Medicine: The Old Wise Man

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(See Cover) Freud, Adler and Jung—these names personify, above all others, modern man's restless exploration of his own mind, his struggles for self-knowledge and for control of his darkest drives. In the 20th century, impelled by the detailed theory and dogma of the Big Three, psychology has burst out of consulting room and clinic, spreading all through life and leaving nothing untouched—neither love nor the machine, war nor politics, neither art nor morals nor God. Of the three pioneers who built this Age of Psychology, Freud and Adler are dead. The third, Carl Gustav Jung, is still at 79 tirelessly adventuring through the vast reaches of the psyche.

Last week, wreathed by pipe smoke that swirled through his thinning white hair and gave him the aspect of a medieval alchemist, Jung was busy in the study of his oldfashioned, high-ceilinged house at Küsnacht on Lake Zurich. The three-volume work on which he was dotting the last "i" seemed strange for a modern psychiatrist: Representation of the Problems of Opposites in Medieval Natural Philosophy. "Pretty abstruse, huh?" said Jung to a visitor. Then laughter rocked his heavy shoulders. "I must laugh! I have such a hell of a trouble to make people see what I mean."

For a man who has added such words as introvert, extravert and complex (in its psychological meaning) to the party patter of millions, Jung has indeed great difficulty in making people see what he means. That is partly because he has explored yoga, alchemy, fairy tales, the tribal rites of the Pueblo Indians, German romantic philosophers, Zen Buddhism, extrasensory perception and the cave drawings of prehistoric man, along with an estimated 100,000 dreams. But when Dr. Jung is accused of having left medicine for mysticism, he replies that psychiatry must take into account all of man's experience, from the most intensely practical to the most tenuously mystical.

If the details of his work are sometimes foggy, his overall purpose is clear: to help man live at peace with his unconscious. That is the aim also of the other "depth psychologists," but Jung significantly differs from the others. He is a constant challenge to the legacy of his old master, Sigmund Freud, whose teachings have affected man's view of himself more deeply than anything since Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection.

The Freudian View. Through most of the Christian era, the healing of the mind was considered part of the realm of the soul. The Enlightenment abolished the soul. Its p'ace was taken, in the minds of millions, by reason, which stood atop a quaking pile of instincts.

When Freud was a young man, scientific inquiry and materialism ruled even in psychiatry. Research was aimed at finding physiological causes for psychic effects. Freud's great contribution was his discovery of the unconscious mind, the source of human drives that did not fit into this narrow system.

But Freud still clung to the mechanical and material scientism of his age. He constructed a new. detailed, machinelike scheme of the mind. The steam that made the machine run was sexual energy or libido. In Freud's view, the unconscious was cluttered with emotional material, commonly thought of as forgotten but actually repressed because of a conflict between sex-powered drives and personal or social

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