lunes, 30 de julio de 2012

Jung and Freud



Jung was thirty when he sent his work Studies in Word Association to Sigmund Freud in Vienna. It is
notable that the first conversation between Jung and Freud lasted over 13 hours. Half a year later, the
then 50 year old Freud reciprocated by sending a collection of his latest published essays to Jung in
Zürich, which marked the beginning of an intense correspondence and collaboration that lasted more
than six years and ended shortly before World War I in May 1914, when Jung resigned as the chairman
of the International Psychoanalytical Association.

proponents of these empires like to stress, downplaying the influence these men had on each other in the
formative years of their lives. But in 1906 psychoanalysis as an institution was still in its early
developmental stages. Jung, who had become interested in psychiatry as a student by reading
Psychopathia Sexualis by Richard Krafft-Ebing, professor in Vienna, now worked as a doctor under the
psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler in the Burghölzli and became familiar with Freud's idea of the unconscious
through Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and was a proponent of the new "psycho-analysis".
At the time, Freud needed collaborators and pupils to validate and spread his ideas. The Burghölzli was a
renowned psychiatric clinic in Zürich at which Jung was an up-and-coming young doctor.
In 1908, Jung became editor of the newly founded Yearbook for Psychoanalytical and
Psychopathological Research. The following year, Jung traveled with Freud and Sandor Ferenczi to the
U.S. to spread the news of psychoanalysis and in 1910, Jung became chairman for life of the
International Psychoanalytical Association. While Jung worked on his Wandlungen und Symbole der
Libido (Symbols of Transformation), tensions grew between Freud and himself, due in a large part to
their disagreements over the nature of libido and religion.

In 1912 these tensions came to a peak because Jung felt severely slighted after Freud visited his
colleague Ludwig Binswanger in Kreuzlingen without paying him a visit in nearby Zürich, an incident
Jung referred to as the Kreuzlingen gesture. Shortly thereafter, Jung again traveled to the U.S.A. and
gave the Fordham lectures, which were published as The Theory of Psychoanalysis, and while they
contain some remarks on Jung's dissenting view on the nature of libido, they represent largely a
"psychoanalytical Jung" and not the theory Jung became famous for in the following decades.
In November 1912, Jung and Freud met in Munich for a meeting among prominent colleagues to discuss
psychoanalytical journals. At a talk about a new psychoanalytic essay on Amenhotep IV, Jung expressed
his views on how it related to actual conflicts in the psychoanalytic movement. While Jung spoke, Freud
suddenly fainted and Jung carried him to a couch.

Jung and Freud personally met for the last time in September 1913 for the Fourth International
Psychoanalytical Congress, also in Munich. Jung gave a talk on psychological types, the introverted and
the extroverted type, in analytical psychology. This constituted the introduction of some of the key
concepts which came to distinguish Jung's work from Freud's in the next half century.
In the following years Jung experienced considerable isolation in his professional life, exacerbated
through World War I. His Seven Sermons to the Dead (1917) reprinted in his autobiography Memories,
Dreams, Reflections can also be read as expression of the psychological conflicts which beset Jung
around the age of forty after the break with Freud.

Jung's primary disagreement with Freud stemmed from their differing concepts of the unconscious. Jung
saw Freud's theory of the unconscious as incomplete and unnecessarily negative. According to Jung
(though not according to Freud), Freud conceived the unconscious solely as a repository of repressed
emotions and desires. Jung believed that the unconscious also had a creative capacity, that the collective
unconscious of archetypes and images which made up the human psyche was processed and renewed
within the unconscious (one might find similarity with the ideas of French philosopher Felix Guattari, who wrote several books with Gilles Deleuze and once stated 'The unconscious is a factory, not a
theatre.')

Carl Jung, biography second, Later Life.


