JUNGIAN.DIRECTORY
In 1896 new departures in psychological theory
and practice took place which marked the beginning of what is now
called depth psychology. The significant events of that year were
Freud’s classification of neuroses and publication of a paper entitled
‘On the Aetiology of Hysteria’ (Ellenberger, 1970). This latter event,
as it turned out, was as important for its failures as its success, leading
as it did by way of second thoughts to Freud’s realisation that in the
UNCONSCIOUS it is very difficult to distinguish FANTASY from memory.
From that time onward, he and his close associates (one of whom
was Jung during the years from 1907 to 1913) paid less attention to
uncovering suppressed memories than to exploring unconscious
material.
Freud’s innovations laid the foundations of what was to come, a
fact well recognised by Jung (inter alia, CW 15, ‘Sigmund Freud in
his Historical Setting’ and ‘In Memory of Sigmund Freud’). Among
these innovations in perspective and technique with patients, of primary
importance was the introduction of dream INTERPRETATION as
a tool of PSYCHOTHERAPY. This was combined with Freud’s assertion
that DREAMS have latent as well as manifest content; his contention
that the manifest content is a distortion of the latent content of the
dream resulting from unconscious censorship; and his application of
free ASSOCIATION as a method in the analysis of dreams. Freud’s
theory of dreams and his awareness of parapraxes which resulted in
publication of The Psychopathology ofEverydqy Life (1901) were formulations
derived from his work on hysteria. In 1897 he started work
on Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), a book in
which he is the first to investigate the psychological function of play.
All of these changes claimed to furpish keys for the investigation of
the unconscious with the aim of renewing the conscious mind and
all were completed before he and J.ung met.
Jung began an encyclopaedia entry on the subject of depth
psychology, written in 1948 and published in 1951, with the words:
“‘Depth Psychology” is a term deriving from medical psychology,
coined by Eugen Bleuler to denote that branch of psychological science
which is concerned with the phenomenon of the unconscious’
(CW 18, para. 1142).
In this article Jung is at pains to trace the sources of the main
ideas but speaks of Freud as the ‘true founder of the depth
psychology which bears the name of PSYCHOANALYSIS’. He identifies
Alfred Adler’s individual psychology as a continuation of one part
of the researches initiated by his teacher, Freud. Confronted with the
same empirical material, Jung concluded that Adler had considered
it from a different point of view from that of Freud, his premise
being that the primary aetiological factor was not sexuality but the
power drive.
As far as he himself is concerned, Jung acknowledges his own debt
to Freud, emphasising that his early experiments with the WORD
ASSOCIATION TEST confirmed the existence of the repressions encountered
by Freud and the characteristic consequences, finding that in
so-called normal persons as well as neurotics, reactions were disturbed
by ‘split-off’ (i.e. repressed) emotional complexes (see COMPLEX).
He identifies his differences in point of view as related to the
sexual theory of neurosis which he found limited and a conception
of the unconscIOus which he felt needed to be broadened since he
saw it as ‘the creative matrix of CONSCIOUSNESS’, containing not only
repressed personal contents but COLLECTIVE motifs as well. He rejected
the wish-fulfilment theory of dreams, emphasising instead the
function of COMPENSATION in unconscious processes and their teleological
character (see TELEOLOGICAL POINT OF VIEW). He also attributed
his break with Freud to a difference in point of view on the
role of the collective unconscious and how that manifests in cases of
SCHiZOPHRENIA, i.e. formulation of his theory of the ARCHETYPE.
In the same article, Jung goes on to outline his further independent
observations and discoveries, now included in the body of works
associated with ANALYTICAL PSYCHOLOGY. With further extension
and proliferation of operational theories of personality and personality
behaviour, the term depth psychology is little used today excepting
in its original sense; namely, to identify and describe those
who specifically investigate unconscious phenomena.