If you have ever thought of yourself as an introvert or extrovert; if you’ve ever deployed the notions of the archetypal or collective unconscious; if you’ve ever loved or loathed the new age; if you have ever done a Myers-Briggs personality or spirituality test; if you’ve ever been in counselling and sat opposite your therapist rather than lain on the couch – in all these cases, there’s one man you can thank: Carl Gustav Jung.
Jung died 50 years ago today. Freud called Jung his “son and heir”, but the relationship was ambivalent from the start:
Jung considered Freud too reductionist. He could not accept that the main drive in human life is sexual. Instead, he defined libido more broadly as psychic energy or life force, of which sexuality is just one manifestation. As to the Oedipus complex, Jung came to believe that the tie between a child and its mother was not based upon latent incestuous passion, but stemmed from the fact that the mother was the primary provider of love and care. Jung had anticipated the attachment theory of John Bowlby, which has subsequently been widely confirmed.
For a culture with an ageing population like ours, Jung offers a vision of the glories of growing old, seeing it as a path to wisdom rather than a decline into senility.
We shouldn’t despair over our mid-life crises, he thought, but seize them as the chance to find new vision and purpose.
Modern neuroscience has done much to back up Jung’s understanding of the unconscious too. It confirms that emotional intelligence as well as reason is vital when making decisions.
Further, in much the same way that you mostly aren’t conscious of your heart pumping or your lungs breathing, Jung argued that the unconscious mind is continually working for us. Personality development, he thought, has a lot to do with becoming more attentive to how you are affected by the whole of your inner life, in a process he called individuation.
SEE ALSO: RSA podcast on Jung’s legacy and influence. Of particular interest, the discussion of his “mystical obscurantism.”
On Jung’s relationship to AA. Bill W.’s Correspondence with Carl Jung.