Carl Gustav Jung OrientationRev. Elsom Eldridge| Concordia Seminary in February, 1973

Introduction:First of all, I think I should say that: I am not a psychologist I am not a psychiatristI am not an analyst

I am a clergyman who has been doing a variety of things through the last many years, and when I was in college I did go so far as to take a course in psychology. And I learned about Freud and the sex drive; and Adler and the power drive; and the third mans name was Jung, the third of the so-called big three.

Carl Gustav Jung

What Jung was talking about was never mentioned. That was in 1934, I think.

Fifteen years ago through a set of somewhat accidental circumstances, we began to discover up at the Educational Center here that Carl Jung, while he was not the great innovator in one way, he was not the great pioneer that Freud had been, he was a tremendous person in his own right and to the sex drive and to the power drive, with which he did not disagree with Freud or Adler, except in their emphasis upon them; he said there is a third major drive which is the drive toward... for meaning and wholeness.

Carl Gustav Jung

And increasingly through the last 15 years we have found his work and the work of his whole school to be of more and more use to us in our work in religious education. And so what we are going to do tonight is try to give you a very brief identification of Dr. Jungs identification of the psyche. It is a pretty complicated thing as he always admitted. There is nothing more mysterious in the whole universe, as far as he was concerned, than the unconscious. And he set out in his early work as a psychiatrist to explore this very mysterious realm.

Carl Gustav JungI rather suspect that when the definitive book is written on the 20th century, there will be certainly an important chapter in it on the exploration of outer space, but I suspect that 20 more chapters will be given to the exploration of inner space, because I think the elements which we will touch upon tonight have so much more depth of meaning for mankind than moon rocks; I think that is probably about the right balance. This is my own view at the moment.

Carl Gustav JungJung himself, didnt base his theories on sitting up in an ivory tower thinking up how things might be, but on... he based the development of his thinking on his work with analysands, his work in the consulting room and working through and trying to discover the meaning of 67,000 dreams. Thats a lot of dreams. And he kept finding certain common elements in dreams of people from all over the world, because he was working with people from all over the world, that he began to identify certain forces and factors for which he began to try to find some way to describe. And he picked some rather strange terms and he would never have absolutized any of them as terms. But he had to find some sort of language, some sort of new language to try to identify factors and forces in the psyche of men and women that needed some sort of definition; even though in many ways they remain forever mysterious.

Carl Gustav JungJung was an amazing guy. He never stopped. He worked at this business right up until the age of 83 or 84 when he died in 1961. He was always willing to go back and revise. He was always extremely willing to have his followers... his students, build on what he had done. He was a pioneer. He recognized in particular areas that he was very much a brand new pioneer and he never absolutized anything that he said. And he very much encouraged, I say, those of his followers to build on and go beyond where he was. This was one area where he differed radically from Freud, because once Freud had said something, that was the end of it. And he didnt want anybody deviating from pure Freud.

Carl Gustav JungThis was his big battle originally with Adler who had been his pupil. It became also a source of a major break with Jung who had never been his pupil, but had been his friend, had traveled with him, had worked with him. They had analyzed each others dreams and so forth and so on. But Jung went a couple of steps in the early days beyond Freud and by 1912 their friendship ended which was a sad thing for both of them.

Carl Gustav JungWhat I am going to try to do here... Jung himself was often annoyed at his own followers, pupils who he would hear. He would say something, say, in 1915 and in 1920 he would have developed that further, but he would hear one of his followers pounding the table and absolutizing something which he had said earlier and his final response to this was, Thank God I am Jung and not a Jungian. And he refused to let his name be applied to his school. The school technically is known as the school of analytical psychology, even though it is still called Jungian psychology, in a more popular vein.

The Centerpoint FoundationI am going to try to rush through two basic areas tonight and then discuss any of them that you want to and you can raise any kind of questions you want to. And if I dont know the answer I will say I dont know the answer, because I am not an analyst. I am merely a guy who got caught with him about 15 years ago and has done a lot of reading and used a lot of his material and the various kinds of things we are doing at the Center.The first thing I want to do is that of trying to identify the nature of a mans psyche as Jung identified it in terms of the various basic concepts. And the second thing I want to do when I finish that is to talk about his whole theory of psychological types which, again, is an extremely important area in which he did the most important work that has ever been done as far as I know.

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1973 Centerpoint Foundation International All Rights Reserved No part of this document may be distributed, reprinted or revised without prior permission.

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