Carl Gustav Jung (German pronunciation: [ˈkarl ˈɡʊstaf ˈjʊŋ]; 26 July 1875 – 6 June 1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist, an influential thinker and the founder of analytical psychology known as Jungian psychology. Jung’s approach to psychology has been influential in the field of depth psychology and in countercultural movements across the globe. Jung is considered as the first modern psychologist to state that the human psyche is “by nature religious” and to explore it in depth.[1] He emphasized understanding the psyche through exploring the worlds of dreams, art, mythology, religion and philosophy. Although he was a theoretical psychologist and practicing clinician, much of his life’s work was spent exploring other areas, including Eastern and Western philosophy, alchemy, astrology, sociology, as well as literature and the arts. His most notable ideas include the concept of psychological archetypes, the collective unconscious and synchronicity.
Jung emphasized the importance of balance and harmony. He cautioned that modern people rely too heavily on science and logic and would benefit from integrating spirituality and appreciation of unconscious realms. He considered the process of individuation necessary for a person to become whole. This is a psychological process of integrating the conscious with the unconscious while still maintaining conscious autonomy.[2] Individuation was the central concept of analytical psychology.
Art therapy
Jung proposed that Art can be used to alleviate or contain feelings of trauma, fear, or anxiety and also to repair, restore and heal.[9] In his work with patients and in his own personal explorations, Jung wrote that art expression and images found in dreams could be helpful in recovering from trauma and emotional distress. Jung often drew, painted, or made objects and constructions at times of emotional distress, which he recognized as recreational.
Rudolf Steiner (25 or 27 February 1861[1] – 30 March 1925) was an Austrian philosopher, social thinker, architect and esotericist.[2][3] He gained initial recognition as a literary critic and cultural philosopher. At the beginning of the twentieth century, he founded a new spiritual movement, Anthroposophy, as an esoteric philosophy growing out of European transcendentalist roots with links to Theosophy.
Steiner led this movement through several phases. In the first, more philosophically oriented phase, Steiner attempted to find a synthesis between science and mysticism; his philosophical work of these years, which he termed spiritual science, sought to provide a connection between the cognitive path of Western philosophy and the inner and spiritual needs of the human being. In a second phase, beginning around 1907, he began working collaboratively in a variety of artistic media, including drama, the movement arts (developing a new artistic form, Eurythmy) and architecture, culminating in the building of a cultural center to house all the arts, the Goetheanum. After the First World War, Steiner worked with educators, farmers, doctors, and other professionals to develop Waldorf education, biodynamic agriculture, anthroposophical medicine as well as new directions in numerous other areas.[4].
Steiner advocated a form of ethical individualism, to which he later brought a more explicitly spiritual component. His epistemology he based upon Johann Wolfgang Goethe‘s world view, in which “Thinking … is no more and no less an organ of perception than the eye or ear. Just as the eye perceives colours and the ear sounds, so thinking perceives ideas.”[5] A consistent thread that runs from his earliest philosophical phase through his later spiritual orientation is the goal of demonstrating that there are no essential limits to human knowledge.[6]
Spiritual research
From his decision to go public in 1899 until his death in 1925, Steiner articulated an ongoing stream of experiences that he claimed were of the spiritual world — experiences he said had touched him from an early age on.[12] Steiner aimed to apply his training in mathematics, science, and philosophy to produce rigorous, verifiable presentations of those experiences. [21]
Steiner believed that through freely chosen ethical disciplines and meditative training, anyone could develop the ability to experience the spiritual world, including the higher nature of oneself and others.[12] Steiner believed that such discipline and training would help a person to become a more moral, creative and free individual – free in the sense of being capable of actions motivated solely by love.[22]
Steiner’s ideas about the inner life were influenced by Franz Brentano[12] – with whom he had studied, and Wilhelm Dilthey, both founders of the phenomenological movement in European philosophy, as well as the transcendentalist stream in German philosophy represented by Fichte, Hegel, and Schelling. Steiner was also influenced by Goethe’s phenomenological approach to science.[12][23][24]
Steiner led the following esoteric schools:
- His independent Esoteric School of the Theosophical Society, founded in 1904. This school continued after the break with Theosophy but was disbanded at the start of World War Two.
