In Our Time - Jung

Episode Date: December 2, 2004

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the extraordinary mind of the psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung. In 1907 Sigmund Freud met a young man and fell into a conversation that is reputed to have lasted for 13 hours. That man was the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung. Freud is celebrated as the great pioneer of the 20th century mind, but the idea that personality types can be 'introverted' or 'extroverted', that certain archetypal images and stories repeat themselves constantly across the collective history of mankind, and that personal individuation is the goal of life, all belong to Jung: "Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart... Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens", he declared. And he also said "Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you".Who was Jung? What is the essence and influence of his thought? And how did he become such a controversial and, for many, such a beguiling figure?With Brett Kahr, Senior Clinical Research Fellow in Psychotherapy and Mental Health at the Centre for Child Mental Health in London and a practising Freudian; Ronald Hayman, writer and biographer of Jung; Andrew Samuels, Professor of Analytical Psychology at the University of Essex and a Jungian analyst in clinical practice.

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Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk, forward slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, in 1907, Sigmund Freud met a young man and fell into a conversation that's reputed to have lasted for 13 hours. The man was the Swiss psychiatrist, Karl Gustav Young.

Freud is celebrated as a great pioneer of the 20th century mind, but the idea that personality-touching can be introverted or extroverted, that certain archetypal images and stories repeat themselves constantly along the collective history and memory of mankind, and that personal individuation is the goal of life all belong to Jung.

Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart, he wrote. Who looks outside dreams? Who looks inside, awakens, he declared. And he also said, show me a sane man, and I will cure him for you. Who was Jung? What was the essence and influence of his thoughts, and how did he become such a controversial

and for many such a beguiling figure. With me to discuss, to discuss Carl Gustav Young is Andrew Samuels, Professor of Analytical Psychology at the University of Essex and a Junglin analyst in clinical practice, Ronald Heyman, writer and biographer of Jung, and Brett Carr, senior clinical research, fellow in psychotherapy and mental health at the Centre for Child Mental Health in London and a practicing Freudian.

Brett Carr, it's difficult to talk about Jung without bringing in Freud, so who had a profound influence on him, on each other in a way. How did they meet and when did they meet? They first met in 197 in person at this famous 13-hour meeting that you referred to. It's extraordinary to think that an intellectual conversation could go on uninterrupted. In fact, in his autobiography, Freud's eldest son Martin remembers the day that Jung first came to the Freud family home in Vienna. And he says at one point, Mrs Freud called them in for a meal. And Jung completely ignored the rest of the Freud family, and he directed all his attention to Freud.

It was quite an extraordinary meeting of these two great minds. What was the seed of that powerful attraction between them? They had corresponded previously. Jung had sent Freud some of his writings, including a book that he had written on schizophrenia, then called Dementia Precox, a late 19th century term for schizophrenia. And it had been very much heavily based on Freud's writings,

and Freud was very much attracted to this. Freud was also quite attracted to Jung, because Jung was one of the first non-Jewish people to take a serious interest in Freud's burgeoning psychoanalytical theory. You see all the earliest members of the Viennese psychoanalytical group, which Freud had started in 1902. They were all Jews. They had names like Max Kahana and Rudolf Reitler,

and psychoanalysis was already becoming known as a Jewish science, and Freud was very, very keen to bring in the rest of the world. So Jung came from Switzerland, outside the boundaries of Austria, and he was a Gentile. And what was the attraction of, why was Jung attracted to Freud? Jung was a very, very ambitious young psychiatrist, and he already had a very plum job at the well-known Berg-Holtzley Asylum just outside of Central Zurich.

And he was working for one of the most eminent psychiatrists at the time, Professor Oiggen Bloiler, who invented the term schizophrenia. And Jung had his eye on the chance. and he found that Freud had some very, very important and very interesting ideas, which would help Jung in his own work with these schizophrenic individuals. And Jung, we must remember, was 31 years old at the time he first met Freud. Freud was a seasoned 50-year-old. And I think Jung was a man who was very much both fearful of father figures,

but also deeply drawn to them. We know from Jung's own autobiographical confessions in his letters to Freud that he had been sexually molested as a young child by an older man. So I think the older man held both a fascination and also a great source of fear for young. Why did they split up and why was it so violent briefly? Oh, the split was very, very painful for both of the men and if you read their letters, their heart-wrenching letters

that these two men who had been best of colleagues, best of friends, really fell by the wayside. And my own personal view is that the personal dimension is much more important than the theoretical dimension. I think this very, very complex relationship between the young 30-year-old and the middle-aged 50-year-old was too much for both of them to handle. But I think there are some important theoretical differences.

