Jung's interests included biology, zoology, paleontology and archaeology. In 1900 he became a doctor at the psychiatric clinic of the University of Zurich, which was headed by Eugen Bleuler, and in 1902 he defended his dissertation On psychology and pathology in so-called occult phenomena(Zur Psychologie und Pathologie sogenannter okkulter Phänomene).

In 1902, Jung went to Paris, where he listened to lectures by Pierre Janet, and then to London. In 1903 he married Emma Rauschenbach. The results of experimental studies carried out jointly with Franz Riklin and other collaborators were presented in 1904 in the work Diagnostic association studies (Diagnostische Assoziationsstudien). Research was aimed at discovering special groups of repressed and emotionally charged mental contents, which Jung called “complexes.” The work brought Jung wide fame, and in 1907 he met with Freud, in whose works on dream interpretation he found confirmation of his ideas.

After traveling around the United States with Freud to lecture in 1911, Jung abandoned both his work on the publication of the Yearbook of Psychological and Psychopathological Research (Jahrbuch für psychologische und psychopathologische Forschungen), founded by Bleuler and Freud, and the post of president of the International Psychoanalytic Society . Jung formulated his new position in the book Metamorphoses and symbols of libido (Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido, 1912), republished in 1952 under the title Symbols of metamorphosis (Symbole der Wandlungen). Using the example of the fantasies of a young woman in the early stages of schizophrenia, Jung revealed the symbolic content of the unconscious with the help of a number of historical and mythological parallels. Jung called his approach analytical psychology (contrasting it with Freud's "psychoanalysis" and Adler's "individual psychology").

In 1909, Jung abandoned work at the hospital, and in 1913 he gave up lecturing at the University of Zurich, where he taught since 1905, delving deeper into the study of mythological and religious symbolism. This period lasted until the publication of the work in 1921 Psychological types(Psychologishe Type). In 1920, Jung visited Tunisia and Algeria, in 1924-1925 he studied the Pueblo Indians in New Mexico and Arizona, in 1925-1926 - the inhabitants of Mount Elgon in Kenya. He traveled around the United States several times and visited India twice (the last time in 1937). The religious symbolism of Hinduism and Buddhism and the teachings of Zen Buddhism and Confucianism played an important role in his research.

In 1948, the Jung Institute was founded in Zurich. His followers created the Society of Analytical Psychology in England and similar societies in the USA (New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles), as well as in a number of European countries. Jung was president of the Swiss Society of Practical Psychology, founded in 1935. From 1933 to 1942 he again taught in Zurich, and from 1944 in Basel. From 1933 to 1939 he published the “Journal of Psychotherapy and Related Fields” (“Zentralblatt für Psychotherapy und ihre Grenzgebiete”). Among his publications are Relationship between the self and the unconscious (Die Beziehungen zwischen dem Ich und dem Unbewussten, 1928), Psychology and religion (Psychology and Religion, 1940), Psychology and education (Psychologie und Erziehung, 1946), Images of the unconscious (Gestaltungen des Unbewussten, 1950), Spirit symbolism (Symbolik des Geistes, 1953),About the origins of consciousness (Von den Wurzeln des Bewusstseins, 1954).

Analytical psychology.

At the center of Jung's teaching is the concept of "individuation." The process of individuation is determined by the entire set of mental states, which are coordinated by a system of complementary relationships that contribute to the maturation of the individual. Jung emphasized the importance of the religious function of the soul, considering it an integral component of the process of individuation.

Jung understood neuroses not only as a disorder, but also as a necessary impulse for the “expansion” of consciousness and, therefore, as a stimulus to achieve maturity (healing). From this point of view, mental disorders are not just failure, illness or developmental delay, but a motivation for self-realization and personal integrity.

Jung's method of psychotherapy differs from Freud's. The analyst does not remain passive, but must often take the most active role in the session. In addition to free association, Jung used a kind of “directed” association to help understand the content of a dream using motifs and symbols from other sources.

Jung owns the concept of the “collective unconscious” - archetypes, innate forms of the psyche, patterns of behavior that always exist potentially and, when actualized, appear in the form of special images. Since the typical characteristics due to membership in the human race, the presence of racial and national characteristics, family characteristics and trends of the times are combined in the human soul with unique personal characteristics, its natural functioning can only be the result of the mutual influence of these two spheres of the unconscious (individual and collective) and their relationship with the sphere of consciousness.

Jung proposed a theory of personality types and pointed out the differences between the behavior of extroverts and introverts according to their attitude towards the world around them.

Jung's interests also extended to areas very far from psychology - medieval alchemy, yoga and gnosticism, as well as parapsychology. He called phenomena that cannot be scientifically explained, such as telepathy or clairvoyance, “synchronistic” and defined as certain “significant” coincidences of events inner world(dreams, premonitions, visions) and real external events in the present, immediate past or future, when there is no causal connection between them.

If you know who Sigmund Freud is, then you probably also know the name of Carl Gustav Jung. Both lived and worked at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, both made enormous contributions to the development of psychology and psychotherapy, and also had a significant influence on medicine, sociology, anthropology, even literature and art.

Being a student of the famous Freud, Jung went further than his mentor. He subjected Freudism to a total, global rethinking, criticism and brought his new ideas into the understanding of what personality and soul are.

