Lecture 1

20 October 1933

Twenty years ago, I resigned from my lectureship at the university. At the time, I had been lecturing for eight years, of course with mixed success. Eventually, I realized that one must understand something about psychology in the first place before being able to lecture about it. I then withdrew, and travelled the world, since our cultural sphere simply fails to supply us with an Archimedean point.

Now, after twenty years of professional experience, I am returning to the lecture hall, and will attempt to convey to you a sense of the field known as "psychology." By no means is this a simple undertaking, as I am sure you will agree. It is very difficult to present such a comprehensive field in a generally intelligible and somewhat concentrated manner, particularly since it occupies such an incredibly vast area. The human soul is enormously complicated, and about as many psychologies could be written as there are minds. Some psychologies address highly specific questions, such as those pertaining to biology or to the individual.

Each year, Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, publishes a weighty tome five centimeters thick and entitled Psychologies of 1933, etc. I must therefore chart a path through this incredible chaos of opinions. I have not spoken to the younger generation for some twenty years. Consequently, I fear that I shall at times be off the mark. Should this occur, I would ask you to send me your questions through the post. But, please: within the scope of these lectures, rather than broaching the future of European currencies, for instance, or the prospects of National Socialism, etc.

I have called the psychology that I endeavor to discuss in these lectures "Modern Psychology." I have chosen such a general title, because the matters at hand are of a very general nature. Instead of engaging with specific doctrines, my aim is to paint a picture based on immediate experience in order to depict the development of modern psychological ideas.

Psychology did not suddenly spring into existence; one could say that it is as old as civilization itself. Obviously, psychology has always been with us, ever since human life, outstanding minds, personages, and psychological demonstrations have existed. In ancient times, there was the science of astrology, which has always appeared in the wake of culture all over the world. It is a kind of psychology, and alchemy is another unconscious form. This is an extremely peculiar form, however, a so-called projected psychology, in which the psyche is seen as entirely outside man, and is projected into the stars or into matter.

But I do not intend at present to speak of those days. In this short introduction to "Modern Psychology," I shall take you back only to its first beginnings as a conscious science. Psychology proper appears only with the dawn of the age of Enlightenment at the end of the seventeenth century, and we will follow its development through a long line of philosophers and scientists who made the manifestations of the psyche their field of study.

Still for Descartes (1596–1650), the soul is quite simply thought directed by the will. In his time, the whole of scientific interest was not yet focused on the human soul, but flowed outward to concrete objects. The age of science coincided with the age of discovery, that is, the discovery of the surface of the world. Thus, science was only interested in what could be touched. The external world was thoroughly explored, but no one looked inward. While all kinds of psychic phenomena existed, of course, they fell into the domain of the dogmatic symbol. The soul was assumed to be known, and everything concerning it was left to the care of the Church. Phenomena of the soul occurred exclusively within the framework of the Church, in the form of religious, mystical, and metaphysical experiences, and were subject to the judgement of the priest. As long as this dogmatic symbol was a living thing, in which man felt contained, no psychological problems existed.

This strange fact — namely, that phenomena of the soul were still contained within the religious sphere — holds true wherever religion is still alive. There, the life of the soul finds valid expression in symbols, and what remains with the individual is in essence his consciousness, since everything else is already expressed in religious forms. For instance, a highly educated Catholic came up to me after a lecture, and remarked: "Dr. Jung, I am surprised that you go to such great pains with psychology, why you struggle with such problems; these are not problems, surely! Whenever doubt seizes me, I quite simply query my bishop, who might ask his cardinal, and eventually turn to Rome. After all, they must have gained more experience over 2,000 years than you have!"

For such people, psychological problems simply do not exist. This was the case for the whole of Europe deep into the first half of the nineteenth century, and this condition still remains undisturbed for those who feel secure in a living and effective religious form. In Buddhism, Islam, Confucianism, and so forth, too, the life of the soul is expressed in symbols.

Essentially, science rested not upon any fundamental doubt, but rather upon the doubt about the secondary manifestations of a truth already revealed. We must not overlook this fact. Thus, for instance, where people are still living within the framework of living symbols, our psychology lacks a point of attack altogether. For such people, these problems effectively do not exist. But once doubt sneaks in, the life in the symbol gutters out, and actual psychology begins.

