Conversations With Carl Jung
A cleaned and structured note edition of the 1957 Richard I. Evans interviews with C. G. Jung, with linked chapters and improved dialogue formatting.
This note adapts the 1957 Richard I. Evans interview transcript with Carl Jung into a cleaner reading format for the site. It keeps the overall chapter structure, adds internal links, and separates the interviewer and Jung with visual dividers for easier reading.
- Preface
- Sections
- Part I. Prologue to a Challenging Venture
- 1. Jung Relating to Freud, Adler, and Rank
- 2. Jung's Appraisal of Freudian Psychosexual Development
- 3. Jung's Appraisal of Freud's Structural Concepts: Id, Ego, and Super-Ego
- The Unconscious
- 4. The Unconscious: Archetypes
- 5. The Unconscious: General Conceptualizations
- Introvert-Extrovert Theory and Motivation
- 6. Introvert-Extrovert Type Theories
- 7. Motivational Concepts
- Some Reactions Concerning Psychological Testing, Psychotherapy, Mental Telepathy, and Other Personal Insights
- 8. Jung on Diagnostic and Therapeutic Practices
- 9. Jung on Contemporary Psychological Problems
- 10. Personal Insights, Reminiscences, and Experiences with Great Figures
The dialogue represented in this volume, the author feels, provided a vehicle for Dr. Jung which allowed perhaps the most exciting and lucid presentation of many of his fundamental concepts yet recorded.
It is hoped that this presentation will not only serve as an introduction to Jung's ideas for students in the behavioral sciences, but also will provide a stimulating look at some of Jung's fundamental contributions to others who have always been discouraged from reading Jung's works because of their alleged obscurity, vagueness, unreasonable complexity, and mysticism.
For the Jungian scholar, the author hopes that a more intimate glance at Jung's thought processes has been provided, as he reacts spontaneously to an orderly sequence of questions. Jung insisted on not being briefed on any of the questions prepared for the interviews.
The reactions from Ernest Jones not only provide further interesting elaborations of Freudian theory, some of Jones' personal interests, and his concepts of Sigmund Freud, the man, but they also provide a sharp and final study by which to contrast Jung, the powerful figure whose break with Freud troubled him most, with Jones, Freud's enduringly loyal and devoted follower.
The author, through the recent award of a grant from the National Science Foundation, will be enabled to complete such teaching interviews with many additional distinguished contributors to personality theory. However, he knows that he will never again have a privilege so profound as recording virtually the last thoughts of two individuals who came so directly in contact with the beginning stages of psychoanalysis, perhaps the most significant revolution in thinking concerning the nature of man.
Richard I. Evans
Houston, Texas
- Part I. Prologue to a Challenging Venture
- Part II. Jung and Freud
- Part III. The Unconscious
- Part IV. Introvert-Extrovert Theory and Motivation
- Part V. Some Reactions Concerning Psychological Testing, Psychotherapy, Mental Telepathy, and Other Personal Insights
In the section that follows the writer has attempted to trace in some detail the challenging series of events which preceded the interviews with Dr. Jung and Dr. Jones. In this section the writer also articulates his impressions and perceptions of the actual process of completing the interviews, including certain personality insights gained by the author based on limited but unusual contact with these notable figures.
The idea of filming a series of interviews with Dr. Carl Jung, when it first occurred, seemed to be only a remote possibility. We knew that Dr. Jung had been approached unsuccessfully by several commercial television and film producers in the past. Yet, it seemed that this was worth a try.
Some months before this, the University of Houston had received an $18,700 grant from the Fund for the Advancement of Education to explore some new dimensions in university instruction. Dr. John Meaney, who at this time was director of the University of Houston Radio and Television Film Center, was involved with this project when he approached the writer concerning the possibility of utilizing these funds in some project involving psychology.
We began to discuss possible approaches which could be pursued if a pilot project in psychology was initiated with these funds. For years, like many other university professors in Colleges of Arts and Sciences, I had become increasingly aware of the tendency among great numbers of students to become less interested in reading the original writings of great contributors. They were becoming content to merely read "predigested" secondary sources which often did injustice to the intentions of these significant thinkers.
For example, it always amazed me to find that a surprisingly large number of even advanced psychology students had never actually read Freud's original writings, but had read instead about Freud through the words of other writers. It seemed that there was a need to motivate the students to look directly at the original writings of such innovators as Freud, if they were to become truly informed and appreciative of their ideas.
It then followed that a challenge lay in developing with our grant funds a stimulating technique which would encourage the students to pursue such primary contact with the ideas of important contributors. Simply making films of lectures by these individuals, wherein they orally presented the same material about which they had already written, did not appear to be the most effective means for our purposes.
The potential pitfall in this method is readily discernible in many college television courses. Specifically, the intellectual, in lecturing as in writing, tends to become somewhat pedantic, thereby losing the interest of his audience. It occurred to me that perhaps one technique which might be utilized to avoid this undesirable, imminent possibility was the filmed interview.
Through use of the interview, the contributor could present his ideas in an atmosphere of spontaneity which would tend to "humanize" him, providing for the student a more pleasant and stimulating experience than is often allowed by the neutrality of the formal lecture.
