Jung 101: An Introduction to Jungian Psychology

[Music] welcome everyone to jung 101 jung's copernican revolution my name is dr james newell and i want to thank you all for registering for this free introductory class on the basic outlines of jungian psychology now this course jung 101 is really the flagship course for our whole series of courses because without this basic outline uh for those of you who have no familiarity whatsoever with jungian psychology you really need to have a grasp of the terminology because although it's really not very complicated that is to say it's not hard to learn these concepts there are

many of them so you could say that it's complex and we want to take each element one at a time put it kind of tease it apart and then put it back together and by the time you finish this course you'll be able to move on to the ideas of practical application and understanding just how jung can be so helpful in individual growth and cultural transformation and i i really think it's so vitally important in our times today i'm kind of an activist on this topic which is why i have become the director of the

deaf psychology alliance and i'm now the director of the deaf psychology academy online because i just want to empower people to have access to this information and as i say it's not hard but it's complex and so i hope to break it down in ways that we can all understand it and work with it so what are we going to do in this first session in general we will look at what jungian psychology is and why as i say i feel it's so valuable to contemporary culture and yet at the same time it's widely overlooked

by contemporary culture specifically we're going to look at the basics of jungian theory and discover some of the ways in which jungian psychology can be of enormous practical value as i've said for individual personal growth and for collective cultural transformation we'll briefly look at some of the key events and developments in the life of cg young just to give us some context and some background on how he came up with this theory and really what sort of cultural milieu he emerged out of then we'll finally uh run through a brief overview of some of the

different components of the eight modules of the actual jung 101 course itself this is the introductory module but then they'll be module one two three on up to eight which will as i say piece by piece move us through the different ideas so why should anyone take jung 101 why even have a class on young 101 there are some people when you ask them they'll say well jung is passe he's been some people even say he's been proven to be wrong yadda yadda uh obviously i disagree with this uh heartily my own motivation as i

said uh for initiating this series of courses was my recognition of the need for a series of courses like this it's by absolute conviction that jung's work has enormous value both for individuals and for the culture secondly the fact that most universities major universities in general do not teach courses on young or jungian psychology alone jungian psychology at all my own training took place in divinity school in divinity schools some divinity schools they will teach union psychology because i think if it being is esoteric and mystical and certainly jung involved himself in those kinds of

studies but he he emphasized over and over that he was attempting and i feel that he was very successful but attempting to conduct a scientific study yet in the sciences science departments you'll find very little interest in jung generally speaking and my third reason is although there is much interest in the work of carl jung has been for many years there's a big renaissance in the 1990s uh there's also a lot of misunderstanding and a lot of misinformation out there about jung and his work this makes it very difficult uh for those trying to understand

jung's work it also undermines the efforts of people like myself to accurately communicate what jung said so our intention with these courses is to make jung's work both available and understandable to a wider audience and i really hope that we'll be able to empower people to take this knowledge and use it in practical ways to do their own inner work if you're a professional counselor coach pastoral person be able to use this information to work with the people that you work with if you're already licensed you can add this component to the work that you

do and to uh help when we just look at the culture today there is scarcely i can't think of and we have lots of chaos lots of problems lots of uh just mass violence and wars and political corruption everything a culture that's obsessed with celebrity and obsessed with materiality there is not an area of those and many many others that i could name that cannot be informed and a lot of light shed on them when we understand the workings of the psyche psyche of the people individually and and how mass psyche works jungian psychology gives

us an enormous insight into these things and is enormously practically valuable not just for an individual's inner work but for understanding culture and for intervening positively in culture in ways that can improve life for everyone that's my very very strong conviction so one might well ask why do i feel that jung's work is valuable and so vital to the world today and why do i want to help people to understand it better well and i named this module this introductory module youngest copernican revolution well what does that mean well in the year 1543 astronomer nicholas

copernicus published his groundbreaking book entitled on the revolutions of the celestial spheres it's a long title but with that book he ushered in what has come to be called the copernican revolution prior to copernicus the ptolemaic astronomical system asserted that the sun and everything else revolved around the earth and that the earth was the center of the universe this was called geocentrism copernicus in a radical move challenged this view and asserted that the only proper explanation for the observable movement of the stars and the planets was to recognize that it was actually the earth which

revolved around the sun not the sun that revolved around the earth now this idea that the uh sun revolved around the earth was called helio uh sorry that the earth revolved around the sun was called heliocentrism it means the sun being the center helio and geocentrism means the sun revolves around the earth almost a full 100 years after the publication of copernicus's discovery the great galileo towards the end of his life was found guilty of heresy and spent the remainder of his life under house arrest for supporting this copernican view of heliocentrism the idea that

