Why the emphasis on Freud, when Jung was incomparably greater?

When it comes to the Psychology/Psychiatry shelves of our bookshops and libraries, the space devoted to Freud compared with Jung’s paltry showing has always baffled me. 

When I left my second job in publishing over thirty years ago, one of the books I took with me was a Mentor paperback edition of A Primer of Jungian Psychology by Calvin S. Hall and Vernon J. Nordby, an excellent, brief introduction to the Swiss shaman’s works. I had read some Freud earlier in my life, but had found his rather depressing view of what makes us tick unappealing: he made us seem such bleak, helpless creatures, conditioned almost entirely by infantile sex urges. It just didn’t ring true. Neither did the idea that dreams are merely the subconscious acting out of repressed urges. Descriptions of the therapeutic process sounded equally unexciting – why would anyone who wasn’t actually mad want to lie in a room free-associating while the person supposed to be helping them sat out of sight saying as little as possible and giving nothing of themselves away. 

Reading an account of Jung’s view of how our inner world is arranged was a revelation. Sex is not the only urge. We go on being shaped by life way beyond infancy. Our subconscious isn’t a dustbin for discarded or suppressed desires, thoughts and images, which has to be approached as if it were a septic tank about to burst. On the contrary, it is always trying to help us by balancing conscious experiences that threaten our mental wellbeing. The main way it seeks to help us is through our dreams – our dreams are full of messages, often heavily symbolic, which, if we could interpret them, can help us become more rounded. The job of psychotherapy isn’t just to aid the mentally traumatized – it’s there to help people who have become miserable and don’t know why. We all have a personal unconscious, unique to us, but we share a collective unconscious with the rest of humanity – we are all connected by a reservoir of images and propensities created by experiences shared over Millennia, now hard-wired into our psyche.

A lot of this sounds quasi-mystical, but Freud and Jung considered themselves serious scientists seeking truth– and Jung spent his formative professional years working with severely ill patients in mental institutions. But Jung, thanks in large part to his ability to apply a scientist’s observational powers to his own experiences during a six-year nervous breakdown occasioned by his split with Freud, entered his middle years with a far richer and more sustaining view of how the psyche is structured, what mental health means, and how to help people achieve it.

So why did Freud end up as the Great God of Psychiatry? First-mover advantage? Partly. Because his therapeutic method was so successful? Not according to many patients who have spent a fortune on treatments that don’t seem to make them feel any better.

I think it’s partly to do with writing ability: Freud was an excellent writer and story-teller. He could organize and communicate his views clearly. He is a pleasure to read. Jung’s copious outpourings are a very different matter: reading his raw output can be a baffling, confusing, frustrating experience. There are exceptions – Modern Man In Search Of A Soul and the autobiographical Memories, Dreams, Reflections (which was co-written with an associate who could actually write) – but on the whole, reading the Master in his own words is a slog.

The Twentieth Century was very big on pessimism. Freud’s view of humanity’s inner working strikes me as unpleasantly bleak and sour. Intellectuals have always rushed to embrace fellow-dystopians. They don’t half love “brave” thinkers who “tells it like it is”. They especially love the sort of brutal reductionism that emphasizes the view that man is “nothing but” a machine, an animal, or a mass of suppressed urges. Jung wasn’t into searing indictments or representing humanity with a few stark brush strokes. He preferred large, complex, colourful mandalas. How uncool!

Freud’s outlook chimed with the view that God is at best an imaginary friend who we’ll all stop believing in when we grow up. Jung recognized that religion was absolutely central to human beings. When dealing with depressed middle-aged patients who had lost a once-strong religious faith, he thought the therapist’s job was to lead them back to it . Stop that at once Carl, or I’ll report you to Mr. Dawkins – he won’t half give you what for! 

The 20th Century was the century of dogma – all those brutal, murderous “isms”. Freud wanted to turn his central tenets into dogma, especially infantile sexuality. He actually phrased it in that way to Jung, who didn’t see what dogma had to do with science. (Climate change, anyone?). Intellectuals weaned on the simple principles of Marxism or Fascism or Capitalism would have found the richness and complexity of Jung’s thought and his willingness to admit he might not be right about everything extremely suspect. 

Although Jung was an introvert, he believed the therapist should sit facing the patient and be willing to offer up opinions and information about him or herself. After all, two people are in a room together because one of them needs help. Remaining secretive, emotionless and faceless might not be the best approach – to put it mildly. Jung was simply too practical. What did it matter how you approached the therapy as long as the patient got better?

Finally, although Jung’s views on the human psyche were revolutionary, they couldn’t be used to denigrate, diminish or dismiss humanity as selfish, stupid or evil and were therefore of no use to those wishing to foment revolution. Politically-motivated intellectuals almost invariably despise the beliefs and attitudes that give comfort to ordinary people, and want to sweep away all that nonsense to create new, improved versions of mankind. 

If I were a self-loathing intellectual who wanted to punish the rest of humanity for the way I feel about myself, I’d reach for Freud every time. If I wanted to stop loathing myself, I’d give Jung a go, and I’d start with Anthony Steven’s Jung:A Very Short Introduction.