And one of the big theoretical differences, of course, is in how they conceptualize the unconscious, which will come to, I know, but particularly the role of sexuality. Jung went in 1912 to New York City and gave nine lectures at Fordham University, where he presented his own version of psychoanalysis, which was somehow denuded of sexuality,

which, as you know, had been such an important cornerstone for Freud. And Freud was absolutely horrified. He felt that Jung was watering down his psychoanical theories. Ronald Heyman, to go to use a Freudian way into Jung, can you tell us something of his childhood and how he came to be the man he was? I think the best word for his childhood is haunted. He grew up in a parsonage.

Eight of his uncles were pastors in this, Protestant Church. And he was terrified a lot of the time. I think he was a very insecure, lonely, scared child, aware of the splits between his parents for a long time they were sleeping in separate rooms, separate beds. He was aware of them separately. His mother, he felt, was very much in touch with the dead, with spirits.

He thought that at night there was something gruesome about her, and he had visions. He describes things like the room of her door where a figure appears, and the head comes off the body to be replaced by another head, and then another and then another. He saw things that weren't really there. He had very little sense of what was real and what was unreal. And before he got his good night kiss,

from his mother each night. He had to say a prayer in which he was asking Jesus to take him in. The Swiss-German word ein-name and can mean either take over, take possession of, or physically eat. And the other word that was used could mean either little chicken or little cake. And he thought he was praying to Jesus that Jesus would eat him. kind of an idea of a cannibal Jesus. This was one of many terrors that afflicted his boyhood. He was just a very scared child.

Seems I wonder that he got to be such an eminent psychiatrist in his early 20s, doesn't it, with that background? In a sense, yes. In another sense, no, because he was his own first patient. Two or three people who have carefully studied the case, psychiatrists think that he was psychotic by the age of three, including the great psychiatrist Winnicott. And I think he had to heal himself. He was desperately aware that he had to make himself

into a whole person. And in one sense, that was the best possible preparation. So we have God, we have torment, we have nightmares, we are headless persons, we have one heck of a childhood. And sorry to be a bit flipper about it, but this is a lot to take in. Andrew Samuels, you're a Jungian analyst, Can you tell us how this led to Jung's, first of all, his liaison with Freud,

is passionate, and it's been described as homoerotic or relationship. And then the way his ideas veered very profoundly away from Freud's. It was certainly a relationship based on mutual need, perhaps a little more mutual than has been mentioned so far, because Jung was pretty well known by the time he got to Vienna. And I think that one way of looking at their relationship is to imagine it sort of as a wholeness that when they split, became two potentially reconcilable halves that in the world of psychology and psychotherapy then went there somewhat different ways,

and perhaps in our time they're reuniting more. I think that the frictions between them produced this kind of a really rather neatly, evenly balanced split in worldviews or perspectives. Now, as regards differences in how they were, worked therapeutically. I mean, let's imagine what you'd get if you went to see Jung. You'd certainly get somebody who knew he was a wounded healer. His ambitiousness, he knew about that.

His crazy childhood, he knew about that. And I think he fashioned a really radical version of the therapy relationship out of these wounds. It was a much more equal relationship than the one that Freud established with his patients. it involved much more of a recognition that in Jung's words, the doctor is in the treatment, just as much as the patient is in the treatment. He said, if anything positive happens in therapy, it's because of the personality of the therapist,

not the techniques and theories, and modern therapists resonate with that. I can see Brett nodding. It's absolutely up-to-the-minute stuff. You heal because of who you are more than what you know and what you've been taught. And then your whole... The whole psychological life would be treated by Jung, responded to by Jung, very differently from the way Freud did.

There's no on high technical application of knowledge. There's no reading of the unconscious as a kind of bag of dirty tricks, and I mean dirty as in sexual repression, nasty, aggressive, destructive stuff. The unconscious is those things for Jung, but it's also much more positive. a creative source that helps you live your life to its fullest extent possible. Your dreams are not attempts by your unconscious to deceive you. You can read your dreams much more easily in the Jungian vein than in the Freudian vein. If you dream about a king, Freud might say, who's this king?