The interview, of course, has long been used as a technique in such fields as journalism, law, psychotherapy, counseling and casework, and obviously is a fundamental device in our culture for gaining insight into other people and their ideas. Why could not carefully planned and filmed interviews be set up with eminent psychologists for instructional purposes?
The student, through the interviewer, could be systematically introduced to a great contributor's point of view. We liked the idea. A course which I had offered for many years, Approaches to Personality, appeared to be a likely vehicle for such an effort, so all that remained was to find a manner in which to launch this technique in as dramatic a fashion as possible.
Thus, the idea of interviewing Dr. Carl Jung, the only surviving member of the "big three" (Jung, Freud, and Adler), originated.
Most individuals became very skeptical of our chances for success when we announced that we were going to contact Jung and pursue the possibility of going to Zurich to film a series of interviews to launch our teaching-interview project. Success or failure, however, the idea of interviewing Dr. Jung was too appealing, so we proceeded to prepare to write to him.
The framing of this letter became an unusual task. One asks oneself if he has never met Jung, and knows him only as a near anachronism in the modern world, how his interest in such a project might best be solicited.
In order to gain perspective for this task, I decided to contact Dr. Joe Wheelwright, a prominent Jungian psychiatrist at the Langley Porter Clinic in San Francisco. He had had considerable contact with Dr. Jung, and could be of much assistance to us as a liaison in our efforts to secure the cooperation of Dr. Jung.
The exchange of letters that followed fixed the August 1957 dates, settled the honorarium, and led to the recording sessions in Zurich. Evans also explains how the project expanded to include Ernest Jones in Paris, how Jung preferred not to see the interview questions in advance, and how strongly Jung's wit, spontaneity, and presence came through during filming.
Evans closes the prologue by noting that the finished films appeared to improve both students' understanding of Jung's ideas and their feeling for Jung as a person.
Richard I. Evans: Dr. Jung, many of us who have read a great deal of your work are aware of the fact that in your early work you were in association with Dr. Sigmund Freud, and I know it would be of great interest to many of us to hear how you happened to hear of Dr. Freud and how you happened to become involved with some of his work and ideas.
C. G. Jung: Well, as a matter of fact, it was the year 1900, in December, soon after Freud's book about dream interpretation had come out, that I was asked by my chief, Professor Bleuler, to give a review of the book. I studied the book very attentively, and I did not understand many things in it, which were not clear to me at all; but from other parts I got the impression that this man really knew what he was talking about. I thought, "this is certainly a masterpiece - full of future."
I had no ideas then of my own; I was just beginning. It was just when I began my career as assistant in the psychiatric clinic. And then I began with experimental psychology or psychopathology. I applied the experimental association methods of Wundt, the same that had been applied in the psychiatric clinic in Munich, and I studied the results and had the idea that one should go once more over it.
So I made use of the association tests, and I found out that the important thing in them had been missed, because it is not interesting to see that there is a reaction - a certain reaction - to a stimulus word. That is more or less uninteresting. But the interesting thing is why people could not react to certain stimulus words, or only react in an entirely inadequate way.
Then I began to study these places in the experiment where the attention, or the capability of this person apparently began to waver or to disappear, and I soon found out that it was a matter of intimate personal affairs people were thinking of, or which were in them, even if they momentarily did not think of them when they were unconscious with other words; that the inhibition came from the unconscious and hindered the expression in speech.
Then, in examining all these cases as carefully as possible, I saw that it was a matter of what Freud called repressions. I also saw what he meant by symbolization.
Richard I. Evans: In other words, from your word association studies, some of the things in The Interpretation of Dreams began to fall into place.
C. G. Jung: Yes. And then I wrote a book about psychology of dementia praecox, as it was called then - now it is schizophrenia - and I sent the book to Freud, writing to him about my association experiments and how they confirmed his theory thus far. That is how my friendship with Freud began.
Richard I. Evans: There were other individuals who also became interested in Dr. Freud's work, and one of them was Dr. Alfred Adler. As you remember Dr. Adler, what in your estimation led him to become interested in Dr. Freud's work?
C. G. Jung: He belonged; he was one of the young doctors that belonged to his surroundings there. There were about twenty young doctors who followed Freud there, who had a sort of little society. Adler was one who happened to be there, and he learned - he studied Freud's psychology in that circle.
Richard I. Evans: Another individual, of course, who joined this group was Otto Rank, and he, unlike yourself, Dr. Adler, and Dr. Freud, was not a physician; did not have the Doctor of Medicine degree. Was this regarded by your group at the time as something unusual, to have someone become interested in these ideas who was not by training a physician?
C. G. Jung: Oh no. I have met many people who represented different faculties who were interested in psychology. All people who had to do with human beings were naturally interested; theologians, lawyers, pedagogues; they all had to do with the human mind and these people were naturally interested.
Richard I. Evans: Then your group, including Freud, did not feel that this was exclusively an area of interest for the physician? This was something that might appeal to many?
