Carl Jung

 

Carl Jung (1875-1961) rejected the mechanistic and reductive aspects of Freud's work and broadened psychoanalysis to include art, mythology and the thought processes of native peoples. He was much closer to common sense than Freud, and gradually moved away from a causative model of personality. Psychic energy was not entirely or even fundamentally sexual in origin.

Jung saw the psyche or total personality as several interacting systems. In place of Freud's superego, ego and id, Jung recognized an ego, a personal unconscious and a collective unconscious. In the personal unconscious were to be found various complexes, and in the collective unconscious were archetypal dispositions to think, perceive and act in a certain way.

The psychic energy for Carl Jung was a basic life-force which would manifest itself as needed (eating, moving, thinking, sex, remembering, etc.) not concentrating through childhood in various body zones (oral, anal, genital) as Freud envisaged. The psychic energy resembled physical energy: it could be exchanged with the external world in muscular effort or ingestion of food, but otherwise remained as a reservoir to be used for thought, sexual activity, artistic creation and so on.

 

Jung had a much more optimistic view of mankind than Freud, and of art in particular. Not all was rooted in sexuality, or in personal experience and psychological difficulties. One type, psychological art, certainly drew on the assimilated experience of the psyche, creating work generally intelligible to the community. But there was also another type, visionary, which drew on the archetypes of the collective unconscious, creating work of a deeper and less individual nature. Appearing in dreams, mythology and art, these patterns took the form of images — self-originating, inventive, spontaneous and fulfilling images. In some respects archetypes could be viewed as metaphors which held worlds together and could not be adequately circumscribed.

But they were also emotionally possessive, organizing whole clusters of events in different areas of life, ascribing to us our place in society, controlling everything we see, do and say. Because their work drains energy from the conscious control of personality, artists may be more susceptible than others to psychological illnesses, but their creations should not be written off as individual or infantile aberrations. Art is crucial to society, giving life and cohesion to its fundamental beliefs.

Jung has received less criticism than Freud: his theories are more positive, less reductive and mechanistic, not sexually-based, and accord religion, art and cultural expression a value in their own right. They also draw support from contemporary interest in alternative medicines, oriental religions, mysticism and existentialism. Jung's own writings are somewhat nebulous, however, and would probably evade scientific testing. As a therapeutic technique, Jungian analysis suffers from the drawbacks of Freudian, but has greater appeal to artists since its practices occupy familiar ground.

A fuller account, with references, can be found on TextEtc.

 

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Carl Jung

 

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