Today's soundtrack is Jimmy Eat World: Bleed American.
This evening marks my first reading of Carl Jung; I'll be reading the first chapter of The Essential Jung (Storr), "Jung's Early Work," featuring selections from several of his earliest publications.
The chapter begins with Jung's observations of his cousin, S. W., who apparently had a connection to the supernatural, as well as displaying traits of multiple personalities. Jung begins the passage by describing the behaviours exhibited before and after her "semi-somnambulism" (p. 29) - somnambulism being simply sleepwalking. Jung said that preceding and following these episodes, she would appear preoccupied and distant. Jung believed that identifying individual components of an individual's subconscious would help to research the antecedent of a persons's unconscious actions. Jung believed that S. W. displayed multiple personalities; he said that "the various personalities [were] grouped round two types, the grandfather and Ulrich von Gerbenstein" (p. 31). Apparently the grandfather's personality produced "sanctimonious twaddle and edifying moral precepts" (p. 31), while von Gerbenstein was "a silly schoolgirl" (p. 31). Jung says that S. W. displayed these personalities because she was trying to repress both of the stronger opposing forces within her: the personality instilled in her by a clergyman who taught her, and her more naturally boisterous personality. Jung believed that she naturally somewhere between the two, but rather than being able to express herself in a balanced way, she swung between these two extremes. Jung could sympathize with this attempt at balancing two personalities within one person; he believed himself to also have two personalities: himself, and an elderly man from the 18th century.
Jung termed emotional obsessions "complexes"; he used word-association tests to ferret out the complexes of his patients, or criminals that the Court summoned him to assess. Jung saw that if two triggering words were stated in close proximity, the client's reaction to the second was stronger than if the stimulus word was stated alone; this he defined as the "sensitizing effect of a perseverating emotion" (p. 36).
Jung correlated complexes with multiple personalities. He said that not only could people have complexes, but "complexes can have us" (p. 38); he said that "fundamentally there is no difference in principle between a fragmentary personality and a complex" (p. 37).
The final section of the chapter deals with schizophrenia. Jung believed that schizophrenia had a psychogenesis, and said that "the symptoms (delusions and hallucinations" are [...] in every respect significant psychic products" (p. 40). He said that the paranoia exhibited by those with schizophrenia has a link to real-world events as processed by the second personality; though some may predispose the tendencies to mental illness, Jung believed that real events would tip them over the edge.