the earth revolved around the sun now there's much of interest in this story of copernicus and galileo but i mention it here only to make two points first that as the intellectual historian thomas kuhn points out in his classic book the structure of scientific revolutions he says that even after being presented with solid scientific evidence it often takes mainstream thinkers a long time to adapt to a new paradigm and you may already have guessed that the second point i want to make is that jung's work for us has ushered in just such a new paradigm

and this is why because it's a new paradigm it's taken people a long time to understand it many of his ideas have been seeping into culture but broadly and particularly among intellectuals he's very much resisted jung has ushered in a scientific revolution perhaps even more important than that of copernicus it took more than a hundred years for the world to accept the copernican revolution and it seems likely that it will take even longer for jung's ideas to be completely understood and accepted now what is this revolution well the old way of thinking was that the

ego the individual personality was the center of the psyche and was the guiding center of the human organism jung has shown that this is by no means true the guiding center of the human organism for jung is rather found deep in the unconscious psyche this guiding center makes itself felt whenever the conscious mind violates the sovereignty of this unconscious psychic center jung called this center the archetype of the self so what does this mean culturally say i'm asking you to suspend disbelief for a moment i think many of you must have already or you wouldn't

be taking this course so what does it mean culturally uh let's let's uh imagine for a minute that jung is correct that the ego is not the center of the organism and uh he's not the first to say that but he's deepened it and this idea of the self is certainly he's the first to propose this well culturally it's been said that up to the period of the enlightenment human beings have progressed from instinct to reason and that now in the period we're in the transition to come is to move from eat reason rationality to

intuition now this does not mean a rejection of rationality or rejection of rational thought rather it is a higher order of reason that jung is proposing jung referred to this original cultural shift the first shift or this first transition that i'm calling uh from uh instinct to reason um he called it uh eros to logos many different terms feminine to masculine from the mythic to the rational uh any of these descriptions is accurate to a certain extent the point is that however we understand this movement it was an important and necessary development it's not something

that we want to reject we want to perfect it we want to move from instinct to reason fully this movement from instinct to reason has actually been the project of science the project of modern science has been to perfect reason and the highest goals of science has been have been to perfect human reason for the service of human life and community this was jung's goal as well however jung recognized that so-called pure reason was understood to emanate from the conscious ego from the center of of the psychic universe psychic simply means of the psyche doesn't

mean uh being clairvoyant or having special powers psychic simply means for jung of the psyche and this was how even today you'll hear people talk and they take only into consideration the conscious mind this does not take into account the intrusions which invade consciousness from the unconscious this being the case in order to perfect reason it's necessary for human beings to include the unconscious and all of its imperatives and all of its intrusions and all of our deliberations must include that aspect of human life or we're just going to be at a loss now this

happens culturally when there's a mass shooting it happens culturally when there's all manner of anti-social uh explosions of bad behavior whether it be war or whatever but we can't unless we're in a position of power we we don't have much influence on that but we have absolute influence on our own lives when we take steps in accordance with uh something that is resonant and congruent with the movement of the unconscious psyche without losing our ability to think and discern rationally that's the key difference between jung and what some people will say is a regression back

to this old level of instinct so for jung what this means is that not just thinking but also sensation feeling and intuition must all be levels of perception that are available to the personality sensation how we feel things feeling our emotions intuition and ability to grasp the deep unconscious while discerning properly with the thinking mind for this to be possible for for the integration of all these four functions what you call the four functions thinking sensation feeling and intuition for this to be possible we must learn to dialogue with listen to and take seriously not

only the personal unconscious the memories of our past deeds and our misdeeds but also we must listen to and take seriously the structured energy forms of the structured deep unconscious jung called these structured energy patterns archetypes of the collective unconscious now simply by mentioning archetypes of the collective unconscious we've already entered into deep waters while some of you may be quite familiar with jungian terms and jungian jargon others may not in order to understand jung's theory properly though we will need to learn his vocabulary and his understanding of unconscious processes now what i've tried to

give you so far is just a a broad as i say cultural and historical view of the development you could say even the evolution of consciousness but in order to get into that more deeply and understand it more thoroughly in a way that's not confusing and overwhelming we're going to take this piecemeal little bit by little bit so what i want to do now is to guide us through a brief outline of jung's theory of course this whole course is going to be as i say taking it piecemeal we're going to go through it a

