Jung began his career at the Burghoeltzli Mental Hospital in Zurich where he remained until 1909 under Eugene Bleuler, working with hospitalized patients with major mental illnesses, most notably schizophrenia. Based on his work exploring meaning in the words and behaviour of schizophrenic patients, Jung extended the work of Pierre Janet to formulate a theory of the psychoses which he outlined in his classic study in psychopathology Psychology of Dementia Praecox (1907). His formulations provide a conceptual link between the neuroses and the psychoses, and his clinical delineation of split-off complexes influenced Bleuler’s choice of the term ‘schizophrenia’ (Bleuler (1911: 476)) which replaced Kraepelin’s term ‘dementia praecox’.
Early in his career Jung developed a word association test, thus linking experimental psychology with psychoanalysis (Studies in Word Association 1914, 1916, 1919). Jung went on to develop his own theories and technique of psychotherapy which is termed analytical psychology. Despite initially being a disciple and then a colleague of Freud’s there are fundamental differences between the two men over the nature of libidinal energy and over infantile sexuality as the cause of neurosis. As early as 1907, Jung disputed whether sexuality was the central factor (1907: 59), and in Symbols of Transformation (1912) and Theory of Psychoanalysis (1913b) Jung put forward a new concept of libido, purely energetic and desexualized. This was an outright rejection of Freud’s view of the libido as exclusively sexual or pleasure orientated in origin and that sexuality alone was the prime motivating force. In Jung’s view libidinal energy was only one of several motivating forces. For example he noted that the hunger drive is more appropriately viewed as a survival instinct rather than one devoted to the pursuit of pleasure. Jung hypothesized that libido is non-specific psychic energy and can be channelled. Freud viewed the unconscious as containing unacceptable sexual and pleasure impulses repressed since childhood and located solely in the past, whereas Jung emphasized that libido (or impulses) arising from the unconscious has relevance to both the past and present. Whereas Freud saw the libido as essentially sexual in nature, Jung viewed it as essentially spiritual. Jung also challenged Freud’s basic tenet of the Oedipal complex. Although acknowledging that boys become powerfully attached to their mothers, potentially bringing about conflict with their fathers, Jung denied that either attachment or conflict was inevitably sexual. Instead he described the son’s attachment for his mother as being spiritual rather than physical or sexual in nature, reflecting a need for psychological renewal.
According to Freud the ego has an intermediary function in the conflict between the id and superego. However, Jung argued that the superego is not separate from the ego. Instead he termed the part of our ego which is concerned with parental and societal values and expectations as the persona – our mask to the outside world. The persona is conscious while the superego is partly unconscious. Jung also conceptualized another part of the unconscious that compels us forward termed the Self. While Jung recognized that the unconscious contained repressed material, he also emphasized its positive side, as the source of psychic energy and creativity pushing us forward to higher levels of consciousness. Jung found Freud’s theory of dream interpretation and wish fulfilment too rigid and reductive, ignoring the paradox and ambiguity of unconscious contents.
A major difference with Freud concerns Jung’s views of the process of development. For Jung this occurs across the lifespan rather than solely concerned with childhood processes. He introduced the concept of individuation, a process beginning at about forty years of age. This is the inner force or drive, ingrained in the species and present in the individual psyche that compels us towards personal growth and development of the self. An integral component of this process is the individual’s drive for meaning. Jung also emphasized the spiritual or religious function of the psyche and thought that its repression could lead to neurotic or psychotic manifestations of psychopathology.
This drive enters our consciousness intermittently, calling for change or, more precisely, the continuation of mental evolution. Jung viewed neuroses not only as a disturbance but also as a necessary impulse to broaden a consciousness that is too narrow, and thus acts as an incentive to maturation and healing. From this positive view, a psychic disturbance is not just a failure, illness or arrested development but a drive towards self-realization and wholeness. Jung also viewed dreams as pointing the way forward and not just concerned with the past. The positive emphasis on growth encouraging interpretations of psychological experience has some links to the humanistic models of psychopathology.
