Jung ( Memories, Dreams,..

) - Review Contrary to more voluminous magna opera like "Mysterium Coniunctionis" or "Psychology and Alchemy", this is a more accessible and, at the same time, central book of Jungian myth. Having seen various elements of this popular hagiography dismantled by mordant & unrelenting Jungophobes like Richard Noll, I would only stress what I consider the lasting value & glowing inspiration for modern ( Western ) (wo)man in search of her/his soul. I'll post my review in a half-humorous form of a fragment of a dialogue, the now extinct form venerated by Plato, Galileo or Bruno. Q. What, then, is the message of Jung's life, that,what William James had described as ordeal of consciousness ? A. The goal of Jungian individuation is expansion & integration of the psychic contents ("soul") within the field of awareness, the ego being the center of conscious life. The grand finale would be fusion, coniunctio, of the "soul" ( psyche ) and "Spirit" ( pneuma/Self ), with ego retaining its "privileged" position as the center of the conscious life. Q. So is this expansion and integration something one is aware of when it is happening or when it has happened ? A. Well, that's a tricky subject. I'll try to give some hints a few outspoken Jungians like Marie Louise von Franz, and Jung himself have adumbrated. Of course, the entire spiritual "enterprise" is based on the Western Hermetic/Gnostic tradition, from Corpus Hermeticum to alchemists's "opera". In short, you got a growth of inner ( and outer life ) on various levels of consciousness ( altered states, dreams, hypnagogic dreams, guided imagination, prayer, conscious ponderings, listening your inner daemon/voice, ordeals of emotional & family life,....). The goal is "individuated" man/woman: that is, someone who lives an authentic life ( Shakespearean "to thine own self be true" ), not an onedimensional spiritual saintly prototype nor a conformistic ego- centered mediocre. I suppose the ultimate ideal would be someone like Goethe or Plato- a multidimensional, creative individuum with strong sense of "I", yet in deep contact/fusion with the divine wellspring within- in sum, ideal of the "Renaissance man". Q. Was Jung able to achieve the "fusion" in his own life? A. From what is described in his spiritual autobiography- yes. Yet, I suspect he went even a step beyond: his final stage was that of a deified psyche ( with ego/ I-sense still present, but somehow subdued & the eternal/divine life perpetually glowing in the background of waking consciousness.) Quotes from Jung's autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, and some reflections This book is available at Amazon.com "I do not subscribe to the facile assumption that the patient is blocked merely by ordinary resistances. Resistances - especially when they are stubborn - merit attention, for they are often warnings which must not be overlooked. The cure may be a poison that not everyone can take, or an operation which, when it is contraindicated, can prove fatal." (p.141) In Shadow Work, we heed the warnings of resistances by speaking with their representative, the Risk Manager. "The spirit does not dwell in concepts, but in deeds and in facts. Words butter no parsnips..." (p.144) "Words butter no parsnips" would make a great quote for a plaque if it weren't that most Americans no longer remember what parsnips are. "One thing was clear: Freud, who had always made much of his irreligiosity, had now constructed a dogma; or rather, in the place of a jealous God whom he had lost, he had substituted another compelling image, that of sexuality. It was no less insistent, exacting, domineering, threatening, and morally ambivalent than the original one." (p.151) A description of the wound addressed by a Shadow Work process called the God-split, in which we elicit the "god" by which a person has been living painfully and help them substitute for it a "real" god that will allow them to live abundantly. "The idea dawned on me that Eros and the power drive might be in a sense like the dissident sons of a single father, or the products of a single motivating psychic force which manifested itself empirically in opposing forms, like positive and negative electrical

charges... Where is the one drive without the other? On the one hand man succumbs to the drive; on the other hand, he tries to master it." (p.153) In the Shadow Work four-quarter model, the tension between Magician and Lover. "It may well be said that the contemporary cultural consciousness has not yet absorbed into its general philosophy the idea of the unconscious and all that it means, despite the fact that modern man has been confronted with this idea for more than half a century. The assimilation of the fundamental insight that psychic life has two poles still remains a task for the future." (p.169) More than 40 years later, the same is still true. "In order to grasp the fantasies which were stirring in me "underground," I knew that I had to let myself plummet down into them, as it were. I felt not only violent resistance to this, but a distinct fear. For I was afraid of losing command of myself and becoming a prey to the fantasies - and as a psychiatrist I realized only too well what that meant. After prolonged hesitation, however, I saw that there was no other way out. I had to take the chance, had to try to gain power over them; for I realized that if I did not do so, I ran the risk of their gaining power over me. A cogent motive for my making the attempt was the conviction that I could not expect of my patients something I did not dare to do myself." (p.178) Jung's intention in undergoing for five years what came to be called his "descent into the unconscious." "It was then that I ceased to belong to myself alone, ceased to have the right to do so. ... I myself had to undergo the original experience, and, moreover, try to plant the results of my experience in the soil of reality; otherwise they would have remained subjective assumptions without validity. It was then that I dedicated myself to service of the psyche. I loved it and hated it, but it was my greatest wealth. My delivering myself over to it, as it were, was the only way by which I could endure my existence and live it as fully as possible." (p.192) "I took great care to try to understand every single image, every item of my psychic inventory, and to classify them scientifically-so far as this was possible-and, above all, to realize them in actual life. That is what we usually neglect to do. We allow the images to rise up, and maybe we wonder about them, but that is all. ... The images of the unconscious place a great responsibility upon a man. Failure to understand them, or a shirking of ethical responsibility, deprives him of his wholeness and imposes a painful fragmentariness on his life." (pp.192, 193) Following through on inspiration becomes a moral imperative. I find that this concept helps me to realize my artistic ideas. "The book on types yielded the insight that every judgment made by an individual is conditioned by his personality type and that every point of view is necessarily relative." (p.207) Proof, of a sort, for relativism. "Only after I had familiarized myself with alchemy did I realize that the unconscious is a process, and that the psyche is transformed or developed by the relationship of the ego to the contents of the unconscious." (p.209