little bit quickly now because i just want to encapsulate it in this brief class and then throughout the the next eight modules we'll tease it out more do it slowly piecemeal and then bring everything together and see how it functions as a whole as a theoretical systematic theory some people suggest that jung was not systematic i think time has shown that he was but we have to really dig into his work to do it if you want to go into his 20 volume collected works and dig out the theory you can what i want to

do is make a little easier and also point the way to some other thinkers some other jungians who have already done a lot of the legwork to tease out these ideas and make them easier to understand without getting into all of jung's digressions jung is a wonderful author wonderful to read i highly recommend that you read jung through this course and and even if you don't take the course just he's just a wonderful author but in some of his works he'll start into a digression an associative line of thought which is purposeful it's not just

random but it can throw people off and i'm going to try and keep things focused on what we're doing so hopefully by understanding some of the overriding theory we will then better be able to understand how the basic union concepts that we'll be studying can be helpful in doing inner work for ourselves and understanding how we can work with others if we're professional or just a counselor of any kind and also how the culture can be transformed when people begin to understand just what is going on internally in the psyche and what's really at stake

ultimately is cultural generativity each of us each mature human being must learn how to transform narcissism into healthy self-esteem and with a healthy sense of self-esteem we must learn how to then provide generative care for our families for our communities for our culture and for the planet and jungian theory provides us with a way to steward these kinds of energies when we have a strong enough he calls it the individuation process the first stage is to develop a strong sense of self so we can contain these energies and the second phase is to turn within

and be able to generate steward generative energies through the work that we do to help others it keeps us going even when we're tired even when we're not really feeling oh i can't do it now because we're tied into those energies we rally the energy and serve our families and our culture in ways that we wouldn't be able to do otherwise as i say young's term is individuation individuation is the word that he used to describe the differentiation of the conscious ego from the unconscious self that's the first phase is to differentiate the two as

young says the aim of individuation is nothing less than to divest the self of the self meaning the personality self here the self of the false wrappings of the persona on the one hand and of the suggestive power of primordial images on the other and what he's saying is we'll get into those terms persona and primordial images as we move through this class by primordial images he means the archetypes and by the persona he means the face that we put out to the public now we'll see here a this is what i would call a

metaphorical representation if you cut open the human mind you will not see an ego in a cell feel now if someone does a a dissection of a brain they will not see a persona or consciousness or any of that this is how we sort of abstract these subjective experiences now you see on the outside of the circle we have the persona that is the face that we develop in order to face the world outside that of necessity it's not represented here but that of necessity as i pick and choose what i want to show people

out in the world now naturally i'm i'm withholding other things and what falls into what jung called the shadow is those things that i've withheld and i don't want people in society to see the center of consciousness as you see here is the ego it's the sort of the processing center the unconscious where the there's many layers of the unconscious and we'll talk about that in the first module but the uh the first basic layer of the personal unconscious is where complexes are where the uh things that fall out if i i know where my

keys are they're i can't find them then i remember oh they're so well dipped into the unconscious and not deep unconscious but that's something that's dipped into the unconscious but i can pull it out there are other things that are not so easily uh rescued or retrieved from the unconscious then uh there's a representation here of the self the archetype of the self the archetypes will dwell in this area below called the collective unconscious and the communication between the ego through the personal unconscious to the archetype itself looks very direct here in this diagram as

we'll see it can be a very very difficult pain staking jung at times referred to it compared it to crucifixion he said the crucifixion actually was a lovely uh metaphoric representation of the individuation process so the individuation process is not a pretty easy uh candy canes and unicorns kind of experience it's a very very very very painful and difficult one but well worthwhile when we can withstand it now a key idea in and this is an idea that i'm sure many of you are familiar with but a key idea in depth psychology in general it

really began with freud it's not unique to jung but a very important idea is the idea of projection now in this diagram we see a again a metaphoric representation these by the way are from esther harding's book the i and the not i which i highly recommend it's a wonderful book for understanding these structures that we're discussing the textbook we're going to use in this course is murray stein's jung's map of the soul but even in conjunction with that book harding's book the eye and the knot i is really a wonderful adjunct so the idea

of projection is that when anyone it develops the idea or rather the process it develops very very early spontaneously but what happens is when we have we see we encounter something in the world and we see it out there and but we don't it's unknown there's something in the world that's unknown unfamiliar and when something unknown or unfamiliar approaches us our very evolution teaches us that uh it's actually practical and useful to have a little anxiety because you don't know it could be a predator it could be any kind of a dangerous thing so there's

