Undoubtedly, it is Jung’s merit that in a crude materialistic age, like ours, he has once again pointed out the depths of the human being and the meaning of human existence and responded to the unquenchable longing of human beings for individual development and towards the Whole.
Carl Gustav Jung: psychoanalyst, a man for whom the psyche represents a profound reality, and his life is a story of self-awareness of the unconscious.
The truth is that he cannot be summarized in any of the familiar categories, because he quenched his thirst from many sources, but he still remained true to himself, and his system of archetypal psychology is of great importance for humanity. In all his books, he delved into the depths of the unconscious and drew from them the primal origin of mythical man, while also telling us his personal myth through his numerous works. Life itself, he says, is an “uncertain experiment”. When observed in oneself, it is so transient and so fragile that it is literally a miracle that anything exists and develops simultaneously.
These facts have left
Jung left a deep impression on me. Life reminded him of a plant that draws life from its roots while its true life remains invisible and hidden within it. Jung wrote mostly about inner life because for him, it represented a true source of experiences; his encounter with the other reality and confrontation with the unconscious left an indelible mark in his memory. Jung early realized that answers to life’s problems are of little value if they do not come from within. In his metaphysical research, Jung dives into the deep past, realizing that no human story exists solely in its own timeline, but is an integral part of the drama of archetypal past and collective unconscious. Events from a person’s past return through generations, as well as branching out into future generations.
C. G. Jung was born in 1875 in Kesswil, Switzerland, as the son of a Protestant priest. Jung’s father was plagued throughout his life by doubt about the calling he had chosen, as well as a deeper question about the true nature of his faith. The influence of what he was involved in and what he passed on to others was inevitable. This dilemma inevitably influenced his son, Carl.
The influence of his mother, who was frail, prone to depression, and constantly in conflict with Carl’s father, was also not absent. This family situation left a mark on young Carl Gustav. He suffered from a series of mental and physical ailments, which later in life helped him a great deal in studying various psychogenic disorders, dreams, and fears that usually accompany a person on their journey of maturation.
It seems that every person carries memories from their childhood that will more or less influence their future development.
C.G. Jung himself had a series of events in his childhood that were incredibly important to him, and whose interpretations he would find in later years.
Jung’s early sense of insecurity in the world around him conditioned the events that he later described in his own unique way.
In his tenth year, he had a pencil case in which he placed a small wooden toy. g created the clothing for his little figurine himself. Along with the figurine, he stored a small black stone that he divided into two parts by its color, and they became his little secret that he hid in the attic under a rotten beam, knowing that no one would discover it there. Later, he realized that by doing so and securing himself “guardian friends”, he successfully overcame his insecurity and fear of the world.
Sometimes, he would write short secret messages in his pencil case for his little figurine, which only he could understand. All of this represented a kind of solemn act – a ritual for him.
At the age of thirty-five, Jung came across a book about secret underground shelters called “stone souls” near Arlesheim and about the totemic amulets of Australian indigenous people. It was then that he was astonished to discover that his childhood stone resembled these: black, of the same elongated shape, divided into upper and lower halves. He identified his little figurine with the masked god Telesphoros, found on Asclepius monuments, who He was reading from a parchment scroll. This led him to the conclusion that there are archaic psychic components that enter individual psyche without any direct traditional connection. Later, he even discovered that as a ten-year-old he performed his own ritual in the same way African natives do in some of their rituals…
He decided early on to study medicine and psychiatry. By studying exact sciences, he wanted to find out the natural causes that lead to a rupture in the psychic life of a person, which he himself experienced during his adolescent years.
Immediately after completing his studies, he became an assistant to Dr. Eugen Bleuler at a famous hospital in Zurich. At the age of 27, he studied pathology in Paris, and at the age of 30, he became a lecturer in psychiatry at the University of Zurich. Jung’s personal development already showed various peculiarities early on, with brilliant success in school and later at university, especially during the period he spent with Sigmund Freud. Jung certainly followed his own path and was an above-average individual. but symbols and manifestations of deeper psychological processes. He believed that by studying these symbols, he could uncover the hidden truths of the human psyche. His approach was unique and often perplexing, leading many to question his ideas. However, Jung remained steadfast in his belief that true understanding of human society required delving into its psychological roots. He was not swayed by political events of his time, instead focusing on the inner workings of the human mind. Through his discoveries, he challenged and bewildered people, forcing them to confront their own uncertainties. They were already imbued with the contents of the psychic and the spiritual. Even as a child, he attributed living qualities to a stone, he would lie on the grass during play, look at the stone and wonder, “Am I the one sitting on the stone, or am I the stone on which he is sitting?”
