Jung contra Freud: The 1912 New York Lectures on the Theory of Psychoanalysis

by C.G. Jung, Sonu Shamdasani (Introduction), R.F.C. Hull (Translator)

In the autumn of 1912, C. G. Jung, then president of the International Psychoanalytic Association, set out his critique and reformulation of the theory of psychoanalysis in a series of lectures in New York, ideas that were to prove unacceptable to Freud, thus creating a schism in the Freudian school. Jung challenged Freud's understandings of sexuality, the origins of neuroses, dream interpretation, and the unconscious, and Jung also became the first to argue that every analyst should themselves be analyzed. Seen in the light of the subsequent reception and development of psychoanalysis, Jung's critiques appear to be strikingly prescient, while also laying the basis for his own school of analytical psychology.

This volume of Jung's lectures includes an introduction by Sonu Shamdasani, Philemon Professor of Jung History at University College London, and editor of Jung's Red Book.

Genres: Psychology, Nonfiction

144 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1912

About the author

Carl Gustav Jung (/jʊŋ/; German: [ˈkarl ˈɡʊstaf jʊŋ]), often referred to as C. G. Jung, was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology. Jung proposed and developed the concepts of extraversion and introversion; archetypes, and the collective unconscious. His work has been influential in psychiatry and in the study of religion, philosophy, archeology, anthropology, literature, and related fields. He was a prolific writer, many of whose works were not published until after his death.

The central concept of analytical psychology is individuation—the psychological process of integrating the opposites, including the conscious with the unconscious, while still maintaining their relative autonomy. Jung considered individuation to be the central process of human development.

Jung created some of the best known psychological concepts, including the archetype, the collective unconscious, the complex, and synchronicity. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), a popular psychometric instrument, has been developed from Jung's theory of psychological types.

Though he was a practising clinician and considered himself to be a scientist, much of his life's work was spent exploring tangential areas such as Eastern and Western philosophy, alchemy, astrology, and sociology, as well as literature and the arts. Jung's interest in philosophy and the occult led many to view him as a mystic, although his ambition was to be seen as a man of science. His influence on popular psychology, the "psychologization of religion", spirituality and the New Age movement has been immense.

Reviews

[Satyajeet · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you've read both Sigmund Freud and C.G.Jung's psychoanalysis, this book is like a movie.
Not a great movie, but a one-time-watch movie.
Not a prime-time movie, but a thursday night movie.

[Ethan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book left me with plenty of food for thought and many questions. My most insistent questions are wonderings about what sort of an anthropology must lie behind the development of a system like psychoanalysis. What does Jung think a human being most fundamentally is, and where does his understanding of a mentally healthy person come from? I was certainly challenged to think about myself in ways I never had before.

[Jonathon McKenney · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 The book itself was so so, lectures transcribed not the most gripping, but the discussions in class, as always, stellar. Props to the Math and Science segment for being the top one yet.

[Denis Kotnik · Rating 3 out of 5]

Amazing book. I'm surprised about the clarity of Jung's lectures. He's saying a lot about the things for which people nowadays still misunderstand them.

A couple of notes ...

The traumatic shock would be comparable, in a sense, to the moment of hypnosis, since the emotion it produced would cause, temporarily, a complete paralysis of the will during which the trauma would be fixed as auto-suggestion.
Experience shows us that fantasies can be just as traumatic in their affects as real traumata.

I need only mention the extraordinary importance of fantasy in preparing and perfecting the sexual function.

So when the psychoanalytic school speaks of "sexuality", this wider concept of the preservation of the species should be associated with it, and it should not be thought that we mean merely the physical sensation and functions which are ordinarily denoted by that word.
Instinct for preservation of species can not be separated from the nutritive function.
Obtaining pleasure is by no means identical with sexuality.

Even in the case of death of a parent, the parent is still somehow "alive" in the patient. It has an influence on him. That'y why we prefer to talk about "imago" than parents - about very distorted images of parents - fantasy.

The term "Oedipus/Electra complex" naturally does not mean conceiving this conflict in its adult form, but rather on a reduces-scale suitable to childhood. All it means, in effect, is that the childish demands for love are directed to mother and father, and to the extent that these demands have already attained a certain degree of intensity, so that the chosen object is jealousy defended, we can speak of an Oedipus/Electra complex.

The fantasy of sacrifice means giving up on infantile wishes.

#### Transference, transference relationship
There is no doubt that this method owed its existence not only to a strong scientific interest but also to the personal "empathy" of the analyst, traces of which can clearly be seen in the psychoanalytic case material. Thanks to this personal feeling, Freud was able to discover wherein lay the therapeutic effect of psychoanalysis. While this was formerly sought in the discharge of the traumatic affect, it was now found that the fantasies brought out by analysis were all associated with the person of the analyst. Freud called this process the **transference**, because the patient transferred to the analyst the fantasies that were formerly attached to the memory-images of the parents. The transference is not limited to the purely intellectual sphere; rather, the libido that is invested in the fantasies precipitates itself, together with the fantasies, upon the analyst. All those sexual fantasies which cluster round the imago of the parents now cluster round him, and the less the patient realizes this, the stronger will be his unconscious tie to the analyst. The less libido he gives to reality, the more exaggerated will be his fantasies and the more he will be cut off from the world. Typical of neurotics is their disturbed relationship to reality—that is to say, their reduced adaptation. The transference to the analyst builds a bridge across which the patient can get away from his family into reality. The more he is able to see the analyst objectively, to regard him as he does any other individual, the greater becomes the advantage of the transference. The less he is able to see the analyst in this way, and the more he assimilates him to the father imago, the less advantageous the transference will be and the greater the harm it will do.
Herein lies the chief psychological value of **confession**. Besides that, however, it has other consequences: through the transference of his secret and all the unconscious fantasies underlying it, a **moral bond** is formed between the patient and his father confessor. We call this a "**transference relationship**."

