Jung’s Legacy in Depth Psychology

Definition

This entry provides a brief introduction to some of the main aspects of the work of C.G. Jung, followed by a description of how his work was developed by others during his lifetime and afterward. This entry provides an overview of the Jungian tradition in Depth Psychology. It begins with a discussion of how Jung’s ideas differed from those of Freud and opened a distinct tradition of analytic (Jungian) psychology. By identifying the other influential people who contributed to the amplification of Jung’s work, this article then details how these ideas expanded beyond the work of training analysts to become a more influential, impactful, and widespread phenomenon.

1. Introduction

Depth Psychology is distinguished from other forms of psychology because it foregrounds the importance of the Unconscious as a major influence on human reality. Other forms of psychology, such as behavioral psychology or social psychology, focus on what can be directly known or observed: these schools take self-assessments at face value. Depth Psychology presupposes that true knowledge requires a process of working with different kinds of psychic phenomena (including dreams and inexplicably physical symptoms) that suggest repressed or otherwise unknown psychological content. Jungian approaches to Depth Psychology are unique in emphasizing the role of archetypes as cross-cultural patterns in the collective Unconscious that provide a universal mirror for common human problems and possibilities in life.

2. Jung’s Contributions

Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961) provided a working definition of the psyche that has proven to be generative of ongoing research throughout his lifetime and afterward. His initial work was developed in conversation with Freud’s description of the Unconscious, the exploration of what can be known about the limits of our knowledge. Jung’s work with Freud allowed him to develop versions of psychotherapy as a talking cure, an interest in how dreams bring to consciousness what otherwise is unknown, and a sense of how symptoms provide an embodied mode of communication from the Unconscious. Freud and Jung also shared an interest in human uniqueness and the importance of ancient stories in myth and religion—although Freud famously believed that the contemporary scientific age would replace the need for religious illusions.

Jung and Freud had important differences in their understandings of the Unconscious that, combined with an intense personality clash, led to a falling out. One of the acknowledged breaking points occurred around the publication of Jung’s first book, Symbols of Transformation, in which Jung departed from Freud’s relatively restrictive structure of the psyche to produce something more expansive [1]. Jung’s diverging points of emphasis ultimately became an important, foundational component of all his future work. Jung’s first point of distinction was moving from Freud’s exclusively sexual definition of the libido to allow for a broader sense of psychic energy. Second, Jung framed the Unconscious in terms of archetypes from the collective Unconscious revealed in mythic and religious sources, rather than thinking of the Unconscious along Freud’s purely personal, egoic terms. Third, Jung was more positively inclined toward religious and mystical beliefs, integrating them as a positive source of information and direction in the psyche—at odds with Freud’s famous atheistic presuppositions. Fourth, in terms of methodology, Jung moved from Freud’s sense that messages from the Unconscious would be distorted and instead believed that the Unconscious wanted to be known. Finally, Jung’s interest was focused primarily on contrasts between adult development and child psychology, a stage that he referred to as the second half of life.

Jung’s later work developed many of these concepts. One core idea concerns the process of individuation—a dynamic transformation of consciousness induced through processing psychological material, extracting the personal from the archetypal, and moving toward a conscious relationship with the archetype of the Self. For Jung, the archetype of the Self was indistinguishable from conceptions of God: it served as the guiding gravity directing the course of our lives. Jung developed two approaches that would help to bring Unconscious material directly into relation with consciousness. These were ways of interacting with the images produced by psyche in forms other than dreams. The first method was active imagination, which often took the form of personifying different inner personalities and engaging with them. This could take the form of writing or producing visual images—particularly circular mandalas, which Jung identified as being able to track the extent to which psychic material had been integrated. A second method was amplification, where the images from dreams, active imagination, or visual arts were associated with the kind of mythic or religious material that constituted the collective Unconscious.

Jung’s research embraced precursors who seemed to share his sense of a dynamic, interactive, participatory world that actively reached to engage us. One major influence was Gnostic conceptions of reality, including the thought that each person was called to move toward wholeness. Jung’s sense that humans find purpose through integrating Unconscious material into an expanding awareness of Self mirrored this earlier worldview. A second major influence for Jung was European alchemy, which Jung saw as a more current or contemporary version of Gnostic conceptions—an interest sparked by reading Richard Wilhelm’s translation of the Chinese alchemical text, Secret of the Golden Flower. Unlike common misconceptions of alchemists as literally wanting to find an elixir of eternal life or turn lead into gold, Jung interpreted the alchemical procedures in terms of active imagination and amplification. As Jung studied alchemy, he found that it provided a confirmation of his insights about the Self. A third major contemporary parallel field for Jung, late in his career, was quantum physics. In order to confirm and develop his theory of synchronicity, which deals with the acausal order of meaningful coincidences, Jung worked with Wolfgang Pauli to explore compatibilities connecting the presuppositions unfolding in the world of quantum particles with those discovered within the objective psyche.

