C.G. JUNG: A brief BIOGRAPHY & BIBLIOGRAPHY ========= ========================= [based on "bio" field in my Hypercard stack, _TheJourneyWithin_] ---------------- **** 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 young man in Zurich, Jung developed the concept of the autonomous (and unconscious) COMPLEX and the technique 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 on the archetypes of the collective unconscious, such as the SHADOW, the ANIMA and ANIMUS, and the SELF, should be viewed [reference to _TheJourneyWithin_]. 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 & 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. Jaffe') (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 ======== | --:--tcg )