[1142] “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.
[1143] As a philosophical and metaphysical concept, the unconscious occurs fairly early, for instance as “petites perceptions” in Leibniz,2 “eternal unconscious” in Schelling, “unconscious Will” in Schopenhauer, and as the “divine Absolute” in von Hartmann.
[1144] In the academic psychology of the nineteenth century, the unconscious occurs as a basic theoretical concept in Theodor Lipps, who defines it as the “psychic reality which must necessarily be thought to underlie the existence of a conscious content”; and in F. H.W. Myers and William James, who stress the importance of an unconscious psyche. With Theodor Fechner, the unconscious becomes an empirical concept. Nevertheless, the empirical approach to the unconscious may properly be said to date from quite recent times, since up to the turn of the century the psyche was usually identified with consciousness, and this made the idea of the unconscious appear untenable (Wundt).
[1145] The real pioneers of experimental research into the unconscious were Pierre Janet and Sigmund Freud, two medical psychologists whose investigations of pathological psychic life laid the foundations of the modern science of the unconscious. Great credit is due to Janet for his investigation of hysterical states, which he developed in his theory of “partial psychic dissociation,” drawing a distinction between the “partie supérieure” and “partie inférieure” of a function. Equally fruitful was his experimental proof of “idées fixes” and “obsessions,” and of their autonomous effects upon consciousness.
[1146] The prominence given to the unconscious as a fundamental concept of empirical psychology, however, goes back to Freud, the true founder of the depth psychology which bears the name of psychoanalysis. This is a special method of treating psychic illnesses, and consists essentially in uncovering what is “hidden, forgotten, and repressed” in psychic life. Freud was a nerve specialist. His theory was evolved in the consulting room and always preserved its stamp. His fundamental premise was the pathological, neurotically degenerate psyche.
[1147] The development of Freud’s thought can be traced as follows. He began by investigating neurotic symptoms, more particularly hysterical symptom-formation, whose psychic origin Breuer, employing a method borrowed from hypnotism, had previously discovered in the existence of a causal connection between the symptoms and certain experiences of which the patient was unconscious. In these experiences Freud recognized affects which had somehow got “blocked,” and from which the patient had to be freed. He found there was a meaningful connection between the symptom and the affective experience, so much so that conscious experiences which later became unconscious were essential components of neurotic symptoms. The affects remained unconscious because of their painful nature. In consequence, Freud made no further use of hypnosis in “abreacting” the blocked affects, but developed instead his technique of “free association” for bringing the repressed processes back to consciousness. He thus laid the foundations of a causal-reductive method, of which special use was to be made in his interpretation of dreams.
[1148] In order to explain the origin of hysteria, Freud established the theory of the sexual trauma. He found that traumatic experiences were especially painful because most of them were caused by instinctual impulses coming from the sexual sphere. He assumed to begin with that hysteria in general was due to a sexual trauma in childhood. Later he stressed the aetiological significance of infantile-sexual fantasies that proved to be incompatible with the moral values of consciousness and were therefore repressed. The theory of repression forms the core of Freud’s teaching. According to this theory, the unconscious is essentially a phenomenon of repression, and its contents are elements of the personal psyche that although once conscious are now lost to consciousness. The unconscious would thus owe its existence to a moral conflict.
[1149] The existence of these unconscious factors can be demonstrated, as Freud showed, with the help of parapraxes (slips of the tongue, forgetting, misreading) and above all with the help of dreams, which are an important source of information regarding unconscious contents. It is Freud’s particular merit to have made dreams once more a problem for psychologists and to have attempted a new method of interpretation. He explained them by means of the repression theory, and maintained that they consisted of morally incompatible elements which, though capable of becoming conscious, were suppressed by an unconscious moral factor, the “censor,” and could therefore appear only in the form of disguised wish-fulfillments.
[1150] The instinctual conflict underlying this phenomenon Freud described initially as the conflict between the pleasure principle and the reality principle, the latter playing the part of an inhibiting factor. Later he described it as the conflict between the sexual instinct and the ego-instinct (or between the life-instinct and the death-instinct). The obtaining of pleasure was correlated with the pleasure principle, and the culture-creating impulse with the reality principle. Culture required the sacrifice of instinctual gratification by the whole of mankind and the individual alike. Resistance to this sacrifice led to secret wish-fulfillments distorted by the “censor.” The danger inherent in this theory was that it made culture appear a substitute for unsatisfied natural instincts, so that complex psychic phenomena like art, philosophy, and religion became “suspect,” as though they were “nothing but” the outcome of sexual repression. It would seem that Freud’s negative and reductive attitude towards cultural values was historically conditioned. His attitude towards myth and religion was that of the scientific materialism of the nineteenth century. As his psychology was mainly concerned with the neuroses, the pathological aspect of the transformation of instinct claims a disproportionately large place in his theory of the unconscious and of the neuroses themselves. The unconscious appears to be essentially an appendix of consciousness; its contents are repressed wishes, affects, and memories that owe their pathogenic significance to infantile sexuality. The most important of the repressed contents is the so-called Oedipus complex, which represents the fixation of infantile sexual wishes on the mother and the resistance to the father arising from feelings of envy and fear. This complex forms the core of a neurosis.