Collective unconscious

One of the fundamental aspects in Jung's concept is the so-called collective unconscious. The author of this term is the scientist himself; before his research, such a phrase had never been found anywhere.

The impetus for the emergence of the whole doctrine of the collective unconscious was Jung’s nightmare. For many years, at night he saw the same thing: murder, death, war, rivers of blood rising to the Alps, and bodies floating in them. What’s most interesting is that many other people had the same nightmares, and they only stopped at the beginning of the First World War, in 1914.

Based on this experience of dreams - his own and from the stories of others - Jung formed his own, in many ways different from, understanding of what the unconscious is, personality and what deep mechanisms control human behavior. In doing so, he made a rather bold statement for a time when Freudianism had great authority.

Jung argued that consciousness and the unconscious do not oppose or fight each other. On the contrary, they are like two sides of the same coin. And the most important principle of their relationship is interaction, not fight.

Jung denied the version that the unconscious is based on a sexual, animal, primitive instinct, and that it is the sexual sphere that controls human behavior. He formed his understanding of the unconscious. The scientist came to the conclusion that this is really a kind of energy, and not biology and physiology, these are some instinctive layers of the psyche that cover all personality traits, all previous experiences of human experience and all existing types of behavior.

An innovation was the idea that the phenomenon of the unconscious is something unique, which is passed on from generation to generation, which always manifests itself not only in personal level, in personal aspects, but also at collective and public levels. That is, it has two essences - individual and collective, and can be transmitted to a person and be innate.

That is, the collective unconscious is something common to absolutely different people, regardless of personal experience and developmental characteristics specific person based on the experience of society as a whole. And it manifests itself in consciousness through a system of a whole variety of symbols, ordered in a certain specific way. This is how the concept of archetype was born.

Archetype

Jung himself explained the term “archetype” as follows: these are transcendental (that is, unknowable, not fully studied) reality in relation to consciousness, bringing to life whole complexes of various kinds of ideas that appear in the form of mythological motifs.

Archetypes appear in human consciousness, but we cannot catch them, since they are invisible and cannot be detected. But they exist and we can observe their action in our lives.

Jung himself gives the following example to explain this mysterious phenomenon. Imagine a crystal growing in a special solution. We definitely know for sure that it develops along very specific geometric axes. The crystal grows according to a strict pattern; it does not do it arbitrarily, it has a given direction. But these axes themselves are not visible in space before the branches are finally formed. We do not detect them: they are not in the stone or in this solution. And only by the way the crystal grows, its bizarre, but always very harmonious and consistent branches, can we trace the history of these axes that are not actually visible. Likewise, archetypes, according to Jung, also cannot be detected, but in any case they form, determine our consciousness, influence it with various kinds of symbols, of which there can be an unlimited number.

Jung spent his entire life trying to understand the phenomenon of these images. He believed that the main task of psychology was to interpret the archetypes that arose in patients.

Individuation

Another fundamental concept in Jung’s concept was individuation, the implementation of which was seen by the scientist as the goal of all psychotherapy.

Individuation is a process in which human consciousness suddenly he feels his isolated position, his separation from nature. The easiest way to explain this concept is to use the example of a child. At a certain stage of his development, up to a certain point in his life, the baby does not distinguish himself from the world around him, in connection with this, for example, he can talk about himself in the third person (“Masha is in pain, she hit herself”). Then the world around him for the child is himself. But then the time comes when little man suddenly he begins to realize and feel a disconnection, a loss of connection with the world, which he had not felt before, but was necessary for him. Suddenly he realizes that he is no longer part of nature, so he experiences incredible fear and a desire to merge with it again, to return everything. But this is no longer possible.

Man nevertheless needs this fusion with nature. Jung said that this is why people create magic, rituals, and various kinds of myths, with the help of which they return to this bosom of nature for a second and feel the relationship with it and their integrity. Over time, rituals become more complex, branched, differentiated, and acquire increasingly vivid intellectual, emotional, volitional, and psychological coloring. And so, according to Jung, religion appears, the most main role which is to maintain a sense of integrity in a person.

Personality structure and types

The division of people according to personality types, once proposed by Jung, still remains relevant: extroverts and extroverts. However, the scientist himself understood that they do not occur in a “pure” form, that both types are always intertwined in a person, one of which can predominate.

An extrovert is a person whose consciousness is mostly focused on the outside world. Here, as a rule, European prevails, logical thinking aimed at transforming the outside world. - this is a type oriental man with intuitive thinking, where feelings predominate, consciousness here is turned inward.

The pinnacle of Jung's work can be considered his concept of personality structure, which consists of six elements. In humans, they are present in a complex where one of them may prevail. And the doctor’s task, according to Jung, is to help a person understand these individual internal layers.

The personality structure, according to Jung, consists of the following elements:

1. Anima is the unconscious feminine side of a man's personality.
2. Animus is the unconscious male side of a woman's personality.
3. The ego is the center of personality, which is built on the basis of conscious sensations and is responsible for the sense of identity.
4. Persona is a component responsible for how a person presents himself to the world, that is, how he positions himself ( social roles, individual style of self-expression, presentation).
5. Self is the real, authentic center of personality, what a person really is, and not how he feels or presents himself. This component ensures balance, stability, and unity of personality.
6. The shadow is the center of the personal unconscious; includes desires and experiences that are somehow denied by a person either consciously or unconsciously, and also contradict social norms, frameworks, and ideals.