Jung’s work
The next few works are just a small opus from Jung’s much larger overall work. They comprise eighteen books, but almost as many articles published in various other publications. We will highlight only those that are extremely significant for the further development of psychiatry, psychology, and psychoanalysis, and which are also extremely fruitful and stimulating.
In 1928, Jung wrote a foreword for his friend Richard Wilhelm’s book “The Secret of the Golden Flower,” confirming his deep understanding of Chinese and broader Asian philosophical and religious thought. As a keen student of Eastern traditions, he highlighted the contrast between the outward-focused, active, and rational consciousness of the Western man and the more introverted consciousness symbolized by the dragon in the East. Jung saw the East and West as complementary halves of the same whole, urging Westerners to embrace their “Eastern selves” as part of their inner reality.
He believed that one-sidedness and fanaticism were signs of primitiveness, while achieving balance between opposites was a hallmark of high culture. Through works like “The Relationship Between the Ego and the Unconscious” and “Psychology and Alchemy,” Jung delved into the processes of transformation occurring through the unconscious.
Throughout his life, Jung experienced repetitive dreams featuring a motif where his house gained an extra wing that he struggled to enter until finally discovering a library with 16th and 17th-century books adorned with unfamiliar symbols—later identified as alchemical symbols. This unknown wing of his house symbolized a previously unrecognized part of his personality.
His exploration of gnosis contributed to his understanding of alchemy, and his interpretation of alchemical events was influenced by Gnostic thought. Jung’s favorite idea within alchemy was that the current era represents a profound transformation, part of a drama unfolding since prehistoric times, involving the continuous inner growth and transformation of humanity.
In alchemical terms, the whole drama is called Aurora Consurgens or the awakening of humanity.
Jung aimed to awaken the inner motive in man, the one with which the process of individuation would begin, which Socrates simply calls self-knowledge.
The meaning of individuation is for the Ego to free itself from various psycho-physical characteristics that are the result of inheritance, upbringing, or cultural influences from the environment, and also to break free from the suggestive power of unconscious images. Where cultural progress is in development – whether it is an individual or a group – there is liberation from collective thinking. According to Jung, every cultural progress is an expansion of consciousness that cannot be achieved without separation or individuation of the individual.
This transformation usually occurs In a person’s mature age, during the so-called transition from the biological to the cultural attitude, which is a process that simply arises on its own and cannot be forced from the outside. Transformation without sacrifice and renunciation is not possible. Every renunciation is painful, and every stage of human maturation is accompanied by a new renunciation. The very act of cosmic creation is a prototype of sacrifice, in order to realize one’s pure Self, which is the ultimate spiritual center of personality and has the function of uniting opposites. Many great writers have written about this transformative journey: the most beautiful example can be found in Goethe’s Faust.
Symbols
The work “Symbolism of the Spirit” (1948) and the study of symbols in general lead to the conclusion that symbols represent condensed experience of human evolution. Myths and dreams are woven from symbols, and the different transcendent and irrational properties of the Self are easiest to express through symbols. Such symbols are usually represented as squares or circles. Jung argues that the circle It falls under the oldest religious symbols of humanity and is called a mandala according to Indian tradition. He discovered examples of mandalas in the dreams of his patients and concluded that they reflect the state of the patient’s psyche, but are also a means of communication between the conscious and unconscious.
Looking at it historically, in ancient civilizations, the mandala represented a way of connecting humans with nature, or rather, understanding the laws of nature and the same laws within oneself in order to harmonize with nature. The mandala also appears in ceremonial sand drawings of Pueblo and Navajo Indians. It always carries and embodies the idea of harmony between the macrocosm – the universe, and the microcosm – the individual.
The circle has always captivated human attention: it is enough to go back three centuries when philosophers and natural scientists vigorously debated the mysteries of the circle and the square, and in Plato’s Timaeus, the circle is considered the most perfect form – equivalent to the most perfect. The substances – gold, anima mundi, or the first created light.
Abstract mandalas begin to appear in Christian art, a cosmic mandala in the form of a dazzling white rose appears in Dante’s vision. Jung himself sketched a large number of mandalas, only later discovering that they represent for him the shaping and exploration of eternal meaning and an eternal conversation with oneself. In these mandalas, Jung sees his entire being directly in action.
Jung writes about psychological energy and the nature of dreams in 1948, and in 1954 he completes his study with the Study on Archetypes.
