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• He was born 26^th July 1875 in Kesswil, Switzerland.
• Jung was the only son of a Swiss Reformed Church Evangelical minister. Due having no siblings to play with until he was nine, he played his own imaginary games.
• He married Emma Rauschenbach 14th February 1903, she was the daughter of a wealthy Swiss-German industrialist. This provided financial backing to pursue his work and ambitions. They had five children; Agathe, Gret, Franz, Marianne and Helene.
• From around 1911 Jung took to Antonia Wolf. She became his mistress until her death in 1952. Emma knew of this relationship and tolerated it. They both worked with Carl Jung and practiced as analysts.
• He died in his house at the age of 85, 6^th June 1961.^[1]

1. He synthesized Freudian psychology with mysticism. It has been acknowledged that Jung made “the first reputable attempt to bring Eastern philosophical principles into the arena of modern Western thought. As such it represents a return to the mysticism found in the Ancient Greek philosophers...”^[4]
   
   The Jungian theory identifies three parts of the psyche:

1. The ego - Jung identifies this with the conscious mind.
2. The personal unconscious - this includes all things/thoughts that are presently conscious, the everyday man would term this the unconscious.
3. The collective conscious - this category can be termed the Jungian distinction, it is the differentiating factor and has been termed a person’s “psychic inheritance.” The contents of the collective unconscious are the infamous archetypes. Jung asserted an archetype as an unlearned tendency to experience things in a particular fashion. The archetype emphasized as most important is “self,” which is the ultimate unity of the personality.^[5]  

1. The principle of opposites – it has been identified that Jung asserted opposition being that which creates the power (libido) of the psyche. The principle teaches that for every positive there is a negative (e.g. for every positive thought there is a negative one, the poles of a battery etc.).
2. The principle of equivalence – asserts that the contrast (i.e. opposite’s principle) creates the energy and this “is given to both sides equally.”
3. The principle of entropy – Jung borrowed this term from physics. It has been asserted that this principle is a tendency for oppositions to come together and the resulting energy created to decrease over time.^[6]

In Jungian theory the chief end of man and his life is to realize self. Dr C. George Boeree (professor in the Psychology Department at Shippensburg University) asserts this of the Jungian theory: “The goal of life is to realize the self. The self is an archetype that represents the transcendence of all opposites, so that every aspect of your personality is expressed equally. You are then neither and both male and female, neither and both ego and shadow, neither and both good and bad, neither and both conscious and unconscious, neither and both an individual and the whole of creation. And yet, with no oppositions, there is no energy, and you cease to act. Of course, you no longer need to act…the self-realized person is actually less selfish.”^[7]

Jung’s underlying philosophy:

First another basic definition of philosophy; the word literally means “the love of wisdom.” “Most generally, philosophy might be described as the rigorous, systematic analysis and critical examination of such topics as reality, nature, time, causation, free will, human beingness, reason, moral judgements, and perception, among others.”^[8] From this basic definition of philosophy it is clear that it deals with a number of major themes that the Scriptures speak to. Therefore, we should want to dominion over this area with a Christ-centered and God fearing philosophy ( Proverbs 1:7, Colossians 2:8). Although Jung did overtly commit to a single philosophical school; he used a number of theories as “he wanted to form his own.”^[9] However, there are a number of men who obviously influenced Jung, namely Immanuel Kant (Idealist^[10]), Friedrich Nietzsche (Existentialist^[11]), Edmund Husserl (Existentialist) and Martin Heidegger (Existentialist).

Some have identified Jung's underlying philosophical position^[13] Materialism^[12]. However, I do not agree with this assertion. Rather I understand Jung’s philosophy as a mixture of Idealism and Existentialism. Dr Boeree clearly indicates that Jung did not assume that only the material world existed: “Jung begins with the highest levels - even spiritualism - and derives the lower levels of psychology and physiology from them.”^[14] Jung “devoured works on philosophy, especially those of Kant and Nietzche. He also read and was influenced by Swedenborg^[15] and studied spiritualism and the paranormal.”^[16]

Dr Boeree comments on Jung’s underlying theory of knowledge: “Jung was never clear about his own religious beliefs. But this unusual idea of synchronicity is easily explained by the Hindu view of reality. In the Hindu view, our individual egos are like islands in a sea: We look out at the world and each other and think we are separate entities. What we don't see is that we are connected to each other by means of the ocean floor beneath the waters. The outer world is called maya, meaning illusion, and is thought of as God's dream or God's dance. That is, God creates it, but it has no reality of its own. Our individual egos they call jivatman, which means individual souls. But they, too, are something of an illusion. We are all actually extensions of the one and only Atman, or God, who allows bits of himself to forget his identity, to become apparently separate and independent, to become us. But we never truly are separate. When we die, we wake up and realize who we were from the beginning: God. When we dream or meditate, we sink into our personal unconscious, coming closer and closer to our true selves, the collective unconscious. It is in states like this that we are especially open to "communications" from other egos”^[17]

Jungian quotes:

“we must for better or worse content ourselves with the assumption that the psyche supplies those images and forms which alone make knowledge of objects possible."^[18]

“Man "himself is the second creator of the world, who alone has given to the world its objective existence" says Jung;" the psyche...is the very foundation of reality."...What he does not recognize is the "facts" that he cites illustrate abundance…but not universality, resemblance but not necessarily affinity, coincidence but not necessarily meaning."”^[19]

“The self is our life's goal, for it is the completest expression of that fateful combination we call individuality.”^[20]

“Philemon and other figures of my fantasies brought home to me the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life. Philemon represented a force which was not myself. In my fantasies I held conversations with him, and he said things which I had not consciously thought. For I observed clearly that it was he who spoke, not I. . . . Psychologically, Philemon represented superior insight. He was a mysterious figure to me. At times he seemed to me quite real, as if he were a living personality. I went walking up and down the garden with him, and to me he was what the Indians call a guru.”^[21]

"The mind of man is prefigured by evolution. Thus, the individual is linked with his past, not only with the past of his infancy but more importantly with the past of the species and before that with the long stretch of organic evolution. This placing of the psyche within the evolutionary process was Jung's preeminent achievement."

"Man inherits these images from his ancestral past, a past that includes all of his human ancestors as well as his pre-human or animal ancestors. These racial images are not inherited in the sense that a person consciously remembers or has images that his ancestors had. Rather they are predispositions or potentialities for experiencing and responding to the world in the same ways that his ancestors did."

"The evolution of a collective unconscious can be accounted for in the same way that the evolution of the body is explained. Because the brain is the principal organ of the mind, the collective unconscious depends directly upon the evolution of the brain."^[22]

“Jung’s synchronicity concept was a major concept in ‘New Age’ thinking in the 60s. Jung was promoted to New Age guru and his ideas were hijacked to justify astrology, the l Ching and other ‘alternative practices. Jung’s efforts had contributed to making study of religion respectable – and the pursuit of religious experience became fashionable…He bridges the world of science (the testing of theories through empirical, clinical observation) and that of divination (the realm of spirits, omens and mythopoeic imagination.”^[23]

“I imagine a far finer and more comprehensive task for [psychoanalysis] than alliance with an ethical fraternity. I think we must give it time to infiltrate into people from many centers, to revivify among intellectuals a feeling for symbol and myth, ever so gently to transform Christ back into the soothsaying god of the vine, which he was, and in this way absorb those ecstatic instinctual forces of Christianity for the one purpose of making the cult and the sacred myth what they once were-a drunken feast of joy where man regained the ethos and holiness of an animal.”^[24]

Next time I will look at Jungian thought post World War II and wrap up with some final analysis.

Published in : Worldviews, Ethics

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