In the 1950s, it was fashionable to mention Freud’s name; it was often used in pseudo-intellectual sex jokes. Freud’s concerns had as much to do with his fame as with his actual psychotherapeutic practice, and it was thought that he had “won” a debate with his former student and friend Carl Jung. And it still seems quite likely. Jung saw religion, hallucinogens, occult practices, and so on, as valid forms of individuation and integration of the human self. After all, he thought, the human self is bound together by more than biological drives toward sex and death.
Today, Jung’s insights have permeated the culture, including increasingly popular fields such as transpersonal psychology, which sees human beings as “fundamentally interconnected, not merely isolated individuals.” Psychologist Harris L. Friedman argues:Psychology lecturer and author Steve Taylor explains that the movement grew out of “the counterculture movement of the 1960s and a wave of psychological experimentation through psychedelics, meditation, and other consciousness-altering practices” – the very practices that Jung studied.
In fact, Jung was the first to “justify a spiritual approach to the practice of depth psychology.” Mark Kasprow and Bruce Scott point outHe also “suggested that psychological development does not stop with the achievement of adult ego maturity, but can continue throughout life, reaching higher states of consciousness.” Unlike Freud, who saw transcendence as a regression, Jung “proposed that transcendental experiences are within and accessible to all, and that the healing and growth stimulated by such experiences often utilizes the language of symbolic imagery and nonverbal experience.”
Jung’s work became increasingly important after his death in 1961. His complete collection Published in 1969, these books introduced readers to his “major concepts and ideas ranging from archetypal symbols to analytical psychology to UFOs.” It’s mentioned in the guidebookNear the end of his life, Jung provided an oral overview of his life’s work in the form of four one-hour interviews conducted in 1957 at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich by Dr. Richard Evans of the University of Houston.
“The conversation was filmed as part of an educational project for psychology students. Evans is a terrible interviewer, but Jung makes up for it.” The Gnostic Society Library writes:The edited interview begins with a question about Jung’s concept of the “self.” Persona (This is also the theme and title of Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 masterpiece, by the way.) Jung, in contrast, describes the persona in easy-to-understand terms and with everyday examples: an imaginary self that is “controlled partly by society and partly by our own expectations and desires.”
According to Jung, the less consciously we are aware of the performance of our public self in this sense, the more susceptible we are to the pressure of our “shadow” and to neurosis. Jung and Evans’ discussion of persona only scratches the surface of a broader conversation about the unconscious and the different ways of accessing it. Throughout, Jung’s examples are clear and his explanations illuminating. Above you can watch a video transcript of the same interview. Read the transcript published in the collection CG Jung’s speechTo see more interviews and documentaries about Jung, Gnostic Society Library.
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Josh Jones A writer and musician based in Durham, North Carolina. Follow
