Jung's Concept Of The Archetype example essay topic

Jeffrey Schein Introduction to Jung Term Paper Prof. Frank FarandaSpring '04 The Life and Work of C.G. Jung Reconsidered In my original paper on Carl Gustav Jung, I took a rather skeptical view of the doctor and his work, for several reasons that I will reiterate. However, after studying further into his work, I realized that these objections only related to his early psychiatric cases, and I found myself to be far more intrigued and impressed by his later work and theories. While I had stated in my first consideration of Jung that, "there is a frustratingly limited, almost biased quality to much of... his work", I was pleasantly surprised later on to find that many of his later theories and assumptions were anything but limited. I still believe that in his early case work he took tremendous risks, both clinically and professionally, yet it is that risk-taking aspect of his personality that ultimately allowed, or rather, propelled him to boldly go forward with some of his most groundbreaking and controversial contributions to the fields of psychology, and philosophy as well. It can even be said, and has been, that Dr. Jung is the father of modern "new-age" thinking. He also laid the groundwork for those who were inspired by his thoughts, perhaps much in the way that he himself was originally inspired by Freud.

Once again, while my original opinion of Dr. Jung caused me to "wonder how much of Jung's work was truly visionary, and how much of it benefits from a positive hindsight bias because of the successes he was able to achieve" in his early casework, I must say that my current opinion, early casework aside, is that Jung was in fact truly visionary, and was the originator of some of the most revolutionary conceptual thinking that the human experience has to offer. I will begin by giving a short background on Dr. Jung's life, revisiting some of my objections to his early case work, and then move on to the ideas and concepts that caused me to reconsider his work as a whole. Carl Gustav Jung was born on July 26th, 1875 in Kesswil, Switzerland, the only son of Johannes Paul Achilles Jung, a Swiss Reformed Church Evangelical minister. He was a strange, melancholic child with no brothers or sisters until he was nine years old. The family was steeped in religion, as he had eight uncles in the clergy as well as his maternal grandfather, Samuel Preis werk, a respected pastor in Basel. In school Jung gravitated towards science and philosophy, winning a scholarship to Basel University to study medicine.

Alongside his medical textbooks he devoured works on philosophy, especially those of Kant and Nietzsche. He also read Swedenborg (a noted Swedish philosopher and theologian best know for his later work in which he presented ideas for a "new spiritual era") and studied spiritualism and the paranormal. Jung eventually realized that what he really wanted to do was psychiatry, and he became an assistant at Burgholzli Mental Hospital, a clinic attached to the University of Zurich. Accounts of his early psychiatric cases, as related to his assistants at Bughholzli, provide an interesting overview of Jung as an individual as well as his formative ideas in the field of psychotherapy and analysis. These early cases and the conclusions he draws from them are, much like his predecessor and one-time colleague, Sigmund Freud, sometimes revolutionary and brilliant. Yet, as I had stated in my earlier paper on Jung, I also found there to be a frustratingly limited and seemingly biased quality to much of this work that, I felt, said as much about Jung the person as it did about the work itself.

I also felt that this frustration was compounded by the fact that Jung openly criticized and departed from what he felt was non-progressive methodologies and ideologies of Freud and other contemporaries. I was intrigued by his objections to "rubber stamped" diagnoses, and the tendencies of doctors and teachers of the time to disregard the unique individuality of their patient's cases. He was clearly certain that each individual case must be treated in a completely unique manner. I felt that Jung was clearly ahead of his time in this matter, because it is my belief that this practice of treating patients in a non-personal manner continues to a large extent even today.

In one early case Jung tells of a woman who had been admitted to the hospital suffering from what was vaguely described by doctors of the time as "melancholia". After a series of tests she was diagnosed with dementia praecox, an early term for schizophrenia. Jung was clearly uncomfortable with this rash diagnosis, and instead perceived this to be a case of rather ordinary depression. After conducting some association experiments and some dream analysis he felt that the woman's unconscious mind had revealed information to him about her past that led to her depressive state. (Jung's work with word association tests confirmed observations about the Unconscious already made by Freud. Upon receiving results that Jung had sent him, the two began a correspondence and friendship which lasted from 1906 until 1913).

What puzzled me was simply that he never reveals how he was able to piece together a reliable timeline of events and facts about the incidents that led to her mental illness. Regardless of such a lack of credible evidence to support his assumptions Jung surmised that a series of painful events had led to a psychogenic disturbance, and not schizophrenia. He felt that nothing had actually been done to treat this woman, and since no one had attempted to provide any course of action, perhaps the best thing to do would be to reveal his "knowledge" of these tragic events to the patient, who up to that point had only been aware of these circumstances unconsciously. Although he was aware that he would be taking great risks with this course of action, both professionally and in regards to the mental health of the patient, he nevertheless proceeded to go ahead with this controversial approach. As it turned out it was a brave move for the young doctor, as the patient was well enough to be discharged two weeks later and did not, to anyone's knowledge suffer a relapse. Although the course of action seemed reckless, this case was instrumental in solidifying Jung's feeling that each patient has an individual story, and that a doctor cannot truly begin the therapy process until he begins to explore and understand the patient and the patient's life story as a whole.

