Analytical psychology is the work of Carl Gustav Jung and his followers. Also known as the psychology of complexes, the term officially appeared in 1913 to designate an extension of psychoanalysis, which is why it is considered both a school of psychoanalysis and a trend in psychoanalysis. psychology deep, according to Bleuler’s expression to characterize any psychology that starts from the hypothesis of the existence of an unconscious psyche. In this Psychology-Online article, we collect the theory about the analytical psychology of Carl Gustav Jung.
Carl Gustav Jung: summary biography
Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) was a young psychiatrist already recognized by the profession when he assumed the defense of Freud’s work, both in psychiatric forums and in his own work, which began in 1902. In 1905 he was appointed free professor of psychiatry and two years later he met Freud. Their close collaboration would be broken in 1913 at the request of Freudfor whom the Jungian developments of psychoanalysis were not in accordance with his own theory.
Gone will be the years in which Jung was the president of the International Psychoanalytic Association from its foundation in 1910 until the beginning of the first World War. A time in which the psychoanalytic movement born in Vienna around Freud from 1900 was established and reached an international dimension (Europe and the United States).
In 1930, he was named honorary vice-president of the German Psychotherapy Association and three years later he was a professor at the Zurich Polytechnic until 1942. He left teaching due to his advanced age and for health reasons. Carl Gustav Jung died at the age of 85, in 1961, leaving a great legacy for psychology and the psychoanalytic movement.
The analytical psychology of Carl Jung
Jung began his professional life in the most important psychiatric center of the time, the Burgöhlzli University Clinic, directed at the time by Eugen Bleuler, creator of the notion of schizophrenia and a facilitator of psychoanalysis during those years. At the Jung Clinic he becomes familiar with the psychiatry of the moment, both in its therapeutic and experimental and research aspects.
From this dedication came the first psychoanalytic reading of psychoses, the experimental device of the Word Association Test and the notion of complex, in addition to several studies of child psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic criminology. In 1910 Jung immersed himself in mythology and in 1912 he presented his idea of the collective unconscious, he developed an energetic conception of libido and in the clinic he considered the current conflict more important than the infantile one. Such modifications were not considered relevant by psychoanalysis from then, nor would any of those presented by the different authors that punctuate that history of schisms that is psychoanalysis. After more than a century of psychoanalysis and overdoses of psychotherapies, all of that is a thing of the past. There are many syntheses that partially or totally articulate different points of view in psychoanalysis, psychology and psychiatry, giving rise to multiple approaches to suffering.
Theory of analytical psychology
Analytical psychology starts from existence of a collective unconscious in the psyche of each individual, so that consciousness, linked to the self, not only has to deal with the contents of the personal unconscious, the complexes, personalized in what Jung calls shadow, but with all the transpersonal contents that dwell inside us, the archetypes. The relationship of this self – a complex among the others, but endowed with consciousness – with the collective unconscious throughout the biography constitutes the process of individuation, or psychic self-realization.
This process, understood as an articulation of psychic opposites which occurs in the form of conflicts, compensations and complementarities, consists of the conscious differentiation by the individual of two great systems of opposites: individual/collective and conscious/unconscious. These include external/internal, before/after, yes/no or any of the opposites that consciousness establishes to configure a reality from the Real.
The individuation process has the naturalness of growth and as such it follows the phases of life from childhood to old age, with its various characteristics. At each moment, different biological, social, and archetypal aspects dominate, bringing to light the character of the individual, his psychic individuality, which Jung calls the self, subject of both consciousness and the unconscious.
The deployment of the self As an articulation of archetypes in the individuation process, it is the specific object of analytical psychology. Analytical psychology defines a structure of the psyche and an energy that explains its dynamics. This energy is libido, expressed in the interest that the subject shows towards its various objects. Driven by that interest, consciousness expands and differentiates. Libido follows the laws of energy insofar as it is produced thanks to a gradient of potential – the psychic conflict -, it is conserved in the processes of understanding and degrades in closed systems. It presents a direction in time -progression/regression- and space -extraversion/introversion. Refering to structure of the psyche, at first Jung delimits the systems of consciousness, the personal unconscious – which integrates the Freudian preconscious and unconscious – and the collective unconscious. He later defines it according to the archetypes person, shadow, anima / animus and self. The dialectic between person (the archetype of the social) and shadow allows the differentiation of the self, which in the dialectic with its unconscious sexual counterpart (anima in the male, animus in the female) attests to the self.
