Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology/Editor's Preface

by Carl Gustav Jung

 

EDITOR’S PREFACE

 

The following papers have been gathered together from various sources, and are now available for the first time to English readers. The subject of Psychoanalysis is much in evidence, and is likely to occupy still more attention in the near future, as the psychological content of the psychoses and neuroses is more generally appreciated and understood. It is of importance, therefore, that the fundamental writings of both the Viennese and Zürich Schools should be accessible for study. Several of Freud’s works have already been translated into English, and it is fortunate that at the moment of going to press, in addition to the volume now offered, Dr. Jung’s “Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido” is appearing in America under the title of “The Psychology of the Unconscious.” These two books, read in conjunction, offer a fairly complete picture of the scientific and philosophic standpoint of the leader of the Zürich School. It is the task of the future to judge and expand the findings of both schools, and to work at the devolopment of the new psychology, which is still in its infancy.

It will be a relief to many students of the Unconscious to see in it another aspect than that of “a wild beast couched, waiting its hour to spring.” Some readers have gathered that view of it from the writings of the Viennese School. This view is at most that dangerous thing “a half-truth.”

There is no doubt that some even scientific persons have a certain fear of whither the study of the Unconscious may lead. These fearful persons should be reminded that they possess an Unconscious in spite of themselves, and that they share it in common with every human being. It is only an extension of the Individual. To study it is to deepen the self. All new discoveries have at one stage been called dangerous, and all new philosophies have been deemed heresies. It is as if we would once more consign radium to its dust-heaps, lest some day the new radiancy should overpower mankind. Indeed this very thing has proved at once most dangerous and most exquisitely precious. Man must learn to use this treasure, and in using it to submit to its own laws, which can only become known when it is handled.

Those who read this book with the attention it requires, will find they gain an impression of many new truths. It is issued towards the end of the second year of the great European war, at a time when much we have valued and held sacred is in the melting-pot. But we believe that out of the crucible, new forms will arise. The study of Psychoanalysis produces something of the effect of a war in the psyche; indeed we need to make conscious this war in the inner things if we would be delivered in the future from the war in the external world, either in the form of individual or international neurosis. In the pain and the upheaval, one recognises the birth-pangs of newer, and let us hope, truer thought, and more natural adaptations. We need a new philosophy of life to take the place of that which has perished in the general cataclysm, and it is because I see in the analytical psychology which grows out of a scientific study of the Unconscious, the germs of a new construction, that I have gathered the following essays together. They are printed in chronological order, and those readers who are sufficiently interested will be able to discern in them the gradual development of Dr. Jung’s present position in Psychoanalysis.

CONSTANCE E. LONG.

2, Harley Place, W.

February, 1916.