some anxiety and in a state of enzy anxiety the in this case we're looking at a child's diagram so the the child reaches into the unconscious and tries to find something that is similar to this thing some some way to differentiate to identify this thing so the child thinks of this thing and then associates it with what is seen in the outside world well when i instead of seeing what's in the outside world i'm actually seeing part of myself that's is what freud originally called projection and jung used that term as well i've projected an

unconscious content onto a person a thing or a situation in the outer world and i experienced that thing in the outer world partly as what's actually out there and partly as a part of myself that i'm not conscious of it but i'm really in conversation with myself not with the thing in the outer world now to better illustrate this concept jung in a book that was uh key in his big sort of break with a separation from freud uh he came up with a book called it was originally called the um psychology of the unconscious

later he sort of updated it and it became symbols of transformation but in this book he points to the myth of the hero as a way to illustrate the tendency of the ego to descend into the unconscious in order to access the libido or the psychic energy that is available through the archetypes as i say this was described by neumann as being um a process that's of a process of fragmentation that occurs again through uh projection onto something outside ourselves usually another person uh one way that another quote this is a quote from eric neumann

which he says in the process of realizing and assimilating and unconscious content the ego makes a descent from the conscious standpoint into the depths in order to raise up the treasure this is from his classic book the origins neumann's classic book the origins and history of consciousness and in both jung's symbols of transformation and in neumann's the origins and history of consciousness jung and neumann both talk about the role of the hero and the symbolic nature of the heroes what joseph campbell later came to call the hero's journey and what we see here is a

depiction of drawn very much from joseph campbell's work who of course was very influenced by jung and the the cycle is represented here again metaphorically and symbolically through this little cycle around this circle so there's a departure we're in the ordinary world then there's a call to adventure or perhaps a refusal of the call some event happens something interrupts the normal process of life and there's what is sometimes referred to as norman just referred to as a dissent or a departure perhaps the hero meets a mentor but however he or she crosses the threshold there

are tests there are allies there are enemies sometimes little animals come and help the hero as they do in fairy tales eventually there's this descent deep deep deep down into the underworld or someplace an innermost cave someplace where there's great suffering there's some sort of ordeal then there's death and rebirth there's a reward the energy of the reward the treasure is seized there's a road back to the ordinary world there's a sort of resurrection and this treasure this boon in this case it's called the elixir is brought back to the world to serve the community

and the circle continues so one way to understand this in terms of as we were talking about earlier this process of differentiation from what again this esther harding calls it the i and the not i this is a diagram series of diagrams in edward edinger's book ego and archetype another book that's highly recommended see this original state sometimes mythologically called the euroboric state but we can talk about that later but the the idea of identification of the ego and the self are completely in case this is what jung called participation or participation mystique and or

participation mystique in which everything that i see i think i'm seeing the outer world but really i'm just seeing my own unconscious projected onto the other world because i'm totally identified with the unconscious this is this diagram where the ego is completely encased now when i go through the hero's journey cycle through that a little bit of differentiation happens i've got a little bit of maturity a little bit of separation a little bit of consciousness and i'm not projecting quite so much i'm not so uh possessed by the archetype so possessed so um in an

inflated state as you would say and we're going to get into that more in a minute but a little bit by a little bit then i go through the hero's journey again i cycle through it many many times and i'm more and more as we see in figure 3 differentiated and if i can do this or if anyone can do this and with this line you see this line neumann originally came up with the term ego self-access and edward edinger uses it again uh in his book ego and archetype but if we can maintain this

context this connection this dialogue with the deep unconscious with the archetypal self where this new uh numinous and highly charged energy is available to us if we keep that contact with the archetype of the self through many many descents and rising up again going through this cycle of the hero's journey over and over again then we begin to get a place now if if that line isn't there if it's just the ego on top and the self on the bottom this would be called a state of dissociation a state of alienation where there's no connection

this is really the state of modern man or modern people is where there's very little line if any at all connecting to the self there's no uh religious sense there's no sense of of reality there's there's no gods i everything is centered around this this is the the geocentric state in copernican terms where everything revolves around the ego but when that happens there's great great great instability one is going to either be inflated by an archetype thinking that i am everything or completely alienated from the archetype and i'm going to go into that more in

