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Achieving the right balance between what Jung called the ego and self is central to his theory of personality development

http://www.guardian....l-jung-ego-self

If you have ever thought of yourself as an introvert or extrovert; if you've ever deployed the notions of the archetypal or collective unconscious; if you've ever loved or loathed the new age; if you have ever done a Myers-Briggs personality or spirituality test; if you've ever been in counselling and sat opposite your therapist rather than lain on the couch – in all these cases, there's one man you can thank: Carl Gustav Jung.

The Swiss psychologist was born in 1875 and died on 6 June 1961, 50 years ago next week. His father was a village pastor. His grandfather – also Carl Gustav – was a physician and rector of Basel University. He was also rumoured to be an illegitimate son of Goethe, a myth Carl Gustav junior enjoyed, not least when he grew disappointed with his father's doubt-ridden Protestantism. Jung felt "a most vehement pity" for his father, and "saw how hopelessly he was entrapped by the church and its theological teaching", as he wrote in his autobiographical book, Memories, Dreams, Reflections.

Jung's mother was a more powerful figure, though she seems to have had a split personality. On the surface she came across as a conventional pastor's wife, but she was "unreliable", as Jung put it. She suffered from breakdowns. And, differently again, she would occasionally speak with a voice of authority that seemed not to be her own. When Jung's father died, she spoke to her son like an oracle, declaring: "He died in time for you."

In short, his childhood was disturbed, and he developed a schizoid personality, becoming withdrawn and aloof. In fact, he came to think that he had two personalities, which he named No 1 and No 2.

No 1 was the child of his parents and times. No 2, though, was a timeless individual, "having no definable character at all – born, living, dead, everything in one, a total vision of life". (At school, his peers seem to have picked this up, as his nickname was "Father Abraham".)

Jung was perhaps not so unusual, as many children indulge similar internal fantasies. Where Jung differed was in taking his inner life seriously. "I have always tried to make room for anything that wanted to come from within," he noted. Later he renamed and generalised No 1 and No 2, calling them the ego and the self. Achieving the right balance between the two aspects of the psyche is central to his theory of personality development, called individuation.

Jung finally came into his own at university. He proved himself a brilliant student, developing "a tremendous appetite on all fronts", graduating in medicine and natural science in double-quick time. His first public paper was entitled On the Limits of the Exact Sciences, in which he questioned an inflexible philosophy of materialism. His doctorate was On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena, and laid the foundations for two key ideas in his thought. First, that the unconscious contains part-personalities, called complexes. One way in which they can reveal themselves is in occult phenomena. Second, most of the work of personality development is done at the unconscious level.

He first made a name for himself in the Burghölzli psychiatric hospital in Zürich, working with Eugen Bleuler, the doctor who coined the word "schizophrenia". Jung developed the word association test of Francis Galton, the cousin of Charles Darwin.

A patient was read a list of words and asked to respond to each one with the first word that comes into their mind. The response, and the time taken to produce it, is recorded.

Previous research had already demonstrated that prolonged response times indicate that the stimulus word unconsciously troubles the patient. Sometimes, it is possible to identify a group of such words. Jung's contribution was to link these groups with the unconscious part-personalities and show how the test provides a window into the distressed world of the mentally ill. People are not simply mad, he concluded. Rather, there is a method in their madness. In one case, Jung showed that a patient who for 50 years had been fixated on the apparently meaningless task of making illusory shoes, had been abandoned by a lover who was a cobbler.

Jung was becoming quite well known, with his fame in Zürich prompting the first of several questions that subsequently came to dog his reputation. It concerns his alleged womanising.

At university, he discovered that he could sway an audience with the force of his character and ingenuity of his ideas. In Zürich, he gave public talks. "Clusters of women formed a phalanx around him before and after each of his lectures," writes Deidre Bair in her seminal biography. Then, a woman called Sabina Spielrein became his patient and, it was rumoured, his lover – perhaps just one of many. Later, he certainly formed a ménage à trois with Toni Wolff, to which his wife Emma only slowly became reconciled. Sleeping with patients is now the unforgivable sin among psychotherapists. Had Jung committed it?

After examining the evidence over several chapters, Bair concludes that it is impossible to discover the truth of what happened, though the rumours and speculation appear wildly exaggerated. After all, this was an age in which husbands and wives would greet each other with a chaste shake of the hand, even in private.

Jung had an electric personality. It is hardly surprising that such charisma was interpreted as erotically unsettlingly.

Further, the phenomenon of patients developing powerful feelings for their therapists – part of what is called transference – was then new. Freud's earliest collaborator, Josef Breuer, dropped the "talking cure" when one of his patients didn't just fall in love with him but developed a phantom pregnancy, naming him as the father. Freud first thought that transference was unhelpful and should be circumvented. Then, he came to believe that it was the cornerstone of psychodynamic therapy because it brings back to life otherwise buried feelings and affections.

But that brings us to Jung's encounter with the founder of psychoanalysis. We will explore that transformative experience next week.

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[ramboself]

Since your into jung have you ever heard of adler freuds other disciple, freud called him paranoid, he invented the inferiority complex who's best solution is good works, sums up social workers, among other things he said it wan't sex that drove things it was power, he's not taught much now probably because he'd ask why proffessionals behave in power crazed ways whilst going on about empowerment

[I am an Aardvark]

ramboself, on 12 June 2011 - 08:05 PM, said:

Since your into jung have you ever heard of adler

Yea

[I am an Aardvark]

[I am an Aardvark]

[I am an Aardvark]

[I am an Aardvark]

[I am an Aardvark]

ramboself, on 12 June 2011 - 08:05 PM, said:

Since your into jung have you ever heard of adler freuds other disciple, freud called him paranoid, he invented the inferiority complex who's best solution is good works, sums up social workers, among other things he said it wan't sex that drove things it was power, he's not taught much now probably because he'd ask why proffessionals behave in power crazed ways whilst going on about empowerment

The epistemology of civil society replays (in parodic form) the politics of power/knowledge.

