C.G. Jung

1. Jung's Dual Nature and the Power of Will

Now I knew: I am myself now, I exist. Previously I had been willed to do this and that: now I willed.

A divided self. From childhood, Jung felt he possessed two distinct personalities: 'Number 1', the ordinary, shy schoolboy, and 'Number 2', a wise, authoritative old man connected to the past. This inner division, coupled with a difficult family life and early trauma, manifested as nervous eczema and fainting spells, allowing him to escape the pressures of school.

Neurosis as evasion. Overhearing his father's despair about his potential invalidism shocked Jung into recognizing his illness as a deliberate, albeit unconscious, evasion. This pivotal moment, triggered by a head injury, led him to confront his symptoms directly through sheer willpower, forcing himself to study despite fainting fits.

• Childhood trauma: Mother's breakdown, sexual assault.
• Physical manifestations: Eczema, fainting spells.
• The turning point: Overhearing father's worry.
• The cure: Deliberate act of will.

Mastering the self. By consciously overcoming his neurosis, Jung learned that mental illness stemmed from a damaged will to live and could be cured by an act of will. This experience instilled in him a profound sense of inner authority and the realization that he could actively shape his own destiny, transforming from a passive 'crab' into a self-directed 'vertebrate'.

2. Drawn to the Depths: Occultism and Psychiatry

These few hints cast such a transfiguring light on psychiatry that I was irretrievably drawn under its spell.

Early occult fascination. Jung's lifelong interest in the 'occult' (meaning 'hidden') began in his youth, fueled by spiritualistic phenomena, poltergeist incidents in his home, and his cousin Helly Preiswerk's mediumistic trances. While initially attempting to explain these psychologically as 'multiple personality' or 'exteriorization phenomena', he felt they pointed to a deeper, hidden reality beyond the physical.

Psychiatry as exploration. A turning point came when reading Krafft-Ebing's textbook, which described psychoses as 'diseases of the personality' and admitted psychiatry's subjective, undeveloped state. This resonated deeply with Jung, offering a field where his romantic, exploratory nature could delve into the 'underworld' of the human soul, seeking to understand what truly happened inside the mentally ill.

• Childhood interest: Ghosts, spiritualism.
• Personal experiences: Poltergeists, cousin's mediumship.
• Academic inspiration: Krafft-Ebing's textbook.
• Professional entry: Burgholzli Hospital under Bleuler.

Tools for the unconscious. At the Burgholzli, Jung found his calling, dedicating himself to understanding the inner world of patients. He refined tools like word association tests and dream analysis, seeing them as keys to unlocking the unconscious mind and uncovering the roots of mental illness, which he increasingly believed lay in psychological repression rather than purely physical causes.

3. The Pivotal, Contentious Break with Freud

At that moment... he lost it altogether.

Initial admiration and alliance. Jung's early career was significantly shaped by his enthusiastic adoption and promotion of Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic theories, particularly the concept of repression and the power of the unconscious. Their first meeting in 1907 was a thirteen-hour intellectual marathon, leading Freud to see Jung as his intellectual heir and a crucial figure for gaining academic legitimacy.

Growing divergence. Despite the initial bond, fundamental disagreements emerged, primarily Jung's inability to accept Freud's insistence that all neurosis stemmed solely from sexual repression. Jung saw other powerful instincts (hunger, survival, religion) and felt Freud's 'monotony of interpretation' was a narrow, materialistic view that devalued culture and spirituality.

• Shared interest: The unconscious, repression, dream analysis.
• Key disagreement: The centrality of sex.
• Jung's view: Libido as general vital energy.
• Freud's view: Religion/culture as sublimated sexuality.

The inevitable rupture. The tension escalated as Jung developed his own ideas, culminating in his book Symbols of Transformation, which subtly, then overtly, challenged the sexual theory. Personal conflicts, including Freud's fainting fits during discussions of patricide and Jung's resentment of Freud's need for absolute authority and tendency to psychoanalyze his followers, led to a bitter exchange of letters and Jung's eventual resignation from the psychoanalytic movement.

4. Descending Within: Confrontation and Active Imagination

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.