just a minute but that's why when we can maintain this ego self-access where there's a communication with the deep unconscious not just a communication like sending notes back and forth but where there's a real sense of stewarding this archetypal energy where i know it's not my energy it's collective energy it's human energy that is a gift to me which i share which i steward with others now this is the same as the diagram of the exact same heroes journey but this is in strictly jungian terms this is again a diagram from edward edinger's book ego

and archetype so he this state of the hero when he says starts out he's calling original wholeness or a state of inflation or a just a little before that he calls that passive inflation over on the left there you see passive inflation so it's just it's a sense where the energy is there i'm feeling okay everything is working but if i think if i'm if i don't have that ego self-access if i'm not in touch with the fact that it's not my energy it's an energy that's gifted to me by virtue of being a participant

in life in reality if i'm not aware of that if i think it's all me then i move into active inflation this is a union term which means i'm identified with the archetype i think i am the archetypal energy and in that state of active inflation i do something which is an inflated or heroic act in other words it's a little bit more than i can handle i think that i can do anything and then i stub my toe or walk into a wall or i uh i'm so dissociated from reality that i insult my

wife and i end up getting divorced or i make a mistake at work i think i'm so great i can do something and i lose the company a lot of money whatever it is maybe i might i succumb to my alcoholism whatever i'm inflated and i fall down below this threshold i'm rejected by those who once respected me i'm alienated from myself i have no access to this psychological energy i have no access to the archetypal energy i'm alienated i'm wounded i'm dismembered i feel this great sense of humility i start to repent i just

feel i i develop what edinger is calling here a sacrificial attitude which you notice that sacrifice is key in all primitive uh religious practices and i i have this sense that i really must sacrifice what this sense of inflation this sense that i am the greatest i i have to give that up i know it's not true because here i am down in the in the ashes so to say as i get more in touch with reality through the ashes through this repentant state i then see that i have access to the energy but it's

not my energy it's energy that i have access to that i can bring up and help others with and so in that greater sense of the reality principle being more in touch with what is true what is right acknowledging what is in the world i begin to reconnect with who i am with what's possible and again i raise up into the circle into the state of passive inflation now i'm now i'm a little bit more capable i'm a little bit more aware of who i am i have a little bit more self-efficacy and agency in

the world now this brings us back again to the other diagram of edinger where by doing that i'm a little bit more uh differentiated i'm a little less in a state of participation mystique participation on mystique where i'm identified with the unconscious and i become a little more conscious and i develop a little bit more of the ego self-access the more i go through that process over and over i learn through that i learn the skills and i learn and i recognize that i am not i am not the energy i am not the god

i if i behave myself and i am humble enough i will have access to this energy and i will be gifted uh through skills that i develop through hard work i will be gifted to help others and to steward this vital numinous psychic uh that is to say psychological energy to with others and two others in the world now as i said earlier this uh process of going back and forth involves the repetition of this process involves the fragmentation of the archetypes and of the complexes now we haven't talked about complexes there will be a

whole module on complexes later in the the uh course but for now i'm just going to kind of gloss over it because it's it's not a difficult concept but it takes this off on a little tangent so i'm going to avoid that for now so although this identification with the archetypal content leads to an inflated state the fragmentation allows for a slow process of integration and assimilation of the fragmented contents of the archetype every time i break down i have the the energy the treasure the numinous uh psychological energy that i've been previously alienated from

becomes available to me this process of fragmentation and assimilation involves a process of making unconscious projections conscious in this light we can see the hero's journey involves a progressive cycle of journeying me and projecting and making conscious various structures of the unconscious now jung has identified these structures as the personal shadow the anima slash anonymous depending on our gender identification and eventually the deep archetypes of the collective unconscious which relate to what we in this culture and most cultures have understood to be religious symbols so again that's that's a lot it's involves as i said

this process of projection and recollection projecting and then fragmenting and making accessible a more realistic a more grounded sense of both who and what is outside of myself and who and what or exactly what uh this energy is and these structures are in my own being in my own unconscious so this first one we mentioned on that list is the shadow now why would jung use a sort of anthropomorphic sort of human-like figure and call it the shadow that doesn't sound again if you cut open do a a dissection of a human brain you will

not find a human shadow but the way how did jung come to know about these things how did he come to know about the structures of the unconscious he did it largely through two methods you could say three but all right let's say two or three methods but one is through cultural forms mythologies uh i'll just leave it in mythologies because there's many different subcategories of that fairy tales and religious forms and alchemy and et cetera et cetera so their mythologies cultural artifacts i'll call them and the other is through dreams now i said two

