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<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\nCarl Gustav Jung was born on this day, the 26th of July, in 1875, in Kesswil, Switzerland.<\/p>\n
His father was a rural pastor of the Swiss Reformed Church, his mother the child of a prominent clerical and academic family.<\/p>\n
He would later write how his mother\u2019s mental illness marked him. He would say he grew up with two personalities, one the boy of his time and place, but the other, a being from some other place, he imagined the 18th century. At first he believed he would grow up to become a minister, then was fascinated by archaeology. Finally he settled on medicine, and psychiatry.<\/p>\n
After graduation, and based on some of his research Sigmund Freud invited Jung to visit him in Vienna. This led to a lengthy coorespendence. Quickly Jung was seen as chief among Freud\u2019s disciples, and Freud saw the younger psychiatrist as his heir. But within six years strains began to appear. Jung began to question Freud\u2019s emphasis on the primacy of sex while Freud was concerned with Jung\u2019s growing focus on comparative religions and mythology. By 1913 with the publication of Jung\u2019s Psychology of the Unconscious<\/em>. they broke with each other completely.<\/p>\n Jung went on to develop Analytical psychology, with its emphasis on symbols and a sense of a collective unconscious. The Wikipedia article on Jung summarizes,\u00a0\u201cthe central concepts of analytical psychology is individuation<\/a>\u2014the lifelong psychological process of differentiation of the self out of each individual\u2019s conscious and unconscious elements. Jung considered it to be the main task of human development. He created some of the best known psychological concepts, including synchronicity<\/a>, archetypal phenomena<\/a>, the collective unconscious<\/a>, the psychological complex<\/a> and extraversion and introversion<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n Following a sometimes controversial and generally distinguished career, after a short illness, on the 6th of June, 1961, Carl Jung died.<\/p>\n As a young seeker Jung caught my attention with his emphasis on religion and mythology. And, when I learned that it was he who identified the psychological inclinations of introversion and extraversion, I got his genius. But, I was more than a little suspicious of his idea of a collective unconscious. And as I came to see most people I read who followed him, believed the collective unconscious was a literal thing, long on certainty and very short on evidence, what passing interest I had, passed.<\/p>\n Then, in my mid thirties, as part of a grand scheme for my spouse Jan and I to shift gears into professional lives, I began taking classes at Sonoma State University, studying psychology.<\/p>\n I was working close to full time and I considered the BA nothing more than a ticket to a professional school, and so was pushing through as fast as I could. Some friends stopped me and said, \u201cDo yourself a favor, James. Find a professor you admire and take whatever she or he offers.\u201d They slyly added, \u201cYou\u2019ll never regret it.\u201d<\/p>\n One of them who knew the school, Sonoma State, a commuter college some sixty miles north of San Francisco, said \u201cTake a class from Gordon Tappan in the psychology department.\u201d A little reluctantly, but needing some relief from the grind, I signed up. Now, totally by accident I walked into a graduate seminar on archetypal psychology, a variation on Carl Jung\u2019s work. I stood at his desk. Gordon looked at my paperwork, glanced up and said, \u201cBeen a mistake. No undergraduates here.\u201d I said, \u201cI\u2019m on a tight schedule and can\u2019t get another class in time to keep my load up, and as someone let me register, I\u2019m not going to leave.\u201d<\/p>\n He gave me the fisheye, then said, \u201cSit in the back and keep quiet.\u201d I sat in the back but didn\u2019t keep quiet. I ended up taking three classes with him, and found them pretty much the only things I recall from that whirlwind that led to my being able to get into grad school.<\/p>\n Gordon was an archetypalist. And as I\u2019ve said, I never actually had much of a taste for Carl Jung\u2019s work. I think while he was some kind of artist of the heart, he also liked to pretend his work was science. And that just annoyed me.<\/p>\n But, his disciple James Hillman, well, he\u2019s a horse of another color entirely. As is his subset of Jungian thought, archetypal psychology. A few years ago when I learned Hillman had died, I felt actual grief, as if it were the passing of one of my teachers. While I never met him, since Gordon\u2019s class I\u2019ve read a lot of Hillman. I consider him one of my important guides.<\/p>\n I\u2019m particularly taken with what Hillman considered the soul to be for someone who doesn\u2019t think there\u2019s a parasite inside us just waiting for the moment it can break free. You may have noticed how spirit and self, and sometimes mind are, in practice, in our times, all taken as synonyms for soul. Actually this is a problem. Hillman suggested this represents a reductionism in our current culture leading to a simple Cartesian divide \u201cbetween outer tangible reality and inner states of mind, or between body and a fuzzy conglomerate of mind, psyche, and spirit.\u201d<\/p>\n