C. G. Jung: Oh my, yes. Mind you, every patient you have gets interested in psychology. Nearly everyone thinks he is meant to be an analyst, inevitably.
Richard I. Evans: One of the very fundamental ideas of the original psychoanalytic theory was Freud's conception of the libido as a sort of broad, psychic sexual energy. Of course, we all know that you began to feel that Dr. Freud might have laid, perhaps, a little too much stress on sexuality in his theories. When did you first begin feeling this?
C. G. Jung: In the beginning, I had naturally certain prejudices against this conception, and after a while, I overcame them. I could do that from the weight of my biological training. I could not deny the impulses of the sexual instinct, you know.
Later on, however, I saw that it was really one-sided because, you see, man is not only governed by the sex instinct; there are other instincts as well. For instance, in biology you see that the nutritional instinct is just as important as the sex instinct. Although in primitive societies sexuality plays a role, food does much more. Food is the all-important interest and desire. Sex - that is something they can have everywhere - they are not tried. But food is difficult to obtain, you see, and so it is the main interest.
Then in other societies - I mean civilized societies - the power drive plays a much greater role than sex. For instance, there are many big business men who are impotent because their full energy is going into money-making or dictating the roles to everybody else. That is much more interesting to them than the affairs of women.
Richard I. Evans: So in a sense, as you began to look over Dr. Freud's emphasis on sexual drive, you began to think in terms of other cultures, and it seemed to you that this emphasis was not of sufficient universality to be assessed primary importance.
C. G. Jung: Well, you know, I couldn't help seeing it, because I had studied Nietzsche. I knew the work of Nietzsche very well. He had been a professor at Basel University, and the air was full of talk about Nietzsche; so naturally I had studied his works. And from this I saw an entirely different psychology, which was also psychology - a perfectly competent psychology, but built upon the power drive.
Richard I. Evans: Do you think it possible that Dr. Freud was either ignoring Nietzsche, or had perhaps not wanted to be influenced by Nietzsche?
C. G. Jung: Of course it was a personal prejudice. It happened to be his main point, you know, that certain people are chiefly looking for this side, and other people are looking for another side.
So, you see, the inferior Dr. Adler, the younger and weaker, naturally had a power complex. He wanted to be the successful man. Freud was a successful man; he was on top, and so he was interested only in pleasure and the pleasure principle, and Adler was interested in the power drive.
Richard I. Evans: You feel that it was a sort of function of Dr. Freud's own personality?
C. G. Jung: Yes, it is quite natural; it is one of two ways how to deal with reality. Either you make reality an object of pleasure, if you are powerful enough already; or you make it an object of your desire to grab or to possess.
Richard I. Evans: Some observers have speculated that the patients whom Dr. Freud saw in the Vienna of this period were so often sexually repressed that they may have been representative of a cultural type; or, in other words, since these patients were a part of a Viennese society, believed to have been a rather "repressed" society, Freud's patients, perhaps, demonstrated an undue tendency to react to sexual frustration, reinforcing his ideas of a sexual libido.
C. G. Jung: Well, it is certainly so that at the end of the Victorian age there was a reaction going over the whole world against the sex taboos, so-called. One didn't properly understand any more why or why not; and Freud belongs in that time, a sort of liberation of the mind of such taboos.
Richard I. Evans: There was a reaction, then, against the sort of tight, inhibited culture he was living in.
C. G. Jung: Yes, Freud, in that way - on that side, really belonged to the category of a Nietzschean mind. Nietzsche had liberated Europe from a great deal of such prejudices, but only concerning the power drive and our illusions as to motivations of our morality. It was a time critical of morality.
Richard I. Evans: So Dr. Freud, in a sense, was taking it from another direction.
C. G. Jung: Yes. And then, moreover, sex being the main instinct and the dominating instinct in a more or less safe society, when the social conditions are more or less safe, sexuality is apt to predominate because people are taken care of. They have their positions. They have enough food. When there is no question of hunting or seeking food, or something like that, then it is quite probable that patients you meet have more or less all some sexual complex.
Richard I. Evans: So the sex drive is potentially the drive in that particular society most likely to be inhibited.
C. G. Jung: Yes. It is a sort of finesse, almost, when you find out that somebody has a power-drive and their sex only serves the purpose of power. For instance, a charming man whom all women think is the real hero of all hearts; he is a power-fable, like a Don Juan, you know. The woman is not his problem; his problem is how to dominate. So in the second place after sex comes the power drive, and even that is not the end.
Richard I. Evans: Going still further into the development of Dr. Freud's theory, which you acknowledge as a significant factor in the development of many of your own early ideas, Dr. Freud, of course, talked a great deal about the unconscious.
C. G. Jung: As soon as research comes to a question of the unconscious, things become necessarily blurred, because the unconscious is something which is really unconscious. So you have no object - nothing. You only can make inferences because you can't see it; and so you have to create a model of this possible structure of the unconscious.
Now Freud came to the concept of the unconscious chiefly on the basis of the same experience I have had in the association experiment; namely, that people reacted, they said things, they did things, without knowing that they had done it or had said it.