"Blind acceptance never leads to a solution; at best it leads only to a standstill and is paid for heavily in the next generation." (p.215) "I really ought to say a great deal more, or a great deal less. It is an improvisation, like everything I am relating here. It is born of the moment. ... The work is the expression of my inner development; for commitment to the contents of the unconscious forms the man and produces his transformations. My works can be regarded as stations along my life's way." (pp.221-222) Jung's answer to the frustration of his biographers over his seeming inconsistency. "All my writings may be considered tasks imposed from within; their source was a fateful compulsion. ... I have never counted upon any strong response, any powerful resonance, to my writings. ... I have been impelled to say what no one wants to hear. For that reason, and especially at the beginning, I often felt utterly forlorn. I knew that what I said would be unwelcome, for it is difficult for people of our times to accept the counterweight to the conscious world." (p.222) Imagine Jung thinking his words would find no resonance in the world. If even he despaired of having an impact, how much more compassion do we owe ourselves for our own moments of despair? "I feel very strongly that I am under the influence of things or questions which were left incomplete and unanswered by my parents and grandparents and more distant ancestors. It often seems as if there were an impersonal karma within a family, which is passed on from parents to children." (p.233) If, as Jung said elsewhere (see page 318 below), each of us is a question asked of life, it makes sense to me that a family's members would be a cluster of similar questions. "...[T]he future is unconsciously prepared long in advance and therefore can be guessed by clairvoyants." (p.235) I like to think Jung means that our shadow lays in wait for us, in the forms of accidents, disease and so on, and that there are other fate-ordained events in our future of which our unconscious knows nothing. "We rush impetuously into novelty, driven by a mounting sense of insufficiency, dissatisfaction, and restlessness. We no longer live on what we have, but on promises, no longer in the light of the present day, but in the darkness of the future, which, we expect, will at last bring the proper sunrise. We refuse to recognize that everything better is purchased at the price of something worse; that, for example, the hope of greater freedom is canceled out by increased enslavement to the state, not to speak of the terrible perils to which the most brilliant discoveries of science expose us." (p.236) Nuclear fission reactors expose us to substances that will remain toxic for a quarter of a million years. "The Arab's dusky complexion marks him as a 'shadow,' but not the personal shadow, rather an ethnic one associated not with my persona but with the totality of my personality, that is, with the self. ... The predominantly rationalistic European finds much that is human alien to him, and he prides himself on this without realizing that his rationality is won at the expense of his vitality, and that the primitive part of his personality is consequently condemned to a more or less underground existence." (p.245)

I am reminded of Rudolf Valentino, whose sultry sensuality in the role of an Arabian sheik so excited women in the 20s that his death reportedly gave rise to a number of suicides. "In the living psychic structure, nothing takes place in a merely mechanical fashion; everything fits into the economy of the whole, relates to the whole. That is to say, it is all purposeful and has meaning. But because consciousness never has a view of the whole, it usually cannot understand this meaning." (p.246) "Out of sheer envy we are obliged to smile at the Indians' naivete and to plume ourselves on our cleverness; for otherwise we would discover how impoverished and down at the heels we are. Knowledge does not enrich us; it removes us more and more from the mythic world in which we were once at home by right of birth." (p.252) What a loss to American culture, that we have not integrated these aboriginal mythologies. "What happens within oneself when one integrates previously unconscious contents with the consciousness is something which can scarcely be described in words. It can only be experienced." (p.287) "For it seemed to me as if behind the horizon of the cosmos a three-dimensional world had been artificially built up, in which each person sat by himself in a little box. And now I should have to convince myself all over again that this was important! ... Although my belief in the world returned to me, I have never since entirely freed myself of the impression that this life is a segment of existence which is enacted in a three-dimensional boxlike universe especially set up for it." (pp.292,295) Jung's near-death experience during a severe illness paints an inspiring picture of life after death as a supremely connected existence. "But when one follows the path of individuation, when one lives one's own life, one must take mistakes into the bargain; life would not be complete without them. There is no guarantee - not for a single moment - that we will not fall into error or stumble into deadly peril. We may think there is a sure road. But that would be the road of death. Then nothing happens any longer - at any rate, not the right things. Anyone who takes the sure road is as good as dead." (p.297) "It was only after the illness that I understood how important it is to affirm one's own destiny. In this way we forge an ego that does not break down when incomprehensible things happen; an ego that endures, that endures the truth, and that is capable of coping with the world and with fate." (p.297) "As a matter of fact, day after day we live far beyond the bounds of our consciousness; without our knowledge, the life of the unconscious is also going on within us. The more the critical reason dominates, the more impoverished life becomes; but the more of the unconscious, and the more of myth we are capable of making conscious, the more of life we integrate. Overvalued reason has this in common with political absolutism: under its dominion the individual is pauperized." (p.302) "Yet death is an important interest, especially to an aging person. A categorical question is being put to him, and he is under an obligation to answer it. To this end he ought to have a myth about death, for reason show shim nothing but the dark pit into which he is descending. Myth, however, can conjure up other images for him, helpful and enriching

