The Analytical Psychology of Jung

2010

The reciprocal interpretation of body and world is, for me, 'the primal psychoanalytical insight'. It is here that our elusive psyche discovers itself, seized by surprise that what is, is. But the whole point of this reciprocal interpretation is that it assumes no order of priority as between body and world. Neither comes first. The insight, the discovery, the surprise depend on this. (Holt 1992: 180) Jung's psychology is founded on the idea of the reality of the psyche. However, it is not always easy to grasp what Jung means by 'psyche'. Although Jung sometimes writes as if psyche were more or less equivalent to 'mind', generally he seems to want to convey something other than this, something deeper and broader. For example Jung writes extensively about the spiritual dimension of psyche, which he describes metaphorically as the ultraviolet end of the psychic spectrum (Jung 1947: par. 414). However, there has been less attention paid, either by Jung or his followers, to what he pictures as the infrared pole-where psyche merges with matter. Most of the work that has been done in this area has taken the form of speculation about analogies between Jung's psychology and the scientific disciplines of modern physics, ethology or, most recently, neuroscience. Interesting though such avenues of inquiry may be, they, on the whole, fail to maintain a psychological perspective on their subject matter. The task is to maintain contact with the materiality of our experience, without losing touch with what we might call its lived psychological dimension. This is not easy, because it comes up hard against the conceptual and linguistic limits of our culture. It is a task that is nonetheless urgent, given the increasing gulf between what we experience as our 'inner' lives and our outer circumstances, a gulf that has serious consequences in ecological, social and political arenas. Hitherto Jungian (or indeed wider psychoanalytic) discourse has, with a few notable exceptions, had little to offer in these areas, beyond the repetition of the mantra that we transform the world by transforming the

2019

The thesis falls into two parts. The first examines Jung’s two personalities, as described in his memoir, Memories, Dreams, Reflections. The argument is that Jung’s experience of the dynamic between the two personalities informs basic principles behind, first the development of Jung’s psychological model and second Jung’s entire mature psychology. It is suggested that what Jung took from this experience was the principle that psychological health required the avoidance of one-sidedness, achieved through the dynamic of the two personalities. This dynamic was thus central to Jung’s notion of individuation. In short, this required the individual to bring any one-sided position into tension with a conflicting ‘opposite’ position, in order that a third position could be achieved which transcended both of the earlier positions. The second part of the thesis utilises the conclusions of the first section to bring an internal critique to bear on Jung’s analytical psychology as enshrined in t...

Jung and Philosophy, Ed. Jon Mills, 2019

Theory Vexed by an Incorporeal Ontology https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9780429261763 In Chapter 5 , Robin McCoy Brooks critiques aspects of C.G. Jung’s epistemological basis for psychic reality that contributes to a view of the self that is ungrounded in biological life and the material world because of his para-psychological biases. Thus, Jung’s attempt to establish the prominence of the objective psyche as a foundation to the other sciences of his era had the unfortunate effect of disregarding the material realities inherent in self- formation. The author investigates the historical contexts to which Jung was inured as a means of determining what of his corpus regarding a disembodied self remains relevant today amidst our present scientific revolution and analytical psychology’s contemporary identity crises. The critique into Jung’s prevailing psychical biases focuses on the historical tensions that contributed to Jung’s ambiguous relationship to natural ( Naturwissenschaften ) and human ( Geisteswissenschaften ) sciences throughout his lifetime that led him to rely on new- Kantian philosophical ideas (a foundational ontology) and turn away from contemporary developments advanced by philosophical phenomenology and Freud’s biological model of personhood. Brooks contends that analytical psychology today has been dealt a fatal theoretical blow if we do not radically reconsider the indivisibility of material and more than material realities as viable influences in self- formation.