If you dream about a king for Jung, he's going to say, which are the ruling or governing parts of your personality? Where does your kingship reside? It's not an attempt to turn the images and symbols of a dream into something else, which, as those of us who, with respect, read Freud, find over and over again is something sexual. But let's just take us, if we can just attempt to have a one breaking point between the two moments, was it Freud's outrage at, I'm not looking for the row, but the intellectual divergent, was it Freud's outrage at these lectures which said,

what you've said, that the drive, the libido is not, and not KN of sexuality. Everything is not driven by that. It is not the pan-universal cause and factor in the way that lives are developed. Was that the split? Yeah, that's spot on. I don't think Jung ruled sexuality out, but he had a notion of psychological energy

that runs through each person and that this energy can go into different channels, moral channel, a social channel, a channel of aggression and a sexual channel. So I would say that for Jung it's sex and not no sex. Can I move to Jung's one of his big ideas, the collective unconscious? Now that is something if we can grapple with for a few minutes. Andrew, what is it?

How would you describe it? Then we'll go around, the others. I'll come in on this, please. What's he on about there? That there's more to psychology than resides in an individual, in a nutshell. that there's something about families, groups, nations, the world that can be discussed psychologically, something held in common by members of these various groups. For Jung, there are basically two strands to this.

I call them the body strand and the culture strand. The body strand is that, of course, there's a collective psychology. We're all possessors of the same bodies with the same hormones, the same apparatus, the same brain transatlose, the same brain. structure. So isn't it obvious, this is the body argument for the collective unconscious, that we will all function similarly, if not

in the same way, psychologically, in a given situation? When we're pricked, we'll bleed, when we're angry, we'll jump and so forth. So I think that's a very powerful and scientifically discussable idea that out of our human bodies comes a human psychology shared by

all. It also, I think, can become quite a mundane idea. There's another aspect, the culture aspect, which is much less scientifically discussable, but much more fascinating and exciting, which is that all over the world, at all times, our similarities throw up similar cultural products. Fairy tales, myths, rituals, religious practices,

and emotions can all be understood in that way. Ronald Hammett, and I come to you on this. He said that the instincts and archetypes together form the collective unconscious. But Jung went very deep. didn't he, said, since man and woman became what we are, the experience of being what we are and what we encountered, stayed with us, is in all of us, and is part of what can be even a corrective to the way we live. And it is thrown up in dreams and fantasies and in certain extreme forms of mental distress. And that's where we can see it. That was his view, isn't it?

That's right, yes, certainly. and he took a much more religious view of this than Freud did and it's an attempt to come to terms with what is beyond the personal. He was deeply interested in getting beyond the confines of the individual personality and he saw all these areas where we have everything in common with other people. I'm going to hammer on about these archetypes right now. How do you get hold of them? I mean, the listeners out there,

it's a wonderful word, archetypical is used every day of the week. What did he mean by them? How did he see them? And what proofs could he bring to bear? Jung, I have to say, was not as clear a writer as Freud was. We must remember that Freud won the Gertr Prize for literature back in 1930. And I think Jung is not always his own best expositor.

But as I understand the archetypes, they're like a kind of psychological deal. of the mind, if I can use that description. He believed that they're here in all of us as these common psychic structures. I like to think of the archetypes as almost a kind of cast of characters from the Comedia del Arte, as though each of us has in our minds the potential to play different roles in our lives. I mean, some of the great archetypes that Jungians have talked about are the archetype of the mother or the great mother, the Magna Mater. or, for example, the kind of Peter Pan character, if you like,

in Latin the Pouer Eternus. I mean, Peter Pan is a kind of archetypal figure, if you like, and we meet a lot of people who in their old years are still quite youthful and trying to avoid the adult responsibilities. And I think Jung felt that these archetypes allowed us to express some of these stock characters, which he felt were common to all cultures and all historical epochs. Ronald Lehman, how did Freud, sorry, how did Jung him, that's a Jungian slip here,

how did Jung himself try to validate the collective unconscious? In various ways, at various times, but one maybe helpful source is philosophy. You can go right back to Plato, you can talk about the ideal and the idea of the table as opposed to this particular table and that particular table. But as far as giving examples of archetypes, in a BBC interview, for instance, when John Freeman was talking to Jung and asked him for evidence of these, the example that Jung gave was a conversation with a schizophrenic patient.