Jung's concept became progressive for that time, since it complicated the personality structure and added components to it that psychologists, philosophers, researchers and scientists continue to study and develop to this day.

If you still have questions about Jung’s philosophy and psychology, write them in the comments to this article. Leave your opinion and impressions about the concept of this scientist, especially since modern man it may seem controversial in some places, and even naive in others.

Carl Gustav Jung was born in Switzerland on July 26, 1875. Until the age of 9, that is, before the birth of his sister, Jung acquired the experience of a somewhat isolated childhood, which he filled with solitary play and a rich inner world: “I did not want to be disturbed (while playing). I was deeply engrossed in the game and hated being looked at.” His father was a Swiss Reformed pastor and an expert in Asian languages. Already as a child, Jung was keenly interested in religious and spiritual problems.

In his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung recounts two powerful experiences that had a profound influence on his attitude toward religion. Between the ages of three and four, he dreamed of a terrifying phallic figure standing on a throne in a dungeon. The dream haunted Jung years later. After a few years he realized that the image was a ritual phallus; he represented a hidden, “underground God”, even more terrible, even more real and even more significant for Jung than the traditional church images of Jesus. The second experience happened when Jung was 11 years old. He came home from school at noon and saw the sun sparkling on the roof of the Basel church. He reflected on the beauty of the world, the splendor of the church and the power of God sitting in heaven on a golden throne. And then suddenly a thought came to Jung's mind so blasphemous that he was horrified. He fought desperately for days to suppress the forbidden thought. Finally Jung gave up: he saw a beautiful cathedral, and God sat on his throne above the world, and from under the throne excrement fell and fell onto the roof of the cathedral, covering it and destroying the walls.

Reflecting on this experience, Jung wrote:

“Many things were not clear to me before. In His test of human courage, God refuses to adhere to tradition, and, in spite of everything, he is sacred... One must be completely devoted to God: no questions asked, just doing His will... Otherwise everything is reckless and meaningless.”

“No one could deprive me of confidence, and it gave me joy to do what God wanted, and not what I wanted... I often had the feeling that in all decisive matters I was no more significant than other people, but I was one with God."

Today we find it difficult to grasp the terrifying power of Jung's vision. Given the traditional piety and lack of psychological knowledge in society in 1887, such thoughts were not only unutterable - they were incredible. Nevertheless, following his vision, instead of the expected guilt, Jung felt a strange sense of relief and a sense of respite. He interpreted this as seeing a sign given by God. It was God's will that Jung go against the traditions of the church. From that time on, Jung felt that he had completely dissociated himself from the traditional piety of his father and his relatives. He saw how most people cut themselves off from direct religious experience by following the dictates of the traditional church rather than seriously touching the spirit of God as a living reality.

Partly as a result of his inner experiences, Jung felt isolated from other people; sometimes he felt an almost unbearable loneliness. He was tired of school; nevertheless, he was an avid reader, with an “absolute desire…to read every piece of printed material that came into my hands.”

“Ultimately, most of our difficulties come from losing touch with our instincts, with the old unforgotten wisdom stored up within us.”

From childhood, Jung realized that he had two personalities combined. One of them was the son of a parish priest - fragile and insecure. The other was a wise old man, “skeptical, distrustful, distant from the world of people, but connected with nature, earth, sun, moon, weather, all living creatures, and at the same time longing for the night, dreams and whatever „ "God" who worked right in him." The parish priest's son lived an ordinary life everyday life a child growing up at a certain time in a certain place. The wise old man lived in a timeless and limitless world of wisdom, meaning and historical continuum. The interaction of these two personalities, Jung said, occurs in every person, only most people do not know about the second figure. This figure was of fundamental importance in his life. In many ways, Jung's theory of personality, especially his concepts of individuation and selfhood, stems from his early knowledge of this inner wisdom.

When it came time to go to university, Jung decided to study medicine—a compromise between his interests in science and the humanities. He became interested in psychiatry as the study of “diseases of personality,” although in those days psychiatry was relatively undeveloped and unremarkable. He imagined that psychiatry, in particular, included both scientific and humanistic perspectives. Jung also developed an interest in psychic phenomena and began researching messages received from his cousin, a local medium. This research became the basis of his dissertation “On the psychology and pathology of so-called occult phenomena.”

In 1900, Jung was accepted into an internship at the Bürzhol Medical Hospital in Zurich, one of the most progressive psychiatric centers in Europe. Zurich became his permanent home.

Four years later, Jung headed an experimental laboratory in a psychiatric clinic and developed a word association test for psychiatric diagnostic purposes. In this test, the subject was asked to respond to a standard list of stimulus words; any unusual delay between stimulus and response is taken as an indicator of emotional distress and associated with the stimulus word. Jung also became a master of interpretation psychological meanings, standing behind the various associations produced by the subjects. In 1905, at the age of 30, he began lecturing on psychiatry at the University of Zurich and took the position of chief physician in a psychiatric clinic. At this time, Jung had already discovered the works of the man who would become his teacher and mentor - Sigmund Freud.

"Freud was the first, truly important person whom I met."

Despite the strong criticism directed at Freud in scientific and academic circles, Jung was convinced of the value of his work. He sent Freud copies of his articles and his first book, The Psychology of Dementia Praecox (1907). Freud responded by inviting him to Vienna. The first time they met, the two talked almost nonstop for about 13 hours. After this, they corresponded weekly, and Freud considered Jung to be his scientific successor.

