C.G. JUNG:
A brief BIOGRAPHY & BIBLIOGRAPHY

 CARL GUSTAV JUNG (1875-1961) was a Swiss-German
psychoanalyst who, with Sigmund Freud, was instrumental in
bringing psychology into the twentieth century by developing
one of several theories of the unconscious. Indeed, as a
a young man in Zurich, Jung developed the concept of the
autonomous (and unconscious) complex and the technique of
of free association, well before joining forces with Freud's
Viennese school. Moreover, he soon broke with Freud over the
latter's reductionist, psychosexual view of the unconscious,
a break foreshadowed in Jung's autobiography as follows: "I
can still recall vividly how Freud said to me, 'My dear Jung,
promise me never to abandon the sexual theory. . . .  we must
make a dogma of it, an unshakable bulwark.' . . . In some
astonishment I asked him, 'A bulwark--against what?'  To which
he replied, 'Against the black tide of mud'--and here he
hesitated for a moment, then added--'of occultism'" (MDR,
Ch. 5). Ironically, Jung's doctoral dissertation had been
"On . . . Occult Phenomena"!

 Just before the outbreak of World War I, Jung experienced
that "black tide" first hand, in the form of a creative
illness--in other words, while his "visions" from the
unconscious nearly led him to psychosis, they also awoke in
him a revolutionary appreciation of how close his own dreams
were to the primitive myths and rituals of humankind, forcing
him to acknowledge forces within the human psyche for which
the Freudian view had no explanation. (In addition, Jung's
early exposure, in Zurich, to lower-class psychotics, as
opposed to the middle-class neurotics encountered by Freud
in Vienna, may explain, in part, their theoretical rift.) In
Jung's writings, henceforth, the unconscious would encompass
not only the biological drives that Freud had emphasized, but
also those metaphysical or spiritual aspirations that, Jung
now realized, were just as integral and innate a part of
human individuality.

 Thus, in formulating his theories on the collective
unconscious and the archetypes, he would posit an
unconscious--and hereditary--source for all of humankind's
creative endeavors and spiritual yearnings. And so his
definition of the archetype: "The primordial image, or
archetype, is a figure--be it a daemon, a human being, or a
process--that constantly recurs in the course of history and
appears wherever creative fantasy is freely expressed.
Essentially, therefore, it is a mythological figure. . . .
In each of these images there is a little piece of human
psychology and human fate, a remnant of the joys and sorrows
that have been repeated countless times in our ancestral
history. . . ." (CW 15: par. 127). It is in this light that the
information provided here [i.e., in my hypercard stack cited
above] on the archetypes of the collective unconscious, such as
the shadow, the anima and animus, and the Self, should be
viewed.

 Aside from his seminal work on the archetypes, Jung also
developed a ground-breaking personality theory that introduced
to the world the concepts of extraversion and introversion
and explained human behavior as a combination of four psychic
functions--thinking, feeling (better English translation:
valuing), intuition, and sensation. Along with the psychological
processes of repression and projection, terms which he borrowed
(and modified) from Freudian psychology, Jung also frequently
employed the word compensation in his writings, to refer to
the unconscious's continual efforts to correct the ego's one-
sided and limited view of reality. He also coined the term
"synchronicity"--or "meaningful coincidence"--as an acausal,
non-mechanistic explanation for extra-sensory events traditionally
deemed "occult." And at last, Jung proposed the concept of
individuation for his own brand of human psychological
development, a life-long dialectical process of encountering
the archetypes within [,to which this stack hopes to serve as
feeble guide].

 Jung spent his later years in Bollingen, beside Lake Zurich,
working into stone the mythological dream figures to which he had
long devoted his life. On the night of his death, thousands of his
friends and disciples throughout the world dreamed in one way or
another of his passing; and his favorite tree beside the lake, as
if to demonstrate Jung's notion of synchronicity, was split in
two by lightning. Perhaps now he was an eternal part of that
pantheistic, collective realm that he had intermittently
intuited while alive: "At times I feel as if I am spread out
over the landscape and inside things, and am myself living in
every tree, in the plashing of the waves, in the clouds and
the animals that come and go, in the procession of the
seasons" (MDR, Ch. 8).


 Good INTRODUCTORY WORKS: 
  * Man and His Symbols,  eds. Jung & Jacobi (see especially
        Jung's own chapter, "Approaching the Unconscious")
  * The Psychology of C. G. Jung,  Jacobi
  * Memories, Dreams, Reflections [MDR ],  Jung (ed. Jaffé)
        (his fascinating "spiritual" autobiography)

Almost all of Jung's other major writings can be found in his
  * Collected Works [CW ] (1953-78: 20 volumes; most seminal,
        perhaps, are
    --Vol. 5: Symbols of Transformation;
    --Vol. 7: Two Essays on Analytical Psychology;
    --Vol. 9i: The Archetypes of the Collective
            Unconscious; and
    --Vol. 9ii: Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology
            of the Self)


"Popular" editions of material now in the CW include
  *Modern Man in Search of a Soul;
  *The Undiscovered Self;
      . . . and several "anthology" collections of his essays,
      most notably--
  *The Portable Jung,  ed. Campbell


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