This study seeks to do a poststructural inquiry on the structure and dynamics of the “I” using the theories of Carl Jung by facilitating the process of individuation in achieving the state of wholeness of the individual. As a symbol, it traces its structure from the self and its relationship to the world. From the self, a further inquiry leads to the Jung’s structure of the psyche which generally attributes a tension between the conscious and the unconscious. The integration of the two opposites synthesizes into a new dimension until to finally arrive to the structure of wholeness called the Self. However, the Self cannot be known but its phenomenological attributes can be traced through the summation of the archetypes. Only by understanding the phenomenological attributes of the archetypes in every dimension of the self that the integration of the conscious and the unconscious as one can be made possible. In this way, it addresses the problems of the self which is attributed as the core of the problems of human civilization. The structure of the phenomenal web of problems is the problems of the self. In this case, Analytical Psychology is just one of the many possible solutions to address the problems of the self. Keywords: Structuralism, Poststructuralism, Analytical Psychology, Individuation.

Why can’t we interpret our own dreams? It’s not merely a matter of training in dreamwork, symbolism, mythology, archetypal imagery, or experience with interpreting others’ dreams, etc. There is something more at stake here. And that “something” has to do with a possible new world of appearances emerging from the unknown future…. My title suggests that this possible future has to do with Jung and with his unique living concept and experience of consciousness—yes it is a living concept, little understood and almost impossible to find one’s way to it! Jung appears to have been born with it and as such, he may be thought of as inaugurating a new world through his very embodiment of this unique style of consciousness.

Consciousness is awareness. To expand consciousness means to bring into awareness of a wider variety of stimuli, both internal and external. This includes incorporating unconscious material into personal consciousness. It also involves becoming aware of things of a higher spiritual dimension. Here one begins to sense the subtleties of the spiritual dimension, to hear the still small voice within and feel the gentle prompting of the angels. This article seeks to further illustrate this process.

Journal of Analytical Psychology, 2018

Given his lifelong battle against one-sidedness Jung's persistent prioritising of the 'inner life' over the 'outer' can seem problematic. The question is raised as to whether an approach that seems to verge uncomfortably close to solipsism can sometimes render Jung blind to the intuition that psychic life is constituted by an ongoing interplay between inner and outer, self and other (an intuition that he himself sometimes articulated so brilliantly). The 'ambiguation' of Jung's work offers an opportunity to confront this problem by utilising a critical dynamic that is consistent with Jung's psychological insights.

The two lectures were previously translated by Stanley Dell and published in The Integration of the Personality (New York, 1939; London, 1940) under the titles "Dream Symbols of the Process of Individuation" and "The Idea of Redemption in Alchemy." Professor Jung then considerably expanded them and added an introduction, in which he set out his whole position particularly in relation to religion. These three parts together with a short epilogue make up the Swiss volume. The translation now presented to the public has been awaited with impatience in many quarters, for it is one of Professor Jung's major works, to be compared in importance with Psychology of the Unconscious and Psychological Types. It may be said that round the material contained in this volume the major portion of his later work revolves. On this account Psychology and Alchemy is being published first, though it is not Volume 1 of the Collected Works. EDITORIAL NOTE TO THE SECOND EDITION For this second edition of Volume 12, technical considerations made it necessary to reset the text, and this in turn made various improvements possible. The translation has been thoroughly revised, and additions and revisions have been made in accordance with the second Swiss edition, 1952. The bibliography and the footnote references have been corrected and brought up to date, particularly in respect of the author's subsequent publications in English. The paragraph numeration has been preserved, but the pagination has unavoidably changed. An entirely new index has been prepared. The late Mr. A. S. B. Glover was responsible for numerous improvements in the translations from the Latin and in the bibliographical references. The illustrations are printed almost entirely from new photographs; consequently the sources have sometimes had to be altered. For valuable assistance in obtaining new photographs the Editors are indebted to Mrs. Aniela Jaffé, Dr. Jolande Jacobi, and Dr. Rudolf Michel; for general editorial help, to Mrs. B. L. Honum Hull. After the author's death in 1961, the unpublished draft of a "prefatory note to the English edition," written in English, was found among his papers, and this has been added to the present edition. For permission to publish it, the Editors are indebted to the late Mrs. Marianne Niehus-Jung, then acting on behalf of the heirs of C. G. Jung. A variant of the text of Part II presenting the essay in its Eranos-Jahrbuch 1935 form appeared as "Dream Symbols of the Individuation Process" in Spiritual Disciplines (Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks, 4; New York and London, 1959).