[1151] The question of the dynamics of unconscious fantasy-formations led Freud to a concept of great importance for the further development of depth psychology, namely, the concept of libido. At first he regarded this as the sexual instinct, but later broadened it by assuming the existence of “libidinal affluxes” due to the displacement and dissociability of the libido. Through the investigation of libido-fixations Freud discovered the “transference,” a fundamental phenomenon in the treatment of neurosis. Instead of recollecting the repressed elements, the patient “transfers” them to the analyst in the form of some current experience; that is, he projects them and thereby involves the analyst in his “family romance.” In this way his illness is converted into the “transference neurosis” and is then acted out between them.
[1152] Freud later expanded the concept of the unconscious by calling it the “id” in contradistinction to the conscious ego. (The term derives from Groddeck.) The id represents the natural unconscious dynamism of man, while the ego forms that part of the id which is modified under the influence of the environment or is replaced by the reality principle. In working out the relations between the ego and the id, Freud discovered that the ego contains not only conscious but also unconscious contents, and he was therefore compelled to frame a concept to characterize the unconscious portion of the ego, which he called the “super-ego” or “ego-ideal.” He regarded this as the representative of the parental authority, as the successor of the Oedipus complex, that impels the ego to restrain the id. It manifests itself as conscience, which, invested with the authority of collective morality, continues to display the character of the father. The super-ego accounts for the activity of the censor in dreams.
[1153] Although Alfred Adler is usually included among the founders of depth psychology, his school of individual psychology represents only a partial continuation of the line of research initiated by his teacher Freud. Confronted with the same empirical material, Adler considered it from an entirely different point of view. For him, the primary aetiological factor was not sexuality but the power-drive. The neurotic individual appeared to him to be in conflict with society, with the result that his spontaneous development was blocked. On this view the individual never exists for himself alone; he maintains his psychic existence only within the community. In contrast to the emphasis Freud laid on instinctual strivings, Adler stressed the importance of environmental factors as possible causes of neurosis. Neurotic symptoms and disturbances of personality were the result of a morbidly intensified valuation of the ego, which, instead of adapting to reality, develops a system of “guiding fictions.” This hypothesis gives expression to a finalistic viewpoint diametrically opposed to the causal-reductive method of Freud, in that it emphasizes the direction towards a goal. Each individual chooses a guiding line as a basic pattern for the organization of all psychic contents. Among the possible guiding fictions, Adler attached special importance to the winning of superiority and power over others, the urge “to be on top.” The original source of this misguided ambition lies in a deep-rooted feeling of inferiority, necessitating an over-compensation in the form of security. A primary organ-inferiority, or inferiority of the constitution as a whole, often proves to be an aetiological factor. Environmental influences in early childhood play their part in building up this psychic mechanism, since it is then that the foundations are laid for the development of the guiding fiction. The fiction of future superiority is maintained by tendentiously distorting all valuations and giving undue importance to being “on top” as opposed to “underneath,” “masculine” as opposed to “feminine,” a tendency which finds its clearest expression in the so-called “masculine protest.”
[1154] In Adler’s individual psychology, Freud’s basic concepts undergo a process of recasting. The Oedipus complex, for example, loses its importance in view of the increasing drive for security; illness becomes a neurotic “arrangement” for the purpose of consolidating the life-plan. Repression loses its aetiological significance when understood as an instrument for the better realization of the guiding fiction. Even the unconscious appears as an “artifice of the psyche,” so that it may very well be asked whether Adler can be included among the founders of depth psychology. Dreams, too, he regarded as distortions aiming at the fictive security of the ego and the strengthening of the power drive. Nevertheless, the services rendered by Adler and his school to the phenomenology of personality disturbances in children should not be overlooked. Above all, it must be emphasized that a whole class of neuroses can in fact be explained primarily in terms of the power drive.