Despite their close friendship, the scientists had fundamental differences. Jung was never able to accept Freud's insistence that incidents of repression are always sexual trauma. Freud, for his part, was disturbed by Jung's interest in mythological, spiritualistic and occult phenomena. There was a philosophical and personal break between them when Jung published Symbols of Transformation (1912), which challenged some of Freud's basic ideas. For example, Jung considered libido to be a generalized psychic energy, while Freud was firmly convinced that libido is sexual energy.

In his preface to the book, Jung wrote: “What hit me was like a landslide that could not be stopped... It was an explosion of all those psychic contents that could find no room or living space in the oppressive atmosphere of Freudian psychology and its limited horizons.” . It was not easy for Jung to lose his friend and mentor. “For two months I was unable to touch a pen, so exhausted was I by this conflict.” The break with Freud was painful and traumatic for Jung, but he decided to overcome his feelings of guilt.

“Dreams bring to light material that cannot be generated by the life of the adult dreamer or his childhood experiences. We are inclined to regard it as part of the archaic heritage which the child brings with him into the world before any of his own experiences and before he is influenced by the experiences of his ancestors. We find duplicates of this phylogenetic material in the earliest human legends and in living customs."

For Jung, the break with Freud precipitated a powerful confrontation with the unconscious. To embrace these powerful experiences and grow from them, Jung began writing them down in his personal journals for the purpose of self-reflection.

Jung gradually developed his own theories of unconscious processes and dream analysis. He came to the conclusion that the methods with which he analyzed the symbols of his patients' dreams could also be applied to the analysis of other forms of symbolism, that is, he picked up the key to the interpretation of myths, folk tales, religious symbols and art.

Interest in fundamental psychological processes led Jung to study the old Western traditions of alchemy and Gnosticism (Hellenistic religion and philosophical tradition) and to explore non-European cultures.

He also seriously studied Indian, Chinese and Tibetan thought. Jung made two trips to Africa, visited India, and came to New Mexico to visit the Pueblo Indians.

In 1949, at the age of 69, Jung nearly died from several heart attacks. In the hospital he had the experience of a vivid vision in which he seemed to be floating high in space, 1000 miles above the earth, with Ceylon under his feet, India under his head and the Arabian Desert to his left. Then Jung entered a black block of stone that was also floating in space. Heading towards the entrance, Jung felt something to his left. All that remained of his earthly existence was his experience, the story of his life. He saw his life as part of a huge historical matrix, the existence of which he had not previously been aware of. Before he could enter the temple, Jung was blocked by a doctor who told him that he had no right to leave the earth now. And then the vision stopped.

A few weeks later, Jung gradually recovered from his illness; he was weak and depressed all day long, but every night around midnight he felt a surge of energy with a feeling of delight. He felt himself floating in a blissful world. His night vision lasted about an hour, and then he fell asleep again.

Upon recovery, Jung began a very productive period, during which he wrote his most important work. His visions gave him the courage to formulate some of his most original ideas. These experiences also shifted his personal perspective toward a deeper acceptance of his own purpose.

“I could formulate it as acceptance of things as they are: an unconditional “yes” to what is, without subjective protest - acceptance of the conditions of existence as I see and understand them, acceptance of my own nature; how happy I am to be alive.. In this way we forge the ego and do not stop working when unfathomable things happen; an ego that endures the truth and is capable of reproducing the world and destiny.

“A few days before his death, Jung had a dream. He saw a huge round stone on a hill, completely barren, and on it were engraved the words: “And this will be for you a sign of Wholeness and Unity.” Then he saw many vessels... and a quadrangle of trees, the roots of which stretched around the earth and went around it, and golden threads glittered among the roots" (Franz, 1975).

Jung died on June 6, 1961 at the age of 86. Throughout his life, clinical practice, and research, Jung's work had an undeniable influence on psychology, anthropology, history, and religious writings.

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Carl Gustav Jung (July 26, 1875 - June 6, 1961) was born in the small Swiss town of Keeswil, in the family of a Protestant priest. The father paid great attention to the upbringing and education of Karl and, despite the relative poverty of his family, he found the opportunity to send his son to the best gymnasium Swiss city of Basel. From a young age, Karl talks with his father about religion; thoughts about God and the structure of the world occupy a significant part of his youthful diaries and notes. It seemed that fate itself had prepared for him the path of a priest. However, the more deeply Karl studies religious texts, the more often conflicting thoughts about God and the church arise in him. He increasingly has the impression that the Protestant Church is completely divorced from real life that it has degenerated into a set of empty rites and ceremonies, not filled with any inner meaning. “Living religious experience should not be sought in the church,” Karl concludes, “many poetic and philosophical works are much closer to it than liberal Protestantism.” Later, reflections on God and religious sacraments would become one of the main themes of his work.

By the end of the gymnasium, Karl clearly understands that the career of a priest is alien to him and decides to study medicine. He enters the University, where, in addition to his specialty, he studies philosophy - both ancient and modern - with great interest. He is completely immersed in himself, in his own thoughts, experiences and dreams - they occupy him much more than the events of the outside world. It is no coincidence that he calls his autobiography: “Memories, Dreams, Reflections.” Until the last year of high school, these two interests - philosophy and science - existed for Jung separately from each other, and suddenly, already during the last semester, he opened a psychiatry textbook for the first time and from that moment his life changed. “My heart suddenly began to beat sharply,” he writes in his memoirs. “The excitement was extraordinary, because it became clear to me, as in a flash of enlightenment, that the only possible goal for me could be psychiatry. Only in it two streams of my interests merged into one... Here the collision of nature and spirit became a reality.”