Psychological crisis. The break with Freud and the ensuing isolation plunged Jung into a profound psychological crisis, marked by disturbing visions and a sense of impending madness. Recognizing the danger, he consciously decided to stop resisting the influx of unconscious material and instead surrender to it, documenting his experiences in his private 'Black Book' and 'Red Book'.

Active imagination. This period became a deliberate 'confrontation with the unconscious', where Jung actively engaged with the figures and landscapes emerging from his psyche through a process he termed 'active imagination'. He would consciously enter a state of deep relaxation and vigilance, allowing visions and internal dialogues to unfold as if they were external realities.

• Crisis trigger: Break with Freud, isolation.
• Symptoms: Visions, sense of madness.
• Method: Surrender, active imagination.
• Documentation: Black Book, Red Book.

The reality of the psyche. Through these intense experiences, Jung gained a crucial insight: the psyche possessed an objective reality independent of the conscious ego. Figures like Philemon, a wise old man with kingfisher wings, spoke to him, offering knowledge he didn't consciously possess, convincing him that the unconscious was not merely a repository of repressed material but a creative, autonomous source of wisdom and life.

5. Discovering the Collective Unconscious and Archetypes

I had the first inkling of a collective a priori beneath the personal psyche...

Beyond personal history. Jung's exploration of the unconscious led him to believe there was a layer deeper than the personal unconscious, which contained repressed memories and complexes. This deeper layer, which he termed the 'collective unconscious', was shared by all humanity and contained universal patterns and images.

Archaic psychic components. He found evidence for this in recurring symbols and motifs across cultures, religions, and the fantasies of his patients, even those with no apparent exposure to these ideas. Two key instances solidified this concept for him:

• A schizophrenic patient's vision of a sun-phallus tube as the source of wind, paralleled in a Greek magical papyrus and medieval art.
• His childhood manikin and soul stone, which he later connected to ancient 'soul stones' and the Greek spirit Telesphoros, suggesting an unconscious performance of archaic rites.

Universal patterns. These universal patterns, or 'archetypes', were not inherited ideas but rather inherited predispositions or potentials for certain types of experience and imagery. They were like instincts for the mind, shaping how humans perceived and responded to fundamental aspects of life, such as the hero's journey, the mother figure, or the shadow.

6. Synchronicity: The Principle of Meaningful Coincidence

either there are physical processes which cause psychic happenings, or there is a pre-existent psyche which organises matter.

Beyond causality. Jung's experiences, such as finding a dead kingfisher after painting Philemon with kingfisher wings or his precognitive visions of war, led him to question the purely causal view of the universe. He sought a principle to explain seemingly acausal, yet meaningful, connections between inner psychological states and outer events.

Meaningful coincidence. He termed this principle 'synchronicity', defining it as a meaningful coincidence where there is no apparent causal link between events. Examples included the scarab beetle appearing at the window while a patient discussed a scarab dream, or the repeated encounters with M. Fortgibu and plum pudding.

• Definition: Acausal connecting principle.
• Key characteristic: Meaningful coincidence.
• Examples: Scarab beetle, plum pudding story, astrological correlations.

Psyche and matter. Synchronicity suggested a fundamental interconnectedness between the psyche and the material world, implying that the mind could, in some way, influence or align with external reality. This challenged the prevailing scientific materialism and hinted at a universe where meaning and pattern were inherent, not merely imposed by human perception.

7. Alchemy as a Map of Psychological Transformation

Alchemy thus stood in a compensatory relationship to the world of consciousness and to Christianity, just as a dream does to the conscious situation of the dreamer.

A hidden tradition. Jung's search for a historical tradition that understood the psyche's transformative processes led him to alchemy, initially encountered through a Chinese text, The Secret of the Golden Flower. He found in its obscure symbols and processes a parallel to the journey of individuation.

Projection of the psyche. Jung interpreted alchemical texts not as literal chemical recipes but as symbolic descriptions of psychological processes. He believed alchemists unconsciously projected their inner experiences of transformation onto the substances and procedures in their laboratories, seeing visions and psychological states reflected in the chemical reactions.

• Discovery: The Secret of the Golden Flower.
• Interpretation: Alchemy as psychological symbolism.
• Core idea: Projection of inner states onto matter.
• Parallel process: Individuation.

