Carl Jung Essay, Research Paper
CARL JUNG
Jung was the child of Johann Paul Achille Jung was a Protestant pasteur. His mother Emilie Jung was from a well-established Basel family. His parents, however, may have been ill-matched in some ways, and this is probably one of the reasons why he was left alone a lot.
In these times of lonely childhood, he wondered and meditated over Life’s big issues. He already then had an inherent inclination for dreaming and fantasy, which he consciously sought to develop. According to himself, these inner abilities largely influenced his adult work.
After graduation in medicine, in 1902, from the universities of Basel and Z rich, with a wide background in biology, zoology, paleontology, and archeaology, he began his study of human psychology. In February 1903, Jung maried Emma Rauschenbach, a psychoanalyst. Emma was an important support for Jung in his scientific activities, and they lived together until Emma’s death in 1955. They raised five children.
After his graduation, Jung began his research in word association. When a patient speaks, language outfolds its own logic of continuity – linking thought impulses and remembrances of events together; hence a patient’s responses to an analyst’s stimulus words will inevitably reveal what Jung called complexes, a term which has since become universal.
After working with Eugen Bleuler and Pierre Janet for quite some time, Jung met Sigmund Freud, with whom he cooperated the following years. The first move was made by Jung, when he, early in 1906, sent his book on word association to Freud. This initiated a somehow strange letter exchange between the two, which intensified during the year. By his support of Freud, Jung contributed to making Freud be taken seriously in the scientific world.
In 1912, by writing “New Ways of Psychology” (which later was reedited and published 1917 as “On the Psychology of the Unconscious”), Jung declared his independence from Freud’s overemphasis on sexuality. Jung disliked Freud’s severe reservations towards spirituality and art (whose products Freud called “mere sexual sublimations”). Freud wished to promote Jung as the heir of Freudianism, whereas Jung wished to make his own renown.
During his remaining 50 years, Doctor Jung, in accordance with his acknowledgment of the existence of an individual human soul, continued to develop his theories, drawing on a wide knowledge stemming from his deep quest into mythology, history and a diversity of wisdom traditions; and Jung traveled a lot and visited diverse cultures in New Mexico, India, and Kenya. Hereby he founded his own school of analytical psychology which allowed his spiritual leanings an excellent expression. Jung’s continued scientific research granted him international renown. For example he was chosen president of the International Psychoanalytical Association in the three years preceding World War One.
In a major work “Psychological Types” (1921), Dr. Jung dealt with the relationship between the conscious and unconscious as well as divided personality types into extrovert and introvert. He later made a distinction between the personal unconscious (the repressed feelings and thoughts developed during an individual’s life together with unfolded life possibilities and much more), and the collective unconscious (inherited feelings, thoughts, “instincts” and memories shared by all humanity); the collective unconscious made up of, what he called, archetypes.
Archetypes are such inherent, instinctual and primordial images and symbols in all human beings, which often find an unconscious (or conscious) outer expression in religion, art, mythology, folk and fairy tales, astrology, etc. Jung began to use his archetype notion in 1919 in accordance with his view that the human soul-life and instinct-nature, in form of “unloaded images” may be traced back to humanity even on a common and archaic level. But an archetype is not the image in itself, but the unfilled pattern and the possibility to fill out a given pattern (form) with an imagelike content.
Many Jung-interprets understand that the archetypes are collective by nature, and that these so-called potential psychological structures are conceived as belonging to the whole collectivity of mankind without consideration of ethnic or other differences. Jung has been criticized from many sides for his strong involvement in the psychological union in Germany in the 1930s and during the World War II among other, even though he lived and worked in Switzerland. Yet, to his neutral attitude towards National Socialism he wished to make a distance in his work “After the Catastrophy”, which was published in 1945.
Jung, who did not accept Freud’s theory that human development is essentially complete after the first five years of life, claimed that personal development is a lifelong process. He underlined that conflicts established in infancy often are not resolved satisfactorily until adulthood or maturity. And through such resolutions, around or even before one’s midlife, some persons may begin to search for inner truths and achieve a state of self-assertion and identity integration – which Jung called individuation.
Doctor Jung wrote voluminously, especially on his psychological theories, analytical methods and the relationships between psychotherapy and religious beliefs. He wrote in his own language, Swiss-German, and the totality of his written scientific oeuvre is translated into Danish, English, French, as well as into manyfold other languages. Carl Gustav Jung died on the 6th of June 1961 in K snacht, Switzerland.