This Could Be Carl Jung's Century (The Guardian)

Tuesday, February 7, 2012

This Could Be Carl Jung's Century (The Guardian)

excerpt:

“…Yet if the last century has been called “the Freudian century”, there are reasons for thinking that this one could be Jung’s. His time does seem to have come.

For a start he invented the term “complex”, meaning combinations or clusters of emotional issues and dynamics, drawn from past, present and even the future. This idea rescues clinicians from having to make precise diagnoses, which are not appropriate in connection with mental health. (This questioning of the validity of tight diagnoses such as “depression” or “anxiety” is still alive today.)

Jung also discovered differences between what he termed “introversion and extraversion” and has become the psychologist of choice for reflective, quiet, shy, poetic people who suffer excruciatingly in their more extraverted families and societies.

He had a much more positive view of the human psyche and unconscious than Freud. For Jung, the unconscious is not only full of wild and destructive drives; it is also the source of creativity, spirituality and the capacity for relationships. Similarly, dreams are not the untrustworthy “texts” that Freud deciphered. Rather, they tell the dreamer exactly what is going on in their psyche. In Jung’s idea of “individuation”, we see a mapping of the relations between an individual and the group or collective (and Jung coined the term “collective unconscious” to indicate what all humans have in common from a psychological point of view).

…What Jung saw in western culture is very familiar to what its contemporary critics perceive. He despaired of the over-rational one-sidedness of western culture, the way it has got cut off from nature (Jung is the pioneer of what is now called ecopsychology). He hit out at the materialism and loss of individuality in our world, focused on the mind-body split, on mechanical approaches to sex, and the west’s loss of a sense of existential and spiritual purpose and meaning…”