3. The First Jungians

The initial group of Jungians were part of an inner circle who had worked closely with him in Zurich during his life and career. Much of the work in this first era of scholars and analysts involved explicating and developing many of the themes that Jung touched on. Although Jung was explicitly insistent on not developing a school—thus calling his work “Complex Psychology” and “Analytic Psychology”—during his lifetime, Jung had also attracted a group of individuals interested in both the theory and the treatment provided through Jungian analysis. This group was attracted to how Jung’s work differed from other modes of psychology, including other forms of Depth Psychology, in terms of its de-emphasis on the ego and its willingness to explore the Unconscious in terms of something to welcome rather than to refuse.

One manifestation of this group appeared at the Eranos conferences started by Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn that were held in Ascona, Switzerland, beginning in 1933. The conferences attracted a diverse set of thinkers and scholars throughout the humanities and sciences. Although Jung was never officially in charge of Eranos, he was one of the founding thinkers and influential in shaping its trajectory until he stepped down in 1952. These conferences were also important to developing Jung’s legacy, as they allowed Jung to share and develop many of his core theories in a dialogical setting with those from other disciplinary backgrounds.

A second manifestation of Jung’s legacy occurred through the development of the C.G. Jung Institute. This was launched in 1948, after the war, and began offering postgraduate training for those who wished to become analysts. In addition to Jung, Jolande Jacobi and Marie-Louise von Frantz were instrumental in establishing the Institute. They, with Toni Wolff and Barbara Hannah, constituted the primary core of original instructors. There are currently 58 Jung Institutes and 69 affiliate groups worldwide, and roughly 3000 candidates graduate globally each year. These Institutes provide a systematic way to share Jung’s thinking as a recognizable brand, and the work undertaken in individual analysis remains a core and important part of Jung’s legacy.

Marie-Louise von Franz, who met Jung early in her life, was one of the most prolific of his colleagues and was crucial in translating Latin, Greek, and some Persian texts that Jung collected into German for him. Her work was critical in helping to explicate Jung’s ideas with clear examples, building out and developing much of what was implied in Jung’s original works and ideas. Her amplifications provide an excellent entry point into a clarified core of Jung’s ideas. She wrote a book on alchemy [2] and active imagination [3] and is perhaps best known for extending Jung’s approach to mythology into fairy tales [4]. She also wrote two books deepening Jung’s work on synchronicity, focusing on the notion of divination [5] as well as the archetype of numbers and time [6]. Esther Harding, part of Jung’s American circle, contributed several books focused on women and feminine psychology, including the Way of all Women [7] and Woman’s Mysteries [8].

Erich Neumann was another key figure who popularized and extended Jung’s theories of the Unconscious, who led the Eranos conferences after Jung retired in 1951. His Origins and History of Consciousness [9] persuasively used myths and archetypes to reveal how individual consciousness parallels the emergence of consciousness throughout human history. In the same year, with the horrors of World War II fresh in mind, Neumann published Depth Psychology and a New Ethic [10]. This book amplified Jung’s Gnostic presuppositions and outlined the importance of a moral code that would no longer require repression of shadow material but would strive toward wholeness, rather than a rigidly defined perfection. His book The Great Mother [11] provided an important extrapolation of one of the core archetypal influences, while Amor and Psyche [12] offered a foundational extrapolation of how the myth outlines the development of the feminine psyche. Neumann also published several essays on the importance of creativity.

Four other scholars were key in promoting a first wave of Jungian ideas and concepts in ways that remained largely faithful to extending and developing Jung’s work. These scholars, who primarily wrote for a general reading public, were instrumental in opening Jung’s work to a much wider American audience.

Robert A. Johnson, who studied at the Jung Institute, soon became an American popularizer of Jung’s work. His Inner Work [13] offered readers a springboard into Jung’s ideas concerning how working with dream work and active imagination can bring Unconscious matter into conscious awareness. Johnson also published a number of interpretations of fairy tales along Jungian themes and was also highly regarded for his works on masculine and feminine psychology—He [14] and She [15].

