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The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 2: Experimental Researches
Word Association Experiment:
A test devised by Jung to show the reality and autonomy of unconscious complexes.
Our conscious intentions and actions are often frustrated by unconscious processes whose very existence is a continual surprise to us. We make slips of the tongue and slips in writing and unconsciously do things that betray our most closely guarded secrets-which are sometimes unknown even to ourselves. . . . These phenomena can . . . be demonstrated experimentally by the association tests, which are very useful for finding out things that people cannot or will not speak about.[“The Structure of the Psyche,” CW 8, par. 296.]
The Word Association Experiment consists of a list of one hundred words, to which one is asked to give an immediate association. The person conducting the experiment measures the delay in response with a stop watch. This is repeated a second time, noting any different responses. Finally the subject is asked for comments on those words to which there were a longer-than-average response time, a merely mechanical response, or a different association on the second run-through; all these are marked by the questioner as “complex indicators” and then discussed with the subject.
The result is a “map” of the personal complexes, valuable both for self-understanding and in recognizing disruptive factors that commonly bedevil relationships.
What happens in the association test also happens in every discussion between two people. . . . The discussion loses its objective character and its real purpose, since the constellated complexes frustrate the intentions of the speakers and may even put answers into their mouths which they can no longer remember afterwards.[“A Review of the Complex Theory,” ibid., par. 199.]
http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Jung/Association/lecture1.htm
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Summary
Carl Jung , in full Carl Gustav Jung , (born July 26, 1875, Kesswil, Switzerland—died June 6, 1961, Küsnacht), Swiss psychologist and psychiatrist who founded analytic psychology , in some aspects a response to Sigmund Freud ’s psychoanalysis . Jung proposed and developed the concepts of the extraverted and the introverted personality , archetypes , and the collective unconscious . His work has been influential in psychiatry and in the study of religion , literature , and related fields.
He was fortunate in joining the staff of the Burghölzli Asylum of the University of Zürich at a time (1900) when it was under the direction of Eugen Bleuler , whose psychological interests had initiated what are now considered classical studies of mental illness . At Burghölzli, Jung began, with outstanding success, to apply association tests initiated by earlier researchers. He studied, especially, patients’ peculiar and illogical responses to stimulus words and found that they were caused by emotionally charged clusters of associations withheld from consciousness because of their disagreeable, immoral (to them), and frequently sexual content. He used the now famous term complex to describe such conditions.
Jung was the son of a philologist and pastor. His childhood was lonely, although enriched by a vivid imagination, and from an early age he observed the behaviour of his parents and teachers, which he tried to resolve. Especially concerned with his father’s failing belief in religion, he tried to communicate to him his own experience of God. In many ways, the elder Jung was a kind and tolerant man, but neither he nor his son succeeded in understanding each other. Jung seemed destined to become a minister, for there were a number of clergymen on both sides of his family. In his teens he discovered philosophy and read widely, and this, together with the disappointments of his boyhood, led him to forsake the strong family tradition and to study medicine and become a psychiatrist. He was a student at the universities of Basel (1895–1900) and Zürich (M.D., 1902).
Association with Freud
These researches, which established him as a psychiatrist of international repute, led him to understand Freud’s investigations; his findings confirmed many of Freud’s ideas, and, for a period of five years (between 1907 and 1912), he was Freud’s close collaborator. He held important positions in the psychoanalytic movement and was widely thought of as the most likely successor to the founder of psychoanalysis. But this was not to be the outcome of their relationship. Partly for temperamental reasons and partly because of differences of viewpoint, the collaboration ended. At this stage Jung differed with Freud largely over the latter’s insistence on the sexual bases of neurosis. A serious disagreement came in 1912, with the publication of Jung’s Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (Psychology of the Unconscious, 1916), which ran counter to many of Freud’s ideas. Although Jung had been elected president of the International Psychoanalytic Society in 1911, he resigned from the society in 1914.
His first achievement was to differentiate two classes of people according to attitude types: extraverted (outward-looking) and introverted (inward-looking). Later he differentiated four functions of the mind—thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition—one or more of which predominate in any given person. Results of this study were embodied in Psychologische Typen (1921; Psychological Types, 1923). Jung’s wide scholarship was well manifested here, as it also had been in The Psychology of the Unconscious.