At the same time, the patient satisfies another need, that is, he achieves a relationship outside the family and thus fulfils a biological demand. Accordingly, he now starts to produce numerous fantasies showing how this goal might be attained. Eroticism plays a large role here, and is exploited and exaggerated in order to demonstrate the impossibility of separation. The patient, understandably enough, puts up the most obstinate resistance when the analyst tries to break the transference relationship.

The basic trouble with the neurotic is that, instead of adapting himself to life in his own special way, which would require a high degree of self-discipline, he makes infantile demands and then begins to bargain.

Patients often try to convince themselves, by seeking out special adventures, that it is possible to go on living in an infantile way. It would be a great mistake if the analyst tried to stop them. There are experiences which one must go through and for which reason is no substitute. Such experiences are often of inestimable value to the patient.

Nowhere more clearly than at this stage of the analysis will everything depend on how far the analyst has been analysed himself. If he himself has an infantile type of desire of which he is still unconscious, he will never be able to open his patient's eyes to this danger. It is an open secret that all through the analysis intelligent patients are looking beyond it into the soul of the analyst, in order to find there the confirmation of the healing formulae—or its opposite. It is quite impossible, even by the subtlest analysis, to prevent the patient from taking over instinctively the way in which his analyst deals with the problems of life. Nothing can stop this, for personality teaches more than thick tomes full of wisdom.

The only danger—and it is a great one—is that the unacknowledged infantile demands of the analyst may identify themselves with the parallel demands of the patient.

They forget that one of **the most important therapeutically effective factors is subjecting yourself to the objective judgment of another**.

[Matt Ely · Rating 4 out of 5]

If Jung is asking one question in this text, it's "What does psychoanalysis do?" He knew from experience that therapy was useful in practice, but he wanted to lay out a system about what was happening when analysis (as he called it) was conducted.

The result is a reformulation of some of Freud's adages into a more thorough worldview, in which the nature of the human mind could be understood in relationship to force and energy. By including real world case studies, Jung can build out that theory and note its practical impacts, as well as ways that Freud's approach fails to account for common issues.

While Jung is very clear that he's trying to grow the field, not establish a separate school from Freud, that was precisely the result. Jung didn't know he was creating Jungian thought here, but after 1912 he remained outside Freud's good graces for the rest of their lives. It's interesting for its content, but also as a historical document of a field that was about to see massive growth and massive divisions, unbeknownst to the people at the heart of it.

As a final point, hello Johnnies. I do actually think this text proceeds reasonably from the others as we see people take increasingly systematic approaches to natural science. This is an attempt to create observable data in a field that was previously obscure, just as Bacon, Descartes, and Darwin did before.

[Ramzi Ghadban · Rating 4 out of 5]

This isn't remotely my first approach to Carl Jung's work, having read his Memories, Dreams, Reflections and a couple of his essays (The Undiscovered Self; Symbols and the Interpretation of Dreams) in the past years. Now, with the intention of putting my new Kindle Paperwhite to the test, I decided to dig out one of the books that have been on my to-read list for the longest time—Jung Contra Freud.

To provide some context on my link to Jung it is worth mentioning that, a few years ago, I got into tarot reading. To be fair, I was having a terrible week and I wanted to engage on something different, something tactile. I had thrifted a book on tarot that same week (just for funsies), so I went and bought a deck. Those who are familiar with the concept of the archetypes developed by Jung might guess how one thing led to the other.

The Jung who opens up on Memories, Dreams, Reflections is very much a mystic as well as a psychoanalyst. Here, on Jung Contra Freud., I'm suprised to find a Jung who is very grounded. I'd always been aware, generally speaking, of the topics Jung and Freud disagreed on, but reading a whole book about it has been very refreshing.

Jung explains his theories very eloquently. He uses analogies to clarify abstract concepts and it works every time; amidst all of the technical talk, he even manages to come across as very poetic at times. And for a book born from disagreement, he respectfully gives credit to Freud on a dozen occasions along these lectures. It's not without its cringeworthy moments, like when he says that it makes sense for a subject to deny being homosexual the same way one would deny being a murderer, or something along those lines.

Whether one believes in the teachings of psychoanalysis or not, having its workings explained to oneself can be a very stimulating and—at least for me—fun exercise.

[André Jan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sometimes insanity can begin when you see a mountain that is very hard to climb and keep telling yourself it is unscaleable so you should not try

[Donald · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book should not have been a reading for seminar, but it's a clear enough explanation of psychoanalysis. These lectures are before Jung gets into the crazy ' collective unconscious' mystical stuff.