The description above correctly states that sometimes Jung trades readability for erudition. He was an astonishingly well read man, a polyglot, and seemingly an etymologist as well. He moves quickly from the myths of one society to another, sometimes assuming a familiarity which I do not have. Still, I was able to understand the myths that he referenced from context, for the most part.
Jung believes, in contrast to Freud, that the libido (that is, what he calls the genetic libido) is broader than the merely sexual libido. He "proves" this assertion through an analysis of the disinvestment of the world by the libido in psychosis. This disinvestment, Jung argues, is so complete in psychosis that it cannot possibly be merely the disinvestment of the sexual libido. That is, the subtraction of the sexual libido's energy from the individual's engagement with the world could not explain the completeness of the individual's disengagement with the world in psychosis. This seems to me to be a strong argument, if one accepts the premise that neurosis and psychosis can be explained by degrees of investment of the libido.
I was less convinced by his contention that as one becomes disengaged with the world, one regresses into oneself such that one's thought processes come to reflect the thought processes of earlier societies. For one, this is problematic because it assumes that some societies are more "primitive" than other societies. Secondly, it seems a bit outlandish to claim that, somehow, antique Greek myths are lying beneath the conscious mind of, for example, your average uneducated Middle American. Nonetheless, Jung marshals a huge amount of anecdotal evidence—from his practice and from mythology and literature—in support of this claim. It is enough, at least, to assume the claim is correct in order to follow his analysis of Ms. Miller through the rest of the book.
I won't go over his discussions of the importance of the symbols of fire, trees, the sun's going up and down, dragons, sea monsters, treasures obtained at difficulty, etc. All of his arguments are, again, supported by a frankly unbelievable array of examples in literature, mythology, and Jung's clinical practice.
In the end, I both was seriously challenged by and really enjoyed this book. I feel like it has given me another vocabulary with which to engage with literature, film, and art. I would strongly recommend it to anyone who is interested in the subject.
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From the Publisher
psychology of the Unconscious
In Psychology of the Unconscious, Jung seeks a symbolic meaning and purpose behind a given set of symptoms, placing them within the larger context of the psyche. The 1912 text examines the fantasies of a patient whose poetic and vivid mental images helped Jung redefine libido as psychic energy, arising from the unconscious and manifesting itself consciously in symbolic form. Jung's commentary on his patient's fantasies offers a complex study of symbolic psychiatry and foreshadows his development of the theory of the collective unconscious and its constituents, the archetypes.
WHO IS CARL GUSTAV JUNG?
- Carl Gustav Jung, Swiss psychologist and founder of Analytic Psychology, was a close collaborator of Sigmund Freud.
- Jung rejected Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis of childhood neuroses and sensuality, publishing his own landmark psychoanalytic method as Psychology of the Unconscious in 1912.
- He redefined psychotherapy as a study of present conflicts versus childhood conflicts and influences.
- Jung proposed the theory of sensuality as a series of images, patterns, and symbols linking the human body and psyche, instinct, and image, shaped as fantasies derived from mythology, religion, ethnology, art, literature, and psychiatry.
- He defined the original concept of the collective unconscious––the conscious mind is genetically inherited, shared by other members of a culture, or universally by all human beings.
- Jung proposed the role of archetypes as influences on human behavior and introduced the personality traits of introversion and extroversion.
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