After graduating from the University, Jung moved to Zurich and began working here in a psychiatric clinic. In Zurich, philosophy was not in favor; preference was given to more practical things - things that could be studied scientifically. In this opposition - either philosophy and religion, or strict science - Jung saw the tragedy of the Western worldview, the “split of the European soul.” In his works, he sought to unite these two poles, to show that they do not contradict, but complement each other and can exist in harmonious unity.

There is another area of ​​​​knowledge, perhaps the most mysterious and mysterious, and Jung, of course, could not ignore it. This is ancient esoteric knowledge: occultism, magic, astrology, alchemy... In 1902, Jung wrote his doctoral dissertation entitled “On the psychology and pathology of so-called occult phenomena.” Unlike most of his colleagues, Jung was not inclined to see the occult only as fruits.
sick imagination. He claims that many poets and prophets have the ability to hear someone else's voice coming from unknown distances, and it is to this talent that we owe many poetic and religious revelations. Later he finds a name for this mysterious world, whose voices and images sometimes appear to us in dreams or during creative inspiration - he calls it the collective unconscious.

In 1907, Jung met the person who had perhaps the greatest influence on his future fate - he became a student of the “father of psychoanalysis” Z. Freud. This meeting became a source of unprecedented creative inspiration for Jung, and it later led him to despair and the deepest crisis. Freud's ideas about the unconscious, which turns out to be the true master of human actions, determines his entire life - these ideas capture Jung and he becomes one of the most devoted and talented students of the founder of psychoanalysis. Freud has high hopes for his student - it is in him that he sees a person capable of eventually taking his place and leading the Psychoanalytic Society. However, Jung increasingly finds himself disagreeing with his teacher; psychoanalysis does not accommodate all of his interests. Jung refuses to consider the main life energy - libido - to consist exclusively of animal impulses (sex and aggression). In 1912 he wrote the book “Transformations and Symbols of Libido.” The ideas of this work of his largely contradict the views of Freud, and from this moment their rupture begins. Freud initiates a lawsuit against a former student and demands that Jung change the name of his method, since his work cannot be called psychoanalysis. Jung fulfills this requirement and from that moment on he becomes the founder of his own direction - analytical psychology.

1912 marks the beginning of a severe psychological crisis for Jung. In his own words, he was close to madness. Images of the collective unconscious invaded his life, bringing with them nightmarish visions. Jung imagined streams of blood flooding all of Europe, the collapse of the world. These visions only stopped in 1914, with the outbreak of World War II, when these ominous images became a reality.

Jung's subsequent life was entirely devoted to the study of the collective unconscious and its archetypes. Jung travels a lot, studying primitive cultures and the worlds of ancient civilizations. All his works are aimed at one goal - returning lost integrity to man, unifying the inner and outer worlds, science, religion and mysticism, the wisdom of East and West. He calls analytical psychology “Western yoga,” or “twentieth-century alchemy.” He is deeply convinced that every person is not only a biological being endowed with instincts and reflexes, a person no less belongs to the world of spirit - he carries within himself the experience of culture, religion, and scientific traditions. “Psychology is one of the few sciences that is forced to take into account the spiritual dimension,” he writes. The spiritual experience of ancestors is passed on from generation to generation with the help of archetypes - universal images of the collective unconscious, common to all people. K. G. Jung comes to this conclusion by studying folklore, and also by working with dreams of a wide variety of ethnic groups and cultures.

Based on his research, C. G. Jung offers his own diagram of the structure of the human psyche. He writes that the human soul is like an iceberg: only a small part of it is visible on the surface, and a large part is hidden in the depths of the unconscious. What a person presents every day in communication with others is his persona (mask). His ego is most often identified with her. But, in addition to this, the human psyche includes the shadow (unacceptable experiences and thoughts about oneself), anima or animus (the idea of ​​​​an ideal partner of the opposite sex), self (the deep core of the personality that gives meaning to life), as well as a number of archetypes (Great Mother, Eternal Child, Wise Old Man, etc.). Jung called the path of self-knowledge, the movement from ego to self, individuation.

Jung's work has had a profound influence on modern culture. For example, G. Hesse’s book “Steppenwolf” was written under the influence of psychotherapeutic sessions that the author had with Jung. The influence of ideas about the collective unconscious and its inherent archetypal images can be seen in many works of art and movies.

Analytical psychology has developed in a wide variety of directions. Jungian psychotherapists continue to study practical psychology in combination with cultural studies, religion and esotericism. “The fullness of life is natural and not natural, rational and irrational,” wrote C. G. Jung, “Psychology that satisfies only the intellect is never practical; for the integrity of the soul is never grasped by the intellect alone.”