Later Life
Following World War I, Jung became a worldwide traveler, facilitated by his wife's inherited fortune as
well as the funds he realized through psychiatric fees, book sales, and honoraria. He visited Northern
Africa shortly after, and New Mexico and Kenya in the mid-1920s.
In 1938, he delivered the Terry Lectures, Psychology and Religion, at Yale University. It was at about
this stage in his life that Jung visited India. His experience in India led him to become fascinated and
deeply involved with Eastern philosophies and religions, helping him come up with key concepts of his
ideology, including integrating spirituality into everyday life and appreciation of the unconscious.
Jung's marriage with Emma produced five children and lasted until Emma's death in 1955, but she
certainly experienced emotional trauma, brought about by Jung's relationships with other women. The
most well-known women with whom Jung is believed to have had extramarital affairs are patient and
friend Sabina Spielrein and Toni Wolff. Jung continued to publish books until the end of his life,
including a work showing his late interest in flying saucers. He also enjoyed a friendship with an English
Catholic priest, Father Victor White, who corresponded with Jung after he had published his
controversial Answer to Job.
Jung's work on himself and his patients convinced him that life has a spiritual purpose beyond material
goals. Our main task, he believed, is to discover and fulfill our deep-innate potential, much as the acorn
contains the potential to become the oak, or the caterpillar to become the butterfly. Based on his study of
Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Gnosticism, Taoism, and other traditions, Jung perceived that this
journey of transformation is at the mystical heart of all religions. It is a journey to meet the self and at
the same time to meet the Divine. Unlike Sigmund Freud, Jung thought spiritual experience was essential
to our well-being. When asked during a 1959 BBC interview if he believed in the existence of God,
Jung replied, "I don't believe-I know".

martes, 24 de julio de 2012

Carl Jung, July 26, 1875 - June 6, 1961July 26, biography first part.




Carl Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist and founder of a neopsychoanalytic school of psychology, which he
named Analytical Psychology.
Jung's unique and broadly influential approach to psychology has emphasized understanding the psyche
through exploring the worlds of dreams, art, mythology, world religion and philosophy. Although he was
a theoretical psychologist and practicing clinician for most of his life, much of his life's work was spent
exploring other realms, including Eastern and Western philosophy, alchemy, astrology, sociology, as
well as literature and the arts.
His most notable contributions include his concept of the psychological archetype, his theory of
synchronicity and the collective unconscious - also known as "a reservoir of the experiences of our
species."
Jung emphasized the importance of balance and harmony. He cautioned that modern humans rely too
heavily on science and logic and would benefit from integrating spirituality and appreciation of the
unconscious realm. Jungian ideas are not typically included in curriculum of most major universities'
psychology departments, but are occasionally explored in humanities departments.
Early Life
Jung was the son of a philologist and paster. His childhood was lonely, though enriched by a vivid
imagination. From an early age he observed the behavior of his parents and teachers, which he tired to
understand and resolve. Especially concerned with his father's failing belief in religion, he tried to
communicate to him his own experience of God. Though the elder Jung was in many ways a kind and
tolerant man, neither he nor his son succeeded in understanding each other.
A very solitary and introverted child, Jung was convinced from childhood that he had two personalities, a
modern Swiss citizen, and a personality more at home in the eighteenth century. "Personality No. 1," as
he termed it, was a typical schoolboy living in the era of the time, while No. 2 was a dignified,
authoritative, and influential man from the past. Although Jung was close to both parents, he was rather
disappointed in his father's academic approach to faith.
A number of childhood memories inspired many of his later theories. As a boy he carved a tiny
mannequin into the end of the wooden ruler from his pupil's pencil case and placed it inside the case. He
then added a stone which he had painted into upper and lower halves of, and hid the case in the attic.
Periodically he would come back to the manikin, often bringing tiny sheets of paper with messages
inscribed on them in his own secret language. This ceremonial act, he later reflected, brought him a
feeling of inner peace and security. In later years, he discovered that similarities existed in this memory
and the totems of native peoples like the collection of soul-stones near Arlesheim, or the tjurungas of
Australia. This, he concluded, was an unconscious ritual that he did not question or understand at the
time, but was practiced in a strikingly similar way in faraway locations that he as a young boy had no
way of consciously knowing about. His theories of psychological archetypes and the collective
unconscious were inspired in part by this experience.
Shortly before the end of his first year at the Humanistisches Gymnasium in Basel, at age 12, he was
pushed unexpectedly by another boy, which knocked him to the ground so hard that he was for a
moment unconscious. The thought then came to him that "now you won't have to go to school any
more.". From then on, whenever he started off to school or began homework, he fainted. He remained at
home for the next six months until he overheard his father speaking worriedly to a visitor of his future
ability to support himself, as they suspected he had epilepsy. With little money in the family, this
brought the boy to reality and he realized the need for academic excellence. He immediately went into
his father's study and began poring over Latin grammar. He fainted three times, but eventually he
overcame the urge and did not faint again. This event, Jung later recalled, "was when I learned what a
neurosis is.

