10 points to the person who can give me the best description of Jungian theory?

Question

I'm interested in an overall explanation of the man's basic theoretical concepts.

Answer 1

Wow! No small question. Nor do I blame you for asking it. It will not be easy to sum up Jung.

I started pouring through Jung in 1978 and basically have returned to him in cycles ever since. To a considerable extent Jung is inexhaustible which is in part why his psychology has also been called "Depth Psychology". Jungian psychology is based upon the deep capacity for the personality to renew itself not unlike timeless notions about the Phoenix and the uroboros or the snake that bites its own tail.

I think it is important to state from the outset that Jung did not have a final or precise definition of the Self. And I think it has to be emphasized that the Self was the central, empirical concern of Jung's entire psychology. He did not believe the conscious mind could set fixed parameters to the Self. For Jung consciousness was too narrow and one-sided to be capable of limiting the self to this or that definition. This runs parallel to modern physics. We have theories, concepts, models of what is occurring in quantum-scale events such as within a nucleon, but we have learned that we cannot equate a theory or concept with the 'objective reality' of the thing. Getting to know the 'thing' is entangled with our means of measure and detection. The Self is like that reality. It exceeds the way that the ego-consciousness represents it. So Jung has been called "obscure", "enigmatic", etc. He felt very isolated from his contemporaries. As he got older this got worse. Jung did not believe that the rational faculty was capable of having the final say about the the Self or God, or the reality of the inner make-up of a proton!

What he found - largely through the content revealed to consciousness in dreams, visions, spontaneous symbolic representations found in art, mandala drawing, dance, literature and poetry, myth, religious experiences, etc. - was that the Self was rooted in a deep Collective Unconscious matrix. Interpreting these appearances or symbols that rise up from the unconscious was a mix of science, philosophy, religious revelation, ego consciousness, physics, mythology, etc. He recognized that just as the body consists of archetypal functions, morphological shapes, organs and parts, common to all people, so too the unconscious at a deep enough level also demonstrates common motifs, symbols, structures, themes and so forth that Jung came to call Collective Archetypes or Collective Unconscious Archetypes in the sense that they are not products of conscious fancy or will but in fact are the very under-pinnings of the inmost nature of how the psyche formed and how it functions or is maintained. Becuase these archetypes are so primal Jung naturally noticed that they recur consistently all around the world in all cultures in religious symbols and in various mythologies and art. The archetypes recur. They are themes or motifs that Nature keeps producing. We cannot say they are fixtures, though Jung likened them to Plato's Ideas or Forms, rightly or wrongly. What is more important is that Jung treated these archetypes as psychic facts and therefore endowed them with both reality and power. They were dynamical, forces, powers, self-organizing tendencies common to all people. He contested the belief that these deep experiences of the psyche were fanciful or unreal. They were real in the realm in which they were manifesting. He was also interested in theEgyptian notion of th e"ka" or "double" that also concerned the Coptic Christians and Gnostic Christians.

It is important to emphasize also that the purpose that Jung saw as the whole reason and motivation behind his work - his truest and deepest purpose for doing psychology and psychiatry - was to learn about the mystery of what he called "personality". He was really interested in the personalities of the people who came to him. In the end he realized that deep revelations of the Self at an archetypal level demonstrated the foundation of the Self but did not yet explain the entire personality - the wholeness of the individual. He was interested in wholeness or the attempt to achieve wholeness knowing that wholeness - like perfection- were never final states, but were peak states of a cyclic process of renewal and pesonal re-integration. The reason for transforming neurosis or psychosis was because these pathological conditions were obstructing the natural urge toward wholeness and if possible peak experiences of the Self where man could glimpse the 'divine' in himself.

He saw the Self as a composition or union of all the opposites or complementary opposites. One important complementary pair was perfection/completion. The Self cannot accomplish both at once. So, the greatest of all Archetypes - the Self - was itself seen as being dynamical. It had a visible and transcendental dimension to it. It was creative but also moved by fate!

Jung had a lasting association with Wolfgang Pauli the physicist who discovered the Exclusion Principle. Pauli was a colleague of Heisenberg so Jung was no stranger to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Relation.

The Uncertainty Relation inspired Jung not to fix or reduce the Self to a thing. But he also recognized that the human concept of God and powerful theories about physics could not really be separated from man's own experience of the Self. For this reason he tended to see Christ as a principle residing at the heart of the Self - an archetype that was in fact common to all humanity. Different personalities grappled with or expressed this universal Christ in different ways. But the foundation of the archetype was really the same at the core of each individual. In the male what was encountered was a masculine ego-persona and a feminine anima. These often appeared through Western History as Chrisst and Mary and Sol and Luna, King and Queen, Osiris and Isis, etc. For Jung there was no way an indiviual could relate to eh New Testament unless he himself was composed of the same essence as the figure we call Christ.

