Conversations with Carl Jung and Reactions from Ernest Jones

Conversations with Carl Jung and

Reactions from Ernest Jones

THE CENTER FOR THE HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY SERIES

The Center for the History of Psychology Series

David B. Baker, Editor

David B. Baker and Ludy T. Benjamin Jr., From Séance to Science: A History of the Profession of Psychology in America

C. James Goodwin and Lizette Royer, Editors, Walter Miles and His 1920 Grand Tour of European Physiology and Psychology Laboratories

Ludy T. Benjamin Jr. and Lizette Royer Barton, Editors, Roots in the Great Plains: The Applied Psychology of Harry Hollingworth, Volume 1

Ludy T. Benjamin Jr. and Lizette Royer Barton, Editors, From Coca-Cola to Chewing Gum: The Applied Psychology of Harry Hollingworth, Volume 2

Richard I. Evans, Conversations with Carl Jung and Reactions from Ernest Jones, edited by Jodi Kearns

Conversations with Carl Jung

and Reactions from Ernest Jones

Richard I. Evans

EDITED BY JODI KEARNS

First University of Akron Press edition, 2020

First published 1964 by D. Van Nostrand Company, Inc.

Copyright © Randolf W. Evans and Vicki Evans

All New Material Copyright © 2020 by The University of Akron Press

All rights reserved • First Edition 2020 • Manufactured in the United States of America.

All inquiries and permission requests should be addressed to the Publisher,

The University of Akron Press, Akron, Ohio 44325-1703.

ISBN: 978-1-629221-93-9 (paper)

ISBN: 978-1-629222-03-5 (ePDF)

ISBN: 978-1-629222-18-9 (ePub)

A catalog record for this title is available from the Library of Congress.

∞The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Cover Photo: [Box M6919 Folder 11 Richard I. Evans papers] The Drs. Nicholas and Dorothy Cummings Center for the History of Psychology, The University of Akron. Cover design by Amy Freels.

Conversations with Carl Jung and Reactions from Ernest Jones was designed and typeset in Goudy Old-style by Amy Freels and printed on sixty-pound natural and bound by Bookmasters of Ashland, Ohio.

In loving memory of our amazing Dad,

Randy and Vicki

Contents

Editor’s Note*

Preface

Introduction to the Second Edition (1976)*

Introduction to the Praeger Edition (1981)*

Acknowledgments

Part I. Prologue to a Challenging Venture

Prologue

Part II. Jung and Freud

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 Superego

Part III. The Unconscious

4. The Unconscious: Archetypes

5. The Unconscious: General Conceptualizations

Part IV. Introvert-Extrovert Theory and Motivation

6. Introvert-Extrovert Type Theories

7. Motivational Concepts

Part V. Some Reactions Concerning Psychological Testing, Psychotherapy, Mental Therapy, 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

Part VI. Reactions from Ernest Jones

Reactions from Ernest Jones

Part VII. In Conclusions—Some General and Theoretical Observations on the Dialogue Content

In Conclusion

Appendix A—Report on the Jung-Jones Film Project: Submitted by the University of Houston to The Fund for the Advancement of Education

Appendix B—An Exploratory Investigation of the Psychological and Educational Impact of a Filmed Dialogue with Carl Jung

Appendix C—Complete Transcripts of the Four One-Hour Discussions Between C. G. Jung and Richard I. Evans, August 5–8, 1957*

Appendix D—Finding Aid for Richard I. Evans papers at the Drs. Nicholas and Dorothy Cummings Center for the History of Psychology, The University of Akron*

Bibliography

Index

Items marked with an asterisk * were not published in the original 1964 edition.

Editor’s Note

The reprint you’re about to read is a transcription of the original 1964 publication resulting from Dr. Richard I. Evans’ filmed conversations with Dr. Carl Jung in 1957. This series of interviews represents the first time Jung agreed to be interviewed on film. Evans released these films as a teaching tool for public consumption in 1957 and followed up in 1964 with a book to aid in the study the conversations: this book. Sixty years after the publication of the Jung film, with guidance from Dr. Evans’ children, Vicki Evans, and Dr. Randolph W. Evans, we made the decision to rerelease the contents of the Evans-Jung conversations for a new generation of scholars.

