Carl Gustav Jung was born in Switzerland in 1875. He made his reputation as an innovative psychiatrist pioneering religious/mystical approaches to the explanation of unusual psychological phenomena. However, in his attempts to explain schizophrenic symptoms he preferred, for the most part, to remain fairly conventional. He spent most of his long career wavering within the medical model. At first he favoured the biological explanation of the cause, and then the environmental approach. Finally, towards the end of his career, he found a way to integrate both as causal agents. But in this synthesis he also included observations of mythological phenomena in schizophrenic thinking that are essential components of mystical experience. The full complexity of his theory is often not adhered to by modern Jungians and, through selecting only certain parts of his theory, Jungians find they can accommodate themselves to both medical and mystical interpretations of schizophrenic symptoms.
As a young man Jung studied under Professor Bleuler at the Burgholzli hospital in Zurich, where he was an assistant physician. Under Bleuler’s guidance Jung chose for his doctoral dissertation to ‘investigate experimentally the disintegration of ideas in schizophrenia’.[47] In 1907 he published a paper, entitled ‘The Psychology of Dementia Praecox’, in which he set forth the knowledge he had accumulated on the subject.[48] (This was shortly before Bleuler gave the condition its modern name of schizophrenia.) The publication of Jung’s paper established his reputation as a psychiatric researcher, bringing him to the attention of Freud.[49]
In this paper Jung continued Kraepelin’s work of delineating the boundaries of the mental disease which was soon to become known as schizophrenia, and which was then generally assumed to have a biological cause. Some of Jung’s most interesting assertions are concerned with a symptom he called ‘affectations’. He argued that affectations involved phenomena such as ‘mannerism, eccentricity, and mania for originality’, and were often encountered in people who were out of their social element.
"A very common form of this affectation is the pretentious and artificial behaviour of women of a lower social position—dressmakers, nurses, maids, etc.—who mix with those socially above them, and also of men who are dissatisfied with their social status and try to give themselves at least the appearance of a better education or a more imposing position."[50]
What is noteworthy here is that brain dysfunction was only indicated, according to Jung, when lower class people rather than people of elevated status, used affectations that were inappropriate for the class to which they belonged.
Jung’s cavalier attitude towards power relationships, and his belief that a reluctance to adopt submissive postures was indicative of mental disease, is evident elsewhere in this paper. At one stage he discusses ‘the characteristic lack of emotional rapport in dementia praecox’, which he compares to that which is found in hysteria, and explains that it is only through having this emotional rapport that an analyst can penetrate the mind of the patient and gain moral power over them. He likens this process of gaining moral power over a patient to that of ‘ordinary confessions’. But he goes on to lament that dementia praecox ‘patients cannot feel their way into the mind of the doctor, they stick to their delusional assertions, they attribute hostile motives to the analyst, they are and remain, in a word, uninfluenceable.’[51] Quite possibly it was Jung’s inability to influence this type of person that contributed to his belief at the time in a biological cause for the condition.
By 1914 Jung’s thinking had advanced beyond his original class-oriented view. In a paper entitled ‘The Content of the Psychoses’[52] he observed that ‘psychiatry is a stepchild of medicine’ and that unlike other branches of medicine it did not have ready access to the scientific method. This was because psychiatry had to deal with problems that lie beyond the brain in the ‘psyche, as indefinable as ever, still eluding explanation, no matter how ingenious’.[53] Jung was now ready to scoff at the ‘dogma which you will find repeated in every text-book of psychiatry: "Mental diseases are diseases of the brain".[54] This critique was reiterated in a 1919 paper entitled ‘On the Problem of Psychogenesis’ in which he called the brain disease interpretation ‘materialistic dogma’.[55]
In a 1928 paper, ‘Mental Disease and the Psyche’, Jung was able to state firmly that ‘schizophrenia has a “psychology”, that is, a psychic causality and finality, just as normal mental life has …'. [56] But by 1939 he was beginning to waver in his certainty that there was no biological component in schizophrenia. In a paper entitled ‘On the Psychogenesis of Schizophrenia’ Jung began by agreeing with his former mentor, Bleuler, that there are primary and secondary symptoms for schizophrenia. Jung argued that while the secondary symptoms ‘are due chiefly to psychic causes’ he was less certain about the cause of the primary symptom, which Bleuler had nominated as being ‘a peculiar disturbance of the association-process’.[57]
Musing over the lessons of his youth Jung wrote: ‘My teacher, Eugen Bleuler, used to say that a psychological cause can produce only the symptoms of the disease, but not the disease itself.’ Jung summed up his equivocation at this time by arguing that ‘it is well-nigh impossible to prove, even approximately, that schizophrenia is an organic disease to begin with. It is equally impossible to make its exclusively psychological origin evident’.[58]
It was not until 1956 that equivocation between a biological and a psychological origin produced a synthesis, which could also take into account mystical considerations. In ‘Recent Thoughts on Schizophrenia’ Jung categorically asserted that ‘this condition has two aspects of paramount importance, biochemical and psychological’.[59] He added that he had proved fifty years ago that it could be treated by psychotherapy. He argued that the contents of schizophrenic experience were like those of a significant dream, what he called a ‘big dream’.
