TWENTY YEARS AGO, I resigned from my lectureship at the university. At the time, I had been lecturing for eight years, of course with mixed success. Eventually, I realized that one must understand something about psychology in the first place before being able to lecture about it. 56 I then withdrew, and travelled the world, since our cultural sphere simply fails to supply us with an Archimedean point. 57
Now, after twenty years of professional experience, I am returning to the lecture hall, and will attempt to convey to you a sense of the field known as “psychology.” By no means is this a simple undertaking, as I am sure you will agree. It is very difficult to present such a comprehensive field in a generally intelligible and somewhat concentrated manner, particularly since it occupies such an incredibly vast area. The human soul is enormously complicated, and about as many psychologies could be written as there are minds. Some psychologies address highly specific questions, such as those pertaining to biology or to the individual.
Each year, Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, publishes a weighty tome five centimeters thick and entitled Psychologies of 1933, etc. 58 I must therefore chart a path through this incredible chaos of opinions. I have not spoken to the younger generation for some twenty years. Consequently, I fear that I shall at times be off the mark. Should this occur, I would ask you to send me your questions through the post. But, please: within the scope of these lectures, rather than broaching the future of European currencies, for instance, or the prospects of National Socialism, etc.
I have called the psychology that I endeavor to discuss in these lectures “Modern Psychology.” I have chosen such a general title, because the matters at hand are of a very general nature. Instead of engaging with specific doctrines, my aim is to paint a picture based on immediate experience in order to depict the development of modern psychological ideas.
Psychology did not suddenly spring into existence; one could say that it is as old as civilization itself. Obviously, psychology has always been with us, ever since human life, outstanding minds, personages, and psychological demonstrations have existed. In ancient times, there was the science of astrology, which has always appeared in the wake of culture all over the world. It is a kind of psychology, and alchemy is another unconscious form. This is an extremely peculiar form, however, a so-called projected psychology, in which the psyche is seen as entirely outside man, and is projected into the stars or into matter. 59
But I do not intend at present to speak of those days. In this short introduction to “Modern Psychology,” I shall take you back only to its first beginnings as a conscious science. 60 Psychology proper appears only with the dawn of the age of Enlightenment at the end of the seventeenth century, and we will follow its development through a long line of philosophers and scientists who made the manifestations of the psyche their field of study.
Still for Descartes (1596–1650), 61 the soul is quite simply thought directed by the will. In his time, the whole of scientific interest was not yet focused on the human soul, but flowed outward to concrete objects. The age of science coincided with the age of discovery, that is, the discovery of the surface of the world. Thus, science was only interested in what could be touched. The external world was thoroughly explored, but no one looked inward. While all kinds of psychic phenomena existed, of course, they fell into the domain of the dogmatic symbol. The soul was assumed to be known, and everything concerning it was left to the care of the Church. Phenomena of the soul occurred exclusively within the framework of the Church, in the form of religious, mystical, and metaphysical experiences, and were subject to the judgement of the priest. As long as this dogmatic symbol was a living thing, in which man felt contained, no psychological problems existed.
This strange fact—namely, that phenomena of the soul were still contained within the religious sphere—holds true wherever religion is still alive. There, the life of the soul finds valid expression in symbols, and what remains with the individual is in essence his consciousness, since everything else is already expressed in religious forms. For instance, a highly educated Catholic came up to me after a lecture, and remarked: “Dr. Jung, I am surprised that you go to such great pains with psychology, why you struggle with such problems; these are not problems, surely! Whenever doubt seizes me, I quite simply query my bishop, who might ask his cardinal, and eventually turn to Rome. After all, they must have gained more experience over 2,000 years than you have!”
For such people, psychological problems simply do not exist. This was the case for the whole of Europe deep into the first half of the nineteenth century, and this condition still remains undisturbed for those who feel secure in a living and effective religious form. In Buddhism, Islam, Confucianism, and so forth, too, the life of the soul is expressed in symbols.
