Jung carl gustav biography of williams

WILLIAM JAMES AND C. G. JUNG

EUGENE TAYLOR

Little known and scarcely written about is the significance William James had on the intellectual destiny of Carl Gustav Jung. Historical evidence indicates that James’s early influence on Jung played no small part in Jung’s thought and its subsequent evolution.

According to Jung’s own account, James’s writings helped to shape his earliest formulation of psychological types; James was the guiding spirit in the direction Jung took in diverging from Freud over the essential nature of psychic energy; he influenced Jung’s definition of science, and his views on the collective unconscious. Early on James impressed Jung with the importance of viewing personality as a holistic totality that quite transcends the bounds imposed on it by the rational mind. Let us now look at facts that will show the importance of James for Jung.

After the publication of his Principles in 1890, William James turned his attention away from laboratory psychology toward psychotherapy and psychic phenomena. His keen appreciation of the great power inherent in a non-traumatic exploration of the unconscious led him in 1892 to call for a greater emphasis on visual imagery as a tool for understanding nonverbal states of awareness, in 1894 to present the work of Breuer and Freud to the American scientific public for the first time, and to suggest that their work was evidence that the American mental healers were practicing sound principles of psychotherapy. He would, first in 1894 and again in 1898, publicly defend the mental healing profession in the Massachusetts legislature against the attacks of the medical men. In 1896, he outlined the most recent advances in our understanding of a dynamic, individual psychology of the unconscious and demonstrated the workings of its more pathological manifestations in the social sphere, when he delivered his unpublished lectures on Exceptional Mental States before the Lowell Institute. Furth

Today is the birthday of Carl Gustav Jung, born July 26. 1875 (d. June 6, 1941).

CG Jung was one of the towering figures of the 20 century.  Not only was he “towering” in accomplishments as a psychiatrist, but he actually lived and worked, part-time, in a tower that he built in Bollingen, Switzerland not far from his family home in Kusnacht.  That thought reminded me of another tower-man, and contemporary of Jung’s, William Butler Yeats (June 13, 1865-January 28, 1939).  Like Jung, WB Yeats lived and wrote some of his most famous poems in an old Norman tower near the town of Gort, Ireland.  And the similarities don’t end there.

Both men carved inscriptions on their tower homes.  Jung’s said, “”Philemonis Sacrum—Fausti Poenitentia (Shrine of Philemon—Repentance of Faust)’” according to his collaborator Aniela Jaffe in the chapter on “The Tower” in his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections.  Yeats wrote the following (appearing just before the poems in “The Tower”):

To be carved on a stone at

Thoor Ballylee

I, the poet William Yeats

With old mill boards and sea-green slates,

And smithy work from the Gort forge,

Restored this tower for my wife George;

And may these characters remain

When all is ruin once again.

(#203 from The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, rev. 2 Ed.)

For Jung the inscription was about the “tension of opposites” such as good and evil represented by the archetypal, wise old man, Philemon, and the soul-less, Faust.  Yeats also expressed the tension between change, “ruin,” and constancy, “may these characters remain.”  He went so far as to develop a symbol, the “gyre,” to express this tension.  They were intersecting cones (as in the Star of David) representing oppositional forces (Ellmann, Richard.  1978 Yeats: The Man and His Masks, p. 231).

In the opening of his poem (#262), Vacillation, Yeats echoes this theme:

Between extremities

Man runs his course;

He then touches on anoth

(1875-1961)

Who Was Carl Jung?

Carl Jung believed in the “complex,” or emotionally charged associations. He collaborated with Sigmund Freud, but disagreed with him about the sexual basis of neuroses. Jung founded analytical psychology, advancing the idea of introvert and extrovert personalities, archetypes and the power of the unconscious. Jung published numerous works during his lifetime, and his ideas have had reverberations traveling beyond the field of psychiatry, extending into art, literature and religion as well.

Early Life

Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung was born July 26, 1875, in Kesswil, Switzerland. The only son of a Protestant clergyman, Jung was a quiet, observant child who packed a certain loneliness in his single-child status. However, perhaps as a result of that isolation, he spent hours observing the roles of the adults around him, something that no doubt shaped his later career and work.

Jung's childhood was further influenced by the complexities of his parents. His father, Paul, developed a failing belief in the power of religion as he grew older. Jung's mother, Emilie, was haunted by mental illness and, when her boy was just three, left the family to live temporarily in a psychiatric hospital.

As was the case with his father and many other male relatives, it was expected that Jung would enter the clergy. Instead, Jung, who began reading philosophy extensively in his teens, bucked tradition and attended the University of Basel. There, he was exposed to numerous fields of study, including biology, paleontology, religion and archaeology, before finally settling on medicine.

Jung graduated the University of Basel in 1900 and obtained his M.D. two years later from the University of Zurich.

Career Beginnings

While attending the University of Zurich, Jung worked on the staff at Burgholzli Asylum, where he came under the guidance of Eugene Bleuler, a pioneering psychologist who laid the groundwork for what is now conside

Description

“You know that he didn’t like a doctrinaire approach to his work. He has been known to say that he was glad he wasn’t a “Jungian”. And so I think it half amused him to think that somebody working on the edition had a different background.” – William McGuire

William McGuire was born in Florida in 1917. He began his work with the Bollingen Foundation as a freelance editor in 1948. Later he became the managing editor of all of the Bollingen Series and Executive Editor of the Collected Works of C. G. Jung. He served as the editor of The Freud/Jung Letters, and of several volumes of Jung’s seminars as well. With R.F.C. Hull, he was co-editor of Jung Speaking, published by Princeton University Press. Here he gives a detailed personal sketch of the history of the Bollingen Foundation, and of the relationship of Jung to Mary and Paul Mellon, who made the work of the foundation possible. He describes some of his own meetings with Jung and other people significant in events occurring in the formative years of Analytical Psychology. He is author of Bollingen, An Adventure in Collecting the Past, and Poetrys’ Catbird Seat. William McGuire died in September 2009.

This interview was conducted by Suzanne Wagner, Ph.D., a Jungian analyst practicing in Sausalito, California, and filmed in a residence in West Los Angeles, in March of 1982.

Producer: George Wagner – Director: Suzanne Wagner, Ph.D. – Editor/Line Producer: Tee Bosustow – Music: John Adams.

Also available for video streaming.