pictures of life in the land of the dead. If he believes in them, or greets them with some measure of credence, he is being just as right or just as wrong as someone who does not believe in them. But while the man who despairs marches toward nothingness, the one who has placed his faith in the archetype follows the tracks of life and lives right into his death. Both, to be sure, remain in uncertainty, but the one lives against his instincts, the other with them." (p.306) "Myth is the natural and indispensable intermediate stage between unconscious and conscious cognition." (p.311) "In the light of eternity, [death] is a wedding, a mysterium coniunctionis. The soul attains, as it were, its missing half, it achieves wholeness." (p.314) "The meaning of my existence is that life has addressed a question to me. Or, conversely, I myself am a question which is addressed to the world, and I must communicate my answer, for otherwise I am dependent upon the world's answer." (p.318) If I am a question, I suspect I am, "Why?" "In the final analysis, we count for something only because of the essential we embody, and if we do not embody that, life is wasted." (p.325) "We must, therefore, no longer succumb to anything at all, not even to good. A so-called good to which we succumb loses its ethical character. ... In practical terms, this means that good and evil are no longer so self-evident. We have to realize that each represents a judgment. In view of the fallibility of all human judgment, we cannot believe that we will always judge rightly." (p.329) Any absolute belief places something in shadow - presumably even this one. "Our psyche is set up in accord with the structure of the universe, and what happens in the macrocosm likewise happens in the infinitesimal and most subjective reaches of the psyche." (p.335) Fractals, then, apply to the psyche as well as to the natural world. "That is the meaning of divine service, of the service which man can render to God, that light may emerge from the darkness, that the creator may become conscious of His creation, and man conscious of himself." (p.338) Perhaps this is the answer Jung would give to the question, What is the meaning of life? "Meaninglessness inhibits fullness of life and is therefore equivalent to illness. Meaning makes a great many things endurable - perhaps everything. No science will ever replace myth, and a myth cannot be made out of any science. For it is not that 'God' is a myth, but that myth is the revelation of a divine life in man. It is not we who invent myth, rather it speaks to us as a Word of God." (p.340) And so Native American animal medicine and tarot cards speak to me. "By no means every conflict of duties, and perhaps not even a single one, is ever really 'solved,' though it may be argued over, weighed, and counterweighed till doomsday. Sooner or later the decision is simply there, the product, it would seem, of some kind of

short-circuit. Practical life cannot be suspended in an everlasting contradiction." (pp.345346) The psyche will "park" an issue to achieve balance. "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." (p.356) See also Books and CDs We Recommend, a bibliography of books, CDs and tapes related to personal growth and spirituality, at the Shadow Work Seminars site. % List of books. % Tell a friend about this page

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Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1961) Carl Jung

