Psychology of the Unconscious (Jung, 1912/1916)
The first primary Jung text in this spoke. Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido, translated by Beatrice M. Hinkle, M.D. and published by Moffat, Yard and Company, New York, 1916; the German original ran 1911–12. Public domain, full text at Project Gutenberg.
Everything the wiki has said about Jung until now came through essayists and encyclopedias — carl-jung, analytical-psychology, second-half-of-life and jung-on-creativity rest entirely on second-hand accounts. This is the book itself, and it is the one that ended his friendship with Freud.
The libido, redefined
The break is a definition. Jung takes libido to be a general life energy rather than a specifically sexual one: “a hypothetical energy of life, comparable to Bergson’s élan vital,” running through growth, development, hunger and every human activity. The book calls it a “cosmic energy or urge manifested in the human being,” and compares it explicitly to energy in physics.
Sexuality does not disappear; it becomes one channel among many through which the energy flows. That is the whole quarrel with Freud in a sentence, and it is worth noting how little of it is empirical. The disagreement is over how to individuate a theoretical quantity, not over an observation either man could show the other.
The physics analogy is doing more work than it admits. Energy in physics is conserved and measurable; libido as used here is neither, and the comparison lends a precision the concept does not have. The spoke should hold that as a caveat on the source rather than a finding against Jung, who was writing before the standards that would demand it.
Two kinds of thinking
The distinction the later work is built on appears here. Directed thinking is logical, verbal, modern, scientific, effortful. Fantasy thinking (dream thinking) is archaic, image-based, associative, and continuous with how myth-making peoples and children think.
From that comes the book’s governing analogy: “The myths a mass-dream of the people: the dream the myth of the individual.” A myth is not a primitive attempt at science that failed; it is the same psychological process a dream is, running in a culture instead of a person.
Miss Frank Miller
The evidence is a case Jung never saw. He analyses the published fantasies and poems of a young American woman, tracing her introversion — his term for the retreat of interest inward — and the symbolic transformations by which an erotic impression is reworked into spiritual and mythological imagery.
This is the methodological problem in plain view, and it is better to record it than to soften it. The central case in the book rests on documents by a person the author never met, interpreted for correspondences with myth, with no procedure that could have shown the reading wrong. Set against kahneman-income-happiness-2006 and the measurement debates elsewhere in this spoke, the contrast in evidentiary standard is the most useful thing the ingest supplies.
Why it matters here
Two gains. The corpus can now quote Jung on libido, on the two kinds of thinking, and on the myth/dream identity from Jung, with a translator and a date attached, instead of paraphrasing a paraphrase. And the sigmund-freud split stops being a biographical anecdote: it has a text, a definition, and a year.
What it does not supply is the archetypes and the collective unconscious in their mature form — those belong to the 1920s–30s work, which is still second-hand here.
Connections
- author carl-jung · translator Beatrice M. Hinkle
- the school it founds: analytical-psychology
- the break it caused: sigmund-freud
Related
carl-jung · analytical-psychology · sigmund-freud · jung-on-creativity · second-half-of-life · jung-on-death