Analytical Psychology
In his Analytical Psychology, Jung developed a psychological typology that delineates attitude types (introvert-extrovert) and function types (feeling-thinking, sensation-intuition). Every person can be classified according to one of the four basic function types determining their typical way of experiencing reality. The psyche in Jung’s model is an auto-regulated system, combining the typical characteristics formed by influences as species, race, nation, and the spirit of the age with uniquely personal ones. Its functioning results from the interrelation of the two realms of the unconscious (personal and collective) and their relation in turn to consciousness. The ego identifies with the conscious mind acting as a filter so that all ego reflections go to the personal unconscious. The personal unconscious includes both memories easily brought to mind and what Jung described as lost memories, repressed painful idea and subliminal perceptions and content not yet ready for consciousness. These repressed thoughts and feelings form clusters or complexes in the personal unconscious. The third part of the psyche in Jung’s theory is the collective unconscious or ‘psychic inheritance’. Freud did not see the necessity of such concept which became one of the main reasons for their rift.
Jung viewed that thoughts, feelings, and memories group themselves into dynamic clusters of complexes. Jung’s conceptualization of the collective unconscious and the function of archetypes developed from his exploration of his own dreams and from his studies of the dreams, hallucinations and delusions of his schizophrenic patients. He explored delusory systems, comparing them with mythological and cultural themes, which led to his idea of primordial images and later to his ideas on collective (archetypal) material in the unconscious psyche. Complexes are the means by which archetypes manifest themselves in the personal unconscious. Jung observed that many of the images related to him by patients reflected recurring mythological images and symbols universal to mankind. From these observations he went on to conceptualize the collective unconscious which he describes in ‘Man and his Symbols’ (1957) as an inaccessible layer of the psyche containing universal experiences and images. He described it as being the reservoir of our experiences as a species, a form of knowledge we are all born with yet not directly conscious of influencing all our emotions, experiences and behaviour. We only know about it indirectly by looking at those influences. Examples of the effects of the collective unconscious include the spiritual experiences of mystics, dreams, fantasies, fairy tales and the immediate recognition of certain symbols and the meanings of certain myths. Jung viewed that all such examples could be understood as the conjunction of our outer reality and the inner reality of the collective unconscious.
Archetypes are the central organizing structure of a complex. They are the innate forms of the psyche consisting of universal primordial images and patterns of symbol formation recurring throughout humankind. They are not inherited images as such but rather inherited possibilities predisposing us to form typical image. Jung viewed that archetypal patterns were biologically determined although their manifestation in imagery often carries a symbolic meaning for the individual. The unconscious aspect of an event is revealed to us in dreams because in dream-like states where consciousness is not present to protect the ego from the manifestations of the unconscious, it appears not as a rational thought but a symbolic image. The four important archetypes that play a very significant role in everyone’s personality are the Persona, Anima(us), Shadow and the Self. The archetype of the Self is both the totality of the personality, conscious and unconscious, and the process of becoming of the whole personality. Jung viewed our deepest needs to be for meaning and purpose and saw religious practice as a fundamental archetypal need and deprived of its symbolism, individuals were cut off from meaning, and societies perished. Meaning can be found through dreams and their symbols in the form of archetypical images, arising from the collective unconscious. Jung defined neurosis as the suffering of the soul which has not discovered its meaning.
It is in the field of schizophrenia where conceptual differences between Freud and Jung are most apparent. Jung elaborated Janet’s concepts concerning the neuroses and applied these to the study of schizophrenia (1911). He considered that the primary symptoms of schizophrenia as described by Bleuler (1911) were defensive reactions of the individual due to being ‘overwhelmed’ by the complexes. A psychotic episode occurs when the unconscious overwhelms the conscious psyche as it effectively shuts out and represses the psyche as a whole. Jung viewed psychopathology as being a continuum, conceptualizing a similarity between diverse psychological states, for example between certain mechanisms underlying the formation of symptoms in hysteria and the symptoms in dementia praecox (1907: 62–83), that is between the neuroses and the psychoses.