Essentially, science rested not upon any fundamental doubt, but rather upon the doubt about the secondary manifestations of a truth already revealed. We must not overlook this fact. Thus, for instance, where people are still living within the framework of living symbols, our psychology lacks a point of attack altogether. For such people, these problems effectively do not exist. But once doubt sneaks in, the life in the symbol gutters out, and actual psychology begins.
As I mentioned, at the time when the great seafarers were discovering new continents, something freed itself, something which could no longer be contained in the dogmatic symbol. At first, one did not know what this was. It showed itself in a sudden longing for something from which the Renaissance subsequently emerged. The Renaissance arose out of what, through doubt, had freed itself from Christianity. This was actually the first time that a psychological problem manifested itself.
Those of you who have read Jakob Burckhardt’s study of the Renaissance might have stumbled over a small reference to a book entitled Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, 62 written by a monk, Francesco Colonna. The title means “sleep-love-conflict,” that is to say it is highly symbolic. It was translated at the end of the sixteenth century by an otherwise unknown Frenchman as Le songe de Poliphile. 63
The title refers to Polia, 64 or Madame Polia, the heroine of the conflict. The story begins with the hero—that is, the dreamer of a long dream—losing his way in the Black Forest, which the Italians considered an ultima Thule 65 at the time, and where unicorns were still said to roam. A wolf appears to him and leads him to the ruins of a sunken city with temples. Its architecture is that of the Renaissance—the whole of psychology was expressed in the form of architecture in the Renaissance. He steps into the dark entrance of one of the temples. After a while, he wishes to leave the temple again. He gets a somewhat uncanny feeling. But a great dragon appears in the doorway and blocks his way. In what follows, and since he can only go forward, he is compelled to experience everything that has happened to this sunken city. Through endless adventures, he is constantly looking for Madame Polia. Even though we do not know who this figure is, we can nonetheless venture a guess: Lady Soul. Eventually, he reaches the royal court. He is promised that he will be escorted to the Island of the Blessed where he will be wed to his beloved Polia. Upon arriving on the island, he hears a ringing and awakens. It is the morning of May 1st. Hélas! 66
At the time, the story was said to be particularly profound and mysterious, and even thought to be a divine revelation. Later, it was considered to be so banal that Jacob Burckhardt did not even read it. Incidentally, the book is now a bibliographical rarity. Even the French edition has a collector’s value of approximately five hundred Swiss francs. It took me great pains to read it at the time. 67
The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili is an important document humain, and actually represents the secret psychology of the Renaissance, namely, that which had struggled free from the grip of the symbol. Significantly, its author was a monk, even though he expressed himself in a pagan way. Strictly speaking, he would have been obliged to express what moved his soul in Marianist terms, that is, through the symbol of the Mother of God, and yet he chose not to. His is an involuntary psychology, typical and in a way symptomatic of an entire historical period. It reveals what liberated itself at that time, and summons the world of the ancient Greek Gods to express this in one way or another. Under the cloak of this allegory, he describes the descent into the underworld of the psyche. Dame Polia held something for him that he could not find in the Madonna.
If this interpretation is correct, we must expect that anyone who became involved with this new symbol in subsequent centuries could no longer be a real Catholic. When we come to the philosophers, who took the path of psychological discovery and who became the founders of this comparatively modern science, we find that they were indeed almost without exception Protestants. In earlier days, the healing of the psyche was regarded as Christ’s prerogative, the task belonged to religion, for we suffered then only as part of a collective suffering. It was a new point of view to look upon the individual psyche as something whole that also suffers individually. The Protestant is the natural seeker in the field of psychological research, for he no longer has a symbol in which he can express himself, and therefore his sense of incompleteness makes him uneasy; he searches, he is active and restless. He will set out to explore every nook and cranny of the world in search of what he lacks, and he may have recourse to antiquity and learn about it, or will often reach out to other faiths, such as theosophy, Christian Science, Buddhism, etc., to find it there.
Eventually, he will come upon his soul and ask: Why is there something inside us that desires something else? “Why does my spiritual life no longer satisfy me?” is particularly the problem of the Protestant; he thinks that it should, but the fact remains that it does not, and that he is often troubled with neurotic symptoms. Thus, psychology was at first an entirely Protestant affair, then it became the business of the Enlightenment man, the skeptic, and the freethinker. For we can neither escape the fact that something rankles us nor that we are terribly nervous. Ultimately, psychology thus became a matter for the doctor. He must attend to those who have fallen into a profound doubt, and out of the symbol.