"Unlike ordinary dreams, such a dream is highly impressive, numinous, and its imagery frequently makes use of motifs analogous to or even identical with those of mythology. I call these structures archetypes because they function in a way similar to instinctual patterns of behaviour."[60]
Jung believed that the archetypes are probably ‘the psychic expressions or manifestations of instinct’ and that schizophrenia is caused when they are released into consciousness by the effect of an unknown toxin in the brain. He further argued that future research into schizophrenia will require a two-pronged effort:
"Whereas the problem of a specific toxin presents a task for clinical psychiatry on account of its formal aspects, the question of the contents of schizophrenia and their meaning presents an equally important task for the psychopathologist as well as the psychologist of the future."[61]
Jung’s view, which he further elaborated in another paper presented the following year, entitled simply ‘Schizophrenia’,[62] was essentially that stress triggered the release of a toxin, which he described as ‘a kind of mistaken biological defence-reaction’.[63] When this happened the toxin could act in a way similar to hallucinogenic drugs such as mescalin, and, by penetrating a biological storage area in the brain, unlock the person’s instincts and flood the conscious mind with archetypal images.
Jung’s final theory is comprehensive, to say the least. It bridges the two main branches of the medical model and it also recognises mystical experience in the form of archetypal images. It says that in the first instance the symptoms of stress are caused by environmental pressures and that when these are not addressed a toxin is released which switches the condition into a biological mode. But it goes on to recognise a pattern of mythological archetypes in the phenomenological content of schizophrenic experience.
This is unlike the conventional medical model which generally prefers to view the visionary content of schizophrenic symptoms as a random procession of delusions and hallucinations produced by a malfunctioning brain. Jung's recognition of mythological material might have allowed him to see schizophrenic symptoms as an essentially non-medical religious phenomena. But he was prevented from adopting this position because he also believed these archetypes are actually the raw material of instincts which, in normal circumstances, are locked away from conscious access in an unconscious biological storage area of the brain. The implication of Jung's composite theory is that the release of archetypes through the agency of a toxin is unnatural, and it is therefore a symptom of disease.
However, considering the central role of mystical knowledge in the development of religious thinking, and in turn, the central role of religion in the development of civilisation, the corollary of accepting the disease interpretation of mystical experience is to assume that the project of civilisation is the outcome of mental disease. The full scope of Jung's theory is therefore rather doubtful. At this stage the 'toxin' theory is no more than an aging, unconfirmed hypothesis without any evidence to support it.
Some contemporary Jungian psychiatrists tend to ignore the implication of disease in Jung's theories on schizophrenia. Focussing only on the part of his theory that explains the phenomenology of schizophrenic visionary experience in terms of archetypes, they have successfully treated schizophrenia as an essentially non-medical problem associated with spiritual/mystical emergency. One interesting Jungian theorist who practised this way was John Weir Perry.
Next: John Weir Perry
[47] C. G. Jung, ‘Schizophrenia’, in The Psychogenesis of Mental Disease, p. 256.
[48] C. G. Jung, ‘The Psychology of Dementia Praecox’, in Jung, op. cit., pp. 1–153.
[49] Ibid., p. v.
[50] Ibid., p. 75.
[51] Ibid., p. 74.
[52] C. G. Jung, ‘The Content of the Psychoses’, in Jung, op. cit., pp. 153–78.
[53] Ibid., p. 158.
[54] Ibid., p. 159.
[55] C. G. Jung, ‘On the Problem of Psychogenesis’, in Jung, op. cit., p. 211.
[56] C. G. Jung, ‘Mental Disease and the Psyche’, in Jung, op. cit., p. 227.
[57] C. G. Jung, ‘On the Psychogenesis of Schizophrenia’, in Jung, op. cit., p. 234.
[58] Ibid., pp. 245, 246.
[59] C. G. Jung, ‘Recent Thoughts on Schizophrenia’, in Jung, op. cit., pp. 250–5.
[60] Ibid.
[61] Ibid., pp. 254, 255.
[62] C. G. Jung, ‘Schizophrenia’, in Jung, op. cit., pp. 256–71.
[63] Ibid., p. 271.