He felt that the symptom itself could not be treated without an overall understanding of the patient's personality in its entirety. Another case related by Jung was of a woman who had been suffering for twenty years from a very painful paralysis in her left leg. Since her telling of her story failed to satisfy Jung he decided to use hypnosis to delve into her unconscious. Upon coming out of a hypnotic trance, and after having revealed vivid dreams and visions, the woman was somehow "miraculously" cured, and Jung found himself uncomfortable with his inability to explain this phenomenon. This was one of the cases that ultimately caused him to discontinue his regular use of hypnosis. While he logically expected a relapse of the neurosis that caused the leg paralysis, there was none.

However, the following year she returned, this time complaining of back pains. Once again Jung used hypnosis, and once again there was a "miraculous" recovery which he could not explain. Upon further investigation Jung found out that she had a mentally impaired son who was being treated in Jung's department at the hospital. Jung determined that she had essentially "adopted" him as if he were her son, due to her disappointment over having a son who was mentally ill. Jung had, for all intents and purposes replaced the real son in the woman's mind and was basically living vicariously through him. Jung explained this diagnoses to the woman and she never again relapses.

Dr. Jung considered this his first successful therapeutic analysis. In another case his patient was diagnosed with "incurable alcoholic neurasthenia". Upon consultation with the patient Jung determined the man to be suffering from an ordinary neurosis, the nature of which was completely unknown to the patient. Association tests indicated a strong mother complex, and it seemed that he drank to numb the effects of this painful situation.

In this case the patient worked in the family business which was run by the overbearing mother, and while he was obviously miserable with the relationship, he was too comfortable in his position in the company to change the situation. Jung chose to act in a manner that most people would consider unethical, and this is another area where I took exception with his methods. He convinced the mother (with the aid of a false document, no less) to fire the son on the grounds that he was an incurable alcoholic. Yet once again the risk paid off for the patient as the liberation from his mother caused the neurosis to disappear and the drinking to stop. For many years even Jung himself questioned his own ethics regarding his involvement in this patient's personal life, yet was convinced nonetheless that the course of action he took was the only solution. Another patient wished to meet with Jung for a single consultation, essentially for the sole purpose of confessing to a murder she had committed over twenty years previous which resulted in tremendous feelings of guilt and alienation which continued to plague her.

Once again Jung is in questionable territory regarding his ethics when he concludes that the deep depression and alienation suffered as a result of her guilty feelings was sufficient enough punishment for the murder, a crime of passion. Jung began to conclude that while clinical diagnoses provide a frame of reference, the patient's individual story is the unique factor that a doctor must fully explore in order to provide adequate therapy on an individual basis. In a case that seemed to illustrate this point Jung attended to a woman who had been institutionalized for over forty years. She was diagnosed as a catatonic as a result of dementia praecox, yet Jung the diagnosis itself was sufficient enough knowledge. The woman made strange arm movements that could not be explained easily.

After researching her back-story, he uncovered tales of an unrequited love she had for a man who had been a cobbler, and had ultimately, finally rejected her and she was crushed. This was the traumatic experience that led to her illness. The "strange" arm movements she made imitated the movements that a cobbler might make when lashing leather to the sole of a shoe. This case inspired him to devote his attentions to discovering the meaningful connections in one's life that may have led to a psychosis.

He then began to realize that these apparent chaotic hallucinations and paranoid delusions of schizophrenics contain meaningful clues into the patients' past and that even in this seemingly incomprehensible world lay an essence of the truth. He also thought that if therapy and analysis should be viewed as being unique to each patient, than too should be the individual solutions to each case. He warned against making assumptions based solely on method and theory. My overall impressions of Dr. Jung in regards to these cases was, and still is that while he opened up many new doors with his theories, and often took tremendous risks both clinically and professionally, as he warned against the pitfalls of the inevitability of bringing, at least, partial bias to the application of therapy and analysis, he ultimately fell prey to some of those trappings himself. I found it odd that he so easily saw the limitations and shortcomings of the methodologies and theories of many of his contemporaries, yet seemed so sure of his own convictions when there was very little, if any, in the way of proof behind his ideas. He may have had reasons to reconsider some of his own methods in retrospect, yet boldly acted upon his intuitions, in some cases bordering on recklessness in the absence of any guarantee that his methods would yield the proper results, or even prove to be sound.

