Two Essays on Analytical Psychology
Where Jung sets out his break from Freud and the concept of individuation.
Individuation means becoming an 'in-dividual,' and, in so far as 'individuality' embraces our innermost, last, and incomparable uniqueness, it also implies becoming one's own self.
Two Essays gathers the pair of texts in which Jung sets out the working model that organises his later clinical thought. The first essay traces the unconscious beyond the personal and repressed material of Freud and Adler toward a collective layer with its own structuring images. The second follows what happens in analysis once that layer is engaged: the loosening of the persona, the confrontation with the anima, the risk of inflation when a patient identifies with the collective psyche, and the slow work Jung calls individuation. For the clinician, the value lies in how concretely Jung stages these movements. He treats the transcendent function as a practical operation, a way conscious and unconscious positions are brought into relation rather than a mystical event. The volume also records his reasons for parting from a purely reductive reading of symptoms, and gives the vocabulary much analytical practice still uses.
About the author
Carl Gustav Jung
Carl Gustav Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist who founded analytical psychology. He worked closely with Sigmund Freud in the early years of the psychoanalytic movement before breaking with him in 1913 over the nature of the libido and the unconscious. Jung's work posits a collective unconscious populated by archetypes, and frames individuation as the lifelong integration of the psyche. He also distinguished psychological types along the introversion and extraversion axis. He practised and wrote in Zurich until his death in 1961.
Details
- 1943
- 1953
- Uber die Psychologie des Unbewussten
- German
- R. F. C. Hull
- Princeton University Press
- Princeton University Press, 1966
- 376
- 9780691097763