or three because with jung his dream work involved ultimately active imagination so that would be a third category i i consider it really they're pretty much uh they're part of the same work but the study of dreams in the study of dreams jung would see a dark figure come up if it was a woman that they should typically see a dark feminine figure who was very mean or very triggered all kinds of negative things and that would represent a woman's shadow in a man he would see a dark male figure and the gender being specific

is for specific reasons uh as we get into the anime anonymous i'll talk about gender because in our culture today gender takes on multiple forms they're not the strict kind of gender roles that jung was familiar with in 19th century switzerland 19th century europe so the idea is that all when when i begin to adapt to the cultural milieu around me i see first it's my family i see that my family like it if i act like a little boy they like it if i play with trucks they like it if i show an interest

in learning how to be a doctor or a lawyer so i begin to all those things that that line up with align with the values of my parents and with the culture around me i tend to put those forward anything else if i if i like something you know i like to smoke cigarettes or i like to take drugs or i keep those things in the background i don't want them to know that because they don't reward me for that they punish me for that so that goes into the shadow same thing with you can

list any number of different compulsions or different just even just experiment then sometimes they're not really bad things at all they're just children like to experiment and they try things but then they're embarrassed shame comes up so anything shameful dark goes into the shadow why because it doesn't conform with this other structure that we've constructed which is the persona so what's the next structure we mentioned was the anima and the animus now as i said culturally today we do not have broadly the same gender roles that were very very rigid in 19th century uh europe

and switzerland where jung grew up uh for him was very clear and for his patience see he all these things came either from his own psyche or from the psyche of his patients working with patients and with them they had pretty strict gender roles so a woman would very clearly have a male animus a man would have very clearly a feminine animal means a figure in the dreams they would come up they'll be very seductive and very for for anonymous it tends to be very opinionated according to jung and for anonymous it would be very

uh anima sorry for a man's feminine figure would be very manipulative and very seductive so these figures today in contemporary culture it's some people would want to just reject the concept of anima anonymous altogether because gender roles are so more fluid in our culture however i don't think we should reject them i think what we need to be aware of is that whatever our conscious gender identity is the anima anonymous if it's a mixed identity then i'm also going to have a mixed identity on a moronimus if it's more one gender identity identification than another

then the opposite is going to be in the unconscious so the idea is that there's an opposite gender figure in the unconscious whatever my identification is the opposite is going to be in the unconscious and we're going to do a whole module on onoma anonymous so there'll be a lot more to say about that knowing something but this is one of the most difficult things for people to wrestle with this idea of the anima anonymous and being able to certainly fragment and assimilate the energies of the animal animus very very very very difficult most people

young says spend most of their life working on the shadow and barely even get to touch the anima anonymous but it is possible it's an important concept to understand and as i say we'll get into it more and more as we uh progress through this course i'm going to leave it at that but another important point about the autumn anonymous is that it is actually a sort of gateway to the collective unconscious because it's partly made up of personal unconscious factors the mother my animal would be made up of my mother my sister my grandmother

people women that i knew when i was young and this archetypal factor so it's right on the borderline between the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious and these terms personal and collective unconscious we'll get into more in the course as well of course for now what i want to do is say a little bit about the life of you cg young just give a little overview of him of his work and what he did and after that i'll give a brief uh summary of the eight modules that we'll be going through in the eight week

course jung 101 so what kind of person was cg jung himself well he was born in 1875 in quest will switzerland now 1875 is the 19th century in 1876 is the year of the battle of the little bighorn the famous custer's last stand so we're really talking about 19th century and yet jung's work here we are 21st century and still people have not really grasped or been able to accept certainly not the intellectual world has not really grasped and accepted jung's work by and large or the copernican nature of the revolution that he's brought about

proposed is in the certainly i would say in the process of bringing about he was certainly well well aware of the necessary changes in culture well before uh any of his peers and and even people today so the milieu in which he grew up was not just 19th century but a 19th century christian specifically lutheran his father was a pastor and a pastor who had lost his faith and many say that jung's work in many ways was a response to this struggle that he saw uh in with some despair saw his father going through but

his father seemed to be jung felt in denial about it jung wanted to face this same struggle what was the struggle the struggle is this 19th and 20th century clash many would say between science and religion his father seemed to think that science had disproven all these things that he believed in and yet uh he wanted to have faith but he he tried to just ignore it and deny it and kind of dance around it jung didn't want any of that he wanted to face it head-on and and although he perhaps didn't solve the problem

