Today marks the 50th anniversary of the death of Carl Jung, the Swiss psychologist. Many of his ideas have now entered collective thought. Mark Vernon highlights several of these and explains how modern developments in fields such as neuroscience and attachment theory have supported Jung’s theories – see the BBC’s website at www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-13645959
On The School for Life’s website he identifies Jung’s concept of individuation as a concept that can serve us particularly well, but the temptation in life today is to take an easier path:
“The risk is that instead of individuation, we merely skirmish between this possibility and that option. We don’t want ‘the way’ anymore. We can’t trust it. Instead we prefer ‘my way’.
So is this what Jung is saying to us, 50 years on: that we risk losing a fecund individuation to an arid individualism? For without individuation, the individual is left with the sense of life half lived, with a sense that there is more, and they’ve missed it.”
Vernon summarises Jung’s belief that life can be broken down into two broad movements. First comes the establishment of the ego and the persona. These enable a person to find a place for themselves in the world – work, love, home etc. In itself this is not enough. At around the mid time of life (hence the “mid-life crisis”) a person seeks a deeper participation in life – “a fuller consciousness, the way, God”. This is the sometimes painful process of the ego stepping aside to allow greater room for the Self – a journey into the unknown, the desire to connect with a richer inner life, to find out who and what we are.
To read the article in full, visit www.theschooloflife.com
The RSA has produced a podcast where a panel of specialists offer a more in-depth analysis and also compare the work of Jung with that of Freud and other current approaches to psychotherapy. The hour long podcast may be listened to at https://www.thersa.org/__data/assets/file/0014/404510/20110602MarkVernon.mp3
