The Tip of The Iceberg

This month we will be discussing part one of Volume 7 "Two Essays on Analytical Psychology" Titled "On the Psychology of the Unconscious". I have a Pdf available, message me with your email address if you'd like to have it. Originally published as a paper in the 1912 Rascher Yearbook Jung would go on to revise this work five times throughout his career. Subsequent revisions were heavily influenced by the events of World War I and its aftermath. Jung intended it as a popular work to provide an accessible introduction to his model of the psyche in the hope that it would give people the framework to understand and begin to address the great psychological problems of their time. These problems seem to be with us still, chief among them is belief that we are alone in our own minds. We each carry within us whole constellations of psychic elements hiding just beneath our awareness, each yearning for their time in the sun. These are what Jung called the Personal and Collective Unconscious. These contents in many cases seem to have lives and agendas of their own. For the sake of convenience and social adaptation certain elements of the psyche are cast off and sink into the depths of the unconscious. For a time this works perfectly well, but when it doesn’t then these exiled fragments come rushing back from the wilderness to make their demands heard, with potentially disastrous consequences for the individual and society. In part one of this work Jung presents an overview of Freudian and Adlerian psychology as a jumping off point for his theory of a separate and psychologically autonomous unconscious. Throughout the work Jung uses excerpts from case studies of his patients to help the reader see these processes in action. Overall this volume serves as a good introduction to the ideas of Jungian Psychology.