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The Jung and the Restless
Accused of lapsing into mysticism, in restrospect Jung's theories are more grounded than Freud's.
An anxious Freud pulled aside his young protégé and designated successor. "My dear Jung," he cautioned, "promise me never to abandon the sexual theory. That is the most essential thing of all."
The older man was concerned that his controversial ideas would be watered down and diluted to nothing. "You see, we must make dogma of it," he urged, "an unshakable bulwark."
But Carl Jung saw the Gospel According to Freud as narrow and limiting. The sex thing was only part of the picture, he was convinced. "A bulwark - against what?" he asked.
To which Freud replied: "Against the black tide of mud" - he hesitated a moment and then added - "of occultism."
Freud had discovered the realm of the unconscious and successfully mapped its shoreline to our conscious behaviors, but he had never ventured more than a few miles inland. In Freud's view, the unconscious was a chamber of horrors involving death, sex taboo, and traumatic childhood experiences. He based these views on his work with Vienna's anxiety-ridden upper-middle class.
Jung, on the other hand, spent his formative years amongst a far broader range of patients - inmates across all walks of life condemned to asylums. In the unconscious, Jung saw not only a cause to our madness but a means to our healing.
Nowhere was the Freud/Jung dichotomy more apparent than in their respective approaches to dreams. Where Freud viewed dreams as a difficult lock to be picked - and only leading into sex and death at that - Jung saw our dreams as speaking to us - with no limitations - but in an archaic fashion that required interpretive assistance.
Here, Jung found his analytical tools in the occult, alchemy, mythology, and eastern religion. From his research, he came across common symbols he called archetypes - hero, goddess, trickster, etc - that provided models for various types of human behavior.
At a certain point in his career Jung crossed over from being a disinterested observer of mystical lore into positing mysticism as science. The unconscious - once little more than a substrata of the mind - suddenly became the universe around us simply by adding the adjective, "collective".
The collective unconscious became the taproot of all our behaviors as well as the home of Jung's archetypes. It was almost as if all our individual minds were connected to a vast mysterious universal mind, but he didn't quite go that far.
Ultimately, healing for Jung meant reconciling all the various opposites in our natures and achieving an alchemical kind of transmuting of our base metals into gold, a process he described as "individuation".
The Chinese philosophy of Taoism with its yin-yang principle of opposites gave him a ready blueprint, and in the coming to terms of the good and evil in ourselves he turned to early Christian Gnosticism.
His idea of the animus and animi - the male and female natures we all possess - is largely derivative of Kundalini yoga and Shivaite Hinduism, and for the completion of the journey he borrowed heavily from Tibetan Buddhism.
By now, Jung was convinced the working of the universe was not entirely random, and he coined a term for it - synchronicity.
The black mud of occultism had descended in full, and the split with Freud was inevitable. It was a painful experience for Jung, especially when his former mentor publicly denounced him and the whole psychoanalytic community turned against him. In 1913, Jung suffered a possible extended mental breakdown but which he preferred to call, "a confrontation with the unconscious." On the lake shore in Zurich he collected stones and built a miniature village, including a castle, cottages, and a church.
Trying to understand the rift in psychological terms, he came up with "introvert" and "extrovert" (identifying himself as the former and Freud as the later) as well as four different functioning types: thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition - all of which would form the basis of one of the most widely applied personality tests, the Myers-Briggs.
In due course, a new generation of followers would seek him out at his retreat at Lake Maggiore in Switzerland. He died in 1961, much admired but still in Freud's shadow. Accused of mystical excesses in his day, in retrospect Jung's recourses to alchemy and the vast arcana of the occult are far more grounded in reality than Freud's often naive and silly ideas about sex.
And of the two, there is certainly no doubt in this writer's mind who would make the best dinner table companion. Freud may have planted the flag on the shore of the unconscious, but it is Jung who came away with the true wealth, a treasure trove that still continues to dazzle.
Jung on Depression
In a 1959 letter to a friend who was depressed, Jung dipped into his overflowing mystical reservoir, advising, in a clear reference to the Biblical Jacob's famous encounter: "I would wrestle with the dark angel until he dislocated my hip. For he is also the light and the blue sky which he withholds from me."
The letter also offered practical advice such as seeking out friends and engaging in activities such as gardening, but Jung was soon back to his warlock self in the passage leading up to the dark angel:
"When the darkness grows denser, I would penetrate to its very core and ground, and would not rest until amid the pain a light appeared to me, for in excessu affectus [in an excess of affect or passion] Nature reverses herself. I would turn in rage against myself and with the heat of my rage I would melt my lead. I would renounce everything and engage in the lowest activities should my depression drive me to violence."
Updated Dec 9, 2003, reviewed Feb 12, 2008
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