Medicine: The Old Wise Man

“Death is psychologically just as important as birth,” wrote Carl Gustav Jung. “As the arrow flies to the target, so life ends in death . . . Shrinking away from it is something unhealthy and abnormal which robs the second half of life of its purpose.”

Dr. Jung never shrank from death, but with his powerful constitution and ever-young, inquiring mind, he held it long at bay. Last week, in the willow-shaded seclusion of his home at Küsnacht, on Lake Zurich, the long-poised arrow flew to its target. Death came peacefully, just short of his 86th birthday, to Carl Gustav Jung —the last survivor of psychology’s Big Three and of the great feuds that raged among them.

Sigmund Freud saw the prime mover of the unconscious as sexual energy or libido; Alfred Adler made it the drive for power to overcome inferiority feelings. In his “analytical psychology,” Jung divided the unconscious into two layers. Within one, relatively superficial, he gave libido and the power drive less ambitious roles. In the second and far deeper stratum, he perceived the force of the primeval, collective unconscious of the human race.

To Jung, the systems constructed by his rivals were narrow-gauge, “nothing-but” explanations of human behavior and aspirations, which reduced man’s most numinous visions to sordid sex symbols and shrank his soul to the vanishing point. Jung posed bolder concepts—reaching for the ultimate limits of the universe and of man’s relationship to his God or gods.

Romantic Wallowing. “Sigi” Jung (nicknamed from the Schwyzerdütsch pronunciation of his initials), only son of a Reformed Church pastor, had a lonely, bookish boyhood in Basel. His father began teaching him Latin at six. In adolescence he wallowed in the German romantics. He read Greek and Sanskrit and steeped himself in philosophy. He thought of becoming an archaeologist. To please his father he took up medicine—and began digging into the minds of patients.

Teaching and practicing in Zurich, young Dr. Jung was fired by Freud’s descriptions of psychoanalysis. In 1907 he made a pilgrimage to Vienna and was confirmed in the Freudian faith. In the tall Teuton, Freud saw his heir apparent.

But Jung persisted in his own digging. He began to unearth “archetypes”—patterns of experience and feeling that have reappeared down the ages in dream symbols, as collective myths, or in the arts. Among the most significant: the “old wise man” and the “earth mother.”

Break with Freud. Jung classified basic personality types as extraverts or introverts, then added a breakdown by function: “With perception, you know something is there. Thinking tells you what it is. Feeling tells you what it is worth to you or to others. And intuition tells what the damn thing comes from or goes to.” Finally, in the persistence of religious movements throughout history, Jung saw an archetypal need for a religious attitude. A religion did not need to be formalized, he insisted; but to be emotionally healthy, a man must have made his peace with the unseen and perhaps unknowable power behind creation and the universe. Unable to accept the sexcentricity of psychoanalysis, Jung broke with Freud in 1913. But as a sworn foe of rigid organizations, Jung discouraged his followers from starting formal institutes to perpetuate his own teaching.

With advancing years, the “old wise man” withdrew more and more from the arena of battling psychologies, concentrated on his mystical and often obscure writings. He took no part in public affairs, although, during one dark period, he edited a psychiatric journal published by a Nazi group who used his race-memory theory to promote their racist creed.

Freudian teachings have captured many a citadel of psychiatry, and the name of Freud has become a household word as Jung’s never will. But no science of the mind with any claim to catholicity can deny the influence of Jung’s thinking. Though it be denied or rejected, it is part of the collective unconscious of psychiatry itself.