Friday essay: long in the shadow of Freud, Carl Jung’s ideas are finding fresh relevance today
- Written by: Nick Haslam, Professor of Psychology, The University of Melbourne
Once upon a time, great psychological thinkers bestrode the earth. William James, Sigmund Freud, Jean Piaget, Fred Skinner, Carl Jung and a few other heavyweights left deep footprints in the cultural landscape. The ground trembled when they fought.
Just as dinosaurs evolved into birds, grand theorists have been replaced by flocks of empiricists. As the science of the mind splinters into a hundred specialist fields, academic psychology no longer pays much heed to old theoretical systems. But the ideas of these early 20th century theorists continue to reverberate. Among the most interesting are Jung’s.
Jung’s thought has been doubly overlooked, obscured by the general eclipse of grand theories and the shadow of Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis.
As an early figure in the psychoanalytic movement who left it on bad terms, Jung tends to be written out and written off. His ideas of the collective unconscious and his emphasis on archetype and myth are often treated as obscure and mystical today, but they are worth a closer look.
Other ideas, such as his concept of individuation, challenged the dominant psychoanalytic view that our personalities are forged and fixed in our early years, anticipating the large body of recent research establishing that personality change continues throughout adulthood. And his discovery of introversion and extraversion deserves recognition.
Jung made several claims that ran against the theoretical tide of his time but chime with recent trends in psychology. His keen interest in non-Western cultures and traditions aligns with our modern desire to make psychology more global.
Why then does he not receive the level of acknowledgement a pioneer might expect?
Jung’s early life
Carl Gustav Jung was born in Switzerland in 1875, the son of a Protestant pastor and his wife. A shy, anxious youth with an interest in philosophy, he trained as a doctor in Basel, wrote a thesis on the psychology of occult phenomena and moved to Zurich in 1900 to work in the famous Burghölzli psychiatric hospital.
There he took a special interest in schizophrenia (then called dementia praecox) and carried out experiments on word associations.
Around this time, Jung was introduced to psychoanalytic ideas about the unconscious determinants of behaviour, the everlasting conflict between instinct and civilisation and the “talking cure”.
He began to apply them in his clinical work – including the fateful treatment of a young woman, Sabina Spielrein, portrayed in the 2011 film A Dangerous Method, which led to an intense romantic relationship.
He also began a lively correspondence with Freud. By 1910, Freud had anointed Jung as his successor and installed him as president of the International Psychoanalytic Association. This move was driven partly by fatherly enthusiasm and partly, perhaps, to combat the perception that psychoanalysis was a Jewish enterprise.
The intense bond between Jung and Freud was short-lived. Differences in their views of human motivation and the unconscious led to a bitter break in 1913.
Goodreads
Jung referred to these basic elements of the unconscious as archetypes, meaning primordial forms or patterns. These forms shape how individuals experience the world, in ways that also depend on the particularities of their cultural setting and life circumstances.
Analytical psychology has no agreed list of archetypes, but they can include character types, such as the hero, sage or mother, aspects of the person, such as their female and male elements (anima and animus), or events, such as pivotal life changes.
Individuation
Jung’s account of personal development is also distinctive and centred on the idea of individuation. For Jung, this is the process of growing into one’s authentic self and a sense of wholeness. This process of self-realisation integrates aspects of our personality and frees us from false ways of being.
For Jung, the self is the centre of the person, which can be distinguished from the ego, the person’s distorted and incomplete conscious self-image.
Goodreads
To individuate, people must differentiate themselves from the collective, incorporate the disowned elements of the personality that endure in the personal unconscious (the shadow) and set aside the social masks through which we perform a socially acceptable self (the persona).
Jung argues that individuation occurs throughout our lives, perhaps especially in and after midlife. This contrasts with the emphasis in classical psychoanalysis on development during childhood.
Personality
Jung also carried out theoretical work on the nature and underpinnings of differences between people. These studies in personality were informed by his early studies on word associations and culminated in his 1921 book Psychological Types.