The text of the original was transcribed verbatim with only a few original typos adjusted. A few additional resources from the 1976 second edition and the 1981 Praeger edition are included in this package, such as the about-the-author pieces and the introductions from each. In the text, Evans describes that he had a team of editors familiar with Jung and his ideas working to ensure the spoken words of the interview were presented in a readable way; the original unedited transcripts of the four interviews are added as an appendix. Additionally, readers will find the original index at the back of this book, but the page numbers have been changed to match the pagination of this reprint. You will learn about Evans’ interview process, funding, and further projects in his own words in the introductory and prefatory sections.

I wish to acknowledge colleagues and students of the Drs. Nicholas and Dorothy Cummings Center for the History of Psychology who worked on transcriptions, processing and digitization of papers, photographs, and film, and proofreading that led to the publication of this reprint: Jon Endres, Dr. Cathy Faye, Emily Gainer, Say Paw, Rose Stull, and Stacy Young. Additionally, we worked closely with the Evans family throughout the reprint process.

The Richard I. Evans papers were donated by the Evans family to The Drs. Nicholas and Dorothy Cummings Center for the History of Psychology in 2016 and are now processed and available to the public for research. The University of Houston sent us Dr. Evans’ film collection in 2019. The collection contains outtakes and prepublication versions of his Notable Contributors to the Psychology of Personality film series. The finding aid to the Richard I. Evans papers can be found in an appendix. Contact [email protected] for research and licensing requests.

Editions of Evans-Jung Conversations in Print

Evans, Richard I. Conversations with Carl Jung and Reactions from Ernest Jones. Princeton, New Jersey: D. Van Nostrand Company, 1964.

Evans, Richard I. Jung on Elementary Psychology. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976

Evans, Richard I. Dialogue with C. G. Jung. New York: Praeger, 1981.

Jodi Kearns, Ph.D.

Editor

Director, Institute for Human Science & Culture

Manager, Digital Projects

Drs. Nicholas and Dorothy Cummings Center for the History of Psychology

The University of Akron

Preface

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 provided 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

Introduction to the Second Edition (1976)

In 1957 I was granted a series of interviews with Carl Jung, which were published, under the title Conversations with Carl Jung, in 1964. Since that time several developments have occurred which make the publication of this second edition necessary and desirable.

The most important of these has been the immense growth of interest in Jungian psychology. In the early 1950s I was one of very few social-personality psychologists who began teaching Jungian theory as part of a personality psychology course; at the time Jung was more likely to be dismissed as a mystic. It is no wonder that Jung’s first question to me when I met him in the garden of his home in Küsnacht that summer of 1957 was, Why do you American psychologists hate me so much? It would have amazed him to know that the very first interview (Evans, 1967) in that new American magazine, Psychology Today, was taken from the discussions we completed that summer; that his ideas would be a subject of interest as presented by American psychologists on popular nationally televised talk shows, as they have been on several occasions; or, in the more academic realm, that his theories would be presented in virtually all college psychology courses, if not always in depth, at least with a sense of their historical significance.

The historical importance of these discussions has also become increasingly apparent. Among Jung’s few filmed appearances, these are perhaps the only ones in which he was asked specifically to address himself to elementary concepts and to beginning students. Though his outward manner appeared receptive to this approach, it would not have surprised me to learn that he really felt that this American psychologist was putting him on a leash with these simple questions that restricted a more profound discussion. In fact, Time Magazine accompanied the story that described our discussions with a unique photograph of Jung wearing a microphone around his neck, and captioned, Jung on a leash.

As I prepare the second edition, however, the original purpose of these discussions still seems to me valid; that is, to introduce the beginning student to Jung’s ideas; to stimulate those readers who had been discouraged from reading the original works because of their alleged obscurity, complexity or mysticism; and to provide for the more advanced Jungian scholar a more intimate glance at Jung’s thought processes as he reacted spontaneously to an orderly sequence of questions.