In what follows, I shall discuss in greater depth the development outlined so far. Specifically, I shall adduce a number of dates that will help us trace the gradual progress of psychology over the past centuries.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), 68 an encyclopedic genius and a celebrated philosopher in his day, made the first explicit contribution to what we call psychology today. I shall mention only a few key points here that were essential to the emergence of modern psychology. Very often, by the way, the teachings of the older philosophers are truths that then fell into oblivion for a long time.
Leibniz’s central concept is what he called the petites perceptions [minute perceptions], perceptions imperceptibles [imperceptible perceptions], or perceptions insensibles [unfelt perceptions] 69: He thinks of perceptions as representations, since a perception is at the same time a representation.
Leibniz cites as an example the experiment involving blue and yellow powder. 70 When they are mixed insufficiently, blue and yellow grains of powder are distinctly perceptible. But when they are mixed thoroughly, only green powder is perceptible, even though the powder still consists of blue and yellow grains. While it looks green, it is in reality yellow and blue. We perceive these two colors—blue and yellow—unconsciously, that is to say, beneath the threshold. They are imperceptible. Leibniz tried to find a psychological meaning to his experiments and sought to make analogies to similar processes that take place in the human mind: something happens in me of which I am not aware. Here we first chance upon the conception of a soul that is not conscious. Descartes still considered the soul to be nothing other than thought.
For Leibniz, these “minute perceptions” contrast with another psychological principle: the principle of the intellect or the idea. Ideas and innate truths do not exist as actualities in us, however, but instead as some kind of dispositions that experience must fill out in order for them to become perceptible: “c’est ainsi que les idées et les vérités nous sont innées comme des inclinations, des dispositons, des habitudes ou des virtualités.” 71 It is like a drawing that, although it has already been made, is invisible, but nonetheless exists, because when we douse it with powder it suddenly becomes visible.
Perceptions are the opportunities for and the causes of rendering conscious innate ideas and dispositions. Leibniz thus anticipated the idea of innate dispositions, that is, images in which we accumulate and shape experience. For him, representations are a kind of powder that is spread over the inborn or unconscious ideas. These ideas, which came already very close to modern psychology, remained latent for a very long time, as is often the case with ideas when the time is not yet ripe for them.
His younger contemporary Christian August Wolff (1679–1754) 72 initiated another line of thinking. Wolff limited his discussion entirely to consciousness, and divided his psychology into two parts: firstly, empirical psychology, which considers in particular the cognitive faculty and the activity of consciousness; and secondly, rational or speculative psychology, which centers on desire and the interrelations between body and soul. 73
Wolff considered the “soul” a simple substance, endowed with three powers: the representative faculty, the appetitive faculty, and the cognitive or cogniscitive faculty. 74 However, he considers thinking to be the essence of the soul. 75 In Wolff, we encounter for the first time the notion that psychology could be experience and that one could even experiment with it, which was a completely new idea. Wolff’s psychology is the first ever experiential psychology. 76
Johann Nikolaus Tetens (1736–1807) 77 went even a step further. He is the actual founder of experimental, physiological psychology, which later flourished before World War One in the era of Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920). 78 Tetens was influenced by the English physiological approach to psychology, as represented by David Hartley (1705–1757). 79 Tetens was the first to measure the sensations of light, hearing, and touch. He espoused a wholly empirical approach and did not consider doctrines to be eternal truths, but, rather as did the English, to be mere “working hypotheses.”
