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Experimental Researches
Experimental Researches
Experimental Researches (Collected Works Volume 2) collects Jung’s publications from the Burghölzli years — the period in which, working under Eugen Bleuler, he conducted the Word Association Experiments and established the feeling-toned complex as a psychological fact. The papers date principally from 1904 to 1909 and include “The Associations of Normal Subjects” (with Franz Riklin), “An Analysis of the Associations of an Epileptic,” “The Reaction-Time Ratio in the Association Experiment,” “Psychoanalysis and the Association Experiment,” and the diagnostic applications in cases of hysteria and dementia praecox.
The volume is empirically dense and clinically oriented. Jung tabulates reaction-times, documents perseverations, traces individual complexes through sequences of responses, and demonstrates the diagnostic reliability of the procedure. A representative summary: “(1) From the figures given, it follows that relatively long reaction-times are almost without exception caused by the intervention of a strong feeling-tone. (2) Strong feeling-tones as a rule belong to extensive and personally important complexes. (3) The reaction can be an association belonging to a complex of this nature and take its feeling-tone from this complex, though the complex need not be conscious. The constellation (Ziehen) of an association is mostly unconscious (or not-conscious); the constellating complex here plays the part of a quasi-independent entity — a ‘second consciousness’” (Jung, CW 2 §621).
The volume is the documentary foundation for the later architectural claims of Two Essays and The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. What The Archetypes announces as a theoretical topography Experimental Researches proves under laboratory conditions. The personal unconscious as a concept rests on the data this volume contains.