Most autobiographies cover the main events of a life, with the reader often left with only glimpses of the inner life of the author. Carl Jung's autobiographical Memories, Dreams, Reflections, in contrast, focuses on the great psychologist's spiritual and intellectual awakenings, rather than the external events of his life. The descriptions of his visions, dreams and fantasies, which he considered his 'greatest wealth', fill the book; this he did not for indulgence's sake, but because he considered them the prism through which he could perceive the collective psyche of humankind. Memories, Dreams, Reflections is controversial because it was still in manuscript form when Jung died, and required further editing to become the final version we read today. But it found the popular audience Jung had always hoped for, and inspired many to become psychoanalysts. Like a Christmas cake, it will be too rich and dense for some; for others it may inspire a life-long interest in Jungian psychology, which aims to reveal the science of the mind and personality as being driven by spiritual forces. Jung and God Other volumes carry his thoughts on mythological and psychological concepts such as the 'God-image', but Memories, Dreams, Reflections, according to its editor Aniela Jaffe, is Jung's 'religious testament' to the world, the only occasion in which he really talks about his personal experience of God. Both sides of Jung's family had been pastors and theologians, and his father was a rather doctrinaire minister. Into this environment Jung naturally grew up dwelling on religious issues, but the God he imagined was not personal or enlightening, but simply represented the power of the universe in all its light, darkness, chance and infiniteness. Through dreams he felt led to the conclusion that God actually wanted us to think 'bad thoughts', thoughts that went against established wisdom, so that we could make our way independently back to God. He felt that the truly spiritual person was a free thinker who demanded experience of God rather that just faith. Everyone has religious ideas in them, Jung believed, feelings about the infinite or intimations of greater meaning. Asked, in a television interview, whether he believed in God, Jung said: "I don't believe - I know". He had observed that those who shut them out often developed neuroses, yet such people would not have been 'divided against themselves', if they lived in an earlier time, in which their lives were closely tied to myth, ritual and nature. Modern people are too objective, he wrote, their spiritual horizons too narrow; many lives were lived almost entirely on the plane of the conscious, rational mind. Were they to close the gap between their ego and unconscious minds, Jung believed, they would return to full mental health. Integrating the self If psychoses resulted from some corruption in a person's psyche, so the life of a sane person would be shaped by internal myths and complexes. The goal of what Jung termed 'individuation' was the uniting of inner opposites, or recognizing the many contradictions within yourself. This self-knowledge would allow a sense of unity of purpose about your life and your personality to emerge. Jung recounts that, as a boy, he realized that there were two basic aspects to a person's being, which he termed personality No. 1 (what we usually think of as the self) and personality No.2 (the 'other'). His own No. 1 was the boy who did his homework and got into fights, but he also sensed a No. 2 which rested upon a 'timeless, imperishable stone' of wisdom.

Jung went out of his way to listen to this part of himself because he felt it to be his most valuable, and though most people never even want to recognize the 'other' within themselves, his lifetime's work in exploring the various sides and dimensions of the self means that today we are not afraid of talking about this No. 2 personality (variously called 'the shadow', the 'higher self', the 'true self'). We appreciate that its integration is necessary for a sense of wholeness. Without doing so, we tend to project onto other people or things what we do not recognize in ourselves, with often harmful consequences. Freud and beyond At their first meeting in Vienna in 1907, Freud and Jung talked straight for thirteen hours. In Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung describes Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams as 'epoch-making', and states that "By evaluating dreams as the most important source of information concerning the unconscious processes, he [Freud] gave back to mankind a tool that had seemed irretrievably lost." The famous split came about because Jung could not accept Freud's belief that most human behavior and any instance of the spiritual in art or in a person was the result of 'repressed sexuality'. From Jung's point of view, Freud, who so abhorred the religious impulse, wanted to turn his scientific ideas into a religion. "When I parted from Freud", Jung wrote, "I knew that I was plunging into the unknown. Beyond Freud, after all, I knew nothing; but I had taken the step into the darkness." In this darkness Jung would develop many of his now famous ideas. Though he coined the psychological terms 'complex', 'introvert' and 'extravert', Jung went out on more of a limb with his idea of the 'collective unconscious', a larger human mind of which every individual was a part, manifested in the images, symbols, dreams, and myths that seemed to emerge in all cultures, and with the concept of 'archetypes': ways of being or acting that people unthinkingly adopt but which are also patterns in this broader collective psyche. Another of Jung's famous ideas, 'synchronicity', or the occurrence of seemingly meaningful coincidences that go beyond the realms of normal probability, suggested a universe in which the boundaries which humans normally perceive between mind and matter may in some circumstances be eroded. Synchronicity is now a key concept in the New Age movement (see Redfield, The Celestine Prophecy ), but was also given credence by Jung's friend, the Nobel physicist Wolfgang Pauli. Jung was also interested in numerology, particularly the significance in art and mythology of the number four, and became a scholar of alchemy, Gnosticism and the Bible. He understood the real meaning of alchemy not as turning ordinary metals into gold, but the transformation of the psyche, an awakening. In 1913, Jung had had a powerful vision of all the land between the North Sea and the Alps flooded. The water on closer inspection was blood, in which floated the drowned bodies of millions. At first he thought it indicated that a revolution would take place, then it dawned on him that the Great War was about to break out in Europe. Jung's personal powers of precognition led to his delving into parapsychology, and the credence he gave, as a scientist, to non-physical causality, was met with derision by Freud. Only time will tell whether Jung or Freud were right on these nontraditional areas of science, but it is reasonable to say that Jung's star has risen in the last few decades while much of Freud's thought has been debunked. Final word Jung admitted that his 'mythologising' gave life a glamour that, once experienced, was difficult to do without. But then, he asked, why should we do without it? To the intellect, matters to do with dreams and the unconscious may seem like a waste of time, but if they enrich our emotional lives and heal a divided mind, surely they are valuable. If we have a purely rational, artless existence, never taking account of our dreams or fantasies, we become one-dimensional. In seeking perfect explanations, we never dwell on 'the incomprehensible things', as Jung described the mysteries of time and space; yet that which is mysterious also gives meaning to life. The spiritual life may be about reaching higher, but Memories, Dreams, Reflections also suggests that it requires digging deeper into the stories, symbols and traditions that make up our heritage. Perhaps our ancestors knew things that we, with all our technology, have forgotten. If you are tired of the shallowness of materialist, consumer culture, this book may be exactly what you need. Jung's account of travels in Africa, America, India and Italy are fascinating, as is the chapter on the tower-house he built at Bollingen on the shores of Lake Zurich to get away from it all. The descriptions of dreams and visions that appear throughout the work will not hold everyone's attention, but for many they will spark a new interest in the unconscious mind as a provider of guidance and wisdom. Carl Gustav Jung (IPA: [0'karl 0'g?staf 0'j??]) (July 26, 1875, Kesswil June 6, 1961, Ksnacht) was a Swiss psychiatrist, influential thinker, and founder of analytical psychology.