This age peaked in the great critical era whose pre-eminent figure was Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). 80 His critique of knowledge also imposed boundaries on psychology. In particular, Kant contested its possibility of being a science, arguing instead that it was at best a “discipline.” Despite his skepticism Kant was not opposed to psychology, but actually took a profound interest in it. His views on the subject are somewhat contradictory and awkward, however, and are consequently discarded by “true” Kantians. 81 In his Anthropology he follows Leibniz’s thinking, and speaks of “obscure representations,” that is to say, representations that we have without being conscious of them. 82
56. As a Privatdocent at the University of Zurich, Jung had lectured there from 1905 to 1913. He had resigned “[c]onsciously, deliberately,” feeling that he had to make a “choice of either continuing my academic career . . . or following the laws of my inner personality.” It would have been “unfair to continue teaching young students when my own intellectual situation was nothing but a mass of doubts” (Memories, pp. 218–219).
57. That is, a fixed point outside one’s own sphere, offering “the possibility of objective measurement” (Jung, 1926 [1924], § 163). Jung repeatedly stressed that in psychology no such outside standpoint exists. For further references to this, see Jung & Schmid, 2013, pp. 15–16.
58. Clark University, of course, being the university at which Jung and Freud had lectured in 1909, and received the degree of Doctor of Laws honoris causa (cf. Rosenzweig, 1992; Burnham, 2012). The series was edited by Carl Murchison and published by Clark University Press, Worcester, MA. The first traceable volume is from 1925.
59. Cf. Jung, 1988 [1934–1939], p. 1496: “[O]ur whole mental life, our consciousness, began with projections . . . and it is interesting that those internal contents, which made the foundation of real consciousness, were projected the farthest into space—into the stars. So the first science was astrology.”
60. MS: bewusste Wissenschaft; that is, a psychology that is conscious, aware, of being a “psychology.”
61. René Descartes (1596–1650), the famous French philosopher and mathematician, most known for his dictum “cogito ergo sum,” and his highly influential (and controversial) dualistic view of the mind–body problem (res cogitans vs. res extensa—mind is essentially thought, and body is essentially extension). His book Meditationes de prima philosophia (1641) is considered a classic contribution to Rationalism. In his theory, the soul is, in contrast to the body, an immaterial, unitary, and indestructible substance. It is always thinking, because thinking (cogitatio) is part of its essence. Thinking is guided by the will, which has to give its assent (assensus) to the judgment (actus iudicandi).
62. Jacob Burckhardt (1818–1897), noted Swiss historian of art and culture, and one of the major progenitors of cultural history. His best known work is the one on the Renaissance, quoted here by Jung (Burckhardt, 1860, the reference on p. 186, Engl. ed.). Jung used the second German edition of 1869 (Transformations, § 2123). Regarding Burckhardt and the Hypnerotomachia, Jung remarked: “It is perhaps significant that this book, so important for the psychology of the Renaissance, was carefully avoided by the bachelor Jacob Buckhardt” (1963, § 12792; my trans., only in GW, not in CW; see also note 67). As a cultural historian, however, Burckhardt was more interested in other, e.g., architectural, aspects of this book than in the psychology of the novel. Jung repeatedly quoted Burckhardt’s notion of “primordial images” (e.g., 1917–1942, § 101; Types, definitions: image) in connection with his own of the “archetypes.”
63. Colonna, 1499. Béroalde de Verville’s translation appeared in 1600; the first complete English version was published in 1999, five hundred years after the original (see Bibliography). In this book, Francesco Colonna describes his dream of an adventurous journey, in which he (as a monk) searches for the Lady Soul. The identity of Colonna is contended. He could have been a Venetian Dominican, or a Roman nobleman.
64. φιλία (philia) = Greek for love; Poliphilus = the one who loves Polia.
65. A mythical place beyond the borders of the known world.
66. French, alas!
67. In 1947, Linda Fierz-David (the wife of Hans Eduard Fierz, C. G. Jung’s friend and professor of chemistry at the ETH) published a monograph on The Dream of Poliphilo (Engl. ed. 1950), to which Jung wrote a foreword, in which he told of his first encounter with the book: “I set about reading the book, but soon got lost in the mazes of its architectural fantasies, which no human being can enjoy today. Probably the same thing has happened to many a reader, and we can only sympathize with Jacob Burckhardt, who dismissed it with a brief mention while bothering little about its contents” (1947 [1946], § 1749).
68. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), German mathematician and philosopher, known as the last “universal genius.” He made major contributions to the fields of metaphysics, epistemology, logic, and philosophy of religion, as well as mathematics (infinitesimal calculus), physics, geology, jurisprudence, and history. He is considered one of the great seventeenth-century advocates of Rationalism. Known for his theories of the monads and of pre-established harmony (to which Jung will refer in his writings on synchronicity; cf. Jung, 1952, §§ 927–928). Famous is his (often misunderstood) dictum of ours as “the best of all possible worlds.”
69. “At every moment there is in us an infinity of perceptions, unaccompanied by awareness or reflection; that is, of alterations in the soul itself, of which we are unaware because these impressions are either too minute and too numerous, or else too unvarying, so that they are not sufficiently distinctive on their own” (Leibniz, 1981 [1704–1706], p. 53). The infinity of petites perceptions is, so to speak, epistemological white noise.
70. “[W]hen we perceive the colour green in a mixture of yellow and blue powder, we sense only yellow and blue finely mixed, even though we do not notice this, but rather fashion some new thing for ourselves [novum aliquod ens ex nobis fingentes]” (Leibniz, 1684, p. 426).
71. Ideas and truths are innate inside us as “inclinations, dispositions, tendencies or natural potentialities and not as actualities” (Leibniz, 1981 [1704–1706], p. 52).
72. Christian Wolff (1679–1754), arguably the most important German philosopher in the early and middle portion of the eighteenth century, between Leibniz (with whom he was acquainted and corresponded [Leibniz & Wolff, 1860]) and Kant. He wanted to base theological truths on mathematical evidence, his philosophy being a systematic development of Rationalism. Accused of atheism, he was ousted in 1723 from his first chair in Halle, and ordered by the king to leave Prussia within 48 hours or be hanged, causing one of the most celebrated academic dramas in the eighteenth century. He had a wide following of “Wolffians,” making him the founder of the first German philosophical “school,” dominating Germany until the rise of Kantianism. Interestingly, in connection with Jung, his preoccupation with Confucius, and Chinese philosophy (cf. his famous lecture “On the Practical Philosophy of the Chinese” [1721]), is considered an early highlight of the encounter between Western and Eastern philosophy. His complete writings have been published since 1962 in an annotated edition (Wolff, 1962 sqq.).
73. Wolff defined psychology as that “part of philosophy that deals with the soul” [pars philosophiae, quae de anime agit] (Wolff, 1728, § 58, p. 29). He then distinguished between psychologia empirica and psychologia rationalis. In the latter, “we derive, solely from the concept of the human soul, a priori everything that can be seen as belonging to it a posteriori, and also that which is deduced from observations [of the soul]” [In Psychologia rationali ex unico animae humanae conceptu derivamus a priori omnia, quae eidem competere a posteriori observantur & ex quibus observatis deducuntur] (ibid., § 112, p. 151).
74. Wolff was a representative of “faculty psychology” [Vermögenspsychologie], a point of view that conceived the human mind as consisting of separate powers or faculties, which was a widespread concept during much of the nineteenth century.
75. Cogitatio igitur est actus animae, quo sibi sui rerumque aliarum extra se conscia est [Thinking is therefore the act of the soul by which it becomes conscious of itself and of the other things outside of itself] (1732, § 23), quoted by Jung in Transformations, ed. 1991, p. 25. On Wolff’s general views on the soul, cf. Wolff, 1719–1720, 1733.
76. “Practical philosophy is of the utmost importance, and that is why it is so important that we do not proceed from principles that could be doubted. We can only base the truths of practical philosophy, therefore, on basic principles that are obviously supported by experience in psychology” [Philosophia practica est maximi momenti; quae igitur maximi sunt momenti, istiusmodi principiis superstruere noluimus, quae in disceptationem vocantur. Ea de causa veritates philosophiae practicae non superstruimus nisi principiis, quae per experientiam in Psychologia evidenter stabiliunter] (Wolff, 1728, p. 52). On Wolff as a pioneer of psychology as a natural science, see also Jung, 1946b, § 345.
