context of analytical psychology’ (in ‘The Cambridge Companion to Jung’2) and Sonu Shamdasani’s Jung and the Making of Modern Psychology: The Dream of a Science3 are the two main sourced used in chapter one of this essay. These sources enable us to effectively sketch the historical context of Jung’s psychology.
Douglas rightly touches upon a multitude of influences on Jung. She starts off by saying that Jung himself referred to two aspects of his psyche, one that is empirical, rational, practical and so on, and another that is romantic and “at home with the unconscious, the mysterious, and the hidden whether in hermetic science and religion, in the occult, or in fantasies and dreams.”4 Already a key Jungian belief about the psyche is implied here. And that is that the human psyche has evolved (in the western world) to the point where it can think and rationalize (hence at its height it creates scientific and mathematical models, philosophies and the technology that we see around us) whilst the psyche is also fantasy prone, it dreams, is emotional and so forth. Despite Jung’s belief that this description of the psyche is true, Douglas correctly writes that “Analytical psychology still struggles to hold the tension of these opposites with different schools, or leanings, or even schisms, veering first to one side of the pole, then to the other.”5 However, Jung’s perspective is supported in this work because both rationality and fantasy are psychological realities.
Before developing on the phenomena that equates to the historical context of Jung’s psychology it would suit our purpose to merely list some of them and then to expand. The
following list is not exhaustive by any means,
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