Jung's unique and broadly influential approach to psychology has emphasized understanding the psyche through exploring the worlds of dreams, art, mythology, world religion and philosophy. Although he was a theoretical psychologist and practicing clinician for most of his life, much of his life's work was spent exploring other realms, including Eastern and Western philosophy, alchemy, astrology, sociology, as well as literature and the arts. His most notable contributions include his concept of the psychological archetype, the collective unconscious, and his theory of synchronicity.Jung emphasized the importance of balance and harmony. He cautioned that modern humans rely too heavily on science and logic and would benefit from integrating spirituality and appreciation of the unconscious realm. It is for this reason that Jungian ideas are not typically included in curriculum of most major universities' psychology departments, but are occasionally explored in humanities departments.[citation needed]

Contents [hide] 1 Biography 1.1 Early years 1.2 Adolescence and early adulthood 1.3 Later life 2 Jung and Freud 3 Jung and Nazism 4 Influence 4.1 Spirituality as a cure for alcoholism 5 Influences on culture 5.1 Literature 5.2 Television and film 5.3 Music 6 See also 7 Notes and references 8 Recommended reading 9 Jung bibliography 10 External links [edit] Biography [edit] Early years Part of a series of articles on Psychoanalysis

Constructs Psychosexual development Psychosocial development Conscious Preconscious Unconscious Id, ego, and super-ego Libido Drive Transference Resistance Important Figures Sigmund Freud Carl Jung Alfred Adler Otto Rank Anna Freud Karen Horney Jacques Lacan Ronald Fairbairn Melanie Klein Harry Stack Sullivan Erik Erikson Nancy Chodorow Important works The Interpretation of Dreams Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis "Beyond the Pleasure Principle" Schools of Thought Self psychology Lacanian Analytical psychology Object relations Interpersonal Relational Attachment Ego psychology

Psychology Portal This box: view talk edit Karl Gustav II Jung was born on July 26, 1875 in Kesswil, in the Swiss canton (state) of Thurgau, as the fourth but only surviving child of Paul Achilles Jung and Emilie Preiswerk. [1] His father, Paul Jung, was a poor rural parson in the Swiss Reformed Church while his mother, Emilie, came from a wealthy, established Swiss family. Six-year old Jung. At six months, Paul Jung acquired a position at a better parsonage in Laufen and the family moved there. Meanwhile, the tension between Paul and Emilie was growing. An eccentric and depressed woman, Emilie spent much of the time in her own separate bedroom, enthralled by the spirits that she said visited her in the night. Emilie left Laufen for several months of hospitalization near Basel for an unknown physical ailment. Young Carl was taken by his father to live with Emilie's single sister in Basel, but later brought back to the vicarage. Emilie's continuing bouts of absence and often depressed mood influenced his attitude towards women one of "innate unreliability," a view that he later called the "handicap I started off with."[2] After three years of living in Laufen, Paul Jung requested a transfer and was called to Kleinhningen in 1879. The relocation brought Emilie in closer contact to her family and lifted her melancholy and despondent mood. A very solitary and introverted child, Jung was convinced from childhood that he had two personalitiesa modern Swiss citizen, and a personality more at home in the eighteenth century.[3] "Personality No. 1," as he termed it, was a typical schoolboy living in the era of the time, while No. 2 was a dignified, authoritative, and influential man from the past. Although Jung was close to both parents, he was rather disappointed in his father's academic approach to faith. A number of childhood memories inspired many of his later theories. As a boy he carved a tiny manikin into the end of the wooden ruler from his pupil's pencil case and placed it inside the case. He then added a stone which he had painted into upper and lower halves of, and hid the case in the attic. Periodically he would come back to the manikin, often bringing tiny sheets of paper with messages inscribed on them in his own secret language. This ceremonial act, he later reflected, brought him a feeling of inner peace and security. In later years, he discovered that similarities existed in this memory and the totems of native peoples like the collection of soul-stones near Arlesheim, or the tjurungas of Australia. This, he concluded, was an unconscious ritual that he did not question or understand at the time, but was practiced in a strikingly similar way in faraway locations that he as a young boy had no way of consciously knowing about.[4] His theories of psychological archetypes and the collective unconscious were inspired in part by this experience. Shortly before the end of his first year at the Humanistisches Gymnasium in Basel, at age 12, he was pushed unexpectedly by another boy, which knocked him to the ground so hard that he was for a moment unconscious. The thought then came to him that "now you won't have to go to school any more."[5] From then on, whenever he started off to school or began homework, he fainted. He remained at home for the next six months until he overheard his father speaking worriedly to a visitor of his future ability to support himself, as they suspected he had epilepsy. With little money in the family, this brought the boy to reality and he realized the need for academic excellence. He immediately went into his father's study and began poring over Latin grammar. He fainted three times, but eventually he overcame the urge and did not faint again. This event, Jung later recalled, "was when I learned what a neurosis is."[6]

