'Jung' by Anthony Storr (Chapter One)

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Photo taken on October 9, 2005, Sunday, at Sir William Stephenson Public Library on Keewatin Ave., Winnipeg, Manitoba

After three consecutive nights before sleeptime, I finished Jung by Anthony Storr (1973, Fontana), which, along with Freud and Jung: Years of Friendship, Years of Loss by Linda Donn (1988, Charles Scribner's Sons), I borrowed a week ago at Sir William Stephenson Public Library courtesy of Aunt Ethel, who has a borrower's card.

Carl Gustav Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist, regarded as the founder of Analytical Psychology. The Austrian Sigmund Freud, on the other hand, was the founder of Psychoanalysis.

The book discusses the ideas of Jung in contrast with those of Freud. The two had collaborated and established a six-year friendship—an alliance which, unfortunately, ended up bitterly primarily because of the striking differences in their beliefs and principles on which the psychology of each was founded.

As always, I took down notes as if I was writing a book report. The excerpts below were the passages that etched a deep impression on my own psyche, either validating or re-analyzing my own psychological principles and philosophical beliefs.

Chapter One
The Personal Background

1. It is impossible to separate ideas from the personality of the person to whom they occurred.

2. Freudian psychology is a paternally-based psychology, with a good deal of emphasis upon conscience, duty, and fear of punishment. Jungian analytical psychology, on the other hand, is far more rooted in the maternal aspect of the psyche.

3. Religious problems—that is, doubts about faith—were the chief preoccupation of some of the most able minds of the nineteenth century.

4. Freud: "Dreams bring to light material which cannot have originated either from the dreamer's adult life or from his forgotten childhood. We are obliged to regard this as a part of the 'archaic heritage' which a child brings with him into the world, before any experience of his own, influenced by the experiences of his ancestors. We find the counterpart of this phylogenetic material in the earliest human legends and in surviving customs."

5. Freud attributed supreme value to the orgastic release of sex, whereas Jung found supreme value in the unifying experiences of religion.

6. Jung tended to interpret even sexuality as symbolic, postulating that sex represented an irrational union of opposites—a symbol of wholeness.

7. All of us are apt to be overenthusiastic about those whom we feel to be rejected unfairly, and on whose behalf we take up the cudgels.