This is something you can observe in the association experiment; sometimes people cannot remember afterward what they did or what they said in a moment when a stimulus word hits the complex. In the word association reproduction experiment, you go through the whole list of words. You see that the memory fades when there is a complex reaction or block. That is the simple fact upon which Freud based his idea of the unconscious.
There is no end of stories, you know, about how people can betray themselves by saying something they didn't mean to say at all; yet the unconscious meant them to say just that thing. That is what we can see, time and again, when people make a mistake in speech or they say something which they didn't mean to say; they just make ridiculous mistakes.
For instance, when you want to express your sympathy at a funeral, you go to someone and you say, "I congratulate you"; that's pretty painful, you know, but that happens, and it is true. This is something that goes parallel with Freud's whole idea of the psychopathology of everyday life.
In Paris there was Pierre Janet who worked out another side of the understanding of unconscious reactions. Now, Freud refers very little to Pierre Janet, but I studied with him while in Paris and he very much helped form my ideas. He was a first class observer, though he had no systematic, dynamic psychological theory; his is a sort of physiological theory of the unconscious phenomena.
Freud says what sinks below consciousness does so because it is repressed from above. That was my first point of difference with Freud. I think there have been cases in my observations where there was no repression from above; those contents that became unconscious had withdrawn all by themselves, and not because they were repressed. On the contrary, they have a certain autonomy.
Richard I. Evans: And this then is independent of any of the, you might say, pressures on the consciousness as Freud suggested?
C. G. Jung: Yes. There can be such cases, sure enough, but besides them, there are also the cases that show that the unconscious contents acquire a certain independence. All mental contents having a certain feeling tone that is emotional have the value of an emotional affect, have the tendency to become autonomous. So, you see, anybody in an emotion will say and do things which he cannot vouch for.
Richard I. Evans: Dr. Freud suggested that the individual is born under the influence of what he called the id, which is unconscious and undeveloped, a collection of animal drives. It is not very easily understood where all these primitive drives, all these instincts, come from.
C. G. Jung: Nobody knows where instincts come from. They are there and you find them. It is a story that was played millions of years ago. Their sexuality was invented, and I don't know how this happened; I wasn't there. Feeding was invented very much longer ago than even sex, and how and why it was invented, I don't know. So we don't know where the instinct comes from.
It is quite ridiculous, you know, to speculate about such an impossibility. So the question is only where do those cases come from where instinct does not function. That is something within our reach, because we can study the cases where instinct does not function.
Richard I. Evans: Another part of Dr. Freud's theory, of course, that became very important was the idea of the conscious; that is, out of this unconscious, instinctual "structure," the id, an ego emerges. Freud suggested that this ego resulted from the organism's contact with reality, perhaps a product of frustration as reality is imposed on the individual. Do you accept this conception of the ego?
C. G. Jung: If man has an ego at all, that is your question. Ah, that is again such a case as before; I wasn't there when it was invented. However, in this case, you see, you can observe it to a certain extent with a child. A child definitely begins in a state where there is no ego, and about the fourth year or before, the child develops a sense of ego, "I, myself."
There is, in the first place, a certain identity with the body. It is the spatial separateness that induces, apparently, the concept of an ego. Then, of course, there are lots of other things. Later on there are mental differences and other personal differences of all sorts. You see, the ego is continuously building up; it is never a finished product.
Richard I. Evans: In his later writing, in addition to the ego, Freud introduced a term to describe a particular function of the ego. That term was the super-ego. Broadly speaking, the super-ego was to account for the "moral restrictive" function of the ego.
C. G. Jung: Yes, that is the super-ego, namely that codex of what you can do and what you cannot do.
Richard I. Evans: Built-in prohibitions which Freud thought might be partly acquired and partly built-in.
C. G. Jung: Yes. However, Freud doesn't see the difference between the built-in and the acquired. You see, he must have it almost entirely within himself; otherwise, there could be no balance in the individual. And who in hell would have invented the Decalogue? That is not invented by Moses, but that is the eternal truth in man himself, because he checks himself.
Perhaps the area of greatest concentration and analysis in Jung's theory is the area of the unconscious. In contrast to Freud's development of a single unconscious, which, particularly in his earlier work, was the source of all pleasure-seeking, instinctual urges within the individual and the domain of repressed material as well, Jung postulated both a personal unconscious and a race or group unconscious, perhaps his most controversial contribution.
Of particular importance in the race unconscious is Jung's contention that archetypes, innate behavior potentials, inherited in what might best be described as a quasi-Lamarckian sense, are crucial determiners of human development. In these interviews, Jung explicitly explains archetypes and related concepts such as persona, the ego, and the self.
The reader will note that Freud's concept, the ego, which to Freud is the unifying core of human personality, is essentially what Jung means by the self.
Richard I. Evans: You mentioned earlier that Freud's Oedipal situation was an example of an archetype. At this time would you please elaborate on the concept, archetype?
C. G. Jung: Well, you know what a behavior pattern is, the way in which a weaver bird builds its nest. That is an inherited form in him. And so man has, of course, an inherited scheme of functioning. You see, his liver, his heart, all his organs, and his brain will always function in a certain way, following its pattern.