Following the recorded interview on each of the four days which Jung allowed me, he clarified some of the points he had made, and this is reflected in the edited version, particularly when he had not clearly understood a question. Because of his difficulty in hearing, I stated my questions in a bit more detail than would ordinarily have been necessary, and some of this reiteration was deleted to enhance written communication. As an appendix to this edition [2019 Editor’s note: Appendix C in this 2019 reprint], a transcription of the actual soundtrack of the filmed discussions is included. This transcription has been carefully compared to the recorded soundtrack by a group of Jungian scholars, including William McGuire, the late R. F. C. Hull, Aniela Jaffé, Marie-Louise von Franz and Barbara Hanna, and their suggestions, particularly in those areas where Jung’s accent and use of either foreign or highly technical terms made transcription difficult, have been integrated into the discussions.

Some minor differences between the actual transcriptions and the final edited version reflect an effort to bring together the major concepts in an orderly fashion for the introductory student. Others reflect the highly informative, but unfortunately unrecorded comments evolving out of more informal discussions following the recording sessions. In spite of the difficulties encountered in this venture, it was reassuring that readers of the first edition who were acquainted with Jung, such as Henry Murray and Aniela Jaffé seemed to feel that the essence of Jung and his ideas had been successfully captured.

The new title for this edition [2019 Editor’s note: Dialogue with Carl Jung] reflects the fact that my discussion with Jung covered basic psychological issues, not metaphysical concepts. It would have been literally impossible to do justice to most of Jung’s spiritual and metaphysical ideas in the limited time he allowed for our discussions. In fact, I doubt that in all of his published works are the subtleties of his own active imagination fully realized.

The fine response to this discussion with Jung encouraged me to continue a series of filmed and audiotaped discussions with the world’s notable contributors to psychology, including Erich Fromm, B. F. Skinner, Erik Erikson, playwright Arthur Miller, Gordon Allport [1], Jean Piaget, Carl Rogers, Konrad Lorenz, R. D. Laing, and Nikolaas Tinbergen. Films [2] produced from these discussions are now being used in conjunction with various courses in over 300 American universities, and a series of books has been published based on transcriptions of the dialogues.

Designed as an innovative teaching device, the series was supported by a grant from the Fund for the Advancement of Education and is being continued under a current grant from the National Science Foundation. A basic purpose of the project is to produce for teaching purposes a series of films that introduce the viewer to outstanding contributors to the field of psychology and human behavior. We hope that these films may also serve as documents of increasing value to the history of the behavioral sciences.

The books in this series are based on edited transcripts of the filmed dialogue, including, in some instances, audiotaped discussions as well as the contents of the films. The dialogues are designed to introduce the reader to the contributor’s major ideas and points of view, conveying through the extemporaneousness of the dialogue style a feeling for the personality of the contributor.

Since the questions in this series reflect many of the published writings of the interviewee, it might be expected that a comprehensive summary of his work is evoked. However, the selectivity necessary in developing the questions within a limited time interval does not always provide the basis for an inclusive summary. In fact, we are hoping to present a teaching technique leading away from the trend observed among many of our students today to become increasingly content with only secondary sources for gaining information concerning major contributors to various disciplines. The material—films and books—resulting from our dialogues provides a novel original source exposure to the ideas of outstanding persons, which in turn may stimulate the viewer or reader to go back to the original writings which develop more fully the ideas presented through our discussion.

It is my intention that these dialogues offer a constructive, novel method of teaching, with my role as interviewer being neither the center of focus nor critical challenger. The purpose of this book will be realized if I am perceived as providing a medium through which our distinguished interviewees can express their views. It is within the spirit of these teaching aims that our contributors so generously participate, as is evident, for example, in a letter from the late Carl Jung, reproduced in this volume [3]. Using such sessions primarily as a background for critical examination of the views of the participants must be left to another type of project, since even if this critical set were to be emphasized in my questioning, it might be difficult to introduce the reader to the contributor’s views and criticize them as well, within the limited time commitment. I expect that some of the participants who agreed to work with us on this project would not have done so if they had sensed primarily a critical attack of their work.

As was the case with subjects of other books in the series, it is hoped that the dialogue presentation allows the reader to be introduced to, or reexamine some of Jung’s ideas through a relatively extemporaneous situation. It must be pointed out, however, that in his own writings, Jung expressed himself in his own unique style, and he had the opportunity to rewrite and polish until he deemed the finished product satisfactory. In the spontaneity of our discussion, he was called upon to develop his ideas extemporaneously. I hope this element of spontaneity may present more of the man behind the book while losing none of the ideas central to his thought.