[I am an Aardvark]

Carl Jung, part 2: A troubled relationship with Freud – and the Nazis
http://www.guardian....ung-freud-nazis

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Carl Jung, part 3: Encountering the unconscious

Read the full article here - http://www.guardian....ook-unconscious

Jung's split with Freud in 1913 was costly. He was on his own again, an experience that reminded him of his lonely childhood. He suffered a breakdown that lasted through the years of the first world war. It was a traumatic experience. But it was not simply a collapse. It turned out to be a highly inventive period, one of discovery. He would later say that all his future work originated with this "creative illness".

He experienced a succession of episodes during which he vividly encountered the rich and disturbing fantasies of his unconscious. He made a record of what he saw when he descended into this underworld, a record published in 2009 as The Red Book. It is like an illuminated manuscript, a cross between Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

Its publication sparked massive interest in Jungian circles, rather like what happens in Christian circles when a new first-century codex is discovered. It is of undoubted interest to scholars, in the same way that the notebooks of Leonardo are to art historians. And it is an astonishing work to browse, for its intricacy and imagination. But it is also highly personal, which is presumably why Jung decided against its publication in his own lifetime. So, to turn it into a sacred text, as some appear inclined to do, would be a folly of the kind Jung argued against in the work that followed his recovery from the breakdown.

In particular he wrote two pieces, known as the Two Essays, that provide a succinct introduction to his mature work. (He can otherwise be a rambling, elusive writer.) On the Psychology of the Unconscious completes his separation from Freud. He shows how tracing the origins of a personal crisis back to a childhood trauma, as Freud was inclined to do, might well miss the significance of the crisis for the adult patient now.

In The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious, he describes a process whereby a person can pay attention to how their unconscious life manifests itself in their conscious life. It will be a highly personal and tortuous experience. "There is no birth of consciousness without pain," he wrote. But with it, the individual can become more whole.

By way of illustration, Jung considers the example of a man whose public image is one of honour and service but who, in the privacy of his home, is prone to moods – so much so that he scares his wife and children. He is leading a double life as public benefactor and domestic tyrant. Jung argues that such a man has identified with his public image and neglected his unconscious life – though it won't be ignored and so comes out, with possibly explosive force, in his relations with his family. The way forward is to pay attention to this inner personality, literally by holding a conversation with himself.

He should overcome any embarrassment in doing so and allow each part of himself to talk to the other so that both "partners" can be fully heard.

A non-judgmental attitude is critical. If one side judges the other, then the other side actually gains power because it feels wronged, and so justified in its complaints. This is where therapy can help. "The course of therapy is thus rather like a running conversation with the unconscious", Jung writes. And when properly heard, the tensions between the inner and outer personality should subside. The result will be a more honest saint who is a lot easier to live with. Moreover, he will find that he has more energy for life because he will be less at war with himself and those around him.

The Red Book, then, can be interpreted as Jung's conversation with his unconscious. The devotee of Jung who reads it as if it were a conversation with their own unconscious diverges from the particular path towards individuation that they themselves must forge.

Needless to say, a discussion with the unconscious is not straightforward. If conscious life is not wholly rational, driven as much by emotions and intuitions, then the patterns and instincts of the unconscious are even more buried and obscure. Worse, Jung argues that the modern world has developed a positive fear of the unconscious because it escapes the precise determination, analysis and control promised by modern science. The natural language of the unconscious is not exact like mathematics; it is flexible like mythology.

It is at this point that the links between Jungian psychology and religion emerge particularly clearly, because if symbolism and mythology are the natural languages of the unconscious, they are the natural languages of spiritual traditions too.

Jung found continual inspiration for his psychology in spiritual writings. The Talmud says that "The dream is its own interpretation." Jung agreed. Heraclitus, influenced by Eastern philosophies, wrote, "Out of discord comes the fairest harmony". Jung adopted this principle of enantiodromia as his own.

Further, Jung understood spiritual traditions to be a kind of psychotherapy avant la lettre. (Or to put it the other way round, he thought that psychotherapy emerged in the 19th century precisely because religious systems had begun to fail.) Human beings cannot stand meaninglessness in life, he argued. The decisive question we pursue is whether we are "related to the infinite or not?" Religious traditions provide frameworks within which this question can be approached, not primarily in an empirical or rational sense, but rather in an experiential and practical one.

For the Christian, the symbol of Christ represents complete humanity. The Buddha holds the same hope for the Buddhist. "The Christ-symbol is of the greatest importance for psychology in so far as it is perhaps the most highly developed and differentiated symbol of the self, apart from the figure of the Buddha," Jung averred.

Further still, he argued that Christ and the Buddha had both experienced their own confrontations with the unconscious, respectively in the stories of the temptations of Jesus and the Mara episode in the Buddha's legend. They are experiences that individuals shouldn't seek to imitate, but might expect and follow.

[I am an Aardvark]

Carl Jung, part 4: Do archetypes exist?
Jung's theory of structuring principles remains controversial – but provides a language to talk about shared experience

Full Article -

http://www.guardian....http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2011/jun/20/jung-archetypes-structuring-principles