It is quite certain, however, that man is born with a certain functioning, a certain way of functioning, a certain pattern of behavior which is expressed in the form of archetypal images, or archetypal forms.
For instance, the way in which a man should behave is expressed by an archetype. Therefore, you see, the primitives tell such stories. A great deal of education goes through story-telling. Another way is they tell them all of the things they should not do, like the Decalogue, "Thou shalt not," and that is always supported by mythological tales.
That, of course, gave me a motive to study the archetypes, because I began to see that the structure of what I then called the collective unconscious was really a sort of agglomeration of such typical images, each of which had a unique quality.
The archetypes are, at the same time, dynamic. They are instinctual images that are not intellectually invented. They are always there and they produce certain processes in the unconscious that one could best compare with myths. That is the origin of mythology. Mythology is a pronouncing of a series of images that formulate the life of archetypes.
Richard I. Evans: To recapitulate then, the archetype is just a higher order of an instinctual pattern, such as your earlier example of a bird building a nest. Is that how you intended to describe it?
C. G. Jung: It is a biological order of our mental functioning, as, for instance, our biological-physiological function follows a pattern. The behavior of any bird or insect follows a pattern, and that is the same with us. Man has a certain pattern that makes him specifically human, and no man is born without it.
We are only deeply unconscious of these facts because we live by all our senses and outside of ourselves. If a man could look into himself, he could discover it. When a man discovers it in our days, he thinks he is crazy, really crazy.
Richard I. Evans: Now would you say the number of such archetypes are limited or predetermined, or can the number be increased?
C. G. Jung: Well, I don't know what I do know about it; it is so blurred. We have no means of comparison. We know and we see that there is a behavior, say like incest; or there is a behavior of violence, a certain kind of violence; or there is a behavior of panic, of power, etc. Those are areas, as it were, in which there are many variations. They overlap, and often you cannot say where the one form begins or ends.
The archetype in itself is completely unconscious and you only can see the effects of it. You can see, for instance, when you know a person is possessed by an archetype; then you can divine and even prognosticate possible developments.
Richard I. Evans: To be more specific, Dr. Jung, you have used the concepts anima and animus, which you are now identifying in terms of sex, male or female. I wonder if you could elaborate perhaps even more specifically on these terms?
C. G. Jung: The anima is an archetypal form, expressing the fact that a man has a minority of feminine or female genes. That is something that doesn't appear or disappear in him, that is constantly present, and works as a female in a man. As early as the sixteenth century, the humanists had discovered that man had an anima, and that each man carried female within himself.
The same is the case with the animus. It is a masculine image in a woman's mind which is sometimes quite conscious, sometimes not quite conscious; but it is called into life the moment that woman meets a man who says the right things. Then because he says it, it is all true and he is the fellow, no matter what he is.
Those are particularly well-founded archetypes, those two. And you can lay hands on their bases.
Richard I. Evans: Dr. Jung, to pursue our discussion of the unconscious further, let us take the particular situation of a dream and its interpretation. It is my understanding that, in your view of the unconscious, what you would find in the dream would not necessarily be an image or symbol of what has happened in the past to the individual.
C. G. Jung: Oh no. It just is a symbol of the situation of the unconscious, looked at from the unconscious. You see, I tell you, for instance, something which is my personal subjective view. Then if I ask myself, "Now are you really quite convinced of it," well, I must admit I have certain doubts. There are certain doubts, not in the moment when I tell you, but these are doubts in the unconscious. When you have a dream about it, these doubts come to the forefront. That is the way the unconscious looks at the thing.
It is as if the unconscious says, "It is all very well what you are stating, but you omit entirely such and such a point."
Richard I. Evans: Now if the unconscious acts on the present situation, looking at this in broad motivational terms, this effect of the unconscious is not something which is a result of repression in the way the orthodox psychoanalyst looks at it at all.
C. G. Jung: It may be, you know, that what the unconscious has to say is so disagreeable that one prefers not to listen, and in most cases people would be probably less neurotic if they could admit the things. But these things are always a bit difficult or disagreeable, inconvenient, or something of the sort; so there is always a certain amount of repression. But that is not the main thing. The main thing is that they are really unconscious.
If you are unconscious about certain things that ought to be conscious, then you are dissociated. Then you are a man whose left hand never knows what the right is doing, and counteracts or interferes with the right hand.
Richard I. Evans: Now the distinction between the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious, then, is that the personal could be more involved with the immediate life of the individual, and the collective would be universal - the unconscious realm composed of elements which are the same in all men?
C. G. Jung: Yes, collective. For instance, the psyche has collective problems, collective convictions, etc. We are very much influenced by them. If there arises a matter of personal conflict, the collective unconscious is not touched upon. But the moment you transcend your personal sphere and come to your unpersonal determinant, say you respond to a political question, or to any other social question which really matters to you, then you are confronted with a collective problem; then you have collective dreams.
Richard I. Evans: Another very interesting concept or idea in your work is the persona. This seems to be highly relevant to the daily living of the individual. I wonder if you would mind elaborating a bit more about how you construe this term, persona.