As I mentioned, at the time when the great seafarers were discovering new continents, something freed itself, something which could no longer be contained in the dogmatic symbol. At first, one did not know what this was. It showed itself in a sudden longing for something from which the Renaissance subsequently emerged. The Renaissance arose out of what, through doubt, had freed itself from Christianity. This was actually the first time that a psychological problem manifested itself.

Those of you who have read Jakob Burckhardt's study of the Renaissance might have stumbled over a small reference to a book entitled Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, written by a monk, Francesco Colonna. The title means "sleep-love-conflict," that is to say it is highly symbolic. It was translated at the end of the sixteenth century by an otherwise unknown Frenchman as Le songe de Poliphile.

The title refers to Polia, or Madame Polia, the heroine of the conflict. The story begins with the hero — that is, the dreamer of a long dream — losing his way in the Black Forest, which the Italians considered an ultima Thule at the time, and where unicorns were still said to roam. A wolf appears to him and leads him to the ruins of a sunken city with temples. Its architecture is that of the Renaissance — the whole of psychology was expressed in the form of architecture in the Renaissance. He steps into the dark entrance of one of the temples. After a while, he wishes to leave the temple again. He gets a somewhat uncanny feeling. But a great dragon appears in the doorway and blocks his way. In what follows, and since he can only go forward, he is compelled to experience everything that has happened to this sunken city. Through endless adventures, he is constantly looking for Madame Polia. Even though we do not know who this figure is, we can nonetheless venture a guess: Lady Soul. Eventually, he reaches the royal court. He is promised that he will be escorted to the Island of the Blessed where he will be wed to his beloved Polia. Upon arriving on the island, he hears a ringing and awakens. It is the morning of May 1. Hélas!

At the time, the story was said to be particularly profound and mysterious, and even thought to be a divine revelation. Later, it was considered to be so banal that Jacob Burckhardt did not even read it. Incidentally, the book is now a bibliographical rarity. Even the French edition has a collector's value of approximately five hundred Swiss francs. It took me great pains to read it at the time.

The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili is an important document humain, and actually represents the secret psychology of the Renaissance, namely, that which had struggled free from the grip of the symbol. Significantly, its author was a monk, even though he expressed himself in a pagan way. Strictly speaking, he would have been obliged to express what moved his soul in Marianist terms, that is, through the symbol of the Mother of God, and yet he chose not to. His is an involuntary psychology, typical and in a way symptomatic of an entire historical period. It reveals what liberated itself at that time, and summons the world of the ancient Greek Gods to express this in one way or another. Under the cloak of this allegory, he describes the descent into the underworld of the psyche. Dame Polia held something for him that he could not find in the Madonna.

If this interpretation is correct, we must expect that anyone who became involved with this new symbol in subsequent centuries could no longer be a real Catholic. When we come to the philosophers, who took the path of psychological discovery and who became the founders of this comparatively modern science, we find that they were indeed almost without exception Protestants. In earlier days, the healing of the psyche was regarded as Christ's prerogative, the task belonged to religion, for we suffered then only as part of a collective suffering. It was a new point of view to look upon the individual psyche as something whole that also suffers individually. The Protestant is the natural seeker in the field of psychological research, for he no longer has a symbol in which he can express himself, and therefore his sense of incompleteness makes him uneasy; he searches, he is active and restless. He will set out to explore every nook and cranny of the world in search of what he lacks, and he may have recourse to antiquity and learn about it, or will often reach out to other faiths, such as theosophy, Christian Science, Buddhism, etc., to find it there.

Eventually, he will come upon his soul and ask: Why is there something inside us that desires something else? "Why does my spiritual life no longer satisfy me?" is particularly the problem of the Protestant; he thinks that it should, but the fact remains that it does not, and that he is often troubled with neurotic symptoms. Thus, psychology was at first an entirely Protestant affair, then it became the business of the Enlightenment man, the skeptic, and the freethinker. For we can neither escape the fact that something rankles us nor that we are terribly nervous. Ultimately, psychology thus became a matter for the doctor. He must attend to those who have fallen into a profound doubt, and out of the symbol.

In what follows, I shall discuss in greater depth the development outlined so far. Specifically, I shall adduce a number of dates that will help us trace the gradual progress of psychology over the past centuries.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), an encyclopedic genius and a celebrated philosopher in his day, made the first explicit contribution to what we call psychology today. I shall mention only a few key points here that were essential to the emergence of modern psychology. Very often, by the way, the teachings of the older philosophers are truths that then fell into oblivion for a long time.