he certainly was not in denial about it and tried to reconcile these two worlds which had a lot to do with his choices as he went through school and he did go through school he graduated in 1900 at the age of 25 within medical degree from the university of basel and against the advice of his professors jung decided to go into psychiatry now this is this horrified his professors because he uh in those days psychiatric hospitals you've heard the term bedlam well bedlam was the name of a psychiatric hospital because it was such a chaotic

place they really the psychiatric theory was just hellish and really didn't seem to be making any traction or making any sense and oftentimes from perhaps being in that environment the psychiatrist themselves would seem rather unbalanced well he was a promising intelligent brilliant young man and his professors thought my god don't go into that but jung found that this that psychiatry for him was the perfect place for the subjective experience of the spirit to study that experience and the objective work of science he felt that if there's something real there then it can be studied scientifically

and he was determined to try to do that and he felt psychiatry was a mode in which he could pursue that worthy goal so he ended up uh working at the burkholsey psychiatric hospital doing an insur internship there in zurich under professor eugene bloyler he worked there from 1900 to 1909 during which time he earned his phd in psychology at the university of zurich and he began work on the word association experiment which led to his theory of complexes which we'll discuss in detail in module two uh the word association experiment was absolutely experimental psychology

a lot of people think well jung didn't know much about science this was it made huge waves in the psychiatric world and it actually was his sort of the the means by which he began his association with freud because freud was so impressed that he'd come up with a scientific method for identifying processes in the unconscious using this word association test which by the way eventually became the basis for the lie detector test so it was also during this time that jung read sigmund freud's classic book the interpretation of dreams and he initiated because of

reading that book he initiated a correspondence with freud and jung and freud first met in 1907 in vienna now a lot of people like to say oh jung i should say freudians like to say that jung was freud's student that was never the case they were always colleagues freud is very very interested in this experimental work of young's and uh it is just not the case that he was matter of fact he he was certainly freud was the older man and um one reason jung himself said that he did not disagree more strongly with freud

earlier in their relationship was because he was so much older than him and he wanted to show him as uh certainly people of that time naturally would do the elder person would just be shown a certain amount of respect just because of their age well because of this association and his great success in the psychoanalytic world which was a very controversial world as it is uh because of that he resigned from the burgle c psychiatric hospital and opened up his own private psychoanalysis practice in kusnockt which he ran until his death in 1961. now from

1907 until 1913 jung's work was closely associated with the work of freud they were colleagues and collaborators but as i mentioned earlier when jung first publishes classic work symbols of transformation it was originally titled uh the psychology of the unconscious but in 1952 he rewrote it to be called symbols of transformation in any case when he wrote that because he finally did speak his mind say what he thought about um how the development of psychiatric theory needed to go and it was very different from freud's ideas this marked a huge departure from freud's theory and

it was also in this book that jung made his first suggestions of the idea of a collective unconscious well freud took this as being a basically a deliberate attack on him and even though jung was president of the international psychoanalytic association and he was sort of understood to be freud's successor and his crown prince they called him he eventually had to resign from the international psychoanalytic association and he made his final break with freud in 1913. and because of this now remember he was very very uh is controversial just to be a psychiatrist then it

was even more controversial to be a psychoanal analyst and then he gets thrown out or essentially uh becomes a pariah in the psychoanalytic movement because of his ideas differing from freud's so now he's just completely alienated from everybody this is when we saw that hero's journey he was down at the bottom at this point because he made the heroic move of of differing from his uh what some would call his mentor but certainly his friend sigmund freud and uh this was very very difficult he's 38 years old and this began what uh jung has called

his confrontation with the unconscious you've all heard of the famous red book it was during this time that he eventually began work on that he had staked everything on his relationship with freud who was very controversial and now he was considered an outcast from the controversial psychoanalytic movement in which he had previously been a rising star but during this lengthy period from 1913 to 1921 although jung published very little he was largely occupied with his practice and with his own inner work and through that inner work uh this work resulted in the creation of this

astonishing red book which in turn laid the groundwork for jung's revolutionary theory now the red book is a whole separate topic which we will discuss in later courses but for now we can say that it had a lot to do with a technique that i mentioned earlier which was called active imagination and i'll leave that at that for now suffice to say it helped jung through this period and gave him the energy you know i was talking about accessing this energy that we steward for others will this came out of jung like gangbusters he just