Murray Stein remains well-known for his work developing Jung’s process of individuation, following the route through the archetypes that moves through an encounter with the shadow to an acquaintance of the Self. His books, including a series called Jung’s Map of the Soul [16] and The Principle of Individuation [17], provide readers with an expanded sense of how the archetypes work to shape ever deeper encounters with patterns of matter from the objective psyche en route to discovering the Self.

Edward Edinger is best known for Anatomy of the Psyche [18], which traces alchemical analogues to Jung’s individuation process; Ego and Archetype [19], which provides a structural analysis of how individuation moves; and several other books presenting transcripts of Edinger lecturing over Jungian books and concepts. He is additionally notable for working to relate Jung’s concepts to Christian and literary written works, doing much to expand Jungian influence on a cultural level.

James Hollis focused primarily on developing Jung’s interest in materials relevant to adults in the second half of life. In books such as The Middle Passage [20] and Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life [21], Hollis takes seriously the psychological importance of one’s fully adult life and ways that Jung’s ideas are crucial for helping to navigate them well.

4. Non-Clinical Early Developments

The Meyers–Briggs Testing Instrument (MBTI) is a widely used and well-known personality inventory developed by Katharine Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Meyers based on Jung’s Psychological Types [22]. In his work, Jung developed his analysis of the four functions of consciousness and the personality types that Jung identified as based on what happens as these functions become part of a person’s identity. The assessment developed by Meyers, Briggs, and later associate Mary McCaulley provided a series of questions designed to illuminate the relative extent to which one is introverted or extraverted, thinking or feeling, and intuitive or sensing, providing a measurement of the “type” of person that one is. Although the test is consistently criticized for not being scientifically verifiable, it remains popular and taken formally by an average of two million people a year.

Ira Progoff not only wrote on Jungian topics such as synchronicity [23] and a field of Depth Psychology [24] but more famously developed the Journal Workshop [25] as a way to spread Jung’s ideas to individuals and communities outside of analytical sessions. The Journal Workshop allowed participants to use journaling as a way to connect with the deeper archetypal presence of their Self through a series of different prompts that helped to create images that people could then use as an entry point for self-inquiry. The Journal Workshop was an innovative, widespread way of moving Jung’s ideas out of the more closed, formal structure of the analytical relationship into something that would ultimately allow participants to create something both personal and profound, a parallel to Jung’s own intensive self-exploration documented in The Red Book [26].

5. Developing Beyond Jungianism

Andrew Samuels has been integral to the development of Jungian thinking, both in bringing an academic sensibility to Jungian thought by introducing it into the academic context and also in opening Jungian thought to politics. First, his seminal work Jung and the Post-Jungians [27] provided an initial assessment of the major divergences in Jungian thinking after Jung. He called these the Classical School, the Developmental School, and the Archetypal School. In 2002, he became a founding member of the International Association for Jungian Studies, which expanded Jungian research to include the cultural as well as the clinical and was opened to general academic scholarship as conversation partners. Along these lines, as a cofounder of the Masters in Jungian and Post-Jungian Studies at the Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex, Samuels became one of the first three professors of Analytical Psychology in the world, helping to expand Jungian thought into the academic world. Along with The Political Psyche [28], Samuels was also instrumental in working to bring Jungian thought into the political sphere by engaging both clinicians and politicians.

Michael Fordham, important in what Samuels called the “developmental” school, was foundational in introducing Jung’s work to Britain and was instrumental in establishing the Society for Analytical Psychology in 1946. He created and oversaw the first training of analysts for both children and adults. In addition, Fordham was instrumental in organizing the editing and publication of The Collected Works of C. G. Jung and started the Journal of Analytical Psychology in 1955 serving as an editor for its first 15 years. Although Fordham was deeply influenced by Jung, he was also in conversation with Klein and Winnicott and thus did much to expand Jung’s model to include children and childhood—a departure from Jung’s emphasis on the second half of life and a way toward renewing relations. This involved a key innovation—seeing the Self as providing a guiding influence of development through a whole life, including the childhood environment.

James Hillman was the lead figure in the Archetypal School of post-Jungian thought, which provided a radical re-visioning of Jungian themes and ideas consistent with the strands of post-modern thinking present in the latter portion of the 20th century. Hillman trained at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich and then took over as the director of studies before developing his own distinct approach to Jungian thought—Archetypal Psychology. His approach argues for a polytheistic awareness of many mythical archetypal centers instead of an emphasis on a monotheistic Self. Additionally, Hillman emphasized the “psyche” of psychology as constituting soul and advocated for understanding psychological inquires as forms of soul work that would help bridge the gap between matter and mind. The founder and primary editor of Spring, a journal devoted to Jungian and Archetypal Studies, Hillman was also a primary influence in the development of the Pacifica Graduate Institute. Although he rose to prominence in the academic world with his publication of Re-Visioning Psychology [29], his most publicly impactful publication was The Soul’s Code [30].