77. Johannes Nikolaus Tetens (1736–1807), German philosopher, mathematician, and scientist of the Enlightenment. In the wake of Christian Wolff, who himself drew on John Locke, Tetens drew on English Empiricism. In English-speaking countries, he has been called “the German Hume,” having studied and popularized Hume’s work in the German-speaking world. His main work, Philosophische Versuche über die menschliche Natur und ihre Entwickelung [Philosophical essays on human nature and its development] (1777), sought to combine Hume’s empiricism (cf. Hume, 1739–1740) with the philosophy of Leibniz and Wolff. He tried to make a psychological analysis of the soul with the methods of natural science. His work also was important for Immanuel Kant, whom he is supposed to have introduced to phenomenological thought and to the empiricism/transcendence dualism.
78. Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920), German physician, psychologist, physiologist, and philosopher, generally considered the “father” of psychology as a separate natural science in general, and of experimental psychology in particular (although according to Jung the credit actually goes to Tetens). Founder of the first psychological laboratory in Europe (1879) and the first journal for psychological research (1881). Wundt played a central role in the nascent field of psychology, not least on Freud (through his ethno-psychological writings) and Jung (association experiments). His legacy in psychology today, however, is a subject of continuing debate.
79. David Hartley (1705–1757), English philosopher, scientist, and mystic, also a practicing physician and vegetarian. His central concept of “association” led to the school of “association psychology” in the nineteenth century (James Mill, John Stewart Mill, William B. Carpenter, Alexander Bain). His principal work, Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectations (1749), studied humans as physical beings (frame), psychological and moral beings (duty), and as religious beings (expectations), representing a wide-ranging synthesis of neurology, moral psychology, and spirituality. His “physiological approach to psychology” was to start with “corporeal causes”—neurological processes (“vibrations” in the brain)—and then to ask how such processes generated consciousness, perceptions, thoughts, etc. He affirmed the unity of body and mind, and trusted in universal salvation and the eventual overcoming of the chasm between hell and heaven. His theories gave rise to heated controversies at the time, but were also strongly supported by influential figures such as Joseph Priestley. On Hartley and Priestley see also Lecture 2, and note 101).
80. Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), from Königsberg/Kaliningrad (then in East Prussia/Germany, now in Russia), the central figure in modern philosophy. Jung’s interest in Kant dates back to his adolescence when, studying and admiring Schopenhauer, he “became increasingly impressed by [the latter’s] relation to Kant” (Memories, pp. 88–89), and he started to study the Critique of Pure Reason (cf. also his Zofingia Lectures (1983 [2000]), which he found “an even greater illumination than Schopenhauer’s work. To a student at the Jung Institute in the 1950’s, Jung exclaimed, ‘Kant is my philosopher,’ and Kant’s critique formed the basis for his understanding of the boundaries of knowledge” (Shamdasani, 2012, p. 22).—The 1780s, when Kant published The Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787), are now considered a transitional decade—what Jung called “the great critical era”—in which the Enlightenment was already in a state of crisis, and the cultural balance shifted toward Romanticism. See also Lecture 2, where Kant’s views are treated in more detail.
81. In Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1786), Kant declared that “empirical psychology [must] be removed from the rank of what may be termed a natural science proper; firstly, because mathematics is inapplicable to the phenomena of the internal sense and its laws. . . . [Secondly,] because in it the manifold of internal observation is only separated in thought, but cannot be kept separate and be connected again at pleasure; still less is another thinking subject amenable to investigations of this kind, and even the observation itself alters and distorts the state of the object observed. It can never therefore be anything more than . . . a natural description of the soul, but not a science of the soul, nor even a psychological experimental doctrine” (Preface). His own Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), however, is itself in large part an empirical psychology. For a contemporary assessment of Kant on psychology, see, e.g., Sturm, 2001.
82. In Anthropology, he defines obscure representations as “sensuous intuitions and sensations of which we are not conscious, even though we can undoubtedly conclude that we have them” (Kant, 1798, Engl. ed. 2006, p. 24). Similarly, he states in his lectures on metaphysics: “Our representations are either obscure or clear, etc. Obscure representations are those of which I am not immediately conscious, but nevertheless can become conscious through inferences” (Kant, 1902/1910 sqq., vol. 29, p. 879).