Because preservation of this naturalness of communication is essential to the purposes of each volume in this series, few liberties have been taking with the basic content of Jung’s responses to my questions. The dialogue presented here duplicates insofar as possible the tenor of the exchange between Dr. Jung and myself as it actually took place. In spite of the editing that was necessary, it was a pleasant surprise to review our hours of discussion and realize how few deletions and alterations were required. I hope that this dialogue makes available to the reader some reactions not readily obtainable from Jung’s more traditional didactic presentations or from the secondary sources of his work in the literature.

Rather than attempt to summarize all of the major concepts presented here, I shall take the liberty of briefly presenting frameworks which I find valuable in teaching personality theory to students.

There are three frameworks around which I believe current approaches to personality psychology can be analyzed in order to help locate any theoretical position within the matrix of general personality theory. These frameworks are really descriptive approaches to the understanding of personality, which develop theoretically from basic orientations focusing around the unconscious-oriented biological-determinism, the social/environment-oriented cultural-determinism, or experience-oriented self-determinism.

One group of contributors, emphasizing unconscious-oriented biological-determinism, has been considered more or less traditionally psychoanalytical, and includes such writers as Hans Sachs and Ernest Jones, as well as Freud himself. This group has been characterized as emphasizing what Freud called repetition compulsion, a concept that maintains that the first five years of life, which are strongly influenced by biological propensities, are very important in human development because they set the stage for and determine a lifestyle that is manifested continuously throughout the individual’s lifetime. Central to this postulate is the notion of the Oedipal complex. Another important aspect of traditional Freudian theory was brought out by Ernest Jones when he said, in a discussion with me, Well, man is, after all, an animal. Some people think that this is a cynical view, although Jones denied that Freud was inordinately cynical. Interestingly, the increasing impact of ethology on contemporary psychology has reopened the issue in a new vein, somewhat more palatable to psychologists. Freud’s earliest picture of man is that of an organism dominated to a large degree by its id, the animal, biological side of him—against which the ego, the conscious, the self of man, is fighting a tough battle. This view, articulated in many of Freud’s early works, was also accepted by many of his early followers. With Freud, they believed that the center of man’s motivation is the sexual libido, which to them was a manifestation of the dominant animal aspect of man. Although Freud, in his later work, began to emphasize other aspects of man’s makeup, many thinkers continue to perceive the classical psychoanalytical position in terms of Freud’s early views. This description is probably a vast oversimplification of Freud’s view, as Fromm and Erikson, for example, implied in my discussions with them.

Another group, the neo-Freudians, has placed more stress on the effects of social-environmental cultural influences on man’s development. To the neo-Freudians, the early Freudians emphasized too much the notion that the instinctual animal nature, the repetition compulsion, and a general biological patterning of early developments are found universally, and that these elements dominate man’s nature. The neo-Freudians take exception to this concept of universality. The believe that man is primarily a product of the specific kind of culture in which he lives, and that learning plays a much more important part than does biological patterning in the development of personality.

The late Karen Horney (1937), for example, became so disturbed by many notions of the biological orientation of the early Freudian position that she broke away from the orthodox position and developed the view that people are shaped to a significant extent by the society with which they must cope when they deal with the anxieties of reality. She considered this anxiety produced by societal pressures more important in shaping us than our anxiety about overcoming our basic biological animal natures.

Although Fromm does not like the label neo-Freudian he, too, certainly takes exception to the emphasis on the Oedipal situation so central to Freud’s biological unfolding view of man’s development.

Virtually all contemporary American psychologists have attempted to place man within his social milieu, in the belief that it constitutes the essential force in shaping personality. The neo-Freudians, however, still did not pay adequate attention to the principles of learning that are necessary to account for the shaping influence of the social environment.

