Jung's Ideas Research Articles

Jung, spirits and madness: lessons for cultural psychiatry.

An understanding of the nature and meaning of 'dissociative,' 'altered' or unusual states ultimately turns on the meaning and definition of consciousness. The view of consciousness from the discipline of psychiatry is largely based on a biomedically endorsed, culturally specific perspective of 'normal' consciousness as an integrated pattern of quotidian relationships with the 'observable' physical world. This perspective underlies the nosology for mental disorders, particularly psychoses, suggesting irreconcilable difference in cognition and affect of persons with these diagnostic labels. This article reviews some theories of Carl Gustav Jung regarding the structure and content of human consciousness and their relationship to aspects of 'dementia praecox' or 'schizophrenia.' It traces the origin and development of these ideas in part to Jung's early contact with, and intense interest in spiritualists and spirits, to later influences comprised of his own altered states (dreams and fantasies) and his involvement with patients diagnosed as schizophrenic. Data on current Spiritist beliefs and healing practices focused on 'madness' (i.e. most often diagnosed as schizophrenia in mental health settings), are described to explore parallels with Jung's ideas on the structure and dynamics of the psyche. These parallels are of special interest because the experience of spirits is ubiquitous, not well explained and often rejected as meaningful by psychiatrists and clinical psychologists. Jung, however, offers a cogent explanation of spirit phenomena as manifestations of the unconscious. A concluding section suggests contributions to cultural psychiatry by Jung.

Finding the space between east and west: the emotional impact of teaching in St Petersburg.

The paper describes our experience of teaching analytical psychology to a group of graduates of the East European Institute of Psychoanalysis in St Petersburg, our developing partnership as we struggled to teach and learn, each with our own assumptions, preconceptions and projections about the other, and the emotional impact of our radically different social, intellectual and political histories. We had to be affected to become effective. It draws on contemporary Jungian ideas to unpack the interpersonal dynamics involved when there are culturally different styles of learning, which created a complicated transference/countertransference matrix. We believe we have by now witnessed a process of individuation among our students and at the same time they too have witnessed some change and growth in us.

Archetypes, complexes and self-organization.

There has always been confusion and disagreement about the nature of the terms archetype and complex in Jungian circles, not to mention non-Jungian ones. Another ongoing concern is whether Jung's concept of the archetype and complex can be justified in terms of current scientific research, most notably that of neurophysiologists and others interested in the brain and consciousness. This paper proposes a theory of the formation of complexes, namely, that they are created through self-organization within the brain/mind. Self-organization is a process typical of large complex systems, and is generally accepted to operate within the brain and to be important in its functioning. Examples of self-organization in biology are related to the psychic processes that form the complexes. It is then natural to define the archetype in terms of the complex, and the authors propose a definition of the archetype as an equivalence class of complexes. On this view, the archetype is an emergent property of the activity of the brain/mind, and is, appropriately, defined at the level at which it emerges. This definition is in line with the original development of Jung's ideas, in that he derived the concept of the archetype from his earlier discovery of the feeling-toned complex.

Addictions and the Self

This paper describes an experimental, strengths-based pro gram for the treat ment of sub stance abus ing offend ers un der crim i nal jus tice su per vi sion in the United States Pro ba tion De part ment. The program is based upon new phys i o log i cal ev i dence that links ad die tions to the ex perience of hope, and consistent research that identifiesself-efficacy, futu rity and self-es teem as cru cial el e ments in re cov ery. Rooted in con cepts taken from Jung ian and Maslowian ideas of the Self, the program uses techniques gleaned from Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP) and Ericksonian hyp no sis to pro vide a con tin u ing sense of Self and the pos si bil ity of pos i tive, self-ac tu al iz ing fu tures. This ar ti cle ex plores the the o ret i cal back ground of the pro gram, spe cific tools em ployed, pro gram re suits and sugges tions for fur ther research

At the Origins of Jungian Thought: Culture and Method. Elements of a Separation'