Refers to "Mystical Worlds"

Carl Gustav Jung

Carl Gustav Jung wrote his works between 1930 and 1960. This was the time when scientific methodology was just becoming established, there was no generalizing book by Imre Lakatos, Falsification and Methodology of Research Programs, and it was just being understood how much the mystical has a right to exist, what knowledge gives: faith or reason.
Of course, as today, mysticism attracted tempting ideas, and people plunged into it headlong, selflessly exploring what seemed to be the most important, the most important thing in life. Carl Jung was just such a researcher, pushing himself to the limits of psychosis and experiencing severe crises in connection with this. He sincerely and seriously tried to find all the relationships between the real and the mystical in such a way as to be able to explain the observed phenomena of the psyche. In any case, that's how he started. Having left behind a huge mark, he influenced with his ideas, methods, classifications the development not so much of psychology as of philosophy and esotericism of all kinds, and also feeds the imagination of many pseudo-scientific theoreticians (see, for example). He considered the psyche and everything mystical that he associated with it, including God, to be really knowable and therefore sought to know it, and was not limited to religious faith. In his book On the Nature of the Psyche he writes:
"The psyche is not a chaos consisting of random whims and circumstances, but an objective reality to which the researcher can access using the methods of natural science. There are indications and signs that put psychological processes into some kind of energetic relationship with the physiological substrate. Since they are objective events, they can hardly be explained by anything other than energetic processes, or to put it another way: despite the immeasurability of mental processes, tangible changes made by the psyche can only be understood as phenomena of energy and."
And, at the same time, practicing mysticism and actually replacing psychological phenomena with mysticism (he did not interpret or substantiate them in any other way, which will be extremely clear later) in principle could not contribute to genuine knowledge, but led deeper and deeper into the unknowable religiosity, which completely determined his beliefs and activities in later years of life.
Initially, considering the psyche as a black box and trying to guess its fundamental principles and mechanisms by its external manifestations, C. Jung, like all other psychologists in such a situation, had the opportunity to compare only directly, empirically and observable, but precisely in the case of the psyche this is the least productive way of understanding it, due to the main property and purpose of the psyche: the constant adaptation of behavior to new conditions, and therefore the fundamental inconstancy of its external manifestations in different conditions. Empirically found patterns and methods for the psyche are not justified because they depend on the specific conditions in which they were obtained, and as soon as these conditions are different in some way, the generalizations cease to correspond to the real (see About the science of psychology). That is why they cannot be accepted as a scientific basis (axioms) for further development. In practice, the use of his methods and what they were modified by his followers gave controversial results, and if we do not consider only success (in his case, determined by his authority and charisma), and if we take into account failures, they could not claim sufficient reliability, although they were used and are still widely used, always supported by loud authority and sonorous names.
Due to non-reproducibility and lack of certainty, the “empirical laws” found by C. Jung and his methods have always caused considerable criticism, and the more the more mystical was involved in their justification. K. Jung wrote:
“It is strange that my critics, with few exceptions, are silent about the fact that I, as a doctor, proceed from their empirical facts, which everyone can verify. But they criticize me as if I were a philosopher or a Gnostic who claims that he has supernatural knowledge. As a philosopher and as an abstractly reasoning heretic, it is, of course, easy to defeat me. Probably for this reason they prefer to hush up the facts I have discovered.”(German edition of the works of C. G. Jung: Gesammelte Werke. Zurich, 1958. Bd. 11, S. 335)
However, if the methods were actually quite effective, and the patterns found could claim to be axioms, the fate of this heritage would be strikingly different, and all this would not only be applied with efficiency, but would also develop, bringing even greater fruits . And these “patterns” were not correctly generalized and systematized from the standpoint of scientific methodology. By choosing faith at the expense of reason, C. Jung obtained results that were inappropriate to reality.
“In general, Jung’s psychology found its followers more among philosophers, poets, and religious figures than in the circles of medical psychiatrists. Training centers for analytical psychology according to Jung, although training course They accept non-medical students no worse than Freud's. Jung admitted that he "never systematized his research in psychology" because, in his opinion, a dogmatic system too easily slipped into a pompous and self-confident tone. Jung argued that the causal approach is finite and therefore fatalistic. His teleological approach expresses the hope that a person should not be absolutely slavishly enslaved by his own past."- from the book 100 Great Scientific Discoveries.
The name of Carl Jung, having become unusually popular for one reason or another, thereby with its authority attached special weight to the ideas associated with it and, as happens in all such cases, sometimes made them indisputably true in the minds of many, so much so that it is regarded as sacrilege to expose them at all. doubt their greatest significance (see Richard Noll's book "The Jungian Cult: The Origins of the Charismatic Movement"). Of course, those who are engaged in research in related subject areas of science should be more sober in this regard and spend some time assessing the real practical value of Carl Jung's legacy and the possibility of using it.
The purpose of this article is to show how and where certain ideas of Carl Jung developed, where they prevail today, and how legitimate they can be in describing real mental processes.
For this purpose, an abstract review of books and articles about Jung has been compiled, a comparison of the information received has been made, and material has been provided for considering individual ideas of Carl Jung from the perspective of modern knowledge. As an illustration of how completely unnecessary (and erroneous) Carl Jung’s ideas and ideas about the mechanisms of mental phenomena are, let the review On Systemic Neurophysiology, which summarizes the extensive factual material accumulated to date, serve as an illustration.
My comments in the authors' text are in blue.

