Introduction to Carl Jung

I was going to wait until I had fixed my issues with video technology and then talk about Carl Jung, but due to demand via friends and subscribers I have decided to just start my discussion of Jung on this blog. To begin with I will discuss a biography on Jung that I read several months back and some of the things about him I did not previously know until reading this book. For those of you reading this who do not know anything about Jung or even a small amount I would advise you to read this article on him provided by Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Jung

Those who have read read my blog long enough or/and have watched my videos on Youtube know my feelings about Wikipedia(it can only be trusted if there are proper citations and references) so I use it purely as a link of general introduction. I will also list the following biographies which I own, and sadly have not had the time to read in full:

"A life of Jung"-Ronald Hayman
"Jung the Mystic"-Gary Lachman
"C.G.Jung His myth in our time"-Marie-Louise von Franz
"Jung A Biography"-Gerhard Wehr

"Jung A biography"-Deirdre Bair is the biography that I read in full and will be making my brief observations on. In the future when I read the other biographies I will make subsequent articles discussing any sort of bias or new information gathered from these books as well. I have to say that I agree with Peter Gay's assessment that this biography done by Bair is probably one of the most well researched biographies I have ever read. However it is this well researched biography that I feel is also the flaw with it. I felt at times that Bair went into too much detail about small players in the drama that was Jung's life, giving them at times whole pages about their background and major points. This gave her bio a tedious feeling at times which I think she could have done away with with s serious editing process. However when it came to covering and discussing the major aspects of Jung's life I felt she was spot on with her information and research.
The topics I learned about Jung that was totally new to me was the topic of Jung having a mistress(Toni Wolff) whom Emma Jung(Carl Jung's wife) was fully aware of and ultimatly grew to respect and live with. This polygamus relationship was not openly discussed with strangers but was from all counts a healthy one.
The other major topic that I was not aware of prior to reading this bio was the charge that Jung was anti-semitic. From what I can tell and this is the conclusion drawn by Bair, is that he was not and there is no evidence to prove that he was. He just happened to be a member of one of the psychological association based in Berlin during the rise of the Nazis but only kept his role in this group so that he could actually help Jewish psychologists maintain their jobs. Also many of his interviews and works were taken out of context to attempt to prove that he was hateful of Jews. One example is that when talking about cultural psychology he spoke of a Jewish and German psyche, which many ignorant people interpreted as meaning that Jews were unlike Germans and that they had totally different psyches. However anyone who has read the works of Freud(a Jew) knows that Freud spoke of different psyches from a cultural context. Are we to say that Freud was a hater of Jews? I think not. It is also clear that Jung until the day he died denied being a Nazi and continued to be close friends with his Jewish friends, colleges and students.

I would recommend this biography to anyone who wants a extremly indepth look at Jung's life, however if one wants one that is shorter and not so tedious at times, one of the above bios would do the trick.

I would like to now summarize and discuss the first four volumes of Jung's collected works which I have read and finished over the course of the past three months. I will not go into full details about every aspect of these volumes just the parts that I feel stand out and should be noted. I have been told by a number of people(including a Jungian analyst) that the early volumes of the collected works are more of historical importance and not one of current Jungian thought. This makes sense to me given the content of these early works contain information that would not be totally relevant to practicing and understanding Jung's original theory. However my personal view on this matter is to understand Jung and to that extent any psychologists views, one should read all of their work or at least as much of their work possible to get a full picture of where they were coming from. This is why I personally have been reading Jung and Freud's work in the order in which they were written, not an easy task, but one that has been utterly amazing and enlightening. I would further say that for one to have a total grasp of Jungian psychology one must also have a full understanding of Freud's theories since Jung himself was fully read in his works. That is why I have been reading Freud's works and will be posting more articles on what I have found therein.

In this article I discuss in brief the first three volumes of Jung's collected works, leaving the fourth volume for another post since it has gained more details worth discussing.

