Carl Jung: You ask me—or rather tell me—what psychoanalysis is.
The relativity of “truth” has been known for ages and does not stand in the way of anything, and if it did would merely prevent belief in dogmas and authority.
But it does not even do that.
You ask me—or rather tell me—what psychoanalysis is.
Before considering your views, permit me first to try to mark out the territory and give a definition of psychoanalysis.
Psychoanalys!s is first of all simply a method—but a method complying with all the rigorous requirements which the concept of a “method” implies today.
Let me say at once that psychoanalysis is not an anamnesis, as those who know everything without learning it are pleased to believe.
It is essentially a way of investigating unconscious associations which cannot be got at by exploring the conscious mind.
Again, psychoanalys!s is not a method of examination in the nature of an intelligence test,
though this mistake is common in certain circles.
Nor is it a method of catharsis for abreacting, with or without hypnosis, real or imaginary traumata.
Psychoanalys!s is a method which makes possible the analytical reduction of psychic contents to their simplest expression, and for discovering the line of least resistance in the development of a harmonious personality.
In neurosis there is no uniform direction of life because contrary tendencies frustrate and prevent psychological adaptation.
Psychoanalys!s, so far as we can judge at present, seems to be the only rational therapy of the neuroses.
No programme can be formulated for the technical application of psychoanalysis. There are only general principles, and working rules for individual analysis. (For the latter I would refer you to Freud’s work in Vol. I of the Internationale Zeitscrift fur drztliche Psychoanalyse?)
My only working rule is to conduct the analysis as a perfectly ordinary, sensible conversation, and to avoid all appearance of medical magic. ~Carl Jung, CW 4, Para 620-624
The History of Psychoanalysis Quotations
The Freud Files: An Inquiry into the History of Psychoanalysis
There are analysts who believe that they can get along with a self-analysis. This is Münchhausen psychology, and they will certainly remain stuck. They forget that one of the most important therapeutically effective factors is subjecting yourself to the objective judgment of another. ~Carl Jung to Freud, The Freud Files, Page 47
You [Freud] go around sniffing out all the symptomatic actions in your vicinity, thus reducing everyone to the level of sons and daughters who blushingly admit the existence of their faults. Meanwhile you remain on top as the father, sitting pretty. ~ Carl Jung, The Freud Files, Page 50
May I draw your [Freud] attention to the fact that you open The Interpretation of Dreams with the mournful admission of your own neurosis – the dream of Irma’s injection – identification with the neurotic in need of treatment. Very significant. Our analysis, you may remember, came to a stop with your remark that you ‘could not submit to analysis without losing your authority.’ These words are engraved on my memory as a symbol of everything to come. ~ Carl Jung, The Freud Files, Page 70
I beg you to let me know by return whether we should allow such vermin to come to N. [Nuremberg]. Myself, I’d rather not have the bastard around, he might spoil one’s appetite. But our splendid isolation must come to an end one day. Carl Jung to Freud, The Freud Files. Page 83
Freud could be refuted only by one who has made repeated use of the psychoanalytic method and who really investigates as Freud does . . . He who does not or cannot do this should not pronounce judgment on Freud, else he acts like those notorious men of science who disdained to look through Galileo’s telescope. ~Carl Jung to Freud, The Freud Files, Page 6
At last in one of the latest sessions, came the narration of an event which in every respect had the significance of Freud’s youth trauma. ~Carl Jung, The Freud Files, 61
He [Freud] never risked himself in a congress and never defended his cause in public! . . . This always made him afraid! America was the first and only time! . . . He was too touchy! ~Carl Jung, The Freud Files, 62
The dream tells what the real reason [for Bleuler’s resistance] is. It is not as he says, that Stekel is in the society; I am the one who is holding him back. He throws Isserlin in my face, obviously as a screen for his homosexual resistance. ~Carl Jung to Freud, The Freud Files, Page 84
We have been victims of ‘blackmail’ by the newspapers and were reviled although no names were named. I have even consulted a good lawyer with a possible view to bringing libel action. ~Carl Jung to Freud, The Freud Files, Page 90
[Freud] later started to work on concepts that were no longer Freudian in the original sense . . . He found himself constrained to take my line, but this he could not admit to himself. ~Carl Jung, The Freud Files, Page 103
A very famous professor [Freud], whose assertions I had ventured to criticize, came out with the magisterial dictum: ‘It must be right because I have thought it.’ ~Carl Jung, The Freud Files, Page 162
At the end [of Breuer’s case history] it is said: She was cured – through the chimney sweeping – it is said that she was cured. But she wasn’t cured at all! When she came under my hands [Freud’s hands] she had a great hysterical attack, as when Breuer let her go. ~Carl Jung, The Freud Files, Page 69
The theoretical presuppositions for the mental work of Freudian research lie above all else in the knowledge of Janetian experiments. Breuer and Freud’s first formulation of the problem of hysteria starts from the facts of psychic dissociation and of unconscious psychic automatisms. A further presupposition so emphatically stressed by Binswanger among others is the aetiological significance of affects. Both these presuppositions together with the experiences drawn from the theory of suggestion result in the currently generally recognised view of hysteria as a psychogenic neurosis. Freud’s research is directed to finding by which means and in what manner the mechanism of the production of hysterical symptoms works. ~Carl Jung, The Freud Files, 72-73
For sheer obsequiousness nobody dares to pluck the prophet by the beard and inquire for once what you would say to a patient with a tendency to analyse the analyst instead of himself. You would certainly ask him: ‘Who’s got the neurosis?’ . . .I am namely not in the least neurotic – touch wood! I have namely lege artis et tout humblement let myself be analysed, which has been very good for me. You know, of course, how far a patient gets with self-analysis: not out of his neurosis – just like you. ~Carl Jung, The Freud Files, Page 649-50
Carl Gustav Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology. Jung proposed and developed the concepts of extraversion and introversion; archetypes, and the collective unconscious.
His work has been influential in psychiatry and in the study of religion, philosophy, archeology, anthropology, literature, and related fields. A prolific writer, many of his works were not published until after his death.
The theories in this book, written in 1901, although outdated, are still a fascinating glimpse of Jung’s mind at a crucial time in his life.
It followed the “Psychology of the Unconscious”, which represented his break from the Vienna school led by Freud (and his separation from Freud), and a young Jung moving in his own path of thought (although the development of his own “jungian” theory of psychology has a long way to go.This book is Jung in transition, his thought a work in progress, his theory a project under construction.
Carl Jung Depth Psychology Blog
