Текст интервью с К.Г. Юнгом (интервьюер - Р. Эванс, 1957 г)

Carl Jung on Film.

Dr. E. Although the greatness of your works of course, there are facts that in your early works you were to some extent at least associated with Dr. Sigmund Freud and I know it’ll be an interest to many of us to hear a little bit about of how you happened to hear of Dr. Freud and how you happened to become involved with some of his works and ideas.

C.J. Well, as a matter of fact it was in the year 1900, in December, soon after Freud’s book about dream interpretation came out. I was asked by my chief Eugen Bleuler to give a review of the book. I studied the book very attentively and I didn’t understand many things in it, which weren’t clear at all to me. But from most parts I got the impression that it was really new what he was talking about. I thought that this is certainly a masterpiece, full of future. I had no ideas then of my own. I had just begun my career as an assistant in psychiatric clinic. And then I began with experimental psychology, psychopathology. I applied the experimental association method which later was applied in Caprice, a psychiatric clinic in Munich and…and I had results. That reaction to Sigmund’s words was more or less interesting. But the interesting thing was why people could not react to certain Sigmund’s words or entirely in adequate way. And then I began to study these places in experiments where the attention or the capability apparently of the test person began to wave or to disappear. And I soon found out that it is matter of intimate personal affairs people are thinking of or which wears in them even if they momentarily did not think of them, they were unconscious without the words. Nevertheless the depiction came from the unconscious and hindered the expression in speech. And then I in examining all these cases asked whether that was possible and I saw that it was the matter of which Freud called “repressions”. I also saw what he meant by symbolization. And then I wrote the book about psychology of Dementia Praecox now known as schizophrenia. I sent the book to Freud who wrote in Vienna about my association experiments, they were confirmed to go very far. That is how my friendship with Freud began.

Dr. E. Now let’s talk about the of course fundamental ideas. The original psychoanalytical theory was Freud’s conception of libido as far as they brought psyche sexual energy.

C.J. Well you see at the beginning I had naturally certain prejudices against these conceptions. And after a while I overcame them; I could do that from my biological training. And I could not deny the importance of the sexual instinct, you know. But later on I saw that it was very wrong sided because you see man is not only belonged by this sex instinct. There are other instincts as well. As you see the nutrition instinct is as important as the sex instinct although in primitive societies, sexuality plays a role less than food. Food is all important interest and desire. Sex is something they can have everywhere, they are not shy. But the food is difficult to obtain, you see and so it is the main interest. And then in modern societies, for instance, I mean in civilized societies, the power type plays a much greater role than sex. For instance there are many big businessmen who are impotent because all their energy is going into money-making or dictating the laws to everybody and that is much more interesting than attracting women. So you see the inferior: Dr. Adler, the younger, the weaker naturally had the power to put on packs. He wanted to be a successful man. Freud was a successful man; he was on top, and so he was interested only in pleasure and the pleasure principle while Adler was interested mainly in power type.

Dr. E. Sure, I agree. You feel in a sort of a way, a function depends on a personality.

C.J. Yeah, this is quite naturally. This is one of the two ways out to deal with reality. You make a reality an object of your pleasure if you are powerful enough already or you make it an object of you desire, to grab it, to possess it.

Dr. E. Yes. Now of course some observers have thought that perhaps patients of Dr. Freud’s were often individuals who were repressed sexually and then perhaps so many dictators were of this type and that probably was one of the things that reinforced Dr. Freud’s ideas.

C.J. This is certainly so that in the end of the Victorian Age there was a reaction of the whole world against the taboos, the sex taboos. One didn’t understand properly any more why or why not. And Freud belongs into that time, a sort of liberation of the mind of such taboos. Research comes to the question of the unconscious. There things become necessarily blurred because the unconscious is something that is really unconscious. It’s not an object, it’s nothing. You only can begin inferences, you know, we have to create a model of this possible structure of the unconscious because you can’t see it. Now you see he came to the concept of the unconscious; chiefly on the basis of the same experience I had made in the association experiment. Namely that people reacted. They saved things; they deepened things without knowing they actually saved them. And this is something you can observe experimentally in association experiment when people cannot remember afterwards what they did and what they saw in the moment when the stimulus fixed the complex. During production experiment you go through your whole life and you will see that the memory fails where there was a complex reaction. And that is the simple fact that Freud has based his idea of the unconscious on. That is what you can see now and again, that people for instance make mistakes in speech or they say things which they don’t mean to say. They just make ridiculous mistakes, you know. There are numerous stories, you know, about how people can betray themselves by saying something they didn’t mean to say, although yet the unconscious meant them to say that. For example, when you want to express sympathy you congratulate somebody instead. That’s very painful, you know, but that happens and this is true. This is something that cause parallel now with the role of school of psychiatry in Paris. There was Pierre Janet who worked out that side of unconscious reactions quite particularly. Pierre Janet in Paris formed my ideas very much. He was a first-class observer, though he had no dynamic theory or psychological theory but a sort of physiological theory of the unconscious phenomenon. In his book “L’йtat mental des hystйriques” there is a certain dissociation of tension of consciousness; it seems below the level of consciousness and first becomes unconscious. Now that’s Freud’s view, too. Only he says it sinks down because it is compressed. That was my first point of difference with Freud. I think there were cases in my observation where there was no repression from above but the thing itself is true. Those contents that became unconscious had withdrawn all by themselves; they were not repressed on the contrary. They had certain autonomy and that these contents that disappear have the power to move independently from my will. Either they appear then among to say something definite; they interfere and speak themselves instead of what I wanted to say or they make me do something which I don’t want to do at all or in the moment I want to use them they suddenly disappear.

Dr. E. What are the most extreme views that we have? They are all around you and Dr. Freud; the ones you mentioned a moment ago. He spoke of the birth trauma. He said that the actual trauma had a very powerful impact on the ego and sure it influences the person?

C.J. Yes, this is very important for an ego that it is born. It is highly dramatic, you know, when you fall out of heaven.

Dr. E. You take a literally position that birth trauma may have a psychological effect…

C.J. Don’t you see this is an event that happens to everybody that exists? To exist you have to be born. So everybody is born and has undergone that trauma. So the trauma has lost its meaning. This is a general fact which you can’t say is a trauma. It is just a fact. You see? Because you cannot observe the psychology that hasn’t been born. Only then you can say what a birth trauma is. Until then you cannot even speak of such a thing. It is just a lack of epistemology.

Dr. E. Doctor Jung, you’ve been talking about very important things and you’ve pointed out that you wanted to look at rather literally and sort of a hungry drive or a drive of nutrition. There’s another fundamental point in development of the ego every more or less orthodox psychological view follows: it is that there’s then another critical level and ego level development.