Psychology of the Unconscious: A Study of the Transformations and Symbolisms of the Libido (Collected Works of C.G. Jung - Supplements) Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

Psychology of the Unconscious: A Study of the Transformations and Symbolisms of the Libido (Collected Works of C.G. Jung - Supplements) Book

Breaking from Freud by allowing for nonsexual psychic forces driving the libido, Carl Jung made a more lasting name for himself than did his mentor. Psychology of the Unconscious is a prodigious leap away from Freud's dictatorial constraints, exploring the mythic aspects of our interior lives in exquisite detail. While he sometimes sacrifices readability for erudition, this is no failing for the interested student, who strives to follow Jung as he moves from Norse mythology to Shakespeare to Sanskrit etymology quickly but seamlessly. Focusing in particular on the vivid dream and fantasy life of "Miss Miller," he often uses her words as a kind of airstrip from which to take off on his own flights of imagination, always careful to stay focused on analysis and understanding and limited only by his exhaustive knowledge. Having demonstrated to his own satisfaction that the libido (the energy of the unconscious) transcends sex, Jung sets about showing the reader how it is so. Never denying Freud's crucial insights into sexual history and fantasies, he goes beyond them to tell a story prefiguring mythicists like Joseph Campbell's. The libido becomes a hero, escaping from confinement, having multifarious adventures in the world, but always returning to the source of its power--the unconscious--in dreams and imagination. This powerful, elastic theory is still in use today, and Jung's Psychology of the Unconscious deservedly takes its place among those books that have most greatly influenced the way we think about ourselves. --Rob Lightner Read More

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  • Product Description

    "This book became a landmark, set up on the spot where two ways divided. Because of its imperfections and its incompleteness it laid down the program to be followed for the next few decades of my life." Thus wrote C. G. Jung about his most famous and influential work, the one that marked the beginning of his divergence from the psychoanalytic school of Freud. In this book Jung explores the fantasy system of Frank Miller, the young American woman whose account of her poetic and vivid mental images helped lead him to his redefinition of libido while encouraging his explorations in mythology. Published in 1912 as Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido, this is a key text for the study of the formation of Jung's ideas and for understanding his personal and psychological condition during this crucial time. Miller's fantasies, with their mythological implications, supported Jung's notion that libido is not primarily sexual energy, as Freud had described it, but rather psychic energy in general, which springs from the unconscious and appears in consciousness as symbols. Jung shows how libido organizes itself as a metaphorical "hero," who first battles for deliverance from the "mother," the symbol of the unconscious, in order to become conscious, then returns to the unconscious for renewal. Jung's analytical commentary on these fantasies is a complex study of symbolic parallels derived from mythology, religion, ethnology, art, literature, and psychiatry, and foreshadows his fundamental concept of the collective unconscious and its contents, the archetypes.

  • 0691090254
  • 9780691090252
  • CG Jung
  • 26 November 2001
  • Princeton University Press
  • Paperback (Book)
  • 476
  • Reprint
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