The Portable Jung

Carl Gustav Jung was born in1875 in a small Swiss village of Kessewil. His father was a country parson, as were other relatives. Jung began studying classics at a very early age (as young as six), and became an expert in ancient languages and literature, including Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Sanskrit. His first academic choice was archaeology, but instead studied medicine at the University of Basel. While working under famed neurologist Krafft-Ebing, he decided upon psychiatry. He worked with schizophrenics, and is also the inventor of the word-association process in therapy. He had a long-time admiration of Freud, one of the founders of his field, and met him in 1907 (in what was reported to have been a 13-hour long conversation!). A close association followed, but only for a few years, as Jung's ideas began to vary somewhat with Freud, and Freud's occasional paranoia crept into the relationship. After 1909, they were distant. Jung was a visionary, in more ways than one. In 1913 he thought he was having psychotic episodes by having dreams and visions of blood-filled rivers, endless winters and mass death. Jung's sense of the power of the collective unconscious comes partly from experiences such as this, for in 1914 the first world war began, and his visions seemed to have a prophetic ring to them. After the war, Jung took an active interest both in developing his ideas as well as travelling and learning around the world from people in different settings -- this included people in indigenous cultures in Africa, the Americas and India. He was active in the field until the mid-1950s; he died in 1961. Jung worked with Freudian ideas, but did not adopt Freud's framework without significant modifications (and there were parts he outright rejected). Jung saw the interior structure in a tripartite set-up -- the ego, the personal unconscious, and the collective unconscious. The collective unconscious is not the superego of Freudian theory, but rather a typse of psychic inheritance, a species-level knowledge that possibly even extends into the future (like his visions). Another primary development of Jung is the idea of archetypes -- given his literary and linguistic background, this would seem to be a natural for Jung. These are mythical or primordial images -- much of religious literature is full of them; legends exemplify them. Archetypes can be easily understood (such as the mother archetype, the hero archetype) or more obscure (the anima and animus, the mana, the shadow). This volume of Jung's work is compiled and introduced by none other than Joseph Campbell ('The Power of the Myth'), who worked so closely with the Star Wars group to turn it into a modern legend, full of Jungian-style archetypes. Jung's work spans much of spirituality, psychiatry/psychology, and even gets into political and philosophical territory. Campbell gives a good selection of Jung's works here, intending it to be both an introduction to Jung's psychologi

Edited by Joseph Campbell, this 650 page book does a phenomenal job of encapsulating the essence of Dr. Carl Gustav Jung's psychological concepts. The Introduction gives us an overview of Dr. Jung's life and published books which is no small task. The book starts out by describing the functions of the psyche and how it develops from childhood and throughout the lifespan. The role of instinct and the unconcsious are described next. The role of archetypes and the collective unconcsious is given a thorough review. The psychological types: of extraversion and introversion are connected with the feeling, thinking, sensing, and intuitive functions as theorized by Jung. Dream symbolism and alchemy are analyzed in depth. The roles of transcendence, the anima, animus, shadow and synchronicity are examined in the development of the psyche, as man creates meaning in life. This is one of the best introductions to Jungian psychology on the market. It provides a great sampling of his works and simplifies the concepts for the average reader. Most readers will delve further into the vast universe of Jungian psychology immediately after reading just this one book. Erika Borsos (erikab93)

I've put off reading up on anything more "core" Jungian than Man and His Symbols and Memories, Dreams, Reflections, because I believed the story that he was difficult to follow. The book is exciting! Jung's insight and sense of humor shine through as does his self-consciousness about being part of a science still in it's infancy. I've also read VonFranz's intro to symbolism in Alchemy, and I'm sure other things Jung has written attain that density, or greater(/worse). I've no idea how much is owed to the editing of Campbell, but Jung is so lucid in this book that much of what he describes seems almost like (experienced) common sense by the time he's done.

For those interested in getting their feet a little wet in Jung, this book is perfect. His collected works are well represented here and the reader, if interested, will find several pathways marked here that can be taken further. The plus of this book is Joseph Campbell's introduction. He is always on the mark.