[1155] Whereas Freud started out as a neurologist, and Adler later became his pupil, C. G. Jung was a pupil of Eugen Bleuler and began his career as a psychiatrist. Before he came into contact with Freud’s ideas, he had, in treating a case of somnambulism in a fifteen-year-old girl (1899), observed that her unconscious contained the beginnings of a future personality development, which took the form of a split (or “double”) personality. Through experimental researches on association (1903) he found that in normal individuals as well as in neurotics the reactions to word-tests were disturbed by split-off (“repressed”) emotional complexes (“feeling-toned complexes of ideas”), which manifested themselves by means of definite symptoms (“complex-indicators”). These experiments confirmed the existence of the repressions described by Freud and their characteristic consequences. In 1906 Jung gave polemical support to Freud’s discovery. The theory of complexes maintains that neurosis is caused by the splitting-off of a vitally important complex. Similar splinter-complexes can be observed in schizophrenia. In this disease the personality is, as it were, broken up into its complexes, with the result that the normal ego-complex almost disappears. The splinter-complexes are relatively autonomous, are not subject to the conscious will, and cannot be corrected so long as they remain unconscious. They lend themselves to personification (in dreams, for instance), and, with increasing dissociation and autonomy, assume the character of partial personalities (hence the old view of neuroses and psychoses as states of possession).
[1156] In 1907 Jung became personally acquainted with Freud, and derived from him a wealth of insights, particularly in regard to dream psychology and the treatment of neurosis. But in certain respects he arrived at views which differed from those of Freud. Experience did not seem to him to justify Freud’s sexual theory of neurosis, and still less that of schizophrenia. The conception of the unconscious needed to be broadened, inasmuch as the unconscious was not just a product of repression but was the creative matrix of consciousness. Equally, he was of the opinion that the unconscious could not be explained in personalistic terms, as a merely personal phenomenon, but that it was also in part collective. Accordingly, he rejected the view that it possessed a merely instinctual nature, as well as rejecting the wish-fulfillment theory of dreams. Instead, he emphasized the compensatory function of the unconscious processes and their teleological character. For the wish-fulfillment theory he substituted the concept of development of personality and development of consciousness, holding that the unconscious does not consist only of morally incompatible wishes but is largely composed of hitherto undeveloped, unconscious portions of the personality which strive for integration in the wholeness of the individual. In the neurotic, this process of realization is manifested in the conflict between the relatively mature side of the personality and the side which Freud rightly described as infantile. The conflict has at first a purely personal character and can be explained personalistically, as the patients themselves do, and moreover in a manner which agrees both in principle and in detail with the Freudian explanation. Their standpoint is a purely personal and egoistic one, and takes no account of the collective factors, this being the very reason why they are ill. In schizophrenics, on the other hand, the collective contents of the unconscious predominate strongly in the form of mythological motifs. Freud could not subscribe to these modifications of his views, so Jung and he parted company.
[1157] Such differences of viewpoint, further increased by the contradiction between Freud’s and Adler’s explanation of neurosis, prompted Jung to investigate more closely the important question of the conscious attitude, on which the compensatory function of the unconscious depends. Already in his association experiments he had found indications of an attitude-type, and this was now confirmed by clinical observations. As a general and habitual disposition in every individual, there proved to be a more or less pronounced tendency towards either extraversion or introversion, the focus of interest falling in the first case on the object, and in the second on the subject. These attitudes of consciousness determine the corresponding modes of compensation by the unconscious: the emergence in the first case of unconscious demands upon the subject, and in the second of unconscious ties to the object. These relationships, in part complementary, in part compensatory, are complicated by the simultaneous participation of the variously differentiated orienting functions of consciousness, namely, thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition, which are needed for a whole judgment. The most differentiated (“superior”) function is complemented or compensated by the least differentiated (“inferior”) function, but at first only in the form of a conflict.
[1158] Further investigation of the collective material of the unconscious, presented by schizophrenics and by the dreams of neurotics and normal people, elicited typical figures or motifs which have their counterparts in myth and may therefore be called archetypes. These are not to be thought of as inherited ideas; rather, they are the equivalent of the “pattern of behaviour” in biology. The archetype represents a mode of psychic behaviour. As such, it is an “irrepresentable” factor which unconsciously arranges the psychic elements so that they fall into typical configurations, much as a crystalline grid arranges the molecules in a saturated solution. The specific associations and memory images forming these configurations vary endlessly from individual to individual; only the basic pattern remains the same. One of the clearest of these archetypal figures is the anima, the personification of the unconscious in feminine form. This archetype is peculiar to masculine psychology, since the unconscious of a man is by nature feminine, probably owing to the fact that sex is determined merely by a preponderance of masculine genes, the feminine genes retreating into the background. The corresponding role in a woman is played by the animus. A figure common to both sexes is the shadow, a personification of the inferior side of the personality. These three figures appear very frequently in the dreams and fantasies of normal people, neurotics and schizophrenics. Less frequent is the archetype of the wise old man and of the earth mother. Besides these there are a number of functional and situational motifs, such as ascent and descent, the crossing (ford or strait), tension and suspension between opposites, the world of darkness, the breakthrough (or invasion), the creation of fire, helpful or dangerous animals, etc. Most important of all is the supposedly central archetype or self, which seems to be the point of reference for the unconscious psyche, just as the ego is the point of reference for consciousness. The symbolism associated with this archetype expresses itself on the one hand in circular, spherical, and quaternary forms, in the “squaring of the circle,” and in mandala symbolism; on the other hand in the imagery of the supraordinate personality (God-image, Anthropos symbolism).