The author argues that Jung, at the time of his first meeting with Freud, had already developed his own understanding of the Unconscious and of psychic functioning and had autonomously elaborated a research method of his own. Jung's ideas, formed during his university years, had been influenced by the humanistic cultural climate prevailing in Basel, in particular, by the works of Renaissance historian Jakob Burckhardt. Jung further developed his thinking during his placement at the Burgholzli Psychiatric Clinic in Zurich. The author's views are supported by published documents and still unpublished material from the archives of Basel and Zurich. After reading Freud's early works, in particular, The Interpretation of Dreams, which were consistent with his own views, Jung approached him in the hope to collaborate with him. Freud was looking for new followers who would spread his ideas and was well disposed towards Jung as a successor who could pursue his work. The two men, however, had different cultural backgrounds and ways of thinking and had built their own hypotheses independently of each other. The author believes that their relationship and their separation turned around this fundamental problem.

The Gothic Psyche: Disintegration and Growth in Nineteenth-Century English Literature

Gothic literature and art often include dreamlike states, or resemble or represent dreams. Drawing on Carl Jung's ideas of dream interpretation, as well as Hartmann's biological research on nightmares and Victor Turner's anthropological work on the liminal, this work offers close readings of poems by Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron and Keats, and novels such as Frankenstein and Dracula, as well as analyses of paintings by Turner and Fuseli, to argue that the works' characters, plots and images represent failure of individuation: psychic disintegration in which the Self not only falls short of a centred consciousness, but also suffers the ego's absorption into the unconscious. Although recent studies of the genre have probed behind the traditional Gothic conventions to shed light on their psychological meanings, most have limited themselves to a single author or genre (usually fiction) and to the theories of Freud or Lacan. In contrast, this book emphasizes Jung's theory of individuation, and how the failure to achieve wholeness can lead to self-destruction.

The prospects for a Jungian psychology in China

The possibility of a Jungian psychology developing in China is considered by a brief historical excursion through the early translations of psychoanalytical works. Translation problems and the contentious nature of some of Freud's ideas have made for their difficult reception in China. The inattention to Jung's ideas in universities in the west in the past, and a reliance on science based subjects by Chinese students studying abroad, have meant little opportunity to study Jung, and, by implication, to translate him. The turbulent political climate in China over the course of the past century has also hindered developments in psychology generally. In addition, certain traditional practices of understanding mind-body relationships and reporting 'illnesses' have precluded the possibility of any psychotherapeutic psychology emerging. However, the present climate looks more favourable for the dissemination of Jungian knowledge, but the question of an appropriate context and a receptive readership remains. Certain Jungian notions can be seen to fit comfortably within traditional systems of Chinese thought but the present day psychology department in China is no more a congenial environment for Jungian psychology than its counterpart in the west. It may be that the success of importing Jungian ideas into China rests with those with a predilection towards arts and cultural sciences, and with the innovations of the organizers of conferences.

How rejection of essences expresses despair.

The Self and the ego in Jung's psychology are an instance of what Edmund Husserl called a 'double intentionality': one tending toward meaning is distinct from another tending toward meaning, yet they are reciprocally inseparable from each other. As perception in a present moment and memory of a past are impossible without each other, so an intending of ego and that of Self are impossible without each other. Accompanying the ego (mostly in the background) during each moment of time is a tending towards a particular Idea or essence. This reciprocity is expressed in a unique way over a lifetime and is like the relation of mother and child, and so it is important for all of us born of women to retain a sense of essences and the fullness of Self. 'Constructivism', however, is a current belief held by some feminists, and it influences both theorizing and practice in analytical psychology. It involves a rejection of essences, a revision of Jung's Idea of Self, and an attempt to conduct analysis without reference to an intentional subjective Self. Such constructivist revision expresses a despair both about essences as Ideas and about Self as intentional and subjective. It is despair over Self in a Kierkegaardian sense.

