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Jung For Beginners
Jung For Beginners
Jung For Beginners
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Jung For Beginners

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Carl Gustav Jung merged Eastern mysticism with Western psychology, brought scientific respectability to religion, laid the foundation for ‘the New Age,’ and is second only to Freud in influence and importance in the world of psychoanalysis. Many consider him a genius, but many others disagree.

Scholar and clinical psychologist Jon Platania, PhD, presents Jung as a somewhat opportunistic and dissociated character whose most famous historical events were his break with Freud and his questionable sojourn with the psychological elite of the German Third Reich. On the other side of Jung's complex genius, there is a deeply spiritual man who laid the groundwork for a more optimistic approach to our modern understanding of the human psyche in both theology and psychology. He is remembered by many as the "Swiss Doctor of the Soul".

Dr. Platania then takes us on a tour of the work that made Jung one of the pillars of modern psychology. And what a body of work it is. Jung’s open-mindedness was astonishing. Wherever he went—Calcutta, Egypt, Palestine, Kenya—Jung learned something that expanded his views. His open-ended psychology incorporated Yoga, meditation, prayer, alchemy, mythology, astrology, numerology, the I Ching—even flying saucers! He taught us that psychology and religion can not only coexist peacefully together, but that they can enhance us, inspire us, and help us complete ourselves.

Freud, for all of his brilliance, reduced us to little more than vessels of hormones with high IQs. Jung, for all of his flaws, gave us back our souls.
LanguageEnglish
PublisherFor Beginners
Release dateDec 20, 2011
ISBN9781939994110
Jung For Beginners
Author

Jon Plantania

Jon Platania Ph.D. is a psychologist, yogi, author, and teacher. A graduate of the Wright Institute, he received his academic training through the California State University system, completing a post-doctoral internship at the University of California in Berkeley where he currently resides. He is a trained Integrative Analytic Psychologist.  More recently he has again collaborated with Joe Lee in the book 12 Step Restorative Yoga.

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    Jung For Beginners - Jon Plantania

    title_1

    For Beginners LLC

    155 Main Street, Suite 211

    Danbury, CT 06810 USA

    www.forbeginnersbooks.com

    Text: © 2011 Jon Platania, PhD

    Illustrations: © 2011 Joe Lee

    All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission of the publisher.

    A For Beginners® Documentary Comic Book Copyright © 2011

    Cataloging-in-Publication information is available from the Library of Congress.

    eISBN: 978-1-939994-11-0

    Manufactured in the United States of America

    For Beginners® and Beginners Documentary Comic Books® are published by For Beginners LLC.

    v3.1

    CONTENTS

    Jung, The Life

    Mothers, Fathers, Saints and Sinners

    Jung, Freud, Intimacy and Betrayal

    Jung's Dark Night of the Soul

    Jung, Freud and the Holocaust

    Jung, The Work

    The Foundations of Jungian Psychology

    The Structure of the Psyche

    The Personality Types

    The Dynamic of the Archetype

    Jungian Analytic Psychology

    The Psychology of Religion

    The Psychology of Alchemy

    The Psychology of Art

    The Psychology of Sexuality

    Comments from Another Dimension

    Appendix

    Chapter Notes

    Glossary

    Collected Works

    Bibliography

    Index

    he influence of Carl Gustav Jung has never been greater than it is today. Introversion and Extroversion have become standard words. Most people are aware of the connection between the individual psyche and the collective unconscious. Many of us have secretly wondered about our own complex neurosis. The influence of the darker shadow side of life is the subject of concern as we seek to understand the apparent inhumanity of our species. All of this and more has come to us through the voice of C.G. Jung who, perhaps more than any other single individual, has shown that psychology and religion can not only coexist peacefully together, but that they can enhance, inspire, and perhaps even complete each other — and in the process, help us complete ourselves.

    Despite his monumental accomplishments, to this day Jung is still a controversial figure, variously referred to as a philanderer who slept with his female patients, as an opportunist who squandered his wife's fortune, or as a thin-skinned narcissist who couldn't come to terms with the negative father transference he suffered in his break with Sigmund Freud. Many eminent ladies and gents regard him as something of a living saint, a modern prophet whose work on Synchronicity and human consciousness is on a level of originality and genius comparable to Einstein's contributions to quantum physics and big ugly bombs. And, far and away the most chilling, some people know and despise him as the Nazi analyst of the Third Reich.

    Strange as it may seem, they are all right. Some people are so damned good that all we can do is look up to them.

    Jung wasn't one of them.

    He was a great man who made great mistakes.

    JUNG: The Life

    Mothers, Fathers, Saints and Sinners

    arl Gustav Jung was born in Kesswil, Switzerland on July 26, 1875. He was the son of a Protestant minister, Johann Paul—who was, himself, the son of Professor Carl Gustav Jung, the elder. To say the least, C.G. Jung came from a family of deeply religious men. Jung’s mother, Emilie Jung-Preiswerk was certainly a Christian—she was the wife and daughter of Protestant Evangelical ministers— but she was also something of a spiritualist. She thought about, saw, and spoke to ghostly figures from the dead. She straddled the narrow band that separates madness and hysteria from the purely psychic or mystical.

    A few months after Jung’s birth, his parents moved from Kesswil on Lake Constance to the parsonage of Laufen Castle above the Falls of the Rhine River.

    My whole youth could be understood in terms of the concept of Mystery. Our family lived at the parsonage of the church and the church had a graveyard. The graveyard had sextons and the sextons dug deep black holes in the graveyard. Other strange men would come in black frock coats and lay the great black boxes they carried with them into the ground. Women would cry and lament.

    My father would then proclaim that ‘Lord Jesus had taken the deceased to Himself.’

    I began to distrust Lord Jesus.

    My father was a very bad advertisement for religion: He was unhappy, mopey, gloomy, depressed — real holy on the outside and just a heap of despair on the inside. As you can imagine, this was not particularly helpful for me when it came to my own identity development.

    Now, mom, on the other hand, was somewhat hysterical and manic. She was also a genuine psychic. And she gave me a great deal of attention. That was lovely. I enjoyed it.

    Unfortunately, my mother had to go off to some kind of sanitarium when I was a child. She was very loving but none too dependable.

    And my father? He was too consumed by his own high-minded despair to bother with anything as ordinary as a child...

    Losing one’s faith is not such a big deal these days, but when it happened to Papa Jung, it was as though the ground had opened beneath his feet, and there was nothing left to stand on. Carl would remember those days of the Reverend Jung moping about the place with no God to turn to. To young Carl, his father’s idea of God was none too inviting anyway and offered little hope of consolation in this world. Religion for Jung became associated with a mixture of anti-Catholicism, fear, distrust, and death.

    It was at this time that powerful dreams began to fill Jung’s youthful world of mystery and the unknown. In later life, at the age of 75, he would recall the impact and importance of these early great dreams.

    Through my childhood dreams I was introduced to the mystery of the earth.... It was like an initiation into the darkness.

    I am in the garden when I come upon a hole in the ground, a dark, rectangular hole, walled in stone.... I curiously peered down into it. Hesitantly, fearfully, I descended.... I pushed the curtain aside and there before me...on a king’s throne was a huge thing...made of skin and naked and on the top was something like a rounded head with no face and no hair.... On the top of the head was a single eye, gazing motionleesly upward. CGJ

    Although he could not have realized it at the time, Jung would dedicate much

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