First, I offer excerpts from three books by Carl Jung, the original text of which can be read using the links provided.
From Carl Jung's book Memories, Dreams, Reflections
Before I discovered alchemy, I had several dreams with the same plot.
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In 1926, I had a stunning dream that anticipated my studies in alchemy.
It is very typical for all of C. Jung’s texts to constantly turn to one’s subjective, listening to sensations, feelings, impressions from dreams and making it all so of great importance that this subjectivism becomes the basis of his “scientific” reasoning.
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Wasting no time, I immediately rushed to leaf through thick volumes on the history of religion and philosophy, although I did not hope to clarify anything. But after some time it became clear that this dream also points to alchemy, its heyday precisely in the 17th century. Surprisingly, I completely forgot everything that Herbert Silberer wrote about alchemy. When his book came out, I perceived alchemy as something alien and curious, although I extremely appreciated the author himself, I considered his view of things to be quite constructive, which I wrote to him about. But, as the tragic death of Silberer showed, constructiveness did not turn into prudence for him [He committed suicide. - ed.]. He mainly used later material, which I was poorly versed in. The later alchemical texts were baroque and fantastic; they had to be deciphered first, and only then could their true value be determined.
Quite soon I discovered a striking similarity between analytical psychology and alchemy. The experiments of the alchemists were, in a sense, my experiments, their world was my world. The discovery made me happy: I had finally found a historical analogue of my psychology of the unconscious and found solid ground. This parallel, as well as the restoration of a continuous spiritual tradition coming from the Gnostics, gave me some support. When I read the medieval texts, everything fell into place: the world of images and visions, the experimental data I had collected over time, and the conclusions I had come to. I began to understand them in historical connection. My typological research, which began with my studies in mythology, received a new impetus. Archetypes and their nature have moved to the center of my work. Now I have gained confidence that without history there is no psychology - and first of all this applies to the psychology of the unconscious. When it comes to conscious processes, it is quite possible that individual experience will be sufficient to explain them, but neuroses in their anamnesis require deeper knowledge; when the doctor is faced with the need to take non-standard solution, its associations alone are clearly not enough.
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In my book, I argued that every way of thinking is determined by a certain psychological type and that every point of view is in some way relative. At the same time, the question arose about the unity necessary to compensate for this diversity. In other words, I came to Taoism.
This is the belief that the type determines the way of thinking for the rest of one’s life, despite the fact that a person can change radically due to circumstances, becoming actually a different person, that by recognizing the type one can say a lot about a person and predict his reactions, regardless of the circumstances - the basis typologies are still alive today. This belief presupposes a certain initial predisposition, a hereditary quality, which, in fact, does not have any serious justification, but is very attractive for those who would like to have a theory that allows them to simply approach the knowledge of a person, predict and modify his behavior (See Personality and society).
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In physics, we talk about energy, which manifests itself in various ways, be it electricity, light, heat, etc. The same is true in psychology, where we first of all encounter energy (of greater or lesser intensity), and it can manifest itself in a variety of forms. Understanding libido as energy allows you to obtain a unified and complete knowledge about it. In this case, all kinds of questions about the nature of libido - whether it is sexuality, the will to power, hunger, or anything else - fade into the background. My goal was to create a universal energy theory in psychology, such as exists in the natural sciences. This task was the main one when writing the book “On Psychic Energy” (1928). I have shown, for example, that human instincts are various forms of energetic processes, and, as forces, they are analogous to heat, light, etc.
It is worth remembering this unambiguous explanation of the essence of mental energy and - as a kind of analogue of physical energy and, only in its specialized form for the psyche, which completely resonates with esoteric ideas about this. C. Jung's strong focus on mysticism is constantly and directly reflected in his reasoning and conclusions.
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From the very beginning, problems of worldview and the relationship between psychology and religion occupied an important place in my work. I dedicated the book “Psychology and Religion” (1940) to them, and later quite thoroughly stated my point of view in “Paracelsica” (1942), in its second chapter, “Paracelsus as a Spiritual Phenomenon.” There are many original ideas in the works of Paracelsus; the philosophical attitudes of the alchemists are clearly visible in them, but in a late, baroque expression. After meeting Paracelsus, it seemed to me that I finally understood the essence of alchemy in its connection with religion and psychology - in other words, I began to consider alchemy as a form religious philosophy. My work “Psychology and Alchemy” (1944) is devoted to this problem, in which I was able to turn to my own experience of 1913 - 1917. The process I experienced in those years corresponded to the process of alchemical transformation that was discussed in this book.
Naturally, then no less important for me was the question of the connection between the symbols of the unconscious and Christian symbols, as well as with symbols of other religions.
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Everything I can tell about the other world, about life after death, all these are memories. These are the thoughts and images that I lived with and that haunted me. In a certain sense, they are the basis of my work, because my work is nothing more than a tireless attempt to answer the question: what is the connection between what is “here” and what is “there”? However, I have never allowed myself to talk about life after death expressis verbis (quite clearly - Lat.), otherwise I would have to somehow justify my thoughts, which I am not able to do.
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Parapsychology considers a completely satisfactory proof of the afterlife to be a certain manifestation of the deceased: they declare themselves as ghosts or through a medium, conveying to the living what only they can know about. But even when this is verifiable, questions remain, is this ghost or voice identical to the deceased or is it some kind of projection of the unconscious, were the things that the voice spoke about known to the dead or did they again pass through the department of the unconscious?