and a man talked about a tube hanging from the sun and the idea that wind is caused in this way. And actually here there's a bit of faking of evidence which Jung sometimes did. I mean, he did, you use the word fake, and he did fake it. He at one stage, didn't he, claimed somebody had a archetypal experience which, as I remember, consisted of something associated with the mythraic religion and something about it which he could not have known about it,

but the guy could have known about it because the book had been published about it. That's what Ronald's talking about it. That's what you're referring to. I'm fine, right. And he was also prepared to accept God as equivalent to the collective unconscious. This is one way in which he defined it. Andrew Simon. Yeah. Jung was a great traveller, and he made a point of visiting cultures as far different from Europe and from Switzerland as possible.

I mean, he went to India, he went to North Africa, he went to Kenya, and he spent time with the Native Americans in the southwest of the United States. Why? Some people say he was trying to prove the existence of the collective unconscious. Maybe he was, but one of the things he was doing,

it seems to me, was building bridges between Western perspectives and non-Western perspectives. Of course, he made all kinds of mistakes. He idealized these so-called primitive, which a word nobody uses anymore, but he used, primitive cultures. Nevertheless, if you actually go into why he did this and what he saw the

collective unconscious as doing as an idea, he was finding out something wrong about the West. He travelled to these exotic places to look into all these motifs and rituals and religious practices so different from Europe, not to collect anthropological material about India or North Africa, but to throw light on what was going wrong in 1920s and 1930s. Europe. That's a profoundly humane and indeed political project. And that, I think, is one way of understanding how Jung used the idea of the collective

unconscious to build these bridges. Yes, I'm glad. Would you like to develop that, I mean, I come to that conclusion from the notes and stuff I've been reading, that it was, the collective unconscious wasn't something that grew out of him. It was something that grew out of the society that he detested at the time. Anti-materialist, it was anti-scientific. He didn't

like the way things were going. As you're saying, the 20s and 30s though, there's another aspect of that will come to in a minute. But that was the drive. seems to me, an anti-drive, as much as a pro-drive. Right. Oh, I very much agree with what's been said. I think the collective unconscious is a concept that Freudians in particular really struggle with. And I think more open-minded Freudians are trying to take it on board.

But I would think most people who are not practicing Jungians regarded as rather a piece of madness, actually, stemming from Jung's own mad childhood. I know that's a potentially highly reductive reading of this very, very magisterial concept. but it is one that people are really, really grappling with at the moment. And do you think Freud himself, are we only just as a little post-script of this, had Freud a view on this? Freud was very, very much incensed in his later writings

by what he learned of Jung's later writings, and Freud says Jung is becoming his own prophet. So there was tremendous rivalry. Each was becoming a pope of his own fiefdom in the 1920s and 30s. So finally on this collective... How did that come to bear, how does that come to bear in the sessions, if we're bringing it back to the couch, as it were. What does collective unconsciousness do for, as an idea,

we've sort of rummaged around it, but in terms of its specific value as part of an examination of the distress that somebody might be in or what they're aiming to, what part does it play? Well, I think, as Andrew has said, it's very much linked, certainly was linked in Jung's mind to helping clients' patients grapple with this big question of the meaning of life. It's quite striking when you read first-hand accounts

of the many Americans and British people who went over to Zurich to have an analysis with Jung. And, of course, what isn't widely appreciated is that some of the people who came over had sessions with Jung in the morning and then went for us top-up session later in the afternoon with Jung's one-time mistress, Antonio Wolfe, who then became a former patient of Jung's,

who herself became a Jungian analyst. and quite a few of them write, you know, Jung, when I was in my sessions with Jung, he would always focus on the collective unconscious and these bigger existential questions. But if I needed to talk about my relationship with mum and dad, it was Antonio Wolfe who sorted it out later in the afternoon, which is a very different approach to therapy

that most of us would practice today. Well, let's stick to one or two, before we go, before we move on to the final stage, let's stick to one or two other ideas. The idea of individuation, Andrew, now what is he saying there? The idea of individuation is completely different from the idea of mental health or maturity. It is simply becoming yourself different from other people,

but never out of relationship with them. People often read Jung on individuation as saying you just have to become yourself. He doesn't say that. He says you have to become yourself in order to enter fully into relationships with other people. But unlike Freud, who gives specific directions almost, I mean, he almost gives you a roadmap in an A to Z, and he gives notes to psychiatrists themselves, do this and this will. It comes in a much more amorphous way, doesn't it?

