Carl Jung Theories of Psychoanalysis By: Jordan Davis & Lindsay Pierce

His Inspiration

Jung’s experience with the psychotics at the Burgholzli hospital under the guidance of Dr. Bleuler, mostly known because of his work on schizophrenia Jung’s own experience with the association method Jung’s cooperation with Freud, and his experience with the Freudian psychoanalysis, including dream interpretation technique Jung’s exploration of his own unconscious after he left Freud and the Freudian psychoanalytic association during his own confrontation with his inner psyche

His Theories

Collective Unconscious Based on Jung’s experiences with schizophrenic persons since he worked in the Burgholzli psychiatric hospital Jung initially followed the Freudian theory of the unconscious, but later developed his own theory that included new concepts, the most important being the archetype. The collective unconscious is known as a universal datum. Every human being is endowed with this psychic archetype-layer since his/her birth. One cannot acquire this stratum by education or other conscious effort, because it is innate. The collective unconscious may also be described as a universal library of human knowledge, the very transcendental wisdom that guides man. God himself is lived like a psychic experience of the path that leads one to the realization of his/her psychic wholeness.

Archetypes An archetype is a hereditary gift which molds and transforms the individual consciousness. They are inborn tendencies that shape the human behavior. Archetypes are empty, purely formal, nothing else but a pre-shaping possibility or an innate tendency of shaping things. They resemble the instincts in that they cannot be recognized as such until they manifest in intention or action. psychoid(psychic-like) in that they share both psychic and material shape and act as well as psychic and material events

Dream Interpretation For a while, Jung was the universal promotion of psychoanalysis. He was greatly influenced by Freud’s approach to the delicate problem of dream interpretation. Jung introduced the subject level to dream interpretation. The dream becomes an indicator of internal psychological transformations that sometimes point to the development of the individual process. In Jung’s view, if someone dreams of his mother, the mother is not an evocation of the real mother, but of the dreamer’s anima, or his emotional, feminine side of the psyche. The mother can also be a suggestion to what is basically biologic in the human nature or can lead to his inherited background, his homeland in a cultural way. prospective: treats dream like a map of dreamer’s future psychological evolution towards a more balanced relationship between his ego and the Self

Infantile complexes are not important in themselves, but what the individual’s ego does with them. This way, even neurotic complexes become raw material for dreams, the language through which the dream (the unconscious) expresses itself. The dream is an attempt to counterbalance a hypertrophied conscious psychological tendency. Dream interpretation should aim at the uncovering of its compensation’s feature. It becomes a message of the unconscious that indicates several neurotic deficiencies in the individual life orientation. Jung also adds to the free association method (Freud), stating that there are elements of the dreams to which the dreamer cannot provide personal associations. These are symbols.

Alchemy Jung’s interest in alchemy comes from the necessity to find a historic parallel to his own discoveries of the unconscious psychic life and refers to the series of dreams which have evoked the new research course. Alchemy is a symbolic representation of the individuation process. Jung believes that in serious alchemy, processes arising from individual psyche are described encoded.

Synchronicity Jung coined the term synchronicity to express a concept that belongs to him. Synchronicity is about acausal connection of two or more psycho-psychic phenomena. The concept was inspired to him by a patient’s case that was in situation of impasse in treatment. This patient had dreamt one night of a golden scarab; the next day during a psychotherapy session, Jung caught an insect that had hit the cabinet window, and discovered that it was in fact a golden scarab, which was rare and unusual for that particular climate. The idea of synchronicity therefore, is coincidence.

Jung places the archetype behind all of these coincidences, or the constellation of an archetype. In his view, this is a process that equally engages objective manifestations in the physical world, and subjective ones in the psychological universe. Synchronicity applies to phenomena from the area of parapsychology, prevision and premonition to astrology and many other borderline fields. Synchronicity is also present in psychotherapy. Several psychoanalysts noted certain strange coincidences in which their patients received information about them by extra- sensorial ways, information that was not accessible to the general public.

Quotes “Anyone who wants to know the human psyche will learn next to nothing from experimental psychology. He would be better advised to abandon exact science, put away his scholar’s gown, bid farewell to his study, and wander with human heart throught the world. There in the horrors of prisons, lunatic asylums and hospitals, in drab suburban pubs, in brothels and gambling-hells, in the salons of the elegant, the Stock Exchanges, socialist meetings, churches, revivalist gatherings and ecstatic sects, through love and hate, through the experience of passion in every from in his own body, he would reap richer stores of knowledge than text- books a foot thick could give him, and he will know how to doctor the sick with a real knowledge of the human soul. --Carl Jung “The collective unconscious – so far as we can say anything about it at all – appears to consist of mythological motifs or primordial images, for which reason the myths of all nations are its real exponents. In fact, the whole of mythology could be taken as a sort of projection of the collective unconscious… We can therefore study the collective unconscious in two ways, either in mythology or in the analysis of the individual.” --Carl Jung

“The archetype concept derives from the often repeated observation that myths and universal literature stories contain well defined themes which appear every time and everywhere. They impress, influence and fascinate us (our ego). This is why we call their tremendous effect numinous – that is, able to arise deep and intense emotions.” --Carl Jung “Before having discovered alchemy I had dreamed repeatedly dreams that treated each time the same theme: next to my house was another one, more precisely a wing or an added construction that was strange to me. Each time I would amaze myself in my dream because I did not know this part of the house, which apparently was there from the beginning. This strange part of the house revealed its meaning finally: The unknown wing was a part of my personality, an aspect of myself…” --Carl Jung “Only by discovering alchemy have I clearly understood that the Unconscious is a process and that ego’s rapports with the unconscious and his contents initiate an evolution, more precisely, a real metamorphoses of the psyche. --Carl Jung

Work Cited Boeree, Dr. C. George. “Carl Jung.” October 12, Carl Jung Resources. “Jung Theories.” Carl Jung Resources for home study and practice jung.net/theory.html. jung.net/theory.html