Even if we put aside all the rational arguments that essentially prohibit us from talking with confidence about such things, there are still people for whom the confidence that their lives will continue beyond the present existence is very important. Thanks to her, they try to live more intelligently and calmly. If a person knows that he has eternity ahead of him, is this senseless haste necessary?
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The unconscious gives us a certain chance, communicating something or hinting at something with its images. It can give us knowledge that is not subject to traditional logic. Try to remember the phenomena of synchronicity, premonitions or dreams that came true!
...We receive warnings quite often, but we do not know how to recognize them.
The most characteristic statement for esotericists, completely unsubstantiated by serious research into the issue, is pure faith.
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I dare to say that, in addition to the actual mathematical expressions, there are others that are correlated with reality in the most incomprehensible way. Take, for example, the creations of our imagination; due to their high frequency, it is quite possible to consider them as consensus omnium (general opinion - Latin), archetypal motives. Just as there are mathematical equations about which we cannot say which physical realities they correspond to, so there is a mythological reality about which we cannot say which mental reality it corresponds to. For example, equations for calculating the turbulence of heated gases were known long before these processes were thoroughly studied. In the same way, for a long time there have been mythologems that determined the course of certain processes hidden from consciousness, the names of which we were able to give only today.
Not understanding the essence of human abstractions, but replacing everything with ideas about archetypes, K. Jung does not even make an attempt to understand that the same outwardly similar formulas, descriptions, formalizations can be suitable for a variety of real processes within certain frameworks of their abstraction, and found by themselves, do not at all mean their correlation with any reality until the person himself gives them such a correlation.
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Although no one has yet presented satisfactory evidence of the immortality of the soul and the continuation of life after death, there are phenomena that make us think about it. I can accept them as possible references, but I will not dare, of course, to attribute them to the realm of absolute knowledge.
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The unconscious, due to its spatio-temporal relativity, has much better sources of information than consciousness - the latter only directs our meaning perception, while we are able to create our myths about life after death thanks to a few meager hints from our dreams and similar spontaneous manifestations of the unconscious .
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Assuming that life continues “there”, we cannot imagine any other form of existence other than mental, since the soul does not need either space or time. And it is precisely this that generates internal images that then become material for mythological speculation about the other world, which I see exclusively as a world of images. The soul should be understood as something belonging to the other world, or the “land of the dead.” And the unconscious and the “land of the dead” are synonymous.
This is a revelation - for those who seriously believe that the meaning that C. Jung actually puts into the concepts of the unconscious, etc. (and not covering it with masks of decency, as discussed below). - in fact - pure esotericism.
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Since the Creator is one, then His creation and His Son must be one. The doctrine of Divine unity does not allow deviations. And yet the limits of light and darkness appeared without the knowledge of consciousness. This outcome was predicted long before the appearance of Christ - among other things, we can find this in the book of Job or in the famous book of Enoch that has come down to us from pre-Christian times. In Christianity this metaphysical split deepened: Satan, who Old Testament existed under Yahweh, now turns into the diametrical and eternal opposite of God’s world. It is impossible to eliminate it. And it is not surprising that already at the beginning of the 11th century a heretical teaching appeared that it was not God, but the devil who created this world. Such was the entry into the second half of the Christian eon, despite the fact that earlier the myth of fallen angels had already arisen, from whom man received dangerous knowledge of science and art. What would these ancient authors say about Hiroshima?
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Since the god-image, from a psychological point of view, is an obvious basis and spiritual principle, the deep dichotomy that defines it is already recognized as a political reality: a certain mental compensation already takes place. It manifests itself in the form of spontaneously arising rounded images, which represent a synthesis of the opposites inherent in the soul. Here I would include the rumors that have spread widely since 1945 about UFOs - unidentified flying objects.
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I, as you can see, prefer the term "unconscious", although I know that I can just as well say "god" or "demon" if I want to express something mythological. Using the mythological mode of expression, I remember that "mana", "demon" and "god" are synonyms for the "unconscious" and that we know as much as we know little about them. People believe they know much more; and in a certain sense, this faith may be more useful and effective than scientific terminology.
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I do not at all claim that my thoughts about the essence of man and his myth are the last and final word, but, in my opinion, this is exactly what can be said at the end of our era - the era of Pisces, and perhaps on the eve of the upcoming era of Aquarius, which has a human appearance. Aquarius, following two opposite Pisces, is a kind of coniunctio oppositorum and, perhaps, a personality - a self.
...talking about “god” as an “archetype”, we say nothing about his real nature, but we admit that “god” is something in our psychic structure that was before consciousness, and therefore He is in no way cannot be considered generated by consciousness. Thus, we do not reduce the probability of His existence, but we approach the possibility of knowing Him. The last circumstance is extremely important, since a thing, if it is not comprehended by experience, can easily be classified as non-existent.
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If the energy concept of the psyche is correct, then assumptions that contradict it, such as, for example, idea of ​​some metaphysical reality, must seem, to put it mildly, paradoxical. !!!
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Archetypal statements are based on instinctive premises that have nothing to do with reason - they can neither be proven nor disproved using common sense. They have always represented a certain part of the world order - representations collectives (collective representations - French), according to Lévy-Bruhl's definition. Of course, the ego and its will play huge role, but what the ego wants incomprehensibly negates the autonomy and numinosity of archetypal processes. The area of ​​their practical existence is the sphere of religion, and to the extent that religion, in principle, can be considered from the point of view of psychology.