[edit] Adolescence and early adulthood Jung wanted to study archaeology at university, but his family was not wealthy enough to send him further afield than Basel, where they did not teach this subject, so instead Jung studied medicine at the University of Basel from 1894 to 1900. The formerly introverted student became much more lively here. In 1903, Jung married Emma Rauschenbach, from one of the richest families in Switzerland. Jung in 1910. Towards the end of studies, his reading of Krafft-Ebing persuaded him to specialize in psychiatric medicine. He later worked in the Burghlzli, a psychiatric hospital in Zrich. In 1906, he published Studies in Word Association, and later sent a copy of this book to famed psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, after which a close friendship between these two men followed for some 6 years (see section on Jung and Freud). In 1913 Jung published Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (known in English as The Psychology of the Unconscious) resulting in a theoretical divergence between Jung and Freud and result in a break in their friendship, both stating that the other was unable to admit he could possibly be wrong. After this falling-out, Jung went through a pivotal and difficult psychological transformation, which was exacerbated by news of the First World War. Henri Ellenberger called Jung's experience a "creative illness" and compared it to Freud's period of what he called neurasthenia and hysteria. [edit] Later life Following World War I, Jung became a worldwide traveler, facilitated by his wife's inherited fortune as well as the funds he realized through psychiatric fees, book sales, and honoraria. He visited Northern Africa shortly after, and New Mexico and Kenya in the mid-1920s. In 1938, he delivered the Terry Lectures, Psychology and Religion, at Yale University. It was at about this stage in his life that Jung visited India. His experience in India led him to become fascinated and deeply involved with Eastern philosophies and religions, helping him come up with key concepts of his ideology, including integrating spirituality into everyday life and appreciation of the unconscious. Jung's marriage with Emma produced five children and lasted until Emma's death in 1955, but she certainly experienced emotional trauma, brought about by Jung's relationships with other women. The most well-known women with whom Jung is believed to have had extramarital affairs are patient and friend Sabina Spielrein[7] and Toni Wolff.[8] Jung continued to publish books until the end of his life, including a work showing his late interest in flying saucers. He also enjoyed a friendship with an English Catholic priest, Father Victor White, who corresponded with Jung after he had published his controversial Answer to Job.[9] Jung's work on himself and his patients convinced him that life has a spiritual purpose beyond material goals. Our main task, he believed, is to discover and fulfill our deep-innate potential, much as the acorn contains the potential to become the oak, or the caterpillar to become the butterfly. Based on his study of Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Gnosticism, Taoism, and other traditions, Jung perceived that this journey of transformation is at the mystical heart of all religions. It is a journey to meet the self and at the same time to meet the Divine. Unlike Sigmund Freud, Jung thought spiritual experience was essential to our wellbeing. When asked during a 1959 BBC interview if he believed in the existence of God, Jung replied, "I don't believe-I know" [10] Jung died in 1961 in Zrich, Switzerland. [edit] Jung and Freud Group photo 1909 in front of Clark University. Front row: Sigmund Freud, Granville Stanley Hall, C.G.Jung; back row: Abraham A. Brill, Ernest Jones, Sandor Ferenczi. Jung was thirty when he sent his work Studies in Word Association to Sigmund Freud in Vienna. It is notable that the first conversation between Jung and Freud lasted over 13 hours.

