Carl Gustav Jung: A Notable Contributor To The Discipline Of Psychology
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Carl Gustav Jung:
A Notable Contributor to
The Discipline of Psychology
February 8, 2005
Carl Gustav Jung was a Swiss-German psychoanalyst who was one of the truly great minds of psychology and is often considered to be the father of humanistic and transpersonal psychology. Jung was born July 26, 1875 at Kesswil, Canton Thurgau, Switerland, and lived in Switzerland all his life. His father was a protestant parson; his grandfather, after whom he was named, was medical director of the University of Basil, where, in 1895, Carl became a medical student. He had originally wanted to be a surgeon, but his father could not afford the post-graduate schooling. As a senior, Carl attended psychology lectures, but was not at all interested in the subject. He read the text at the last moment before finals, and was amazed that the science was not more developed, like other fields of medicine. Psychiatry was somewhat held in contempt at the time, and many believed mental illness could not really be treated beyond institutional care. Further, no psychology regarded man as whole, but viewed symptoms of mental illness as entities unto themselves. While reading, Jung was reminded how, as a teenager, he had been fascinated by a girl he knew who, while in a trance, spoke a different German dialect and exhibited a completely different personality. He instantly became very interested and in that moment, decided to be a medical psychological scientist.
After graduation, he became assistant at a teaching hospital in Zurich under Professor Eugen Bleuler, a prominent psychologist of the era, and began researching schizophrenia. His thoughts and mind were original, and from his first publication in 1902, he attracted attention. Even at this early stage in his career, he developed the concept of a “complex,” and although word association was in wide use, no one had previously noticed the emotion associated with it; from this, Jung developed the technique of “free association” which is still used today. Hypnosis was also in use at the time, but Jung did much additional work in that field, as well as delving much more deeply into dream interpretation as pioneered by Freud.
Jung attempted to find out about the functioning of the conscious mind by examining the functioning of the unconscious mind. He focused more on healthy, rather than unhealthy, elements of personality, because he believed symptoms of mental illness were not so much isolated, detached entities, but rather signs of disturbed normal functioning. He wanted to understand the causes of the trouble– fears, false ideas and misunderstandings about life– which he called “the intruders of the mind.” His special interest was in the adaptation of the individual to others. He noticed that patients with disturbed minds were often unable to communicate in a healthy way with others. Later, through this, he saw evidence that the mind had collective contents. He viewed his patients not only as individuals, but as members of a community, and took into consideration how this “collective” mind might affect the individual. This eventually matured into his notion of a “collective unconscious” and “archetypes.”
After corresponding with Sigmund Freud in 1906 and a visit to Vienna at Freuds invitation in 1907, Jung became one of Freuds close colleagues, and together, they were instrumental in bringing psychology into the twentieth century by developing theories of the unconscious. Freud himself considered Jung his theoretical heir, until Jungs insights strayed too far from Freuds, causing rivalry and eventually a bitter split in 1913, initiated by Freud. Jung was one of a group of therapists who began under Freuds influence, then went on to create their own “neo-Freudian” schools of thought. Some, including Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, and Karen Horney, believed that Freud overemphasized the role of sexuality in his theories. The crux of the split between Freud and Jung seemed to center around this Freudian emphasis on biological drives and Freuds rejection of occultism. Jungs doctoral dissertation in 1902 had been entitled “On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena,” and his interest in spiritism and occult phenomena caused him to expand his theories of the unconscious far beyond a merely psychosexual view to include metaphysical or spiritual aspects as being just as innate and integral to the development of individual human personality. He expanded Freuds “personal unconscious” to include a “collective unconscious” shared by all human beings. Jungs insights were truly brilliant innovations and paved the way for the “third force” movement in psychology.
His theories on the collective unconscious and the archetypes proposed an unconscious and hereditary source for humanitys spiritual longings and creative activities. An “archetype” is defined as a force, process, or fantasy, such as a myth, that recurs throughout history, representing certain