The Psychology of C G Jung

Abstract

THE evaluation of Jung's contributions to psycho-X logy and psychiatry is by no means an easy task. His earlier achievements were as scientific as any made before or since in these difficult subjects. His book called “The Psychology of Dementia Precox” was a careful clinical study and showed that he was capable of exact observation. Again, his “Diagnostische Assoziationsstudien”, which recorded his careful researches upon reaction times and their relation to unconscious emotion, proved the existence of those constellations of ideas and emotions which he formulated as “complexes”. Adler has made so much of the “inferiority complex” (by which he meant feelings of inferiority and not a complex at all) that too often it is forgotten that it was Jung who first conceived the idea of the complex. Nothing could have been more promising than these observations based upon careful measurement. One might have thought that here at last clinical research was attaining definite scientific basis. In spite of this we cannot agree with Dr. Jolan Jacobi that “As a didactic and diagnostic method it has become an essential aid to all psychotherapy and belongs to-day to the standard equipment of psychiatric institutions, clinical psychological training and vocational guidance of every kind, and even finds its use in the law courts”(p. 38). Such a eulogistic description of controlled association is scarcely true-at least in Great Britain-but nevertheless by his careful investigation into reaction times Jung had made what appeared to be a fruitful start.

The Psychology of C. G. Jung

An Introduction with Illustrations. By Dr. Jolan Jacobi. Translated from the German “Die Psychologie von C. G. Jung” by K. W. Bash. Pp. Xi + 169. (London: Kegan Paul and Co., Ltd., 1942.) 12s. net.