You make me feel so Jung

When I was at University I had a lot of time to read and I was studying History and Politics, which gave me a chance to read both Freud and Marx. Those beardy exiles were still the big boys back then. I read a lot of Freud because he is so readable and I liked Totem and Taboo (which is about the fact that incest is generally taboo in all cultures) and I liked Moses and Monotheism. However, I thought his clinical diagnoses were far-fetched. Generally, if someone says their father has molested them, it is because he has done so, not because he or she has an Electra complex and unconsciously desires this to happen. I think penis envy is plain funny. I also think that everyday repression does not lead to neurosis. Everyday repression is called civilisation.

(Probably I am not sure what repression is: I see that there is also something called suppression.) Freud's models of the mind were based on pure fancy, and there was no reason at all for anyone to believe in any of it - and yet people did! they totally bought it and I think it was because he was telling Americans what they wanted to hear - sex is good for you! Bin your inner puritan! Without a lot of sex you will be neurotic! and you can blame your parents for everything you don't like about yourself. Well, conveying that message certainly made a lot of psychiatrists wealthy.

But when we were in Vienna last summer I so wanted to see Freud's apartment and it was an absolute joy to be there, like a dream come true. I even used his toilet, though I am not sure it was his personal toilet. Maybe it was the maid's toilet.

That is my picture of Dr Freud's waiting room. 

Anyway, at one time he was venerated and now he has been knocked off his pedestal. 

I knew nothing about Carl Jung except that they were contemporaries and they were close at one time, and then fell out. Trendy people seemed to think well of Jung and that made me suspicious of him, as though he were a hippy guru, a bit alternative. But Anthony Storr has published several essays concerning Jung in his book Churchill's Black Dog and Other Phenomena of the Human Mind, all very readable and Jung's contribution so clearly relevant to our understanding of adults today. I have quoted from this book extensively below. In 1931 Jung wrote: 

the clinical material at my disposal is of a peculiar composition: new cases are decidedly in the minority. Most of them already have some form of psycho-therapeutic treatment behind them, with partial or negative results. About a third of my cases are not suffering from any clinically definable neurosis, but from the senselessness and aimlessness of their lives. I should not object if this were called the general neurosis of our age. Fully two thirds of my patients are in the second half of life.

Jung did not share Freud's assumption that the events of early childhood were the prime cause of neurosis, and did not therefore believe that getting the patient to recall his first years was essential. This is significant because by the middle years of one's life all that early years stuff seems very distant and irrelevant.

Jung was interested in adult development. At that time people thought you did not change much as an adult, you entered a trade or a profession, you married and raised a family and you became set in your ways. But Jung had his own mid-life crisis after he broke with Freud, and found that many other people did too.

The nearer we approach to the middle of life, and the better we have succeeded in entrenching ourselves in our personal attitudes and social positions, the more it appears as if we had discovered the right course and the right ideals and principles of behaviour. For this reason we suppose them to be eternally valid, and make a virtue of unchangeably clinging to them. We overlook the essential fact that the social goal is attained only at the cost of a diminution of personality. Many - far too many - aspects of life which should have been experienced lie in the lumber-room among dusty memories; but sometimes, too, they are glowing coals under grey ashes.

Jung comments upon statistics which show an increased incidence of depression around the age of forty in men, rather earlier in women. He believed these changes indicate an important change taking place in the psyche. Jung considered that the first half of life was primarily concerned with the young person establishing himself or herself as a separate entity, with breaking the emotional ties with parents and home, with achieving a position in the world, and with beginning a new family.

Jung wrote, "the years when I was pursuing my inner images were the most important in my life - in them everything essential was decided." ... "His self-analysis convinced him that the most important thing in life was to discern and make manifest one's own, individual point of view."... "By listening to the inner voice, which manifested itself in dreams, fantasies, and other spontaneous derivatives of the unconscious, the lost soul could discover its true path."

Jung felt that personality could be distorted by one-sided development. Too extroverted, you lose sight of your inner world. Too introverted, you fail to cope with reality.

Jung defined personality as an achievement rather than as a datum of genetics. He called it "the supreme realisation of the innate idiosyncrasy of a living being".

"The optimum development tends toward a goal called "wholeness" or "integration"; a condition in which the differentiation elements of the psyche, both conscious and unconscious, are welded together indissolubly; a condition which might be described as the opposite of the fragmentation and splitting found in schizophrenia. The person who approaches this goal, which can never be entirely or once and for all achieved, possesses what Jung called "an attitude that is beyond the reach of emotional entanglements and violent shocks - a consciousness detached from the world."

This search for wholeness is essentially a religious quest, though not one that is concerned with any recognised creed. Jung:

If you sum up what people tell you about their experiences, you can formulate it this way: they came to themselves, they could accept themselves, they were able to be reconciled to themselves and thus were reconciled to adverse circumstances and events. this is almost like what used to be expressed by saying: he has made his peace with God, he has sacrificed his own will, he has submitted himself to the will of God.

 "A critic might allege that the whole of Jung's later work represents his attempt to find a substitute for the faith which he lost when he was a child. He might go on to say that Jung substituted the analysis of dreams and fantasies for prayer..."Jung encouraged his patients to deliberately set aside part of the day for reverie; for what, in Jungian technique, became known as "active imagination." -" a state in which judgment is suspended but consciousness is preserved....In this way, the patient might be able to rediscover hidden parts of himself as well as portray the psychological journey upon which he was embarking."

"Jung's concentration upon changing dynamics within the individual psyche is interesting partly because it is so unfashionable" - Storr wrote in 1989. At that time the psychoanalytical big names were interested in interpersonal relationships ("object-relations").

Later Jung went transcendental - "Jung claimed that there were "sufficient reasons" for believing that that "the psychic lies embedded in something that appears to be of a non-psychic nature." Pauli postulated "a cosmic order independent of our choice and distinct from the world of phenomena." Jung wrote: "the background of microphysics and depth-psychology is as much physical as psychic and therefore neither, but rather a third thing, a neutral nature which at most can be grasped in hints since in essence it is transcendental."

I must say this last sentence makes me think of the mystery of quantum physics.

In summary, Jung looked at things generally as they were (rather than superimposing a fantasy map of the mind), and he looked at how people changed and adapted their lives to keep themselves sane, and because they needed challenge but could only cope with so much, how the unconscious told them when they were disengaged or frustrated and stultified and also sent them messages about the right way to proceed. I believe that there is a good deal of sense in all this and I feel that a lot of what he wrote about adult development is current in everyone's ideas, and in plenty of self-help books. We adapt all our lives and there is no easy time when something isn't happening that needs adapting to. As Anne Tyler once wrote, "we're travelling all our lives; we couldn't stop if we wanted to." Maybe we're all hippies now, looking for self-fulfillment. Hoorah for Jung.
Can't resist it - here's Frank at his peak, with Count Basie's band telling it like it is:
You make me feel so young