A Layman's Introduction to the

Psychology of CG Jung

 (This is Volume 1 of the Jungian Psychology series)

Chapter One

Why Jung?

 Why is the work of the Swiss psychiatrist, Carl Gustav Jung, generally ignored by the mainstream of modern psychology today, especially at the university level?

A legitimate question, but unfortunately one that is usually answered erroneously, either by those who hail Jung as a westernized version of an eastern guru, or others who dismiss him and his work as the ramblings of a mystic on the very same grounds.

It is unfortunate because it is also inaccurate.

If Jung was nothing else, he was a hardheaded, tough-minded, empirical scientist … interested primarily in what worked.  As you will soon see, he was an exhaustive and painstakingly thorough researcher.  Because he insisted that whenever possible, one should go to the original source in the pursuit of facts and proof, he became a remarkable scholar.  It is not an exaggeration to say that his erudition has rarely been surpassed.

In this series of books I hope to be able to present in simplified form the basic tenets of Jung's unusual model of the psyche, so that Jung's model may be judged on its merits.

I will also try to answer the question concerning whether or not Jung's model has any value to today's professional researcher and therapist, or is Jung's merely a quaint view of the psyche that serves as a pseudo-religious palliative for the frustrated affluent middle class?

An Isolated Esoteric?

In my own case, I grew up regarding psychology in general as a largely non-verifiable science, completely dependent on the subjective interpretation -- i.e., opinion -- of the psychiatrist doing the diagnosing and prescribing.  For me, Jung's psychological theories were even more esoteric than most.  I viewed Jung as a cross between a psychologist and a Ouija board, and it was many years after I became involved in psychology that I could in any way become interested in the theories of C.G. Jung.

Among the things that had turned me off of Jung was that I had heard of his interest in such bizarre subjects as alchemy and astrology, not to mention that he wrote an introduction to Richard Wilhelm's translation of the I Ching.  I became convinced that Jung was a man who was not always dealing from a full deck.

In addition, I had a very strong bias against Jung because I had read several slightly hysterical, but convincing, attacks by Freudians who said that Jung was anti-Semitic and a Nazi sympathizer.  Others, including some of the "new breed" of Jungians, talked about his so-called exploitation of a young female patient.  Why should anyone bother with such a man, let alone want to learn about what such a man has to say about the way to heal psychological suffering?

Then, quite by accident, I had occasion to gain an insight into Jung's research method … and that was the beginning of my changing my opinion about him.

Surprised by the vertical and horizontal depth of his research, I decided to check further into what Jung's psychology was all about.  If he researched all his subjects as thoroughly as the book I had just stumbled across, maybe he was something more than an isolated esoteric working out on the fringe of psychology.

It happened one day when I was still in my Freudian stage.  While searching for a reference to Freud, I happened to pick up one of Jung's books in the store to glance at the bibliography.  I was impressed by both the quality and quantity of the works listed.  In Jung's Collected Works, I discovered it was the norm for Jung to refer to and quote extensively from anywhere from 300 to 700 different sources … in each book. 

Had he really read all the works cited?  I mean the universality of the sources contained in the bibliography was quite unlike any scholar I had read.  Was he really familiar with them, or did he merely quote from sources his research assistant supplied him in order to give a scholarly impression?  Many a college professor caught up on the "publish or perish" treadmill knows that trick. 

I turned to a subject I was somewhat expert in, and was quite surprised to see that Jung's knowledge of my specialty exceeded my own.  In addition, some of the sources he quoted were unknown to me -- though his quotes and references were extremely accurate when I later looked them up.  Curiosity demanded I give such a thorough scholar a hearing, and see for myself the extent of his erudition.

I purchased the book.

Jung, the Scholar

If one looks only at Jung's earlier works, the sources the 30-odd-years-old Jung is already familiar with and quotes from extensively are most impressive.  Look at the range of sources listed in just two of his earlier books written by 1920.  (Jung died in 1961.)

A partial sample of the ancient classical writers that Jung was thoroughly familiar with include:

Sophocles, Hippocrates, Hippolytus, Aeschylus, Suetonius, Tacitus, Seneca, Plotinus, Plutarch, Lucretius, Flavius Josephus, Homer, Cicero, Apuleius, Aristotle, Aesculapius, Julius Casear, Ovid, Pliny, The Iliad, The Odyssey, Horace, Virgil, Plato, and Herodotus.

In addition to these classical writers, Jung quoted extensively from leading artists, writers, poets, soldiers, scientists, linguists, physicists, historians, ethnologists, archaeologists, anthropologists, and, of course, analysts, psychologists, and philosophers.

A sample list would include:

Shopenhauer, Shakespeare, Riflin, Rank, Edgar Allen Poe, Maeterlinck, Longfellow, Kerenyi, Holderlin, von Hartman, Frobenius, the Brothers Grimm, Freud, Frazier, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ferenczi, Thomas Carlyle, Lord Byron, Martin Buber, William Blake, Bachofen, Eugene Bleuler, Nakai Toju, da Vinci, Galieleo, Haggard, Thomas Harding, Rabelais, Rubens, Kepler, Liebniz, Yeats, Zoroaster, and St. Exupery.

His knowledge of religious books and authors ranged through thousands of years and spanned the globe.  A sample list includes:

The Vendidad, the Sutta-Nipata, the Ta'Rikh al-Hind al-Gharbi, the Hymns of St. Jerome, the Koran, the Song of Songs, the Book of Manu, St. Epiphanius, the Shepherds of Hermas, Clement of Alexandria, Sir Budge's Coptic Apocrypha in the Dialect of Upper Egypt, the Bundahish, the Pahlavi Texts, the Bhagavad Gita, the Wachandi of Australia, St. Francis of Assisi, the Cross of Palenque, Hymns of the Rig Veda, Ignatius of Loyola, the Incas, Irenaeus, the Hawaiian Goddess Kihe Wahine, the Maori, the Sufi, the Cherokee Indians, Zend-Avesta, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Kakairi Indians of Brazil, the Mahabharata and its Upanishads.