Dying of Landscape: E.L. Grant Watson and the Australian Desert

The six, relatively neglected I Australian novels of Elliot Lovegood Grant Watson, written between 1914 and 1935, present an intriguing and complex reworking of their author's engagement with the Western Australian desert. Equipped with a broad literary background, a close knowledge of psychoanalysis and Jungian ideas, a deep interest in comparative religion and the prior experience of travel in the Middle East, as well as a training in biology and anthropology, Watson would seem the archetypal Renaissance man, uniquely qualified to interpret his experiences within the European context of his time. Yet, unlike his two later autobiographical explorations of this period, But to What Purpose (1946) and Journey under the Southern Stars (1968), the novels proposed such radical views about Aboriginal culture and European settlement that, despite their anti-feminist stance, they could now pass as respectably postcolonial and as prefigurings of the late twentieth-century preoccupation with the spirit of place that in Australia is peculiarly associated with desert areas.

Dissociation and the self in the magical pre-Oedipal field.

This paper explores the clinical relevance of Jung's idea of the Self in pre-Oedipal and pre-individuation psychology. Incorporating data from neurobiology and recent theories of memory and narrative reconstruction, a post-modern conception of the Self is proposed akin to what Jung called a 'dream of totality'. Such a conception of the Self is distinguished from a reified structure or a deified imago, and is considered to be that aspect of psychological functioning consonant with emerging meanings, and the birth of new psychological ground. Links are made back to Flournoy, William James, and depth psychology's early interest in teleology, the occult, and the creative capacities of the psyche. Updating this mystery tradition, clinical material illustrates how narratives of the Self are present in such pre-Oedipal dynamics as dissociation and projective identification. These dynamics are understood not only as primitive defences but as reconstitutive symbolic metaphors and mythopoetic expressions of an emergent rather than a superordinate Self.

Note on the relevance of dreams for evolutionary psychology.

In the past in evolutionary psychology both dream theory and content have been largely ignored. Recently exploration of Freudian and Jungian ideas has begun, making a more extensive examination of dreaming desirable. Further, dream content analysis can provide data for testing evolutionary hypotheses concerning behavior.

The super-ego, the voice of the self and the depressive position.

The Freudian concept of the super-ego and Jung's idea of a primary moral reaction in the unconscious--the voice of the self--are compared. From its origin the superego is connected with human destructiveness, but for Jung individual conscience is based on a collision between the ego and the inner world of archetypes. With reference to Neumann's 'New Ethic', some implications of Jung's idea of the unconscious ambiguity of good and evil are discussed. Finally an attempt is made to relate the concept of the primary moral reaction to a developmental and clinical framework, notably Klein's depressive position, but only a partial integration is possible.

Dream analysis using theories of analytical psychology

The paper covers three major theoretical approches on dreams that now dominate in analytical psychology. Modifications of Jung's original ideas could create some problems dealing with dream material to those who are not familiar with the present situation so the purpose of this paper is to clear up the pecularities characteristic to each theoretical approach. Clinical case report and qualitative data analysis forms methodological basis of the three level interpretation of dreams selected during the course of depth oriented psychotherapy. This method was chosen as the most appropriate dealing with the clinical material.

Jung before Freud, not Freud before Jung: the reception of Jung's work in American psychoanalytic circles between 1904 and 1909

A review is first presented of the new Jung scholarship – that Jung is to be properly understood, not as a disciple of Freud, but as the twentieth century exponent of the symbolic hypothesis in the tradition of the late nineteenth century psychologies of transcendence. This is followed by an outline of the so‐called French‐Swiss‐English and American psychotherapeutic alliance, of which Jung was a part, and the cross‐cultural mediumistic psychology of the subconscious it promoted, chiefly through the works of William James, F. W. H. Myers, and Théodore Flournoy. Focusing on the experimental work of the Swiss‐American pathologist Adolph Meyer and the American neurologist Frederick Peterson, evidence is then produced to show that Jung, before Freud, was more important in American psychotherapeutic circles. His experimental researches into the association method and the psychogalvanic reflex, his study of mediums and connection to Swiss psychiatry had numerous unique alliances with the American scene, particularly because of their similar historical relation between psychology and religion. Therefore, to understand Jung, one must consider the archetypal significance which America held for Jung's own individuation process, as well as the Americanization of Jungian ideas that followed.

