Medicine: The Old Wise Man

  • Share
  • Read Later

(9 of 10)

sought converts with evangelical zeal. Jung, by contrast, for a long time would not even bother to set up a formal training school for analysts who wanted to follow him, and he still refuses to seek converts. Proselytizing, in his book, is merely a reflection of unconscious doubts. Not until 1948 was a C. G. Jung Institute established in Zurich, and Jung has given it little more support than his name. It now has about 100 students from 14 countries, including the U.S., Denmark, India. London, New York. San Francisco and Los Angeles are the next major centers of Jungian influence; in each there is a handful of analysts trained by Jung himself or his earliest disciples. San Francisco has a small training institute, and one is being set up in Los Angeles. The Bollingen Foundation *⊕ is currently bringing out his collected works (four volumes published, 14 to go).

Jung's influence in psychiatric practice, though often unacknowledged, has been conceded by the late A. A. Brill, leading U.S. Freudian, who called him "the pioneer psychoanalyst in psychiatry." Freud thought that analysis was useful only in the milder forms of emotional illness (neurosis). Jung was among the first to use it to interpret schizophrenia, commonest of the most serious psychoses (which fills 300,000 hospital beds in the U.S.).

Results of early treatment by analysis were only tentative. But then came insulin and metrazol, and now, in the last two years, have come two new drugs, chlorpromazine and reserpine, which are making thousands of supposedly hopeless cases of schizophrenia accessible to analytic techniques.

The Natural Face. The ultimate value of Jung's ideas cannot yet be measured by practical standards. His great achievement is that he has shown psychology a new direction: he has constructed a psychology for human beings who reach out toward the unknown, the intangible, the spiritual. üHe has attacked the goal of psychological adjustment, which is fine "for the unsuccessful, for all those who have not yet found an adaptation," but which for others means only "restriction to the bed of Procrustes, unbearable boredom, infernal sterility, and hopelessness." Even if he is only half right, Jung has suggested to mankind a way of "adjustment" not merely to his animal instincts and social pressures but to his great paradoxes and his eternal religious needs.

Living happily in his old house, surrounded by 19 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren, the old man seems to many of his followers the most convincing case history in support of Jungian theories. Has Jung himself achieved individuation? Says he: "Individuation means to become what one is really meant to be.

In Zen Buddhism they have a saying: 'Show your natural face.' I think I have shown my natural face, often to the bewilderment of my time. Yes, I've attained individuation—thank heavens! Otherwise I would be very neurotic, you know."

* Freud and his followers have always insisted that the name "psychoanalysis" belongs properly only to their theory and method. Adler called his "individual psychology"; Jung's is "analytical psychology."

** The mandala, meaning magic circle in Sanskrit, is most familiar as an aid to contemplation among Buddhist and other Oriental sects. A medieval

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10