C. G. Jung: It is a practical concept we need in elucidating people's relations. I noticed with my patients, particularly with people that are in public life, that they have a certain way of presenting themselves. For instance, take a doctor. He has a certain way; he has good bedside manners, and he behaves as one expects a doctor to behave. He may even identify himself with it, and believe that he is what he appears to be.
So the persona is partially the result of the demands society has. On the other side, it is a compromise with what one likes to be, or as one likes to appear. So the persona is a certain complicated system of behavior which is partially dictated by society and partially dictated by the expectations or the wishes one nurses oneself.
Now this is not the real personality. In spite of the fact that people will assure you that this is all quite real and quite honest, yet it is not. Such a performance of the persona is quite all right, as long as you know that you are not identical to the way in which you appear; but if you are unconscious of this fact, then you get into sometimes very disagreeable conflicts.
Richard I. Evans: What is the difference between the term ego as you see it and the term persona? And what about the self?
C. G. Jung: The ego is supposed to be the representative of the real person. But when I say self, then you mustn't think of "I, myself," because that is only your empirical self, and that is covered by the term ego. When it is a matter of self, then it is a matter of personality and is more complete than the ego, because the ego only consists of what you are conscious of, what you know to be yourself.
The self is merely a term that designates the whole personality. The whole personality of man is indescribable. His consciousness can be described; his unconscious cannot be described, because the unconscious is always unconscious. He really does not know it. And so we do not know our unconscious personality. We have hints and certain ideas, but we do not know it really.
Perhaps Dr. Jung's most widely known contribution is his type theory in which he sets up the dichotomy of the introvert and the extrovert. Jung was quite distressed over the misinterpretation of these ideas and takes pains in the interviews to explain the interaction between introversion-extroversion and the four functions: thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition.
The next two chapters capture that explanation and then move into Jung's broader motivational ideas, including his critique of a purely sexual account of psychic energy and his insistence that present conditions matter alongside developmental history.
Richard I. Evans: Dr. Jung, another set of ideas, original with you and very well known to the world, center around the terms introversion and extroversion. I know that you are aware that these terms have now become so widely known that the man on the street is using them constantly in describing members of his family, his friends, and so on.
C. G. Jung: Like the word "complex" - I invented it too, you know, from the association experiments - this is simply practical, because there are certain people who definitely are more influenced by their surroundings than by their own intentions, while other people are more influenced by the subjective factor.
The psyche has two conditions, two important conditions. The one is environmental influence and the other is the given fact of the psyche as it is born. As I told you yesterday, the psyche is by no means tabula rasa here, but a definite mixture and combination of genes, which are there from the very first moment of our life; and they give a definite character, even to the little child.
The man who is going by the external world, by the influence of the external world, thinks that he is more valid, you know, because this is valid, this is real. And the man who goes by the subjective factor is not valid, because the subjective factor is nothing. No, that man is just as well based, because he bases himself upon the world from within.
Richard I. Evans: Of course, one of the very common misconceptions, at least in my opinion, about your work among some of the writers in America is that they have characterized your discussion of introversion and extroversion as suggesting that the world is made up of only two kinds of people, introverts and extroverts.
C. G. Jung: Bismarck once said, "God may protect me against my friends; with my enemies I can deal myself alone." You know how people are. They have a catch-word, and then everything is schematized along that word. There is no such thing as a pure extrovert or a pure introvert. Such a man would be in the lunatic asylum.
Those are only terms to designate a certain penchant, a certain tendency. For instance, the tendency to be more influenced by environmental influences, or more influenced by the subjective fact - that's all.
My whole scheme of typology is merely a sort of orientation. There is such a factor as introversion; there is such a factor as extroversion. The classification of individuals means nothing at all. It is only the instrumentality, or what I call practical psychology, used to explain, for instance, the husband to a wife, or vice versa.
Richard I. Evans: Of course, tied in with your typology of introversion-extroversion, we know of your four functions of thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition. It would be very interesting to hear some expansion of the meaning of these particular terms as related to the introvert-extrovert orientations.
C. G. Jung: There is a quite simple explanation of these terms, and it shows at the same time how I arrived at such a typology. Namely, sensation tells you that there is something. Thinking, roughly speaking, tells you what it is. Feeling tells you whether it is agreeable or not, to be accepted or not, accepted or rejected. And intuition - there is a difficulty because you do not know ordinarily how intuition works.
When a man has a hunch, you cannot tell exactly how he got that hunch, or where that hunch came from. It is something funny about intuition.
The intuitive type is a type that does not see the stumbling block before his feet, but he smells the hunt for ten miles.
Richard I. Evans: Do you make a distinction between an intuitive extrovert and an intuitive introvert?
C. G. Jung: Yes, all those types cannot be alike. The intuitive extrovert you find in all kinds of bankers, gamblers, etc., which is quite understandable. The introvert is more difficult because he has intuitions as to the subjective factor, namely the inner world, and, of course, that is very difficult to understand because what he sees are most uncommon things, things which he does not like to talk about if he is not a fool.