Leibniz's central concept is what he called the petites perceptions [minute perceptions], perceptions imperceptibles [imperceptible perceptions], or perceptions insensibles [unfelt perceptions] 69: He thinks of perceptions as representations, since a perception is at the same time a representation.

Leibniz cites as an example the experiment involving blue and yellow powder. When they are mixed insufficiently, blue and yellow grains of powder are distinctly perceptible. But when they are mixed thoroughly, only green powder is perceptible, even though the powder still consists of blue and yellow grains. While it looks green, it is in reality yellow and blue. We perceive these two colors — blue and yellow — unconsciously, that is to say, beneath the threshold. They are imperceptible. Leibniz tried to find a psychological meaning to his experiments and sought to make analogies to similar processes that take place in the human mind: something happens in me of which I am not aware. Here we first chance upon the conception of a soul that is not conscious. Descartes still considered the soul to be nothing other than thought.

For Leibniz, these "minute perceptions" contrast with another psychological principle: the principle of the intellect or the idea. Ideas and innate truths do not exist as actualities in us, however, but instead as some kind of dispositions that experience must fill out in order for them to become perceptible: "c'est ainsi que les idées et les vérités nous sont innées comme des inclinations, des dispositons, des habitudes ou des virtualités." It is like a drawing that, although it has already been made, is invisible, but nonetheless exists, because when we douse it with powder it suddenly becomes visible.

Perceptions are the opportunities for and the causes of rendering conscious innate ideas and dispositions. Leibniz thus anticipated the idea of innate dispositions, that is, images in which we accumulate and shape experience. For him, representations are a kind of powder that is spread over the inborn or unconscious ideas. These ideas, which came already very close to modern psychology, remained latent for a very long time, as is often the case with ideas when the time is not yet ripe for them.

His younger contemporary Christian August Wolff (1679–1754) initiated another line of thinking. Wolff limited his discussion entirely to consciousness, and divided his psychology into two parts: firstly, empirical psychology, which considers in particular the cognitive faculty and the activity of consciousness; and secondly, rational or speculative psychology, which centers on desire and the interrelations between body and soul.

Wolff considered the "soul" a simple substance, endowed with three powers: the representative faculty, the appetitive faculty, and the cognitive or cogniscitive faculty. However, he considers thinking to be the essence of the soul. In Wolff, we encounter for the first time the notion that psychology could be experience and that one could even experiment with it, which was a completely new idea. Wolff's psychology is the first ever experiential psychology.

Johann Nikolaus Tetens (1736–1807) went even a step further. He is the actual founder of experimental, physiological psychology, which later flourished before World War One in the era of Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920). Tetens was influenced by the English physiological approach to psychology, as represented by David Hartley (1705–1757). Tetens was the first to measure the sensations of light, hearing, and touch. He espoused a wholly empirical approach and did not consider doctrines to be eternal truths, but, rather as did the English, to be mere "working hypotheses."

This age peaked in the great critical era whose pre-eminent figure was Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). His critique of knowledge also imposed boundaries on psychology. In particular, Kant contested its possibility of being a science, arguing instead that it was at best a "discipline." Despite his skepticism Kant was not opposed to psychology, but actually took a profound interest in it. His views on the subject are somewhat contradictory and awkward, however, and are consequently discarded by "true" Kantians. In his Anthropology he follows Leibniz's thinking, and speaks of "obscure representations," that is to say, representations that we have without being conscious of them.

Lecture 2

27 October 1933

Submitted Questions

The first question is about Leibniz's perceptions insensibles and asks for a concrete psychological equivalent to Leibniz's experiment with the blue and yellow powder. Seen from some distance, the blue and yellow powder appears to be green.

Our daily life abounds in concrete psychological examples of Leibniz's "unconscious perceptions" as illustrated by the above experiment. These are the many things we do unconsciously. We look, for instance, at our watch, but we have to consult it again if asked the time a minute later, yet we perceived it unconsciously. There are other cases, such as riding a bicycle, where the process is almost wholly unconscious and if, while actually riding a bicycle, we suddenly become aware of the unconscious perceptions by which we keep our balance, it may prove actually dangerous. These petites perceptions become visible and invisible in a manner analogous to the blue and yellow particles in the green powder.