wrote and wrote and wrote he finally first published in 1921 his book psychological types which was his most important contribution to ego psychology which again we'll talk about more in module one but he also began to outline some of his understanding of the structures of the unconscious and some of the basics of his general theory so in 1921 with the publication of this book he was 46 years old and he spent the next nearly 40 years of his life fleshing out the details of this newly formed theory he found support for many of these ideas

again very controversially in ancient mythology and especially in the writings of the ancient alchemists continued to generate an enormous number of publications and produced some of his most challenging and complicated works in his seventies so he certainly had access to this energy that i've been talking about in 1950 jung published his book ion when he was 75 years old this is a massive treatise on the archetype of the self in 1951 his lecture on synchronicity was published along with work by wolfgang pauley they worked together on this theory paulie was a nobel prize-winning physicist in

1952 jung published his book answered to job he was 77 years old and in 1955 he published his magnum opus mysterium conjunctions when he was 80 years old and there's a lot to say about each of these works we'll talk about more of them in future courses but in 1961 he died after a short illness at his home in kusnock near zurich he was 85 years old he left a massive body of work that is largely unsystematic and is quite difficult for the uninitiated to wade through so the task in this series of courses particularly

this one that's going to set the groundwork will be to outline some of jung's basic ideas and his mapping of the inner structures of the psyche and that's just the basics then why is that useful well there are practical applications they're practical methods and this whole series of courses which will include courses on practical applications of union psychology on active imagination and on dream work and on mythology and fairy tales and alchemy and capstone course will be a historical overview of depth psychology in general and jung's place in it so jung began working on his

theory in the early 20th century and continued until he passed away in june of 1961. since that time there have been many theorists who have built on jung's theory and or changed and adapted it in a number of ways this course and the other courses in this series will introduce you to jung's ideas mainly through his own words and through the words of students and close associates who stuck relatively closely to jung's ideas this approach is generally referred to as a classical jungian psychology approach once you understand jung's approach you'll be better equipped to evaluate

other approaches to jung's work and other approaches to depth psychology in general whether you are taking this course in order to earn the certificate or simply to audit you will benefit very much from reading the textbook jung's map of the soul by murray stein throughout the course we will refer to and draw on that text which is thoroughly in conversation with jung's own writings and will help to orient us in relation to jung's vast collected works so down to close let's just briefly go through the eight modules of the jung 101 course module one will

be on the ego and the unconscious the ego as the center of consciousness and its relationship to the unconscious foundational concepts we'll look at what jung has to say about this and we'll go into some detail about it module two we talk about the complexes the complexes are related to jung's work in the word association experiment and how he tracked that and it really became a an important concept for all of depth psychology during that period and it's central concept for jungian psychology and it will really i think move us into a realm that i

think you'll find really fascinating and very very helpful in in all the work we do with this yogi and theory module three is the animating principle behind all this jung called it psychic energy for freud it was libido and libido was simply sexual but for jung psychic energy uh came not just from sexuality but also from hunger from the biological need for homeostasis and for the drive toward wholeness which he described as a religious function of the psyche we'll go into a lot of detail about that and the physics of psychic energy how it moves

energy around our consciousness module four the real mediators of psychic energy are the archetypes of the collective unconscious the collective unconscious is jung's really groundbreaking concept and we're going to tease that apart in some detail module 4 archetypes and the collective unconscious then module 5 and 6 we'll go into some of the actual structures of the deep unconscious the persona and the shadow for module five the anima anonymous for module six as i say these are mediators of a great deal of psychic energy and there's a lot there's so much practical value just understand the

persona in the shadow and just understanding i'm anonymous if that's all that we learned in this course we would really have a leg up on many many people because there's so many insights available through these concepts however we still have two more modules we go into great detail on the the big strike structure the big mediator of energy which you'll call the archetype of the self the central organizing principle of the psyche remember it's central to jung's copernican revolution is that it's not the ego that's the center of the personality it's the archetype of the

self which is in the deep unconscious and there's a lot of nuance to that which we will describe in some depth and then finally in module 8 we bring everything together with the you know we've teased everything apart and now we bring it together in the process of individuation which is the process of becoming an individual in a way that maintains this ego self-access so that we're constantly in touch with the deep unconscious and it informs our conscious deliberations and decisions so module eight we'll cover and kind of wrap things up with the individuation process

and the ego self-access well with that that's a brief summary of the upcoming eight modules and with that i'm going to close this introductory class if you've enjoyed this class and would like to learn more i hope you will consider signing up for the full jung 101 course thanks for spending this time with me [Music] do [Music] do [Music] you