If he did, he would spoil his own game by telling what he sees, because people will not understand it. So you see, if the introverted intuitive would speak what he really perceives, practically no one would understand him; he would be misunderstood. Thus they learn to keep things to themselves.
Richard I. Evans: One question which is quite important as we attempt to understand the individual centers around the problem of motivation, why the person does what he does. Earlier when we discussed the libido, that which Freud considered a psychic, sexual energy, you may recall your suggestion that it was more than just sexual energy. You suggested that it could be something much broader.
C. G. Jung: The main point is to take the standpoint of energetics as applied to psychical phenomena. Now with psychical phenomena you have no possibility to measure exactly, so it always remains a sort of analogy.
Freud uses the term libido in the sense of sexual energy, and that is not quite correct. If it is sexual, then it is a power, like electricity or any other form or manifestation of energy. Now energy is a concept by which you try to express the analogies of all power manifestations.
I used it because I wanted to express the fact that the power manifestation of sexuality is not the only power manifestation. You have a number of drives, say the drive to conquer or the drive to be aggressive, or any number of others.
Richard I. Evans: Many approaches to motivation in our academic psychology today emphasize what is sometimes referred to as a biocentric theory. It suggests that the individual is born with certain inborn physiological, self-preserving types of drives, such as the drive for hunger, thirst, etc. Sex is just one of them. Would this general approach be consistent with your ideas?
C. G. Jung: Yes, certainly.
Richard I. Evans: Also, concerning motivation, or the condition which arouses, directs, and sustains the individual, there appear to be two views found in much of our psychology today. One might be called an historical view. Another is a field theory, associated with Kurt Lewin, which emphasizes the total present situation. Do you think that the present field idea has any virtue?
C. G. Jung: Well, obviously I always insist that even a chronic neurosis has its true cause in the moment now. You see, the neurosis is made every day by the wrong attitude the individual has.
On the other hand, however, that wrong attitude is a sort of fact that needs to be explained historically, by things that have happened in the past. But that is one-sided too, because all psychological facts are oriented, not only to cause, but also to a certain goal. They serve as a purpose.
So the wrong attitude can have originated in a certain way long ago. It is equally true, however, that it would not exist today any more if there were not immediate causes and immediate purposes to keep it alive today.
Richard I. Evans: Another concept related to motivational development is the process of individuation, a process to which you frequently refer in your writing.
C. G. Jung: Well, you know, that is something quite simple. Take an acorn, put it into the ground, and watch it grow and become an oak. That is man. Man develops from an egg, and develops into the whole man; that is the law that is in him.
In the remaining sections Jung turns from theory toward application. He reflects on projective testing, psychotherapy, dreams, telepathy, psychosomatic illness, tranquilizers, education, history, and his conversations with major figures like Einstein and Toynbee.
Richard I. Evans: We American psychologists do a great deal of testing, utilizing projective tests. As we discussed earlier, you certainly played a major role in developing projective testing with your word association method. What led you to develop the Word Association Test?
C. G. Jung: Well you see, in the beginning when I was a young man, I was completely disoriented with patients. I didn't know where to begin or what to say; and the association experiment has given me access to their unconscious. I learned about the things they did not tell me, and I got a deep insight into things of which they were not aware. I discovered many things.
Richard I. Evans: In other words, from such association responses you discovered complexes or areas of emotional blocks in the patient?
C. G. Jung: Yes, complex, that is one of the terms which I originated.
Richard I. Evans: Are you familiar with Rorschach's test which uses ink-blots?
C. G. Jung: Yes, but I never applied it, because later on I did not even apply the Word Association Test anymore. It just wasn't necessary. I learned what I had to learn from the exact examinations of psychic reactions; and that, I think, is a very excellent means.
Richard I. Evans: But would you recommend that other psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, and psychoanalysts use these projective tests?
C. G. Jung: Well, perhaps. For the education of psychologists who intend to do actual work with people, I think it is an excellent means to learn how the unconscious works. They are exceedingly didactic.
Richard I. Evans: In working with a patient, would you say that it is essential for him to recapitulate his past life in order to help him deal with his present neurosis, as Freud did, or do you feel that you can deal situationally with his problem without going back and probing into things that happened to him during his early life?
C. G. Jung: There is no one-and-only system in therapy. In therapy you treat the patient as he is in the present moment, irrespective of causes and such things. That is all more or less theoretical. Sometimes I can start right away with posing the problem.
There are cases who know just as much about their own neurosis as I know about it in a way. In such a case, I say, "Well, it is perfectly plain to you that it is nonsense what you believe. Now why are you forced to believe such nonsense? What is the power that makes you think such a thing against your free will?" Then we can begin with the observation of the unconscious, often through dreams.
Richard I. Evans: Does your type approach, based on introversion-extroversion constructs, help you in this analytical process?
C. G. Jung: Yes. I find in the study of the type that it supplies a certain lead as to the personal nature of the unconscious, the personal quality of the unconscious in a given case. If you study an extrovert, you find that his unconscious has then an introverted quality. The reverse composition, of course, is equally true. That knowledge gave me a lead of diagnostic value.
