Jung

• Carl Jung


  Swiss psychiatrist
• Carl Jung's background


  • Came from a christian family
  • Father and uncles were clergymen
  • Grandfather studied medicine
  • Close with his father
  • Mother suffered from depression and was hospitalised
  • Considered a career as a clergyman but decided to study medicine
• When Jung was a student, he studied the psychology of 'occult phenomena'
• Jung set up his own private practice and corresponded with Sigmund Freud
• After 6 years, the relationship between Jung and Freud began to break down
• Jung wanted to develop his own ideas and did not agree with many of Freud's conclusions
• Jung thought that Freud over-emphasized the importance of sexual urges in the formation of the unconscious
• The Conscious


  Part of the mind that is directly accessible to us, we are aware of it
• The Personal Unconscious


  Unconscious layer of the mind, personal to the individual, contains repressed/forgotten memories and trauma, contains social conditioning
• The Collective Unconscious


  The deepest and most extensive layer of the psyche, shared by ALL OF HUMANITY irrespective of time/place, contains archetypes which shape our understanding of the world
• The Collective Unconscious is not something we gradually develop but something we are born with, we inherit it as birds inherit the instinct of hatching from an egg or migrating south for winter
• The Collective Unconscious is shared among humanity so it is impersonal, it is older than we are as individuals and dates back to first evolutionary stages of humanity
• Noumena


  Things as they are in themselves, but are beyond our perception and cognitive reach
• Phenomena


  Objects of our experience, only understood by us because our minds impose meaning on them
• Jung thought that the collective unconscious has a similar function to Kant's view, it provides us with forms, archetypes that enable us to recognise and make sense of our experiences
• We are not born with a blank state, we are not born tabula rasa, we begin life with archetypal images already in our collective unconscious
• Jung's evidence for the collective unconscious includes how similar people's dreams can be, how similar hallucinations are between patients, and how different myths from around the world have common themes
• Archetypes


  The forms or images that we use to understand the world, helps us to recognise and classify, we share them in our collective unconscious
• Archetypes


  • The Mother
  • The Child-god
  • The Hero
• Jung's archetypes are similar to the Forms in the philosophy of the Greek thinker Plato
• Important archetypes


  • The Persona
  • The Shadow
  • The Anima + The Animus
  • The Self
• In Jung's view, archetypes present the potential for mental health problems if one becomes too dominant
• The God Within


  God is a manifestation of the deepest levels of our collective unconscious, but not necessarily as an external reality, an image that we all share in the human psyche
• Jung was not clear about whether God exists beyond the human mind, the human psyche cannot 'leap beyond itself' to establish this
• Different world religions also have different ways of accessing this part of the collective unconscious, through public + private worship, through meditation, through sacred texts that provide powerful symbols
• Individuation


  The process of integrating and reconciling the various conflicting aspects of our personality to achieve a sense of wholeness
• Jung argued that every person has the potential for this 'wholeness' through individuation
• Jung believed that religion is helpful in the process of individuation, as it allows people to access the collective unconscious
• When people have a religious experience, they feel that they are connecting with something greater than themselves, something which is timeless and powerful, something which cannot be expressed through words
• Through religion, people grasp their shared humanity and use symbols to understand and develop The Self
• Jung did not necessarily believe God to be an external being, the creator the universe, able to perform miracles
• Jung concluded that religion could be a source of comfort for people, offering the sense that there is a purpose to life and representing people as a collective whole
• Jung found that his patients who had religious belief were better equipped to cope with post-war life, religion gave them a reason to live morally and encouraged them to work towards a better future
• Jung's theories can also be supported by looking at the ethical systems of different world religions, there is a strong tendency for religion to promote kindness, charity, honesty, fairness
• Jung has been criticised for the lack of firm empirical evidence to support his theories, he had to depend on theorising like Freud
• Jung's argument in understanding the unconscious in terms of archetypes is inductive, the recurrence of familiar characters across different cultures could be explained without using the idea of archetypes
• Jung drew attention to the similarities between different cultures but failed to mention significant differences between them, societies that have historically survived on fishing have mythical imagery of the sea and sea monsters whereas people who lived in landlocked countries have myths about crops and harvests
• Jung claimed that religious belief is important for human well-being, but this has not been identified in studies, and there are plenty of people who have good mental health and lead positive lives without religion
• People who accept the views of Jung (and Freud) have a reductionist view, where religion is no more than a product of the human mind, but religious believers reject this reductionist approach
• John Hick had an idea called eschatological justification, where religious truth claims are verifiable because they are 'eschatologically verifiable', meaning they will be verified at death, at the end of time, and cannot be falsified