Esperanza: Poems for Orpheus

Holly Prado. Esperanza: Poems for Orpheus. Los Angeles: Cahuenga Press, 1998. Readers who love a poetry rich with gravidas will admire Holly Prado's Esperanza, her new collection of some seventy poems inspired by Orpheus, ancient lyrist/lyricist. Orpheus is a companion-god, a confidante and religious figure to be adored and revered. He catalyzes her themes: passion, deaths of family and friends, her aging (the book concludes with a sardonic intimation of her eventual departure: will be next. / you will be you, and then not.), totemism of trees and flowers, and Prado's love for poet and actor Harry Northrup who merges with Orpheus. Rituals matter, as Prado makes obeisance to gods of poetry, time, and life force. She is primarily an elegiac poet whose flashes of humor palliate dourness. She is also attentive to psychology, particularly to Jungian ideas, without ever turning slick or gimmicky. Dreams, as channels supplied by Orphic forces, inspire her. Poetry is ritual. Prado cultivates voices (her verse is received, as Greek poets in a divine creative frenzy, or mania, as Plato called it, received voices). Her tropes, themes, and metrics derive from transcendental acts and states of mind often ritualized. Among passages revealing her methods, One I've Been Asked to Do is a blend of ordinary and magical. On a Sunday morning her husband sings about wings before we even have / our breakfast. Natural elements are commonplace: bugs, sparrow, raven, hummingbird, roofs, trees, and By introducing an angel, she evokes mystical and liturgical: an angel's shoulder blade/wing parallels an earlier swiftly glimpsed bird as a of green, spinning healthily right through a tree's / large taking-in of sun. She hopes, she says, to rewrite walking all time, family that can map and cook, imagine transubstantiation: shoulder blade, this bird appearing just way gods should: in flash and speed, another species, and dependent on what isn't true: our joy. Her vision here has a celebratory rightness produced by liturgical languagetransubstantiation, joy, angel. But there are problems: at times devotional apparatus of language and reverential attitudes meander, obfuscating rather than clarifying motifs. Automatic writing-perhaps reflective of Orphic mind where poet abandons logic, fashions bowls of worship (to adapt one of Prado's images) and pursues a chic surrealism-may simply confuse readers. Tropes may connect or they may not. Many, even her most compelling, tropes have mystical appurtenances. Her models, possibly, are Gertrude Stein and HD. Prado seems indebted to both, particularly to Doolittle; and in her surreal flourishes she shares much with her contemporary Diane Wakoski. The latter, though she writes much of Kings, gods, and goddesses, lacks Prado's complexity of mind on matters Orphic and Jungian. In Prado's Ritual shoulder blade, green thread created by flying bird, and the earth-stemmed family transcend pitfalls of automatic writing. Another poem, Gogh Recovers, celebrates powers of poetry and art to quiet and control pain, illness, and narcissism: becomes / noon that leads us to sirens / and Orphic poet. An irony is that sun drove Van Gogh mad, stimulated final painting of disturbing crows over a wheat field, and led to his suicide. Prado seems to construct, even to resurrect, a salvation for painter. In this passage she employs a rose and a wrist to limn a liturgical moment: creative act controls and even sublimates madness and obsession: intense composure, like rose. tunes of inside inside of our wrists. Prado's rose and wrist, so visual, evoke those private tunes of light that must remain elusive, as religious/Orphic mysteries remain elusive. …

Archetypal Landscapes and the Interpretation of Meaning

Carl Jung's analytic ideas on archetypes offer an approach to interpreting ancient meanings in the absence of historic records. The archetypes of the collective unconscious are said to maintain a uniformitarian consistency over time in form and meaning. Their recurrent expression in the vernacular arts, dreams, even film of recent times permits exploration of these same archetypes in ancient contexts. The theory is discussed and applied to three landscapes, archetypal landscapes of glacial wasteland, primordial sea and forest labyrinth.