Aside from my criticisms of this early casework, it is the rest of Dr. Jung's contributions that I find most fascinating and it is here where I began to truly see him as a visionary. While working on dream interpretation and other areas of inquiry Jung began formulating the earliest models of the concepts for which he is best known. Jung regarded the symbol, whether found in dreams or elsewhere, as the best possible expression of something not fully understood. But he often noted that in the dreams of his patients, while highly charged with emotion, had little or no meaning for the dreamer and Jung himself could elicit little significance by associations. He came to realize that many of the same symbols seemed to recur throughout history in religion, art, folktales, alchemy, and other forms of human expression. Jung became convinced that the source of this symbolic material was what he identified as the collective unconscious, a pool of inherited psychic residue accumulated since the beginning of the human race, an echo of the sum of experience accessible to all humans, which manifests itself through archetypes, or patterns of expression.

According to Jung's theories, experiences such as the alternation of day and night, the change of the seasons, birth, and death acquire psychic strength through repetition and become universal images, charged with emotion and serving as readily perceived evidence of the collective unconscious. Jung viewed the collective unconscious as distinct from the personal unconscious, which, according to Jung, serves as a storehouse of experience unique to each individual. The contents of the collective unconscious are called archetypes. Jung also referred to them as dominants, imagoes, mythological or primordial images, and a few other names, but archetypes seem to have won out over these. Archetypes reflect basic patterns or universal themes common to us all which are present in the unconscious. These symbolic images exist outside of space and time, and cannot truly be discussed in conscious terms.

An archetype is an unlearned tendency to experience things in a certain way. It has no form of its own, but acts as an "organizing principle" on the things we see or do. In a more tangible sense it is like a black hole: You only know its there by how it draws matter and light to itself. Jung's concept of the archetype borrows from ideas previously found in anthropology, sociology, religion, philosophy, and theology. The Jungian archetype involves both matter / energy and spiritual factors.

It is grounded in human experience yet transcends our conventional understanding of space and time. One could say it's a category which to some extent challenges contemporary preconceptions about categories. It is an idea pointing to a mystery. The "mother" archetype is a particularly good example. All of our ancestors had mothers. We have evolved in an environment that included a mother or mother-substitute.

We never would have survived without our connection with a nurturing-one during our times as helpless infants. It stands to reason that we are built in a way that reflects that evolutionary environment: We come into this world ready to want mother, to seek her, to recognize her, to deal with her. So the "mother" archetype is a built in ability to recognize a certain relationship, that of "mothering". Jung says that this is rather abstract, and we are likely to project the archetype out into the world and onto a particular person, usually our own mothers. Even when the archetype doesn't have a particular real person available, we tend to personify the archetype, that is, turn it into a mythological "storybook" character.

This character symbolizes the archetype. The mother archetype is symbolized by the primordial mother or "earth mother" of mythology, by Eve and Mary in Western traditions, and by less personal symbols such as the church, the nation, the forest, or the ocean. According to Jung, someone whose own mother failed to satisfy the demands of the archetype may well be one that spends the rest of his or her life seeking comfort in the church, or in identification with the "motherland", or in meditating upon the figure of Mary, or in a life at sea. An archetype can also be a part of us, in the case of the anima, and animus.

Jung felt that we are really all bisexual in nature, in that when we begin our lives as fetuses we have undifferentiated sex organs that only gradually, under the influence of hormones become male or female. Likewise when we begin our social lives as infants we are neither male nor female in the social sense. Eventually we come under the influence of society which gradually molds us into men and women. In all societies, the expectations placed on men and women differ, usually based upon our different roles in reproduction, but often involving many details that are purely traditional in nature. In our society today we still have many remnants of those traditional expectations.

Women are still expected to be more nurturing and less aggressive; men are still expected to be strong and ignore the emotional side of life. But Jung felt that these expectations meant that we had developed only half of our potential. The anima is the female aspect present in the collective unconscious of men and the animus is the male aspect present in the collective unconscious of women. Together they are referred to as syzygy or the divine couple. The anima may be personified as a young girl, very spontaneous and intuitive, or as a witch, or as the earth mother. It is likely to be associated with deep emotionality and as the force of life itself.

The animus may be personified as a wise old man, a sorcerer, or often a number of males, and tends to be logical, often rationalistic, or even argumentative. The anima or animus is the archetype through which you communicate with the collective unconscious generally, and it is important to get in touch with it. It is also the archetype which is responsible for much of our love life: We are, as an ancient Greek myth suggests, always looking for our other half, the half that the Gods took from us, in members of the opposite sex. When we fall in "love at first sight" then we have found something that fulfills our anima or animus archetype particularly well. Jung said that there is no fixed number of archetypes which we could simply list and memorize. They overlap and easily melt into each other as needed, and their logic is not the usual kind.

But here are some mentions: Besides mother there are other family archetypes. Obviously there is father, who is often symbolized by a guide or an authority figure. There is also the archetype of family, which represents the idea of a blood relationship and ties that run deeper than those based on conscious reasons. There is also the child, represented in mythology and art by children, infants most especially, as well as other small creatures.