According to Jung, one layer of the human psyche, the unconscious, is of a personal nature and is therefore called the individual unconscious. It is based on a deeper layer that does not originate from personal experience because it is innate.
According to Jung, this layer of consciousness is called the collective unconscious because it is not of a personal nature; it contains contents that are identical in all people and in this way encompass a universal The foundation of the so-called transcendent nature lies in the mental basis. What has always been truly important is the experience of the archetypal inner image, which man transmitted from within himself to the external world through his own actions. All people share inherited patterns of emotional and spiritual behavior that Jung calls archetypes.
Archetypes
Archetypes are the organs of the soul that transmit to humanity deep memories of the entire human race, deposited in the depths of the collective unconscious, and which individuals and societies revive through their actions in times of crisis.
This interpretation of the archetype is appropriate because it states that collective unconscious contents are old original types and images that have always existed.
In primitive tribes, according to Jung, archetypes are no longer unconscious contents, but they transform into patterns of behavior that are transmitted through tradition in the forms of so-called secret teachings.
Myth and fairy tale are another expression of archetypes, archetypal symbolic figures. stories that were transmitted from generation to generation through storytelling. The occurrence of archetypes in dreams is far more incomprehensible and, of course, more individual than in myths.
According to Jung, an archetype represents a basic experience, or a pattern of experience, common to all humanity, an experience that people have shared since ancient times. Archetypes usually come through symbols that awaken echoes in the deeper layers of the unconscious, and they are not the result of personal and directly experienced situations in an individual’s life.
Freud – Jung
It has already been mentioned earlier how almost all of the discoveries that Jung made were the result of his own self-work. His significant work with chronic mental patients in the Zurich hospital was important.
While Freud avoided mentally ill patients, considering psychotherapy to be unfeasible for them, and turned to treating neuroses, Jung successfully started practicing psychotherapy for psychoses and thus paved the way for others who are engaged in the therapy of severe mental illnesses. disturbance.
At first, Jung found it difficult to determine Freud’s place in his life; he questioned his own beliefs and constantly sought confirmation of his own thoughts in relation to Freud’s. In 1903, he devoted himself to re-examining Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams and discovered his similarities with Freud in the mechanisms of repression, but also differences in the content of repression. For Jung, Freud was, as he himself says, “A man in the clutches of his own demon.”
While for Freud, sexual trauma was the cause of repression, for Jung other factors took precedence, such as problems of social adaptation and depression due to certain tragic life circumstances.
Freud’s views on spirituality remained unknown to Jung forever. Freud, in fact, expressed doubt every time a conversation about a person or a work of art touched upon the aspect of spirituality, and most of the time he did not manifest any opinion on the matter. Anything that couldn’t be interpreted through sexuality, Freud explained as “purely subconscious.” Stefan Zweig expresses his opinion on the difference in understanding of human beings between Freud and Jung: “Through Freud’s prism, man emerged somewhat stripped down, simplified, devoid of a spectrum of colors, while through Jung, a fresh stream of air flowed into psychoanalysis, bringing back hope and enthusiasm.”
The Tower in Bollingen is like a symbol of Jung, embodying his spirit and thoughts: a place where he matured and experienced many events and impressions that contributed to his thinking and maturation.
His new home in Bollingen, by the lake that had always attracted Jung, became a corner where he could fully engage in his inner life.
He arranged the space according to his own ideas, participating in the placement of every stone. According to his notes, a sense of tranquility and rebirth was present in every corner of the house. And his own, intimate corner – a separate room that only he had access to – was of special importance to Jung. He personally painted his room years ago, and it served as his place of spiritual concentration. Just as he gradually built his knowledge, he gradually built the tower, adding something new to it each time: a symbol of each new realization.
As Jung himself says, he experienced the tower as a place of maturation, like a mother’s womb or a maternal form – it allowed him to become what he was, what he is, or what he will be; it gave him a sense of rebirth.
He recorded his feeling of joy with the arrival of each new season, and surrounded by “audible silence,” he observed the flight of birds and the apparent disappearance of life in autumn: leaves become lifeless empty shells that the wind gently shakes off their branches with a soft rustling sound. The life force that once lived in the leaves now remains in the tree, ready to be reborn in spring. Jung considered all of this to be lessons that nature offers to those who can recognize them.
He considered tradition to be the foundation, because as he says, “If we don’t know our ancestors, we don’t know ourselves.” “She never got to know herself”.
“In the last days of his life, Jung spent time with his closest family and friends in Kisnath, by the lake near Zurich. He died in 1961 at the age of 86.”