Adolescence and Early Adulthood
Jung wanted to study archaeology at university, but his family was not wealthy enough to send him
further afield than Basel, where they did not teach this subject, so instead Jung studied medicine at the
University of Basel from 1894 to 1900. The formerly introverted student became much more lively here.
In 1903, Jung married Emma Rauschenbach, from one of the richest families in Switzerland.
Towards the end of studies, his reading of Krafft-Ebing persuaded him to specialize in psychiatric
medicine. He later worked in the Burghölzli, a psychiatric hospital in Zürich. In 1906, he published
Studies in Word Association, and later sent a copy of this book to famed psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud,
after which a close friendship between these two men followed for some 6 years.
In 1913 Jung published Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (known in English as The Psychology of
the Unconscious) resulting in a theoretical divergence between Jung and Freud and result in a break in
their friendship, both stating that the other was unable to admit he could possibly be wrong. After this
falling-out, Jung went through a pivotal and difficult psychological transformation, which was
exacerbated by news of the First World War. Henri Ellenberger called Jung's experience a "creative
illness" and compared it to Freud's period of what he called neurasthenia and hysteria.

lunes, 16 de julio de 2012

Carl Jung's Archetypes




To further help you in uncovering the meaning of your dreams, Jung noted certain dream symbols that possess the same universal meaning for all men and women. He terms this phenomenon the "collective unconscious". While dreams are personal, your personal experiences often touch on universal themes and symbols. These symbols are believed to occur in every culture throughout

history. Jung identifies seven such symbols in what is referred to as the major archetypal characters:

1. The Persona is the image you present to the world in your waking life. It is your public mask. In the dream world, the persona is represented by the Self.  The Self may or may not resemble you physically or may or may not behave as your would. For example, the persona can appear as a scarecrow or a beggar in your dream. However, you still know that this "person" in your dream is you.

2. The Shadow is the rejected and repressed aspects of yourself. It is the part of yourself that you do not want the world to see because it is ugly or unappealing. It symbolizes weakness, fear, or anger. In dreams, this figure is represented by a stalker, murderer, a bully, or pursuer. It can be a frightening figure or even a close friend or relative.  Their appearance often makes you angry or leaves you scared. They force you to confront things that you don't want to see or hear. You must learn to accept the shadow aspect of yourself for its messages are often for your own good, even though it may not be immediately apparent.

3. The Anima / Animus is the female and male aspects of yourself. Everyone possess both feminine and masculine qualities. In dreams, the anima appears as a highly feminized figure, while the animus appears as a hyper masculine form. Or you may dream that you are dressed in women's clothing, if you are male or that you grow a beard, if you are female. These dream imageries appear depending on how well you are able to integrate the feminine and masculine qualities within yourself. They serve as a reminder that you must learn to acknowledge or express your masculine (be more assertive) or feminine side (be more emotional).

4. The Divine Child is your true self in its purest form. It not only symbolizes your innocence, your sense of vulnerability, and your helplessness, but it represents your aspirations and full potential. You are open to all possibilities. In the dreamscape, this figure is represented by a baby or young child.

5. The Wise Old Man /Woman is the helper in your dreams. Represented by a teacher, father, doctor, priest or some other unknown authority figure, they serve to offer guidance and words of wisdom. They appear in your dream to steer and guide you into the right direction.

6. The Great Mother is the nurturer. The Great Mother appears in your dreams as your own mother, grandmother, or other nurturing figure. She provides you with positive reassurance. Negatively, they may be depicted as a witch or old bag lady in which case they can be associated with seduction, dominance and death. This juxtaposition is rooted in the belief by some experts that the real mother who is the giver of life is also at the same time jealous of our growth away from her.

7. The Trickster, as the name implies, plays jokes to keep you from taking yourself too seriously. The trickster may appear in your dream when you have overreach or misjudge a situation. Or he could find himself in your dream when you are uncertain about a decision or about where you want to go in life.  The trickster often makes you feel uncomfortable or embarrassed, sometimes mocking you or exposing  you to your vulnerabilities. He may take on subtle forms, sometimes even changing its shape.

Archetypal dreams, also refer to as "mythic dreams", "great dreams" or "grand dreams", usually occur at significant times or transitional periods in your life. They often leave you with a sense of awe or that you have learned something important about yourself. Such dreams have a cosmic quality or an element of impossibility if occurred in reality. They are often extremely vivid and stay in your mind long after you had the dream.