Jung considered biological factors as part of the aetiology of schizophrenia including the possibility of an unknown ‘brain toxin’ as a causal factor. He later elaborated his theory describing a biological or instinctual format of the mind or psychosomatic organizations of complexes. Jung emphasized the role played by the complexes in schizophrenia where they would split completely from conscious control, ‘swallowing’ completely the ego and producing psychotic symptomatology. Thus, although psychotic visions illustrate an access to the collective unconscious, the person has been in effect consumed by it, resulting in a loss of ability to function and relate. Jung described this split-off quality of the complexes as being physiological and unsystematic, and radically different from their expression in the neuroses (1939/47). Schizophrenic symptoms could not be understood as just a reflection of archetypal imagery: This is usually not the case, any more than it is in normal dreams; here as there the associations are unsystematic, abrupt, grotesque, absurd, and correspondingly difficult if not impossible to understand. Not only are the products of schizophrenic compensation archaic, they are further distorted by their chaotic randomness. (1958)
A complete split between the ego and the complexes results in disintegration in the personality as the schizophrenic identifies with unconscious content. Schizophrenic symptoms seem so bizarre because the general symbols manifested by the collective unconscious are so far removed from a particular individual that they may appear as being beyond comprehension. Their oddness brings about an even greater resistance by the conscious psyche resulting in the contents of these manifestations becoming even more distorted and stranger.
Jung also recognized the role of psychological factors in schizophrenia (1919). He pointed to evidence for this in the changes produced in the illness after environmental modifications (the disappearance of a great number of catatonias after the reform of the asylums), in psychological factors precipitating onset and relapse, and above all in the existence of a great number of cases of latent schizophrenia usually hidden behind a neurotic façade, which emerged in the course of psychological treatment. Nevertheless, Jung claimed that psychological factors alone were not enough to explain schizophrenia. He hypothesized a ‘special predisposition’ or ‘abnormal sensibility’. Due to an external conflict or internal imbalance in the psyche the unconscious responds with a complementary attitude trying to re-establish the psychic equilibrium. In normal circumstances this occurs successfully. However, in the psychoses there is an attempt to escape from the unconscious compensatory trends. The precipitating factor may arise from ignoring or defending against unconscious manifestations and refusing to accept its compensatory significance, for example, the content of one’s dreams, whose function is to compensate for deficiencies and to warn of present dangers. This consequently reinforces a vicious cycle, as lack of awareness of unconscious manifestations results in an intensification of the unconscious compensatory strivings. Jung described how the resultant split was disastrous because ‘the unconscious soon begins to obtrude itself violently upon the conscious processes. Then come odd and incomprehensible thought and moods, and often incipient forms of hallucination, which plainly bear the stamp of the internal conflict’ (1914: 63).
Jung viewed the symptoms associated with schizophrenia, which illustrate the collective unconscious, as connected to normal dreaming because the unconscious material is identical in both. Schizophrenics could be described as existing in a dream-like state. He described dreaming as a mental condition in which formerly unconscious elements are given the value of real factors to an extent that they take the place of reality. Elements of the collective unconscious will be most likely to appear when one is relaxed and off guard, such as in dreams and day time fantasies because these things are the least controlled by a conscious sense of the limits of real life and they are more apparent in all cases of serious psychoses. From this perspective, Jung viewed that the dreamer is normally insane. Thus Jung developed a theory about the psyche, radically different from Freud’s. He saw individuation as a developmental process, manifested through adulthood and in symbolic life. He focused his psychotherapy on the development of individuality by means of increasing self-awareness. Jung’s rich exploration into the contents of psychoses was a hermeneutic study of huge scope offering an alternative to theories postulating an ontological split in the psychoses. His pioneering work in applying psychodynamic concepts to the psychoses has had great influence in later theoretical developments.
Tags: Burghoeltzli Mental Hospital in Zurich, Carl Gustav Jung biography, cause of neurosis, dementia praecox, schizophrenia