It must be kept in mind that related to any theoretical discussion of determinism and personality theory, the behavioristic orientation may still be perhaps the most significant theoretical reference group for American academic and research psychologists. As the leading contemporary exponent of this view, B. F. Skinner interprets not merely cultural influences in a broad sense, but the immediate environment in a narrow sense as being the significant shaping force on the individual. As environment is controlled experimentally, and even in clinical situations, to modify behavior in a desired direction, very few assumptions are made concerning the internal workings of personality. Skinner supplied a cogent model of the process of shaping and controlling behavior, strongly influencing contemporary thinking.

In direct contrast to Skinner, Carl Rogers also formalized a set of learning principles which he believed to be useful, but not controlling. A great deal of thought today continues to reflect the greater concern for man’s individuality and self-responsibility than is found in either biological or cultural determinism. This concern is seen in the work of Rogers, Maslow (1954) and May (1950); in that of the more theoretically-oriented psychologists such as Allport and McCurdy (1961); and such philosophers as Husserl (1952) and Heidegger (1959), all of whom are concerned with the autonomy of the self.

Somewhere between the neo-Freudians and the traditional Freudians there is a group of three significant individuals whom we might describe as Freudian dissentients; for although each worked closely with Freud, each subsequently broke with him, or was repudiated by him, for one reason or another: Carl Jung, Otto Rank, and Alfred Adler.

Adler’s (1927) early work placed the primary emphasis on the social man, and it might be said that Adler set the stage for the emergence of the neo-Freudian group. In a different direction, although many of his ideas about early biological concepts were in agreement with Freud’s, Rank’s preoccupation with the will and its development of autonomy introduced a type of self-determinism that Freud did not emphasize. Rank had a marked influence on Rogers, for example.

As becomes apparent in this dialogue, Jung moved away from Freud’s basic tenets, while retaining Freud’s idea of the unconscious, expanding it into a race or collective unconscious and the individual unconscious. He incorporated into the collective conscious Freud’s early notion of archetypes, developing this concept beyond Freud’s postulation. However, with his central conception of individuation, Jung also moved away from the emphasis on biological determinism. Jung, perhaps more profoundly than either Adler or Rank, turned toward the idea of the development of an ultimately self-determined spiritual being that transcends the biological forces acting on man. This led him to consider many metaphysical concepts which have been difficult for present-day scientific psychology to accept.

This shift from biological, to social, to self-determinism as a means to account for the human predicament is really, however, a matter of emphasis. In spite of the claims of the extreme champions of each of these positions, one must recognize that probably no simple conception of determinism, whether it be biological, social or radical free-will-self-responsibility, can adequately and completely account for the complex behavior of the individual or the group. Interestingly enough, Jung reflects all of these trends at various points in these interviews, showing some tolerance toward a composite of these influences.

For example, visible in many of Jung’s observations is that portion of his focus which, by his own admission, is quite compatible with the biological determinism of Freud. At another point, however, when we were attempting to determine whether Jung necessarily would emphasize the importance of historical analysis in understanding the individual, he indicated that he could see the virtue of a historical or field theoretical analyses as well. In fact, Jung’s responses suggested a surprisingly well-balanced acceptance of the importance of both types of analyses. This is particularly interesting in view of the priority that Freud had bestowed upon primarily historical determinants of personality, as well as the obvious historical deterministic implications of Jung’s collective or race unconscious. At several points in the dialogue, Jung’s reference to and understanding of cultural determinants was apparent through his descriptions of the various cultures he had studied, though many of his conclusions are hardly congruent with the ideas of present-day cultural anthropologists.

The apparent compatibility to Jung of a theory of universal archetypes joined in each individual’s collective unconscious, coupled with the molding of the behavior precipitated by them showing differentiation, at least in part due to variations in cultural patterning, may be one of the most interesting insights he provided in these interviews.

Finally, his concern with the nature of an intrinsic self and the individuation process is certainly consistent with the current interest in self-deterministic perspective in personality theory. This may explain the renewed interest in Jung and his work that is becoming evident in many quarters.

Notes

[1] Gordon Allport: The Man and His Ideas received the 1971 American Psychological Foundation Media Award in the book category.

[2] The films [were] distributed by Macmillan Films, Inc., 34 MacQuesten Parkway South, Mt. Vernon, New York 10550. [2019 Editor’s note: The films are now distributed and licensed by the Drs. Nicholas and Dorothy Cummings Center for the History of Psychology at The University of