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As a boy Jung had remarkably striking dreams and powerful fantasies that had developed with unusual intensity. After his break with Freud, he deliberately allowed this aspect of himself to function again and gave the irrational side of his nature free expression. At the same time, he studied it scientifically by keeping detailed notes of his strange experiences. He later developed the theory that these experiences came from an area of the mind that he called the collective unconscious, which he held was shared by everyone. This much-contested conception was combined with a theory of archetypes that Jung held as fundamental to the study of the psychology of religion. In Jung’s terms, archetypes are instinctive patterns, have a universal character, and are expressed in behaviour and images.
A guest post by Craig Chalquist, Ph.D.
Carl Gustav Jung was born in 1875, died in 1961, and lived in Switzerland all his life, although he traveled now and then. He was a psychiatrist, seeing patients and pioneering various techniques in experimental research before focusing on psychoanalysis and then on evolving his own kind of depth psychology. He created innovative methods for working with symptoms, dreams, fantasies, visions, and even works of art on the level of psychological symbolism.
A remarkable thing about Jung’s work is that so little of it is out of date. Much of the last century’s behaviorally oriented research involving mice, pigeons, and calculators is of no use anymore, if it ever was. But Jung cast light on so many hidden essentials of human nature that, if anything, his work grows more relevant as time goes on—and as mainstream psychology and psychiatry succumb to a Procrustean infatuation with what can be counted and measured.
Jung showed us, for example, that the same symptom in different people can mean different things. One person’s eye twitches because of an oncoming insight; another’s, because he cannot see what’s psychologically in front of him. Simple chains of cause and effect fail here. We can only know what a symptom says by entering into deep dialogue with the unconscious mind of its bearer.
Jung taught that dream symbols are confusing because 1. they bring back to us what we miss during the day, and 2. they express their meanings metaphorically, not rationally. In fact, their figurative language can present a far more accurate psychological picture than any analysis from outside. A psychotherapy client of mine who hated the superficiality of her career dreamed of window shopping for work outfits. A mannequin resembling her opened its eyes and stared urgently at her. “I feel like a mannequin,” she concluded. “I’m turning into plastic.” This enabled her to find a more suitable (!) occupation.
For Jung, imagination is not just another useful human attribute. Rather, it organizes thought, feeling, fact, and possibility even while bringing conscious and unconscious, known and mysterious, into healthy alignment.
Following the lead of William James, Jung also dared to bring spirituality into psychology. The human psyche, wherever and whenever it lives, he observed, spontaneously produces spiritual images. Some of these blossom into myths; others, into rituals. Jung examined this flowering across cultures, times, places, and patients and explored it deeply within himself as well. This general fact of our psychology comes with a dimension of uniqueness: our path into spirituality must satisfy our individuality. Practices and creeds lacking an emotional charge are of no use to us except as invitations to seek further for what serves our sense of wholeness.
The idea of living consciously as an integrated whole is itself epochal. How many big mistakes might we have avoided—in family life, in relationships, at work—had we known how to consult our entirety, conscious and unconscious, instead of blundering onward? How different a world would we live in if political, financial, scientific, and religious leaders enjoyed access to their own psychological depths awaiting consultation beneath reckless, ego-driven agendas?
“That we think in terms of statistical numbers,” Jung remarks in his Visions seminars, “is the contemporary prejudice, our particular insanity; we think how a certain individual problem could be solved as a sort of mass production, as if it were manufactured in a factory.” The prejudice remains at large. To a time preoccupied with diagnosis, Jung brings a refreshing post-diagnostic optimism about the possibilities of being human. In The Secret of the Golden Flower he writes,
I always worked with the temperamental conviction that in the last analysis there are no insoluble problems, and experience has so far justified me in that I have often seen individuals who simply outgrew a problem which had destroyed others. This “outgrowing,” as I called it previously, revealed itself on further experience to be the raising of the level of consciousness. Some higher or wider interest arose on the person’s horizon, and through this widening of his view, the insoluble problem lost its urgency. It was not solved logically in its own terms, but faded out in contrast to a new and stronger life-tendency.