Collected Works Volume One: "Psychiatric Studies"- This volume begins with Jung's paper entitled "On the Psychology of the so-called Occult Phenomena" which turned out to be his Phd dissertation. In this case of a young woman who claimed to be a medium and who conducted seances that groups believed proved that she has the mystical ability to summon and communicate with the dead. Before observing this seance in particular Jung had witnessed and recorded his reactions to many. It was however this case that he picked to write on and has thus immortalized. Through his observations and interviews with the patient(medium) he concluded that the apparent phenomena was explained by phyiscal and mental disorders(somatic and psychological). The details of this case are tedious at times and thus I will only mention here the brief summary if anyone wants to know the details one would have to read the case for oneself.

Another concept that Jung coined in this volume is that of Cryptomnesia. This concept denotes the mental phenemona when one feels like he has read or heard something but is not sure how he knows such information. It is then recalled that he must have heard or read this information in the past, but said information was lost to the unconscious and through consciously seeing the same or similar information, the sensation of knowing is recalled to mind. The Wikipedia article below will give a better introduction then myself:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptomnesia

The following are the other titles that Jung wrote that is contained in this volume:
"On Manic Mood Disorder"
"A case of hysterical stupor in a prisoner in dentention"
"On simulated insanity"
"Medical opinion on a case of simulated insanity"
"A third and final opinion on two contradictory psychiatric diagnoses"
"A medical opinion on a case of simulated insanity"
"On the psychological diagnosis of facts"

What these papers and indeed the volume have in common is that they are purely psychiatric in nature, proceeding Jung's total investigation into psychoanalysis. He does indeed mention Freud and some of his theories in brief, but he was still far from applying psychoanalysis and Freudian at that to his own case studies and theories.

Collected Works Two: "Experimental Researches"- This entire volume deals with the Word-Association Test that was invented by Jung and some of his colleges at the Asylum he worked at. The tests were given to not only insane patience but normal neurotic persons as well. The goal of these tests was to record the response time and the words that a person thought of and wrote down next to individual words that were given by the therapist. The outcome would show if the patient was suffering from a particular problem that might even be unconscious to the person and only revealed by the word associated during the taking of the test. Thus this volume shows the extensive research done by Jung on the many persons he adminstrated the test too all suffering from a variety of complexs. It should be noted that these tests gave birth to the polygraph(lie dedector test) used by police officers and federal agents. The below link to Wikipedia will provide more introductory information:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_Association

Collected Works Volume 3: "The Psychogenesis of Mental Disease"- Jung did extensive research and work on Dementia Praecox or as it would be later renamed Schizophrenia. For the basic information on this mental disease and the general theories surrouding it, which is covered by Jung himself in his book, see this article on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizophrenia

I want to discuss here not the theories of WHY the disease can manifest themselves in humans but what Jung thought of the images seen and heard by such a person under this suffering. Jung viewed the hallucinations experienced by such patients as not only proof of the Unconscious but also the importance and collectiveness of symbols that are contained in that part of the psyche. That the symbols manifesting themselves were similar if not spot on too the symbols expressed in myths, legends and fairytales with the same reactions and interpreation of meaning found in those already exsisting symbols. The disease manifest itself when the psyche, the unconscious in particular, overwhelms the conscious part of the mind thus allowing the person to see the symbols that would normally be seen while dreaming. In essence the images seen by a schizophrenic while awake are the same images normal persons see in dreams. They are both equally as important to understanding the personality of the persons experincing such symbols. That is why Jung had success in treating and understanding his patience because he talked and got to know his patients and through their manifest symbols he could understand them even better then ignoring such images. To understand mythology, religion and symbolism one can fully understand the mind of a schizophrenic.

This concludes the summary of the first three volumes of Jung's collected works, in my next post on this subject I will summarize Jung's fourth volume "Freud and Psychoanalysis". Thanks for reading and please post questions and comments in the comment section on this article.