Half a year later, the then 50 year old Freud reciprocated by sending a collection of his latest published essays to Jung in Zrich, which marked the beginning of an intense correspondence and collaboration that lasted more than six years and ended shortly before World War I in May 1914, when Jung resigned as the chairman of the International Psychoanalytical Association. Today Jung and Freud rule two very different empires of the mind, so to speak, which the respective proponents of these empires like to stress, downplaying the influence these men had on each other in the formative years of their lives. But in 1906 psychoanalysis as an institution was still in its early developmental stages. Jung, who had become interested in psychiatry as a student by reading Psychopathia Sexualis by Richard von Krafft-Ebing, professor in Vienna, now worked as a doctor under the psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler in the Burghlzli and became familiar with Freud's idea of the unconscious through Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and was a proponent of the new "psycho-analysis". At the time, Freud needed collaborators and pupils to validate and spread his ideas. The Burghlzli was a renowned psychiatric clinic in Zrich at which Jung was an up-andcoming young doctor. In 1908, Jung became editor of the newly founded Yearbook for Psychoanalytical and Psychopathological Research. The following year, Jung traveled with Freud and Sandor Ferenczi to the U.S. to spread the news of psychoanalysis and in 1910, Jung became chairman for life of the International Psychoanalytical Association. While Jung worked on his Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (Symbols of Transformation), tensions grew between Freud and himself, due in a large part to their disagreements over the nature of libido and religion. In 1912 these tensions came to a peak because Jung felt severely slighted after Freud visited his colleague Ludwig Binswanger in Kreuzlingen without paying him a visit in nearby Zrich, an incident Jung referred to as the Kreuzlingen gesture. Shortly thereafter, Jung again traveled to the U.S.A. and gave the Fordham lectures, which were published as The Theory of Psychoanalysis, and while they contain some remarks on Jung's dissenting view on the nature of libido, they represent largely a "psychoanalytical Jung" and not the theory Jung became famous for in the following decades. In November 1912, Jung and Freud met in Munich for a meeting among prominent colleagues to discuss psychoanalytical journals.[11]. At a talk about a new psychoanalytic essay on Amenhotep IV, Jung expressed his views on how it related to actual conflicts in the psychoanalytic movement. While Jung spoke, Freud suddenly fainted and Jung carried him to a couch. Jung and Freud personally met for the last time in September 1913 for the Fourth International Psychoanalytical Congress, also in Munich. Jung gave a talk on psychological types, the introverted and the extraverted type, in analytical psychology. This constituted the introduction of some of the key concepts which came to distinguish Jung's work from Freud's in the next half century. In the following years Jung experienced considerable isolation in his professional life, exacerbated through World War I. His Seven Sermons to the Dead (1917) reprinted in his autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections (see bibliography) can also be read as expression of the psychological conflicts which beset Jung around the age of forty after the break with Freud. Jung's primary disagreement with Freud stemmed from their differing concepts of the unconscious. Jung saw Freud's theory of the unconscious as incomplete and unnecessarily negative. According to Jung (though not according to Freud), Freud conceived the unconscious solely as a repository of repressed emotions and desires. Jung believed, that the unconscious also had a creative capacity, that the collective unconscious of archetypes and images which made up the human psyche was processed and renewed within the unconscious (one might find similarity with the ideas of French philosopher Felix Guattari, who wrote several books with Gilles Deleuze and once stated, 'The unconscious is a factory, not a theatre.')

[edit] Jung and Nazism Though the field of psychoanalysis was dominated at the time by Jewish practitioners, and Jung had many friends and respected colleagues who were Jewish, a shadow hung over Jung's career due to allegations that he was a Nazi sympathizer. Jung was editor of the Zentralblatt fr Psychotherapie, a publication that eventually endorsed Mein Kampf as required reading for all psychoanalysts. Jung claimed this was done to save psychoanalysis and preserve it during the war, believing that psychoanalysis would not otherwise survive because the Nazis considered it to be a "Jewish science". He also claimed he did it with the help and support of his Jewish friends and colleagues.[12] This after-the-fact explanation, however, has been strongly challenged on the basis of available documents.[13] The question remains unresolved. Jung also served as president of the Nazi-dominated International General Medical Society for Psychotherapy. One of his first acts as president was to modify the constitution so that German Jewish doctors could maintain their membership as individual members even though they were excluded from all German medical societies. Also, in 1934 when he presented his paper "A Review Of The Complex Theory", in his presidential address he did not discount the importance of Freud and credited him with as much influence as he could possibly give to an old mentor. Later in the war, Jung resigned. In addition, in 1943 he aided the Office of Strategic Services by analyzing Nazi leaders for the United States.[14] However, it is still a topic of interest whether Jung's later explanations of his actions to save psychoanalysis from the Nazi Regime meant that he did not actually believe in Nazism himself. [edit] Influence Jung has had an enduring influence on psychology as well as wider society. He has influenced psychotherapy (see Jungian psychology and analytical psychology). The concept of introversion vs. extraversion The concept of the complex Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) was inspired by Jung's psychological types theory. Socionics, similar to MBTI, is also based on Jung's psychological types. Carl Jung - drawing [edit] Spirituality as a cure for alcoholism Jung's influence can sometimes be found in more unexpected quarters. For example, Jung once treated an American patient (Rowland H.) suffering from chronic alcoholism. After working with the patient for some time, and achieving no significant progress, Jung told the man that his alcoholic condition was near to hopeless, save only the possibility of a spiritual experience. Jung noted that occasionally such experiences had been known to reform alcoholics where all else had failed. Rowland took Jung's advice seriously and set about seeking a personal spiritual experience. He returned home to the United States and joined a Christian evangelical church. He also told other alcoholics what Jung had told him about the importance of a spiritual experience. One of the alcoholics he told was Ebby Thatcher, a long-time friend and drinking buddy of Bill Wilson, later co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) Thatcher told Wilson about Jung's ideas. Wilson, who was finding it impossible to maintain sobriety, was impressed and sought out his own spiritual experience. The influence of Jung thus indirectly found its way into the formation of Alcoholics Anonymous, the original 12-step program, and from there into the whole 12-step recovery movement, although AA as a whole is not Jungian and Jung had no role in the formation of that approach or the 12 steps. The above claims are documented in the letters of Carl Jung and Bill W., excerpts of which can be found in Pass It On, published by Alcoholics Anonymous. The detail of this story is disputed by some historians.