This, in contact with the Real through the soul of the world expressed in synchronicities, makes the unus mundus, the Real, conscious. The constitution and differentiation of these figures occupies the process of individuation, whose relative consciousness is the goal of analysis. An analysis that consists of seeking dialogue between conscious and unconscious. A specific instrument to carry out this dialogue is the active imagination, based on the transcendent function, which links conscious and unconscious and allows the psychic transformation. The other fundamental method is the interpretation of dreams, for which Jung defines an objective and a subjective level, recommends the study of series of dreams and develops a concept of dream symbols consistent with the hypothesis of the collective unconscious. With these conceptual tools Jung creates a psychology, although his interest is not so much in developing a system as in using a series of concepts and hypotheses to address clinical needs. Thus his typology emerged in 1921.
Defining four psychic functions in opposition, thinking/feeling as judicative acts and sensation/intuition as given acts, considers four ideal psychological types with a dominant function, with its opposite underdeveloped and the other two acting as auxiliaries. Depending on whether the dominant attitude is extraverted or introverted, the four types are folded into eight, thus constituting an approximate characterology that allows one to orient oneself in the clinic and explain many of the interpersonal conflicts and object choices. In a first formulation, psychotherapy consists of attending to the movements and transformations of the libido, following its processes of cathexis of the various objects.
These objects, images in their psychic immediacy, can be associated with the various levels of the psyche. At the level of the personal unconscious they are part of the complexes, at the level of the collective unconscious, they are part of the archetypes. The investigation of complexes refers to personal history, the experiences lived by the individual. The study of archetypes, however, refers to the human species in its historical unfolding. These two levels constitute the microscope magnifications that analytical psychology considers essential.
Books and works of Carl Jung
Jung’s work It was established over sixty years. His first publications, the lectures of the Zofingia university club, date from 1896-99, and from 1902 is his bachelor thesis On the psychology and pathology of the so-called occult phenomena. An evolution and growing complexity can be seen from his initial psychiatric writings of the first decade of the 20th century to the latest alchemical texts from 1944. The fundamental books of this journey are: The psychology of dementia praecox (1907), Transformations and symbols of libido (1912), Psychological types (1921), The relations between the ego and the unconscious (1928), Psychology and alchemy (1944), The psychology of transference (1946), Aion (1951), The interpretation of Nature and the Psyche (1952), a work that brings together Jung’s studies on synchronicity and a long article by W. Pauli, and Mysterium coniunctionis (1955-56), in addition to a multitude of specialized articles.
Analytical psychology is not only the creation of Jung, it is also the creation of the disciples and colleagues who were close to him and who have subsequently delved into his perspective. Grouped since 1916 in psychological clubs – the first in Zurich and shortly after in England (1922), the North American east coast (1936) and, from 1939, Germany, France and Italy -, in 1948 the CGJung Institute of Zurich and in 1955 the International Association of Analytical Psychology. Regarding Jung’s relationship with other scholars, so important for deepening the knowledge necessary for the development of analytical psychology, since 1933 he had the annual Eranos meetings. analytical psychologists They have left a suggestive work of their own that expands and modifies Jung’s conceptions. To place these authors, several classifications have been proposed.
The most widespread is due to Samuels, who establishes three schools or paradigms that guide clinical practice and research: classical, centered on the self, evolutionary, which focuses centrally on the process of individuation, and archetypal, oriented more toward the game of the archetypes. Lately, this author adds a fourth group, which he calls fundamentalist, whose appeal says it all. Confluences of analytical psychology with psychoanalysis can be found in all its schools, depth psychology and existential psychiatry. Regarding its influences, they can be traced in systemic, humanistic, evolutionary and transpersonal psychologies and, beyond the specific field of psychotherapy and psychology, in the study of the plastic arts, literature, the science of religions, anthropology, epistemology and politics.
Fundamental differences between Freud and Jung
Within the framework of this theory, Freud and Jung They had a quite different typology, which influenced a large part of their theoretical production. Jung had developed,…