Symbols of individuation. The alchemical stages (nigredo, albedo, rubedo) and symbols (king and queen, sun and moon, the Philosopher's Stone) became for Jung archetypal representations of the process of integrating the conscious and unconscious, uniting opposites (animus/anima), and achieving the 'Self'—the totality of the psyche. Alchemy provided a historical and symbolic framework for his own psychological theories.

8. The Post-Illness Affirmation and Public Persona

It was as if I were in an ecstasy. I felt as though I were floating in space, as though I were safe in the womb of the universe—in a tremendous void, but filled with the highest possible feeling of happiness.

Transformation through crisis. Jung's near-fatal illness and heart attack in 1944 triggered a profound mystical experience, including visions of the earth from space and a sense of timeless ecstasy. This experience solidified his conviction in the reality of a realm beyond the physical and psychological, affirming his deepest intuitions about the universe's meaningfulness.

Unconditional affirmation. The crisis led to a significant shift in Jung's attitude, fostering an 'unconditional "yes" to that which is' and a recognition of his own role in his previous negative state. This personal transformation made him less defensive about his 'occult' interests and more willing to express his deepest convictions publicly, albeit gradually.

• Crisis: Illness and near-death experience.
• Result: Mystical visions, sense of timelessness.
• Shift in attitude: Affirmation, self-responsibility.
• Increased openness: About paranormal beliefs.

Emergence as guru. In his final years, Jung became a widely recognized 'sage', his ideas resonating with a generation seeking meaning beyond materialism. His later works, like Aion and Answer to Job, tackled religious and philosophical questions directly, positioning him as a spiritual authority, even as he maintained the public persona of a scientist.

9. The Sage of Kusnacht: Legacy and Contradictions

The older I become, the less [I realize] I have understood or had insight into or known about myself.

Acclaim and influence. By the 1950s, Jung had achieved global fame, attracting disciples and visitors from around the world. His concepts permeated popular culture, influencing psychology, religion, art, and the burgeoning interest in Eastern thought and the paranormal. He was seen as a counterpoint to Freudian reductionism, offering a path to spiritual and psychological wholeness.

Personal inconsistencies. Despite his public image as an integrated sage, Jung exhibited personal contradictions, including a demanding and sometimes querulous nature, a need for recognition, and complex relationships with women. His own admission of limited self-knowledge in old age highlights the gap between his theoretical ideals of individuation and his lived reality.

• Public image: Sage, guru, spiritual authority.
• Personal traits: Demanding, irritable, complex relationships.
• Self-assessment: Limited self-knowledge.
• Discrepancy: Theory vs. personal life.

Autobiography's revelation. His posthumously published autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, revealed the intensely subjective and mystical roots of his theories, surprising many who knew him only as the scientific psychologist. This candid account, while illuminating, also exposed the deliberate crafting of his public persona and the tension between his scientific aspirations and his deeply romantic and intuitive nature.

10. The Enduring Tension: Scientist Versus Romantic

For many readers, it was almost as startling as discovering, let us say, that an eminent moralist and family man was actually a homosexual or paedophile.

The crafted persona. Throughout his career, Jung wrestled with presenting his revolutionary, often mystical, ideas within the framework of scientific respectability. He often adopted a cautious, academic tone, using complex language and citing extensive scholarly sources, particularly when discussing controversial topics like synchronicity or alchemy, to counter accusations of being unscientific or merely an artist.

Undermining his own claims. This tension led to inconsistencies and 'doublethink', where he would present phenomena like ghosts or UFOs as psychological projections while privately acknowledging their objective reality. His reluctance to fully embrace his romantic, intuitive side, or the implications of his own paranormal experiences, sometimes made his arguments convoluted and less convincing to skeptical readers.

• Public stance: Scientific psychologist.
• Private reality: Mystic, intuitive, experienced paranormal.
• Method: Academic tone, complex language, scholarly citations.
• Result: Inconsistencies, 'doublethink', convoluted arguments.

Legacy of vision. Despite these contradictions, Jung's work endures because of its powerful, optimistic vision of the human psyche. He offered a compelling alternative to purely materialistic or reductionist views, emphasizing the inherent drive towards meaning, wholeness (individuation), and connection to a deeper reality. His exploration of the collective unconscious, archetypes, and synchronicity opened vast new territories for understanding the human experience, even if his methods and conclusions remain subjects of debate.

Last updated: May 28, 2025