Sonu Shamdasani is a historian whose career is largely devoted to the field of Depth Psychology, especially focused on Jung as a historical figure. He is best known for having gained access to Jung’s unpublished material. This most recently includes The Black Books [31], which were Jung’s original attempts at active imagination in written and visual form, as well as The Red Book [26], an ornate illustrated manuscript that allowed Jung to process and represent the sketches from The Black Books in a more lavish style. Shamdasani’s other books are largely historically oriented reconstructions of Jung based on archival materials.

Susan Rowland is well-known and respected as a scholar in the fields of literary studies as well as Jungian and Archetypal Psychology. She has championed the use of Jungian Arts-Based Research (JABR) as a transdisciplinary methodology that brings a conscious awareness of the power of symbolic and imagistic creative thinking alongside an awareness of archetypal themes developed by Jung [32]. The incorporation of art as a research practice allows for a more than simply rational approach to study: it invites the Unconscious as a participant in the work as it develops. Rowland’s work as a mystery novelist provides one demonstration of JABR in action.

6. Contemporary Applications of Jung’s Work

Jung’s voracious appetite for what is currently called interdisciplinary work has been continued among a number of subjects. Jung’s work involving the question of religion has been expanded by John P. Dourley from the theological side [33] and Lionel Corbett [34] from the Jungian angle. David Tacey has explored Jungian thought relative to New Age beliefs [35] and the post-secular sacred [36]. In a somewhat related vein, Liz Greene’s work on astrology remains a standard way of continuing Jung’s interest [37,38], work which Kieron Le Grice has continued to evolve in the form of archetypal astrology [39]. Stanton Marlan has focused on continuing to explore Jungian approaches to alchemy [40]. Although somewhat dated, Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette helped to popularize Jung as opening insights into the men’s movement [41], as did Robert Bly [42]. Marion Woodman was an equally inspiring advocate for feminine psychology [43], while Clarissa Pinkola Estés’s work remains a classic for new generations [44]. Bill Plotkin provides a fresh take on ways archetypes work with experiencing nature [45].

Jung’s insights into the formation of complexes are often unacknowledged as foundational to the development of trauma studies. Current work that highlights the connection to Jung includes studies by Donald Kalsched [46,47] and Marian Dunlea [48]. More recent approaches to working with dreams include works by Edward Whitmont and Sylvia Brinton Perera [49], as well as Leslie Ellis [50]. John Giannini developed work on psychological types [51], as has John Beebe [52].

7. Conclusions

Jung developed an approach to working with the Unconscious that factored in many of its mythic and religious aspects. This opened an appreciation for how consciousness unfolds along cross-cultural lines and illuminated several pathways that would allow individuals to find a deeper sense of meaning, purpose, and connection in their lives. Although Jungian concepts arose initially out of his work with clients, he soon became fascinated with earlier systems of thought based on similar presuppositions (Gnostics, astrologers, and alchemists) as well as contemporary work that seemed to correlate with his beliefs (quantum physics). Recent descriptions of how these studies were influenced by his personal life can be found in biographies, including a standout work by Deirdre Bair [53].

The first wave of Jungians did much to take Jung’s ideas and begin to bring to the foreground some of the recurring ideas and beliefs that had been latent or discussed but not foregrounded in a clear and systematic way. This stage occurred along with the development of the C. G. Jung Institute. A second wave of Jungians translated these ideas into more popular and accessible works, bringing Jungian thought to international and mainstream audiences.

The most recent wave of Jungian schools has continued to develop the practical aspects of Jungian thought in clinical, academic, and cultural contexts. The training and development of analysts skilled at helping people interpret their dreams and the significant circumstances in their lives remains one of the purest continuations of Jung’s work. Expanding Jung’s work to engage with other scholars in the sciences and humanities continues another aspect of Jung’s later passions that was evidenced by his participation in the Eranos conferences. Academic centers of training are also important in ensuring the Jungians discover and create fresh conversation partners in cognate disciplines. Finally, at the cultural level, Jung’s ideas have become more accessible and influential both through personality tests and through political conversations.

If one of the goals of Jung’s work was to bring awareness to what had been Unconscious, opening ways of becoming more creative and imaginative with how we engage with ourselves, with others, and with the surrounding world, then it is clear that the work continues to unfold and develop along interesting trajectories.