- A lodge called Mystica Aeterna within the Masonic Order of Memphis and Mizraim, which Steiner led from 1906 until around 1914. Steiner added to the Masonic rite a number of Rosicrucian references.[25] The figure of Christian Rosenkreutz also plays an important role in several of his later lectures.
- The School of Spiritual Science of the Anthroposophical Society, founded in 1923 as a further development of his earlier Esoteric School. The School of Spiritual Science was intended to have three “classes”, but only the first of these was developed in Steiner’s lifetime. All the texts relating to the “School of Spiritual Science” have been published in the full edition of Steiner’s work.
Robert Anton Wilson (born Robert Edward Wilson, January 18, 1932 – January 11, 2007) became, at various times, an American novelist, essayist, philosopher, polymath, psychonaut, futurist, libertarian[1] and self-described agnostic mystic. Recognized as an Episkopos, Pope, and Saint of Discordianism by Discordians who care to label him as such, Wilson helped publicize the group/religion/melee through his writings, interviews, and strolls.
He described his work as an “attempt to break down conditioned associations, to look at the world in a new way, with many models recognized as models or maps, and no one model elevated to the truth.” [2]
“My goal is to try to get people into a state of generalized agnosticism, not agnosticism about God alone but agnosticism about everything.”
Back to Jung:
Archetypal Psychology is a vein of inquiry into the psyche inaugurated in Western psychology in the early 1900s by Dr. Carl Gustav Jung and his followers such as Marie Louise von Franz and many others whose works have been translated into English. Dr. Jung and numerous of his followers, including Merciade Eliade, imagined the psychology of the archetypes from studying anthropology and archeology reports of their times, and weaving it into their understandings of the psyche. They wrote long treatises, many still in publication, imagining how the hierarchy of ancient gods, the polytheistic religions, and archetypal ideas found in tales could be imagined to influence modern life with regard to soul, psyche, dreams and the Self.
An archetype is, according to Aristotle, an ideal model, the original from which either derivatives, or fragments can be taken. In Jung’s psychology, archetype, among other definitions, is imagined as an inherited pattern of thought or symbolic imagery derived from the past collective experience and present in the individual unconscious.
Jung and his followers followed paths set by Sigmund Freud and others of Freud’s generation, who also investigated, analyzed and put forth theories about how ancient myths, legends, sagas, and religions seemed to mimic some of the broad impulses and drives in the Western psyche.
There are many psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, psychologists, therapists who are sometimes called neo-Jungians, who take various approaches to archetypal psychology, including Jungian psychoanalyst Marion Woodman with her inquires into the archetypes and dreams of the feminine and how these are affected by clashes and supports from masculine archetypes, therefore influencing soul and psyche in women’s development. Dr Jean Shinoda Bolen, a Jungian analyst psychiatrist has also made a lifetime inquiry into the psychology of archetypes for men and for women, and their basis in conscious growth of the soul. Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Jungian psychoanalyst, holds that insights into soul and psyche, archetypes and dreams were preserved specifically and handed down by indigenous people worldwide, they being the original archetypal theorists.
The inquiry into archetypal psychology has many different subsets, many different progenitors. Archetypal psychology as a basis for developing theory, and especially, down to earth applications, is ongoing and evolving constantly.
In the mid-1900, James Hillman, a psychologist who trained at the Jung Institute in Zurich also called his work Archetypal psychology. He reports his is in the Jungian tradition and most directly related to Analytical psychology, yet departs radically. His ‘archetypal psychology’ relativizes and deliteralizes the ego and focuses on the psyche, or soul, itself and the archai, the deepest patterns of psychic functioning, “the fundamental fantasies that animate all life” (Moore, in Hillman, 1991). Hillman’s archetypal psychology is a polytheistic psychology, in that it attempts to recognize the myriad fantasies and myths—gods, goddesses, demigods, mortals and animals—that shape and are shaped by our psychological lives. To him, the ego is but one psychological fantasy within an assemblage of fantasies. Hillman’s archetypal psychology is, along with the classical and developmental schools, one of the three schools of post-Jungian psychology outlined by Andrew Samuels (see Samuels, 1995).
