approved of Schopenhauer’s attention given to suffering in life, Jung (of course) regarded suffering as only one important area of life and also gave a great deal of attention to the meaning of life. As we shall see in chapter 2 Jung’s commitment to ancient myth, alchemy, religion and so forth was all about pre modern meaning.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was admired greatly by Jung. Jung often referred to Goethe’s masterpiece ‘Faust’ whereby Faust struggles with inner conflict.25
Further inspirations were F. W. von Schelling and Carl Gustav Carus. The latter should strike the reader as having remarkably similar ideas to Jung. “Carus depicted the creative, autonomous, and healing function present in the unconscious. He saw the life of the psyche as a dynamic process in which consciousness and the unconscious are mutually
compensatory and where dreams play a restorative role in psychic equilibrium. Carus
also outlined a tripartite model of the unconscious – the general absolute, the partial absolute, and the relative – that prefigured Jung’s concepts of archetypal, collective, and personal unconscious.”26 Why then is Carus notgiven more credit in analytical psychology? One Jungian thinker says that it is simply because Carus didn’t offer treatment.27 Nevertheless Jung himself valued Carus’ work. Shamdasani writes “Jung stated that his own conceptions were “much more like Carus than Freud…”28 On the other hand Jung writes (in Memories, Dreams, Reflections) that Carus (and Hartmann) both failed to empirically ground their theories of the unconscious. Hence they remained philosophically speculative. Jung writes that it was Freud who first “demonstrated empirically the
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