Sometimes I wish Jung had given recommendations to Jungian analysts. He absolutely refused to do it, which I suppose nowadays one can see as being to his credit. It goes back to his idea of the unconscious as creative. There's a certain intelligence, again in quotes, in the unconscious, from a Jungian perspective. You know what you need to do in life. The problem is there's a metaphorical wall or curtain between you and your knowledge of what you need to do in life.

Therapy attempts to lift that. So the solution is not found in the interpretations based on knowledge of the therapist or analyst. The solution is found within the subject, within the individual, who knew it all along, didn't know that they knew it, and can be helped to see that they do know it. And that is individuation? I think so, yes. How does it differ from Freud's idea of maturity, then? Well, Freud said maturity, like normality, were ideal fictions.

And in a sense, individuation is also an ideal fiction. We don't really talk about individuation anymore. We talk about individuating or the individuation processes or something like that. You can be quite mad and quite outside the social norms, quite a disreputable or idiosyncratic person and be said to be individuating. It is very different from a kind of normative, moralistic approach which, saving your presence breadth,

I think, is implicit in Freudian psychoanalysis. There's a right way to do sex, there's a right way to be aggressive, there's a right way to relate to people, and so on. That is missing in Jung's notion of individuation. It's not the Freud I recognise, Andrew, I have to say. What about the Jung? It is the Jung, I recognise.

I mean, you know, I think modern-day practitioners are becoming more integrated and we are talking to one another. Ronald Hammond, can I move back to the life for a moment? I mean, Jung, one of the charges that the Freudians and others brought against Jung was although he was infatuated with a Jewish patient of his and he had a Jewish secretary, his work's being tarnished by his association with anti-Semitism and even with Nazism. Can you tell us a little about that? and how true it was and what place it played in the reputation of Jung.

Well, there were two periods in Jung's life when he benefited enormously from not being Jewish. One has already been discussed. Freud, although he was in his early 50s when he met Jung, felt that he wasn't the right person to lead the psychoanalytic movement into the future, that somebody non-Jewish was needed, and that this young charismatic, this magnificently magnetic young man in his 30s, was the right leader, and Jung became the first president of the International Psychoanalytic Association.

So that was one fruit of not being Jewish. The second period in which he benefited started when Hitler came to power in 1933, and throughout the German speaking, world, which is to say the main world in which psychoanalysis was operating, the biggest territory of psychoanalysis, Freud and Freudianism was going to be farboughton. And already in his, he went in, Jung went to Germany in 1933 to give some lectures and he was interviewed on radio and he understood what was expected of him and he came up with the attack on Freudianism that was wanted.

He said that it was natural for a mass movement to move towards the Fuhrer. Now, in German, the word Fuhrer means leader, so that was a deliberately ambiguous sentence in which he could be referring both to the leader and to Hitler individually. And he, more specifically, he launched an attack starting then, but going on right through the Nazi period, in which he denounced psychoanalysis as destructive and talked about Jewish psychology as if this were relevant only to Jews.

And he said that he had analyzed so many Jews that he knew what the relationship was between the psychic peculiarities of the race. So this would quite rightly taint and tarnish his, character, did it have the same effect? Did it make people rethink and dismiss his ideas? I'm afraid briefly. I was perhaps the first Jungian analyst nearly 30 years ago to say Jung was anti-Semitic.

The Jungian community of analysts and academics has done the best it can to correct those pieces of theory that are wrong and to apologise. It is, though, also the case that the baby can get thrown out with the bathwater. and the charge of anti-semitism, which, as I say, is substantially correct, although one has to be nuanced about it, I think you'd agree as the biographer, it's more complicated than just he was an anti-Semite. That charge is, I think, sometimes used to dismiss other ideas of Jung's that really deserve respectful attention.

Thank you very much for giving so much to it. That's to Brett Carr, Ronald Heyman and Andrew Samuels. And next week we'll be talking about Machiavelli. and the city-states of Italy. Thank you very much for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy

at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio 4.