[edit] Influences on culture This section needs additional references or sources to facilitate its verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed. This article has been tagged since July 2007. The Aura-Soma color divination system relates many of its bottles to Jungian archetypal constructs. [edit] Literature Jung had a 16-year long friendship with author Laurens van der Post from which a number of books and a film were created about Jung's life. Jung influenced much of Joseph Campbell's thought. Herman Hesse, author of works such as Siddhartha and Steppenwolf, was treated by a student of Jung, Dr. Joseph Lang. This began for Hesse a long preoccupation with psychoanalysis, through which he came to know Carl Jung personally, and was challenged to new creative heights: During a three-week period during September and October 1917, Hesse penned his novel Demian. James Joyce in his Finnegans Wake, asks "Is the Co-education of Animus and Anima Wholly Desirable?" his answer perhaps being contained in his line "anama anamaba anamabapa." The book also ridicules Carl Jung's analytical psychology and Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis, by referring to "psoakoonaloose." Jung had been unable to help Joyce's daughter Lucia, who Joyce claimed was a girl "yung and easily freudened." Lucia was diagnosed as schizophrenic and was eventually permanently institutionalized.[15] Jung's differentiation between sensing, intuition, thinking, and feeling inspired the categorization of two of the four delineating factors in their personality test. These are the "I" vs. "S" and "T" vs. "F" groupings. Jung's influence on noted Canadian novelist Robertson Davies is apparent in many of Davies's fictional works. In particular, The Cornish Trilogy and his novel The Manticore base their designs on Jungian concepts. Ted Hughes's 1970 collection 'Crow' shows Hughes's interest in Jungian theory. Jung is one of the main characters in Timothy Findley's novel, Pilgrim. Jungian ideas make up a large part of the intellectual foundations of the Earthsea stories, the classic fantasy series written by Ursula K. Le Guin. Jung appears as a major character as a ghost in the novel Between the Bridge and the River by Scottish TV personality Craig Ferguson. He appears as an hallucination to one of the main characters in various parts of the novel. Jung's theories about the collective unconscious are a tool used by the character Peter Wilmot to get to know Misty in the Chuck Palahniuk novel Diary. Jung appears as a character in the novel "Possessing the Secret of Joy" by Alice Walker. He appears as the therapist of Tashi, the novel's protagonist. He is usually called "Mzee," but is identified by Alice Walker in the afterword. Jung appears as a major character in the 2006 novel "The Interpretation of Murder" by Jed Rubenfeld. [edit] Television and film Jung's writing was introduced to Italian film maker Federico Fellini in the 1950s and had an effect on the way Fellini incorporated dreams into films after La dolce vita. The plot of James Kerwin's scifi noir film Yesterday Was a Lie is said to contain multiple Jungian references, and press interviews with the cast and crew confirm that Jung's work in alchemy and dream analysis played a pivotal role in the development of the screenplay.

Dr. Niles Crane on the popular television sitcom Frasier is a devoted Jungian psychiatrist, while his brother Dr. Frasier Crane is a Freudian psychiatrist. This is mentioned a number of times in the series, and from time to time forms a point of argument between the two brothers. One memorable scene had Niles filling in for Frasier on Frasier's call-in radio program, in which Niles introduces himself as the temporary substitute saying, "...and while my brother is a Freudian, I am a Jungian, so there'll be no blaming Mother today." In the movie Batman Begins, the character of Jonathan Crane, aka "The Scarecrow", is a Jungian psychiatrist and at the same time personifies one of man's primal archetypes (the Scarecrow). Independent film director Tom Laughlin not only makes frequent references to Jung's concepts in his Billy Jack film series, but has also written several books about the man's theories of psychoanalysis. [edit] Music Peter Gabriel's song "Rhythm Of The Heat" (Security , 1982), deals about psychologist Carl Jung's visit to Africa where he had joined a group of tribal drummers and dancers and became overwhelmed with the fear of losing control of himself. At the time Jung was exploring the concept of what he defines as the Collective Unconscious, and was afraid he would come under control of the music, as the drummers and dancers let the music control themselves in fulfillment of their ritual objectives. Gabriel learned about it from Jung's essay Symbols And The Interpretation Of Dreams (ISBN 0-691-09968-5). Gabriel tries to capture this powerful feeling in his song with intense use of tribal drumbeats. The original song title was Jung in Africa.[16] Jung appears in the last row of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band cover, on Edgar Allan Poe's right. Portrayed in this modern pantheon of the collective unconscious, Jung's presence is a tribute to his thought about mass-communication and mass-desire. Singer/Songwriter Steve Taylor satirizes modern psychiatry in "Jung and the Restless" on his I Predict 1990 album.