The Christ child celebrated at Christmas is a manifestation, of the child archetype, and represents the future, becoming, rebirth, and salvation. Curiously, Christmas falls during the winter solstice, which in northern primitive cultures also represents the future and rebirth. The child archetype often blends with other archetypes to form the child-god, or the child-hero. There is also the God archetype, representing our need to comprehend the universe, to give meaning to all that happens, to see it all as having some purpose. The most important archetype of all is the self archetype. The self is the ultimate unity of the personality and is symbolized by the circle, the cross, and the mandala figures that Jung was fond of painting.

A mandala is a drawing that is used in meditation because it tends to draw your focus back to the center, and it can be as simple as a geometric figure, or as complicated as a stained-glass window. The personifications that best represent self are Christ and Buddha, two people who many believe achieved perfection. But Jung felt that the perfection of the personality is only truly achieved in death. Archetypes also exist among the elements in Jung's concept of the personal unconscious, and the anima and animus exist there too. Jung's concept of the personal unconscious comprises various elements including the shadow, a symbolic representation of a human's animal instincts and darker impulses.

According to Jung, the spiritual potential of an individual seeks realization in the unity of the whole organism, incorporating the various elements of the personal unconscious and establishing access to the collective unconscious. Jung called the method whereby this state of unity is reached the process of individuation, which requires one to confront the unconscious in order to differentiate between and gradually integrate the various elements of which it is comprised. Since this unconscious material cannot be directly experienced, it manifests itself through such symbols as art, dreams, or external situations upon which the confrontation is projected and played out. Jung was aware that parallels to the symbols in his own and his patients' dreams were also evident in Oriental cultures as well as European cultures of several hundred years ago. He became convinced that searching for and identifying these parallel symbols would assist in integrating an individual. It also became clear that Jung's theories about individuation and the collective unconscious would be widely applicable to human experience and could embrace areas not previously within the realm of psychological study.

I believe one of his greatest contributions was the he was able to show psychology several new directions. He reconstructed psychology for those who reach out towards the unknown, the spiritual, and the intangible. He has been able to make psychology accessible for addressing the human race's eternal religious needs, and its great paradoxes. Jung's approach went way beyond that of his contemporaries and predecessors, which were primarily concerned with the treatment of neuroses to include everyone from "normal" individuals in all aspects of their mental life, to psychotics and even the mentally deranged. This wide range of application of Jung's theories is, in my opinion, due to the complexity of his framework, an outgrowth of his reluctance to fall into the reductionist tendencies of science He chose rather to construct his concepts on the evidence derived from his clinical observations, and personal experience, including a long period of intense self-analysis that brought him to the edge of insanity.

This stage of Jung's personal and professional development began when his relationship with Freud crumbled in 1913. The relationship disintegrated into a formal breach with the publication of Jung's The Psychology of the Unconscious. From 1913 to 1917 Jung embarked upon a psychic self-exploration that some considered a breakdown and that Jung himself called a "confrontation with the unconscious". Jung emerged from the ordeal with a renewed conviction of his theories on archetypes, the collective unconscious, and the process of individuation. Along with his views on the significance of dream symbolism, these theories formed the basis of his own approach, which he called analytical psychology. From that point on Jung continued to perfect and expand his theoretical framework through his private clinical practice and through his study of such diverse subjects as alchemy, Zen Buddhism, folktales, ESP, astrology, and the occult.

As Jung developed these views much of mainline psychiatry chose to ignore Jung's resulting contributions to the study and understanding of the human mind. Freudian's regarded him as a misguided traitor, and subsequent schools of thought dismissed his work as being too mystical, too cognizant of religion, and too populated by myth to warrant serious consideration. When accused of leaving medicine for mysticism, Jung replied that psychiatry must take into account all of man's experience from the practical to the mystical These theoretical concepts developed by Dr. Jung are what caused the hypothesis and negativity of my original consideration of him to be replaced by a deep respect and, in fact, an almost gleeful fascination with his work. I am discovering that quite a few people find that Jung has a great deal to say to them. This tends to include writers, artists, musicians, film makers, theologians, clergy of all denominations, students of mythology, and of course, and many psychologists In conclusion, my opinion on Carl Gustav Jung has come full circle. In a sense, the very qualities about him that I found troubling initially are the same qualities that allowed him to be brave enough to defy and question, at first, Freud, and later perhaps the entire psychiatric establishment base, and come up with theories and concepts that are still being built upon.

There are elements of his work in the Humanistic approach, Existentialism, and obviously the various Jungians, and neo-Jungians that continue to explore the meaning he was able to give to what previously held little meaning. Dr. Jung's work was visionary, to say the least, visionary indeed.