Jung, Carl Gustav | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

Psychologist Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961), who was born in the village of Kessweil, Switzerland on July 26, and died on June 6 in Zurich was, along with Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), a creator of depth psychology. His controversial research in this area has ethical implications for both makers and users of modern technology. Jung received an undergraduate degree in psychiatry at the University of Basel and completed his doctoral studies at Burghölzli mental hospital in 1902. In 1907 he achieved international recognition with his seminal study of dementia praecox (schizophrenia), leading to a five-year collaboration with Freud, the originator of psychoanalysis. By 1912, however, Jung found his ideas diverging from those of Freud, and from that point until the end of his life, Jung's intellectual journey was both creative and independent.

Like his former mentor, Jung was determined to penetrate and comprehend the human psyche at the deepest possible level. Unlike Freud, who emphasized thecentral importance of childhood experience in the understanding of neuroses, Jung focused on adult psychology, treating patients whose neuroses did not seem rooted in infantile experiences and fantasies. Among Jung's now-familiar concepts are the personality traits of introversion and extroversion; psychological types (which lead to the standardized Myers-Briggs typology test); stage of life distinctions, including description of the mid-life crisis; primitive mental frameworks called archetypes embedded in acollectiveunconscious;and thenotionof the Shadow, a part of the psyche all but inaccessible to the conscious mind but often revealed in dreams.

Jung's body of work, together with that of Freud and Alfred Adler (1870–1937), formed the basis of modern psychoanalytic techniques. These methods of treating mental disorders are today used alongside behavioral and cognitive therapy and (increasingly) psychoactive drugs. Criticism of Jung has tended to focus on the teleological (i.e., that psychic events have a purpose towards future development) and mystical elements of his thought, a significant source of the latter being his explorations of his own complex psyche. His belief in synchronicity, a non-causal linkage of mental and physical phenomena, has also been criticized as speculative and without scientific foundation.

Can the concepts of the collective unconscious and the Shadow help people to better understand their connection to the natural world and to their own technological creations? Prominent Jungian psychologists James Hillman (b. 1926), Stephen Aizenstat, Marie-Louise von Franz (1915–1998), and Robert Sardello have postulated that psychological health in the modern world may demand less focus on the narrow confines of the human mind and more on the connection of the human mind, both conscious and unconscious, with the rest of the natural and technological world. Historian Theodore Roszak (b. 1933) has suggested that an ecological unconscious links the human psyche with the natural world just as Jung's collective unconscious links human beings with each other, while biologist Edward O. Wilson (b. 1929) has argued that evolution has built into human beings an innate connection with and affinity for the natural world that should be explored by psychologists.

Jung himself was much concerned with the impacts of modern life on the psyche. Four years before his death, he published The Undiscovered Self, in which he argues that European civilization's obsession with the externalities of life had left largely untouched the mysteries of the human mind.

The psyche, which is primarily responsible for all the historical changes wrought by the human hand on the face of this planet, remains an insoluble puzzle and an incomprehensible wonder, an object of abiding perplexity—a feature it shares with all of Nature's secrets. In regard to the latter, says Jung, human beings still have hope of making more discoveries and finding answers to the most difficult questions. But in regard to the psyche and psychology there seems to be a curious hesitancy to explore.

Jung's fear was that humankind's collective Shadow, empowered by modern technology, could be released destructively in all its irrational fury. "The more power man had over nature, the more his knowledge and skill went to his head, and the deeper became his contempt for the merely natural and accidental, for all irrational data—including the objective psyche, which is everything that consciousness is not" (Jung 1957, p. 47).

Failure to advance self-understanding thus becomes, in Jung's view, a dangerous moral problem:

It is not that present-day man is capable of greater evil than the man of antiquity or the primitive. He merely has incomparably more effective means with which to realize his propensity to evil. As his consciousness has broadened and differentiated, so his moral nature has lagged behind. That is the great problem before us today. Reason alone no longer suffices. (Jung 1957, p. 54, Jung's emphasis)

In Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1961), Jung'spersonal memoir completed just weeks before his death, he stresses that the solution to the problem of evil lies in self-knowledge, to be arrived at through psychological inquiry:

Today we need psychology for reasons that involve our very existence … [W]e stand face to face with the terrible question of evil and do not know what is before us, let alone what to pit against it. And even if we did know, we still could not understand "how it could happen here." (Jung 1961, p. 331)

His argument for the necessity of such psychological knowledge remains a basic challenge for the future development of scientific technology. For Jung, solutions to the problems of evil do not lie in simply extending power over nature, but in better understanding humankind and its place in the universe.

Freud, Sigmund;; Psychology.

Bair, Dierdre. (2003). Carl Jung: A Biography. Boston: Little, Brown.

Jung, Carl Gustav. (1969). Collected Works, trans. Richard Francis Carrington Hull. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Definitive English edition of Jung's complete works and letters.

Jung, Carl Gustav. (1989 [1961]). Memories, Dreams, Reflections, trans. Richard Winston, and Clara Winston. New York: Random House. Jung's autobiography, oriented towards personal transformations and inner discoveries rather than narrative.

Jung, Carl Gustav. (1990 [1957]). The Undiscovered Self, trans. Richard Francis Carrington Hull. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Jung stresses the importance of exploring the human psyche.

Main, Roderick. (1997). Jung on Synchronicity and the Paranormal. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Roszak, Theodore, Mary E. Gomes, and Allen D. Kanner, eds. (1995). Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth and Healing the Mind. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books. Collection of essays, with introductions by Lester Brown and James Hillman, exploring how the health of the earth affects the minds of human beings.

Roszak, Theodore. (2002). The Voice of the Earth: An Exploration of Ecopsychology, 2nd edition. Kimball, MI: Phanes Press. The historian's latest work on the connection between the human psyche and the planet Earth.

Wilson, Edward O. (1986). Biophilia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Prominent biologist argues that love of all life can be expressed by the "conservation ethic."

This is the complete article, containing 1,122 words (approx. 4 pages at 300 words per page).