Richard I. Evans: How do the dreams and fantasies of the patient enter into the process?
C. G. Jung: When a patient discusses such material, the content of it is associated with all the important persons in the life of that patient. The most important persons are usually father and mother. So, when a patient hands over to you his infantile memories about the father or mother, he also sees in you, the analyst, the image of that mother or father. That is what Freud called transference.
Now we have to work through that condition in the hope that we will arrive at a different condition where the patient is able to see that I am not the father, not the mother, that I am an ordinary human being.
Dreams help because they reveal what is actually being projected into the analyst and where the deeper archetypal value lies.
Richard I. Evans: You are familiar, of course, with the work of Dr. J. B. Rhine at Duke University. Some of his work in extrasensory perception and clairvoyance, or mental telepathy, sounds much like the research into intuitive function.
C. G. Jung: That's quite probable. Or it can be a sensation type, say an extrovert sensation type who is very much influenced by the unconscious. He has introverted intuition in his unconscious.
The point is that Rhine proves that it is more than chance; it is statistically plausible. That is the important point which has not been contradicted. People hate such problems they cannot deal with concretely. But this is a revelation of time and space through the psyche.
Richard I. Evans: Another interesting area which is being discussed a lot in the United States today is psychosomatic medicine, the way in which emotional components of personality can affect bodily functions.
C. G. Jung: As an example of this, I see a lot of astounding cures of tuberculosis, chronic tuberculosis, effected by analysts; people learn to breathe again. The understanding of what their complexes were, that has helped them.
We knew these things long ago. Fifty years ago we already had these cases: ulcer of the stomach, tuberculosis, chronic arthritis, skin diseases. All are psychogenic under certain conditions.
Richard I. Evans: Another development has been the use of drugs to deal with psychological problems, especially tranquilizers.
C. G. Jung: This practice is very dangerous. It is like the abuse of narcotics. It becomes a habit. You don't know what you do, you see, when you use such drugs.
Richard I. Evans: But the argument is that these are not habit-forming; they are not physiologically addictive.
C. G. Jung: Oh yes, that's what one says.
Richard I. Evans: But you feel that psychologically there is still addiction?
C. G. Jung: Yes. There are many drugs that don't produce habits of the kind that morphine does; yet it becomes a different kind of habit, a psychical habit, and that is just as bad as anything else.
Richard I. Evans: I know our students would be interested in your opinion concerning the kind of training and background a psychologist, a person who wants to study the individual, should have.
C. G. Jung: When you study human psychology, you cannot help noticing that man's psychology does not only consist of the ramifications of instinct in his behavior. There are other determinants, many others, and the study of man from his biological aspect only is by far insufficient.
To understand human psychology, it is absolutely necessary that you study man also in his social and general environments. You have to consider the fact that there are different kinds of societies, different kinds of nations, different traditions. In the interest of that purpose, it is absolutely necessary that one treat the problem of the human psyche from many standpoints.
Man is not complete when he lives in a world of statistical truth. He must live in a world where the whole of man, his entire history, is the concern; and that is not merely statistics.
Richard I. Evans: As one reads your work, we seem to be aware that you know archaeology, anthropology -
C. G. Jung: Well this is true inasmuch as a great deal of my work is concerned with these disciplines, but I have no mathematical gifts, you know, which handicaps me some. You cannot get real knowledge or understanding of nuclear physics without a good mastery of mathematics, higher mathematics. There I only have a certain relation with it on the epistemological questions.
Modern physics is truly entering the sphere of the invisible and intangible, as it were. It is in reality a field of probabilities, which is exactly the same as the unconscious. I often have discussed this with Professor Scherrer. Now he is a nuclear physicist, and to my amazement I found that they have terms which are used in psychology too. This is simply on account of the fact that we are both entering a sphere which is unknown. The physicist enters it from without and the psychologist from within.
Richard I. Evans: When you spoke with Dr. Einstein in your early discussion, he more or less tried out some of his ideas on you. Did you ever bring to him the possibility that relativity might apply to psychic functions?
C. G. Jung: Well you see, you know how it is when a man is so concentrated upon his own ideas as was Dr. Einstein; and when he is a mathematician on top of everything, then you are not welcome.
Richard I. Evans: In your dealings with Professor Toynbee, have you gotten rather interested in his ideas of history?
C. G. Jung: Ah, yes, particularly his ideas about the life cycles of civilizations, and the way that they are ruled by archetypal forms. Toynbee has seen what I mean by historical functions of archetypal developments. That is a mighty important determinant of human behavior, and can span centuries or thousands of years.
Richard I. Evans: Well, Dr. Jung, you've patiently and interestingly responded in a spontaneous fashion to questions ranging from your feelings about Freud's ideas to reactions to Toynbee. Perhaps we should not impose upon your extreme kindness any longer at this time. I do hope, however, that our students are stimulated by what you've said to go back to your great array of writings. After all, this is the real purpose for making these interviews available to students, to motivate them to read the original writings of the world's great contributors to our understanding of man's personality.
C. G. Jung: Yes. People have to read the books, by golly, in spite of the fact that they are thick. I'm sorry.
End.