Collective intelligence as a model for the unconscious

The conception of the unconscious as an active agency influencing human behavior forms the cornerstone of all psychodynamic thought. Yet, judged as private, inaccessible, unnecessary, or nonexistent, the unconscious has been virtually ignored by modern psychology and cognitive science. Jungian ideas about the unconscious, especially those concerning the collective unconscious, have long been singled out for particular criticism by the scientific community. However, recent discoveries in the newly emerging fields of complex systems theory and artificial life appear poised to place Jung's ideas on a firm and rigorous scientific foundation. In this article I describe some of these discoveries and propose that naturally occurring collective intellegences provide empirical models upon which to establish a rigorous, scientific study of Jung's model of the unconscious.

How Much Jungian Theory Is There in My Practice?

This non‐clinical paper consists of the author's subjective and personal value judgements on theory and practice. He discusses nine topics: I) What is analysis and why do people seek therapy? 2) Dangers of reification and hypostatizing: reinforcement of narcissistic defences and schizoid unrelatedness. 3) The problems of archetypal psychology and amplification. 4) The cultural and political aspects of the unconscious psyche, and the value of studying the philosophical background to the psychodynamic approach. 5) Criticism of the classical Jungian over‐emphasis of the intrapsychic at the expense of the interpersonal. 6) Psychosomatic healing through experience and interpretation of psychosomatic identity in the transference/countertrans‐ference; idea of the ‘animating body’. 7) Dangers of theoretical hndamentalism and crusading among Jungian schools: envy and intolerance. 8) The need for the analyst to have enough good objects. 9) An acknowledgement of theoretical influences other than Jung on the author's practice; although Jung's ideas facilitate a personal pluralism ‐ the spirit of Jung.

Jung and the Jungians on myth: an introduction

Carl Gustav Jung (1875- 1961) was never more insightful and intriguing than when he discussed mythology. The key to understanding the Jungian approach to mythology lies in the concept of the image, which provides the basis for his theory of the unconscious. By emphasizing the image over the word, Jungian psychology distinguishes itself dramatically from Freudian, Lacanian, and other psychologies that stress the task of interpreting the language - the words - of the unconscious. In Jung and the Jungians on Myth , Steven Walker carefully leads the reader through the essential lines of thought in Jungian psychology before developing his method for using Jungian ideas to approach mythological texts. Whether one is sympathetic toward Jung's ideas or critical of them, one will find in Walker's discussion a lucid introduction to Jungian perspectives on myth and psychology

Depression: a discussion of Jung's ideas.

Depression is differentiated into normal and pathological. Pathological depression is further divided into simple and melancholic. The characteristics of each disordered form are described. Jung's ideas on depression are described in terms of this theoretical standpoint. The concepts used by Jung to explain depression are derived from his libido theory. Through introversion unconscious contents necessary to compensate a one-sided attitude of the ego are made conscious. Introversion depletes the ego of its energy. Depression is the depleted ego's experience of itself. Jung's theory is useful to explain normal depression associated to the process of transformation. It has also been extended to explain disorders of depression via the concept of involuntary or forced introversion in the service of compensation. His therapeutic approach consisted of rectifying the imbalance of psychic energy by helping the ego to integrate unconscious contents. The subsequent accrual of psychic energy redresses the problem of the ego's depletion and depression eases. In the discussion, Jung's contributions to the understanding of depression are recognised, especially his insight into the relationship between normal depression and the process of transformation. The explanatory limitations of Jung's ideas for depressive disorder are also recognised and discussed in relation to aetiology, introversion-extraversion, aggression and psychotherapy. Current clinical information suggests that a theory of depression needs to integrate and also to reformulate some of Jung's ideas.