And this is only a partial list.  Other great thinkers thoroughly read and knowledgeably discussed in these two books were:

The Gnostics, Tertullian, Origen, St. Augustine, Pelagius, Anatol France, Scotus Erigena, Raedbertus, Luther, Zwingli, Spitteler, Goethe, Schiller, Parker, William James, the James-Lange theories, Levy-Bruhl, Abelard, Jordan, Meyrink, Meister Eckehart, Robert Mayer, Napoleon, Dante, Rousseau, Schiller, Socrates, Wagner, Saul of Tarsus, Thomas Aquinas, Wundt … [1]

… and many more too numerous to mention!

In just TWO books!

The real question was, how knowledgeable was he with all of this diverse quantity and quality of material?

I suggest the reader flip open the pages of one of his books and find out.  Another suggestion would be to turn to an author or subject one is familiar with, as I did, and see how accurately and thoroughly Jung discusses that author's work or subject matter.

The more I read of Jung, the more I became convinced of his qualifications as a realistic therapist, and as an objective scientist.  For me, it became intellectually irresponsible to simply dismiss him without a more thorough examination.

So, I decided to give Jung a serious hearing.  I was now curious to see if a man of this vast erudition had discovered anything about the psyche that could be of practical use in my daily life, or was it only a ten-finger exercise of the intellect for academic journals instead of verifiable research that could be replicated universally?

Jung's Thoroughness as a Researcher

One of the first things one discovers as one reads Jung's work thoroughly is that Jung was an embodiment of those traits which are the earmark of a reliable researcher.  Henri Ellenberger, in his excellent book, The Discovery of the Unconscious, delineated the criteria of a thorough investigator beautifully:

1)      take nothing for granted, not even your own theories;

2)      check everything at the source, if possible.  (Jung once learned to speak Swahili in order to be able to talk without an interpreter to the elders on a trip to Africa;)[2]

3)      consider everything in light of the circumstances of the time and place in which it happened;

4)      facts are automatically colored by the bias of the subject receiving and investigating them.  Do not confuse facts with your interpretation of those facts.  (An almost impossible task in psychiatry.)[3]

Jung fit these criteria exactly.

Jung's scholarship and capacity for work gave him a view of the psyche that was extremely vast -- and that includes both our cultural psyche, as well as the natural psyche which Jung believed was the actual creator of our cultural psyche. 

He was able to read and write fluently in seven languages, reading Greek and Latin almost as fast and as fluently as he read German.  As for learning the seemingly irrational language of dreams, it is estimated that Jung analyzed over 80,000 dreams in his lifetime.[4]

He had the courage to explore any field, however unpopular or esoteric, looking anywhere for a clue as to how the human mind developed or worked.  Once, after carefully translating a two-thousand page treatise on alchemy in Medieval Latin, he immediately went back to page 1 and started to read it again to make sure he had translated it correctly.

Unfortunately, Jung's skills as a writer left something to be desired.  He by no means is easy to read.

Unless by accident one stumbles across Jung -- for he is not only unknown, but virtually ridiculed in most university psychology courses today -- a student would not be motivated to devote so much time and effort to a man generally dismissed as an occult philosopher by teachers and psychologists who, unfortunately, are not fully aware of Jung's model of the psyche.

Nor are they aware of the application of Jung's model to the current work in operant conditioning, behavioristic psychology, the biochemical approach, or the minute problems that plague our daily lives.

Jung's Discovery of the Self

Fortunately, the geneticist's discovery of the DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) opens the door to a change in that attitude as scientists begin to realize that it was Jung who posited the paradigm of the DNA over a quarter of a century before its actual discovery.

Jung's fundamental breakthrough and most important discovery was that in the process of human growth the unconscious part of the human psyche was neither a tabula rasa, nor was it fixed and limitable.  It was neither malicious and threatening, or essentially dangerous as in the Freudian and neo-Freudian schools occupied with the foreboding and forbidding das Id. 

Far from it.

For Jung, the unconscious was anything but dangerous and forbidding.  There had to exist some unknown thing in the unconscious that originates all that we call psychological growth and healing, in the same way that some unknown thing in the DNA originates all biological growth and healing.

"All that is outside, also is inside," we could say with Goethe.  But this "inside," which modern rationalism is so eager to derive from "outside" has an a priori structure of its own that antedates all conscious experience.

-- CG Jung, Collected Works, Vol. 9I, para 187

Jung discovered that just like the DNA contained in the genes, there existed in the unconscious psyche of the human being an unknown intelligence that from the moment of conception carries within itself an "imprint" or "image" of what the organism that has just been created will be and look like when completed, as well as the blueprint of how that organism should function in order to continue to grow and develop each day of its existence.

This instinctual intelligence in the unconscious, instead of being negative or destructive, has the indispensable function of creating and developing each person into a full, healthy and complete organism.  This entity, which the biogeneticists have labeled the DNA of the biological organism, Jung called the Self. 

The impact of Jung's concept of seeing in the unconscious a DNA-like entity for the development of the psyche has implications that have not begun to be realized in psychology, psychiatry, or even genetics today.  As we increase our knowledge of the DNA and how its blueprint for human growth operates in creating the human body and personality, Jung will emerge as anything but a flaky mystic.

Astrology and Alchemy as Rorschach Tests

It has never failed to come as a surprise at any seminar I have given at any university, that Jung's interest in such esoteric fields as astrology and alchemy was the same as any researcher might have in using the Rorschach test, where the key is not what the inkblot actually is, but what the patient thinks it is.