Here Jung introduced the ideas of introversion and extraversion (from the Latin for turning inward or outward), which he characterised as psychological attitudes. In essence, extraverts orient their consciousness toward the objective, external world, whereas introverts orient it toward the inner world of subjective experience.
In addition to his two attitude types, Jung identified four psychological functions: thinking, feeling, sensing and intuition. The first two he described as rational. The last two as irrational.
By Jung’s account, each person has a dominant psychological function, and crossing these with the introvert/extravert distinction yields eight personality types. These he describes in rich detail. To complicate the picture, our dominant conscious function is mirrored by a complementary unconscious tendency.
Criticisms
A short essay such as this cannot do justice to the complexity of Jung’s theoretical system, which spans over half a century of prolific writing. However, it should give enough of a flavour of his ideas to appreciate some of the criticisms of them and consider their lasting value.
Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious was controversial from the outset. Indeed it was one of the triggers of the break with Freud. Critics have argued it is unfalsifiable, vague and implausible from an evolutionary standpoint.
The Freudian unconscious is notoriously elusive: not merely unobservable but (in theory at least) actively hidden and disguised. How much more difficult must it be to determine what is in humankind’s shared unconscious?
Is the collective unconscious represented in each individual mind, or does it exist, as some writers suggest, in some kind of spiritual realm, like a group soul? Needless to say, such a claim would be hard for most psychologists to stomach.
And are the contents of the collective unconscious specific images and symbols or abstract, psychologically meaningful themes, like wisdom or darkness? If themes such as these recur across cultures, should we infer an innate collective mind or simply assume they reflect consistent existential predicaments humans face regardless of where they live?
Rather than revealing inborn ideas, cross-cultural consistencies might emerge from predictable interactions between human nature and the world we inhabit.
How the universal content of the collective unconscious could become part of the innate inheritance of our species is also up for debate. It implies a process of Lamarckian evolution in which the experiences of one generation are inherited by the next, a mechanism dismissed by geneticists, with minor caveats.
Jung looked favourably on the evolutionary ideas of Jean Baptiste Lamarck, a 19th century French naturalist, and their implausibility casts some doubt on his account of the collective unconscious.
Even so, the idea that humans come into the world with some sort of innate knowledge is now uncontroversial. The only question is how best to characterise it. Developmental research shows infants encounter the world with expectations about its physical and even social structures.
For example, recent work shows babies understand social hierarchy and can infer the closeness of relationships. It is doubtful archetypes capture the nature of this innate or at least early emerging “core knowledge”, but Jung was prescient in recognising it at a time when most psychologists believed newborns came into the world as blank slates.
A hero’s journey and individuation
Jung’s emphasis on archetype and myth can seem old-fashioned and irrelevant to modern lives but here too his ideas can still speak to us.
Writers in the narrative psychology tradition explore how the stories we tell about our lives can have predictable structures and may have implications for our wellbeing.
One recent study found people whose life narratives fit the mythic template of the “hero’s journey” experienced greater meaning in life than others. Helping people to re-shape their life story so that it aligned more closely with this template enhanced their sense of personal meaning and resilience.
Equally, many scholars have identified age-old narrative structures and archetypal characters in contemporary culture. A recent book, S.G. Ellerhoff’s Jung and Star Wars, explores mythic elements in the Star Wars movies, whose hero’s journey elements are obvious, making a case for their deep resonance with secular, 21st century audiences.
Goodreads
This work recalls Jung’s 1958 book on flying saucers, in which he analysed them as a “modern myth” projecting our own deep-seated terrestrial fears onto imagined interstellar visitors. Jung’s ideas remind us that “myth” does not mean ancient and false.
