Jung's Conception of the Holy Ghost

Carl Jung saw the Holy Ghost as the crowning figure in God's revelation of Himself. For Jung, the Holy Ghost is that mysterious force which unites opposites and allows the transcendent to enter space and time. Through a process called “continuing incarnation”, the Holy Ghost makes it possible for ordinary people to participate in “the sonship of God”.     

Jung's lives

Forty published life histories of C. G. Jung are grouped into eight categories: autobiography, hagiographies, pathographies, professional biographies, intellectual biographies, illustrated biographies, religious biographies, and joint Jung/Freud biographies. Each work is briefly reviewed in terms of its scope, its main contributions to the biographical literature on Jung, and its principal shortcomings. A short list of selected readings on Jung's life is recommended.     

Jung's Lament

This article has two premises. First, that depth psychology is more an art than a science, and second, that expanding imagination is the primary method of therapy. Both Jung and Freud considered themselves scientists, yet both had ambivalent relationships with artists and writers. Freud was given the Goethe award for literature and never the Nobel Prize for medicine, whereas Jung was confronted by both his anima and Herbert Read concerning his devaluation of his own artistic direction as well as of modern art generally. I am proposing through the article's fictional style, that in this age of evidenced-based medicine, we, as therapists, have much more to learn from writers and their fictional stories than from the abstract fantasies of science. I believe we have made an error in our field by turning so completely to developmental theories and object-relation theorists for our method. Jung hinted as early as 1916, in his paper “The Transcendent Function,” that there was a way of engaging the soul directly and allowing its voice and character to emerge. I am proposing that if we truly believe that the psyche is autonomous, then all therapy should be an encounter with “the other.” If this were the case, then active imagination could be developed as a wider and more inclusive method.

Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me.

―Sigmund Freud     

Jung's views of Nazi Germany: the first year and Jung's transition

This article first considers Jung's response to the coming to power of the Nazis in Germany. It brings forth evidence that, besides wanting to preserve psychotherapy in Germany and maintain the international connection between the German and other communities of psychotherapists, he wanted to advance Jungian psychology – his psychology – in Germany. It also presents evidence that, although he occasionally made some anti‐Semitic statements during this early period, he was not anti‐Semitic in the way the Nazis were. The paper then argues that after Gustav Bally's criticisms in the Neue Zuercher Zeitung in February 1934, Jung entered into a transitional period that spring during which he became warier both of the Nazis and of making any statements that could be construed as being anti‐Semitic. Schoenl and Peck (2012) have shown how Jung's views of Nazi Germany changed from 1933 to March 1936. This present article demonstrates very significant changes in Jung's views during the important early part of this period, that is from January 1933 – when Hitler became Chancellor of Germany – through to the spring of 1934. It draws on evidence from archival and other primary sources.     

Jung's reflections on self-healing

Not long before his death on July 17, 1998, Edward Edinger asked me to draw together a book of quotations by Jung on religious themes. Edinger's image was that of a thin, leather-covered book containing spiritual uplift and consolation, that one might carry around in a pocket or purse: a “vademecum” or “enchiridion,” as he termed it. It was a project he had begun by collecting quotations from Jung's Answer to Job and Letters. Always fond of “giving the last word to Jung,” he then employed those quotes to conclude Transformation of the God-Image and The New God-Image, respectively. But he lacked the energy, he confessed, to complete this project

The Vademecum which, I hope, resembles what Edinger had in mind-is now nearly complete. It is tentatively entitled, Jung on Soul: Quotations on Religious Themes. The following excerpted chapter is entitled “On Self-Healing.” The other topical divisions are: First Principles; The Inner Life; Consciousness; Good and Evil; The Paradoxical God-Image; Individuation; Continuing Incarnation; Psychology and Christianity; Old Age, Death and Beyond; Community, Society, Culture; Civilization in Crisis; Love and Sex; Parents and Children; Healing; Analyst and Patient; C. G. Jung: Personal; and From Jung's Answer to Job.     

Jung's Contribution to Psychoanalytic Thought

My response to the discussions is organized from an evolutionary perspective on the development of theory within psychoanalysis. After briefly stating the premises of the paper, I discuss each commentary. I experience Aron's discussion as more evolutionary than Benjamin's or Ellman's. It seems clear that we all have our own agendas. The reader is invited to try them on for size in the spirit of ongoing dialogue that characterizes this journal.     

Revisiting Jung's concept of innate sensitiveness

Jung suggested that innate sensitiveness predisposes some individuals to be particularly affected by negative childhood experiences, so that later, when under pressure to adapt to some challenge, they retreat into infantile fantasies based on those experiences and become neurotic. Recent research by the author and others is reviewed to support Jung's theory of sensitiveness as a distinctly thorough conscious and unconscious reflection on experiences. Indeed, this probably innate tendency is found in about twenty percent of humans, and, in a sense, in most species, in that about this percentage will evidence a strategy of thoroughly processing information before taking action, while the majority depend on efficient, rapid motor activity. Given this thorough processing, sensitive individuals readily detect subtleties-including whatever is distressing or threatening. Hence, as Jung observed, given the same degree of stress in childhood as non-sensitive individuals, sensitive persons will develop more depression, anxiety, and shyness. Without undue stress, they evidence no more of these difficulties than the non-sensitive-or even less, being unusually aware of supportive as well as negative cues from caregivers. Given this interaction, one treatment task is to distinguish the effects of such childhood difficulties from what does not need treatment, which are the typical effects of the trait itself on an adult without a troubled developmental history.     

Transference symptom

Transference symptom is a hazy notion in Freud's writings. The notion is presented here as a particular moment in the crystallization of the transference neurosis. It results from a double cathexis of the analytic frame and the analyst resulting in a symbolic distortion that is represented plastically within the session, as occurs in dreams. The transference symptom proceeds from two different preconscious cathexes, one attached to the reality of the frame, the other to the drive linked to the analyst. A psychic space is thereby opened up for interpreting both the resistance and the unconscious derivatives of infantile conflict. The transference symptom is a compromise formation that includes the analyst and questions the countertransference stance. Three different analytic situations give rise to transference symptoms according to the relative balance between frame and process in the analytic encounter. The concept is compared with enactment.     

Unconcealing Jung's Transcendent Function with Heidegger

In the first sentence of his book, The Transcendent Function, Jeffery Miller says “The transcendent function is the core of Carl Jung's theory of psychological growth and the heart of what he called individuation, the process by which one is guided in a teleological way toward the person he or she is meant to be” (Miller, 2004 Miller, J. C. (2004). The transcendent function: Jung's model of psychological growth through dialogue with the unconscious. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. [Google Scholar], p. 1). Consequently, for Jung, the transcendent function is the question of unveiling the unconscious for individuation to take place or, as Heidegger would say, the question of unveiling Being for authenticity to take place. As a result of the apparent equivalence, these questions can be synthesised to demonstrate that read together, each of these thinkers brings deeper understanding, meaning, and interpretation to the projects of the other in such a way that an extension for application is created for both philosophy and psychotherapy.