Carl Gustav Jung.” Books and Writers. (2008). Retrieved June 30, 2012 from McLynn, Frank. (1996). “Carl Gustav Jung.” New York Times. Pierce, M.J. (March 24, 2007). “The Life of Carl G. Jung and His Contributions to Psychology.” Quazen. Retrieved June 30, 2012 from Read More