This view got him in trouble with Orthodox Christianity which has fixed "Christ" as the Only Begotten or Sole Son of God. Really from the standpoint of what is universal and archetypal in depth psychology, the true blasphemy is the Church itself which has taken a universal reality or archetype and attempted to maintain sole ownership of this vital essence thereby devaluing it in every living individual. This forces us to project our own essence, our own life and blood and spirit onto an image of a dead man who lived 2,000 years ago and was nailed to a cross.

A large part of Jung's work involved research into the content of alchemical texts particularly from the medieval period but not confined to the Middle Ages. Jung did not for one second believe that the Alchemists were actually making physical gold. By examiningg the texts carefully Jung saw that they were projecting the Spirit of the World and notions about Christ and Hermes into their mysterious and secret opus. What these projections revealed to Jung were archetypes of the collective unconscious and the way the psyche strives for perfection and wholeness. This was a religious longing that was rarely achieved. And when it was it almost always came in the form of a dream or vision in which specific images, symbols, archetypes like serpents, colors and so forth would appear. The numinous qualities that accompanied these symbols inspired the alchemist to go on with his work. But in fact the work was the transformations of the psyche itself. And much of the transformation process was in fact gestated within and occurred within the vessel called the collective psyche.

Early in his career Jung was forced to split from Freud. Freud wanted Jung to promise him that he would continue Freud's theory to the bitter end. Jung wanted to know what it was that he was to continue. Freud literally said to Jung that he wanted him to never let go of the "sexual dogma", that the sexual dogma was the true way and to stay away from that dark occult path.

Jung is not a dogmatist. He could not possibly perpetuate so narrow a psychology as Freud's where everything must be reduced to one's repressed sexuality, or infant sexuality, or in any case placing sexuality at the center or core of the psychology of the unconscious. I agree with Jung. This reduces other archetypes in an unnatural way to merely sexual behavior. I think sexuality as we know it is in fact a later development from more primal states which are represented in depth psychology by numinous experiences involving the Quaternary, the Circle, the serpent. the male and female love that precedes sexuality and so forth. Freud's theory is narrow and arbitrary. It is true he was addressing post-Victorian sexual repression and hypocrisy, but still sexual theories only go to a certain depth and then other far more mysterious dimensions take over that precede sexuality. Freud's over reaction to the occult was his own fear and guilt that he was supposed to find the courage to challenge the dictatorial tenets of Rationalism - the same Rationalism that inspired the behavior of Hitler and his movement ironically enough - and allow of a greater variety of influences that shape and maintain the human psyche, the Self and eventually the individual personality. Jung was not afraid of man's Spiritual Reality. Rather he embraced it even if he realized that in the end it was unknowable. It could be revealed but not comprehended. Rather it was the unconscious revealing itself and so becoming conscious.

When Jung realized that the boundary of ehe Self was unknown he was able to develop his theory about synchronicity or non-local connecting principle that had bothered Einstein so much. Einstein also did not like Heisenberg's uncertainty relation because it was rooted in the mathematics of probability or probability distributions as to whether an event will or will not occur.

Jung of course had to reconcile notions about fate, sychronicity, probability with the archetypes. He found the arcehtypes usually overlapped one another so the uncertainties were built into the varieties of expressions and the way expectations tended to revert to their opposites in the twinkling of an eye.

In the end Jung believed the Self was that center and its periphery that sought wholeness. The wholeness was largely unconscious or transcendental. But some of it reaches a threshold that then allows the ego to focus and become conscious. In doing so, however, the ego becomes attached to a narrow world view and a narrow view of the Self. But deep numinous experiences that arise throughthe collective archetypes are able to overflow the ego boundary and can renew the whole personality provided the conscious attitude is willing to yield and let itself be shaken up and transformed. This willingness for the narrow focusing ring of the ego to let go and allow greater depths to irrigate the personailty was probably Jung's gateway to wisdom. He did believe in wisdom as a goal. But he did not think it could be reached without a humility born upon the willingess to stoop to what is below and deep - the dark ground that is right under our feet which supports and renews what cannot be known directlly.
It is the black, the mysterious nigredo of alchemy that supports the green leaf that has been vitalized by the Sun. The Self is that green leaf that can then reflect all the colors of the rainbow and resonate with a Whole that is far beyond sexuality while yet having no need to exclude it nor repress it. Jung recognized various types of personalities. Whatever the type all are built upon the same collective archetypes which reach down into unknown dark depths. All, in one way or other have the potential to resonate with a common whole, the Unus Mundus, the one world that has become divided and yet remains united. The Self is the same. So he saw himself as a doctor of the Self.

This is inadequate but it will have to do for now.

B. Lyons

Answer 2

As I have said before (somewhere) if it was up to me I would have Mr Jung as a sociopath with latent homosexual tendencies
one does wonder why He has had such an impact on this subject , boarder line at best .
Theory is one thing application is or can be quite different .

Answer 3

Collective Unconscious: The thought patterns of a society that eventually develop into the way people live.

Answer 4

Archeotypes of the collective unconscious.Symbols
as the language of the unconscious mind.

Answer 5

Ask Bing Crosby.

Answer 6

I'll take 2 and run TY