Jung’s account of individuation is rarely discussed outside Jungian circles. However, it foreshadowed later explorations of life-span development, which extended developmental psychology beyond its initial focus on childhood. Jung’s idea anticipated recent research establishing personality change continues throughout adulthood, in contrast to the popular belief that, as William James wrote, our characters are “set like plaster” after the age of 30.
Jung’s view of personal development as a form of self-realisation and integration also anticipates the better-known work of humanistic psychologists such as Abraham Maslow, dissident psychoanalysts such as Erik Erikson and the positive psychologists who followed them.
The Jungian theory of personality types remains influential to this day via the Myers-Briggs Type Inventory, which sorts people into 16 groups based on attitude and function types.
The Myers-Briggs remains enormously popular with laypeople and management consultants alike, many of whom find it an insightful shorthand for describing human individuality. Academic psychologists are less enamoured, faulting it for being incomplete and for misrepresenting personality as static categories.
Jung’s psychology of personality is more subtle than the Myers-Briggs and it goes beyond merely classifying types to speculate on the mental processes that underpin them. The distinction between introversion and extraversion is still acknowledged as a primary dimension of personality, although his claim that it pivots on the person’s primary direction of consciousness – inward to subjective experience or outward to the objective world – is no longer accepted.
Jung’s conviction that personality is made up of distinct psychological types has been comprehensively falsified. Introversion and extraversion pick out the ends of a continuum, not distinct kinds of person.
Jung today
One reason why Jung is often neglected today may simply be the passage of time. Like all of his contemporaries, Jung wrote during a period when scientific psychology was in its infancy. The concepts available then to describe and explain brain and mind now sound archaic. Absent a time machine, Jung could not have presented his ideas in a way that would translate smoothly into today’s psychology.
Another factor in Jung’s neglect is more unique. His interest in myths and archetypes and ideas such as the existence of eternal masculine and feminine principles can come across as antiquated in a technological age.
For many readers his mystical tendencies and religiosity cast a scrim of doubt over his entire body of work, although for others it aligns with the resurgent interest in psychedelic experience. In a secular age, theorists who reckon with spirituality are perhaps destined to wear an invisibility cloak.
Still, Jungian thinking is alive and well among devoted communities of followers. Aspiring Jungian analysts can train at institutes in many countries or dream of travelling to the source, the C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich. Active Jung societies cater to professionals and interested members of the public.
Increasingly, Jungians join forces with other psychoanalysts in an ecumenical commitment to depth psychology rather than keeping to themselves.
Jungian ideas reach beyond mainstream psychology.
Alyani F/unsplash
One of the more appealing aspects of Jungian ideas is how far they reach beyond mainstream psychology and psychiatry. Flick through recent issues of the Jung Journal or the Journal of Analytical Psychology and you will find pieces on visionary art, Chinese legend, Moorish design, dreams and the roots of war, in addition to papers on clinical topics. Scholarly essays sit alongside poetry and reviews of films and books.
For those of us who went into psychology hoping for some kind of humanistic wisdom, not just scientific truth or clinical vocation, this kind of breadth is appealing. Its absence from contemporary approaches to psychology education is regrettable. Exposing students to big ideas about the nature of human nature should be possible without sacrificing a thorough scientific education.
Academics wax lyrical on the value of different ways of knowing, but our curricula often reveal a singular confidence that psychology can be built up by accumulating scientific findings piece by piece, like tiny tiles in an immense, spreading mosaic. More than 70,000 articles were published in psychology journals last year. Will their findings self-assemble into a deep and textured understanding of how and why humans think, feel and act as we do?
Analytical psychology will never be a major force in the study of mind and behaviour, but it has a place. Just as an ecosystem dominated by a single species is drab and vulnerable to disease, an intellectual mono-culture is unhealthy.
Psychology is healthier when it is pluralistic, with an assortment of lively alternatives to its mainstream. Jung can be obscure and challenging, but it is worthwhile spending some time in the company of his ideas.
Authors: Nick Haslam, Professor of Psychology, The University of Melbourne
Daily Bulletin
