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Master mariner of the ocean of human personality - I

V SUNDARAM

        The influence of Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) on the development of 'psychology' in the 20th Century has been immense and formidable. His ideas and even his terminology have entered the language in a way that is only paralleled by the case of Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). Today he looms larger on the scene of the human spirit than he did in his own lifetime. Words that he introduced in new senses into the modern English idiom have lost their elitism and are part of our ordinary educated commonplace vocabulary today. The terms like complex, extravert, introvert, persona, archetype, anima, animus and shadow that we owe him, testify how wide and deep his impact has been.

        The books in which he recorded his quintessential self and work, are sought after by the intellectual youth even today. Now the whole world knows him almost exclusively as a psychologist and a psychiatrist. While his contribution in these fields, particularly his gift of healing the abnormal and psychologically sick, remains unsurpassed, yet what is not so well-known is the greater importance which he gave to the so-called normal man and his society. To quote the appropriate words of Laurens Van Der Post in this context: 'The life and work of Carl Jung as a psychologist and psychiatrist cannot be underestimated. It would be wrong not to recognise Jung for the inspired psychologist and born healer he was. After all, he started his career as a pioneer of psychiatry. Psychology and its field of application were his medium and led him first to the discovery, and subsequently to the exploration of a new world within the human spirit greater and in my view far more significant for life on earth than the world Columbus discovered in the world without'.
     Carl Gustav Jung was born on 26 July 1875, in the small Swiss village of Kessewil. His father was Paul Jung, a country parson, and his mother was Emilie Preiswerk Jung. Carl Jung started learning Latin when he was six years old. Then and there began his long interest in language and literature, especially ancient literature. Besides most-modern Western European languages, Jung could read several ancient ones, including Sanskrit, the language of the Vedas and the Upanishads.

        Although his first career choice was archeology, he went on to study medicine at the University of Basel. While working under the famous neurologist Krafft-Ebing, he decided on psychiatry as his career. After graduating in medicine, he took a position at the Burgholzli Mental Hospital in Zurich under Eugene Bleuler, an expert on (and the namer of) schizophrenia. In 1903, he married Emma Rauschenbach. He also taught at the University of Zurich and had a large private practice. It was at the Burgholzli Mental Hospital that Jung first evolved the 'Word-Association Test', which is being re-discovered and put to different uses in several current schools of psychiatry throughout the world.

        Jung made that test an instrument for charting out suppressed and secret areas of injury not only to the mentally-disturbed but also in so-called normal men and women. From his various experiments, more and more accurate and embracing, it became obvious to Jung that in human beings there was a repressed area wherein they tended to bury experiences too painful to be remembered or too hurtful and damaging to be remembered. Out of this work he introduced the word 'complex' in current vocabulary to describe areas of hidden experience and suppressed hurt, critical for the emancipation and development of the personality. 

Carl Gustav Jung (1875 - 1961), father
of holistic psychology and psychiatry.
        This term 'complex' is on everybody's lips today and yet even now, very few people who use it, know that they owe its present use to Carl Jung. Indeed from his varied experience at the Burgholzli Mental Hospital he found this mechanism in the spirit of men was so wide-ranging that his own psychological approach came to be classified under the name of 'Jung's Complex Psychology'.

        Long before he came into contact with Sigmund Freud in 1907, Jung started using 'dream analysis' in his own natural comprehensive and un-slanted way. In his expert hands the dream analysis became a sword to cut away real from unreal, illusion from truth, and the weapon itself. Once the preliminary battle was over, it was surrendered to the patient for future use. Some of his most spectacular successes were accomplished almost entirely in terms of a dream process both in himself and his patients. Indeed, one of his most cherished recollections was of a woman who came to him listless, depressed, without a sense of purpose and left him some two weeks later restored to her own full-self almost entirely because he told her of a dream he had about her. From the case histories originally recorded by CG Jung and preserved in the CG Jung Institute in Zurich in Switzerland, we can clearly see that there are many such examples where Jung broke the code of derangement, established contact, and brought back to the world men and women who had appeared lost to it for ever. In this context, I am reminded of what Jung told his friend Laurens Van Der Post: ' learned here that only the physician who feels himself deeply affected by his patient could heal. It works only when the doctor speaks out of the centre of his own psyche so provisionally called 'normal' to the sick psyche before him that he can hope to heal'. Jung then paused and then added that maxim straight from what was central to the practice of healing at those ancient places of mystery like Epidaurus: 'In the end, only the wounded physician heals. And even he, in the last analysis, cannot heal beyond the extent to which he had healed himself'.

        Though he had been an admirer of Sigmund Freud for a long time, he met him for the first time in Vienna only in 1907. At that very first meeting, Freud cancelled all his appointments for the day, and talked with Carl Jung for 13 hours straight, such was the startling outcome of the meeting of these two great minds! Freud eventually came to look upon Jung as the crown prince of psychoanalysis and as his heir apparent.

        But Jung had never been entirely sold on Freud's theory. Their relationship began to cool in 1909 during a trip to America. They were entertaining themselves by analysing each others' dreams (more fun, apparently, than shuffleboard), when Freud seemed to show an excess of resistance to Jung's efforts at analysis. Freud finally said that they had to stop because he was afraid he would lose his authority! Jung felt rather insulted.

        World War I was a painful period of self-examination for Jung. It was during this period that Jung developed one of the most interesting theories of personality the world has ever seen. After the I World War, Jung travelled widely, visiting, for example, tribal people in Africa, America, and India. He retired in 1946, and began to retreat from public attention after his wife died in 1955. Jung died at the age of 85 on 6 June, 1961.

        Jung's emphasis in the field in psychology had to do with dreams. Jung developed many theories about dreams, a lot of them disagreeing with Freud. Jung was a great psychologist and psychiatrist that changed the ways of psychology today. Freud had ideas saying that dreams were all about sex. No matter what the dream was, he could relate it to a sexual feeling or fantasy. Jung had other ideas, he thought that dreams were tools to help us grow, not just to release extreme sexual desires. Jung felt that dreams were more than about sex, they were about life. According to him, sexual drive doesn't even motivate us as much as the fear of death. Jung was an inspiration to all in the field of psychology. His theories are widely instrumental and operational in different fields of psychology and psychiatry today.

        To sum up in the beautiful words of Carl Jung himself: 'Anyone who wants to know the human psyche will learn next to nothing from experimental psychology. He would be better advised to abandon exact science, put away his scholar's gown, bid farewell to his study, and wander with human heart throughout the world. There in the horrors of prisons, lunatic asylums and hospitals, in drab suburban pubs, in brothels and gambling-halls, in the salons of the elegant, the Stock Exchanges, socialist meetings, churches, revivalist gatherings and ecstatic sects, through love and hate, through the experience of passion in every form in his own body, he would reap richer stores of knowledge than text-books a foot thick could give him, and he will know how to doctor the sick with a real knowledge of the human soul'.

        (to be continued...)
        (The writer is a retired IAS officer)
        e-mail the writer at vsundaram@newstodaynet.com

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