He also gives us permission to embrace our confusion and fragmentation. “I consider a man’s life lived for 65 years in perfect balance as most unfortunate,” he states in a letter. “I’m glad that I haven’t chosen to live such a miracle. It is so utterly inhuman that I can’t see for the life of me any fun in it.”
Depth psychology, Jung pointed out in an interview, was akin to “antique philosophy” in its continuing relevance for psychological well-being and wisdom. No wonder Jung reads at times like an ancient philosopher:
The goal is neither height nor depth, but the center. —Alchemical Studies
Ultimate truth, if there be such a thing, demands the concert of many voices. —The Symbolic Life
Wherever belief reigns, doubt lurks in the background. But thinking people welcome doubt: it serves them as a valuable stepping stone to better knowledge. —Psychology and Religion
Why not go into the forest for a time, literally? Sometimes a tree tells you more than can be read in books. —Letters (vol. 1)
In our most private and most subjective lives we are not only the passive witnesses of our age, and its sufferers, but also its makers. We make our own epoch. —Civilization in Transition
And of course the occasional zinger:
Some men say, “Don’t you think it is a very dangerous thing when you make women conscious of themselves?” I say, “Yes, dangerous for the men!” —Dreams Seminar
Jung not only anticipated but worked on, with, and through so much of what turned into the deeper forms of psychology that summarizing it handily is difficult. Systems theory, existential therapy, evolutionary psychology, the humanistic emphasis on authenticity and on neurosis as attempted growth, therapy as a face-to-face encounter, the need for a training analysis, diagnosis and treatment of codependency, dream work, art therapy, field theory, ecopsychology, the cognitive-behavioral importance of changing attitudes and setting goals, the therapeutic usefulness of projective identification and countertransference, narrative therapy’s sense of story as primary: the list gets longer after each careful reading of Jung’s letters, seminars, and Collected Works. His own therapeutic perspective, forged in the fires of his confrontation with the unconscious, he referred to at first as analytical psychology before developing a more general “complex psychology.”
In philosophy Jung bridges Nietzsche and postmodernism. In theology his discoveries about the psychology of religion, about the psyche’s affinity for spiritual images, and about the symbol as mediator of sacred experience remain under lively discussion. In systems and complexity theory his word “archetypes” spirals around counterbalancing forces and flows akin to those he wrote about in therapy. In environmental studies his reflections on the soul of Earth (anima mundi) and the spirit of place have moved into the open as viewpoints that separate self from land collapse under the weight of their self-contradictions.
Jung’s work would be more timely than ever for our day even had he not predicted so much of the political and ecological turmoil we now face, answering it in the alchemical language he made his own: with conscious rejoinings of upper and lower, spirit and nature, height and depth, conscious and unconscious, data and dream.
Jung destroyed our solipsism. Something unknown, the extra-human, approaches us through symbols, through psyche. We turn inward and find the world awaiting our most genuine and heartfelt response.
Learn more about Pacifica’s nine graduate degree programs, each seeking to create an educational environment with a spirit of free and open inquiry, consistent with the recognized values of academic freedom. At Pacifica, the study of literature, religion, art, and mythology enhance the study of the science of psychology. In the same way, scholarship in mythological studies and the humanities is enlivened by the development of an understanding and appreciation of the tradition of depth psychology and the recurring archetypal motifs that move through the human heart and soul.
Craig is Associate Provost at Pacifica Graduate Institute. He earned his Ph.D. in Depth Psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute and also holds a Master Gardener certificate and another in permaculture design. He is the author of Terrapsychology: Reengaging the Soul of Place (Spring Journal Books, 2007) and co-editor with Linda Buzzell, MFT, of Ecotherapy: Healing with Nature in Mind (Sierra Club Books, 2009). Craig was core faculty in East-West Psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies and former core faculty at John F. Kennedy University, where he served as acting department chair (Consciousness & Transformative Studies), designing and launching the world’s first ecotherapy certificate. He also is founder of Immanence Myth Journal http://www.immanencejournal.com.