[1159] These empirical findings show that the unconscious consists of two layers: a superficial layer, representing the personal unconscious, and a deeper layer, representing the collective unconscious. The former is made up of personal contents, i.e., things forgotten and repressed, subliminal or “extrasensory” perceptions and anticipations of future developments, as well as other psychic processes that never reach the threshold of consciousness. A neurosis originates in a conflict between consciousness and the personal unconscious, whereas a psychosis has deeper roots and consists in a conflict involving the collective unconscious. The great majority of dreams contain mainly personal material, and their protagonists are the ego and the shadow. Normally, the dream material serves only to compensate the conscious attitude. There are, however, comparatively rare dreams (the “big” dreams of primitives) which contain clearly recognizable mythological motifs. Dreams of this sort are of especial importance for the development of personality. Their psychotherapeutic value was recognized even in ancient times.
[1160] Since the personal unconscious contains the still active residues of the past as well as the seeds of the future, it exerts a direct and very considerable influence on the conscious behaviour of the individual. All cases of unusual behaviour in children should be investigated for their psychic antecedents through rigorous interrogation of both child and parents. The behaviour of the parents, whether they have open or hidden conflicts, etc., has an incalculable effect on the unconscious of the child. The causes of infantile neurosis are to be sought less in the children than in the parents or teachers. The teacher should be more conscious of his shadow than the average person, otherwise the work of one hand can easily be undone by the other. It is for this reason that medical psychotherapists are required to undergo a training analysis, in order to gain insight into their own unconscious psyche.
[1160a] Thanks to the parallelism between mythological motifs and the archetypes of the unconscious, depth psychology has been applied in widely differing fields of research, especially by students of mythology, folklore, comparative religion, and the psychology of primitives (Richard Wilhelm, Heinrich Zimmer, Karl Kerényi, Hugo Rahner, Erich Neumann), as was also the case with the Freudian school earlier (Karl Abraham, Otto Rank, Ernest Jones). As the archetypes have a “numinous” quality and underlie all religious and dogmatic ideas, depth psychology is also of importance for theology.
[1161] The activity of the collective unconscious manifests itself not only in compensatory effects in the lives of individuals, but also in the mutation of dominant ideas in the course of the centuries. This can be seen most clearly in religion, and, to a lesser extent, in the various philosophical, social, and political ideologies. It appears in most dangerous form in the sudden rise and spread of psychic epidemics, as for instance in the witch hunts in Germany at the end of the fourteenth century, or in the social and political utopias of the twentieth century. How far the collective unconcious may be considered the efficient cause of such movements, or merely their material cause, is a question for ethnologists and psychologists to decide; but certain experiences in the field of individual psychology indicate the possibility of a spontaneous activity of archetypes. These experiences usually concern individuals in the second half of life, when it not infrequently happens that drastic changes of outlook are thrust upon them by the unconscious as a result of some defect in their conscious attitude. While the activity of the personal unconscious is confined to compensatory changes in the personal sphere, the changes effected by the collective unconscious have a collective aspect: they alter our view of the world, and, like a contagion, infect our fellow men. (Hence the astonishing effects of certain psychopaths on society!)
[1162] The regulating influence of the collective unconscious can be seen at work in the psychic development of the individual, or individuation process. Its main phases are expressed by the classic archetypes that are found in the ancient initiation mysteries and in Hermetic philosophy. These archetypal figures appear in projected form during the transference. Freud recognized only the personal aspect of this psychotherapeutically very important phenomenon. Despite appearances to the contrary, its real psychotherapeutic value does not lie in the sphere of personal problems (a misunderstanding for which the neurotic patient has to pay dearly), but in the projection of archetypal figures (anima, animus, etc.). The archetypal relationships thus produced during the transference serve to compensate the unlimited exogamy of our culture by a realization of the unconscious endogamous tendency. The goal of the psychotherapeutic process, the self-regulation of the psyche by means of the natural drive towards individuation, is expressed by the above-mentioned mandala and Anthropos symbolism.