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Two Essays on Analytical Psychology

Two Essays on Analytical Psychology

Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (Collected Works Volume 7, 1953) collects two long works — “On the Psychology of the Unconscious” and “The Relations Between the Ego and the Unconscious” — which Jung himself described as “the expression of a long-standing endeavour to grasp and — at least in its essential features — to depict the strange character and course of that drame intérieur, the transformation process of the unconscious psyche” (Jung, CW 7, Preface to the Second Edition).

The volume is the architectural document of Jung’s two-stratum psychology. “On the Psychology of the Unconscious” reaches, in Chapter V, the canonical heading “The Personal and the Collective (or Transpersonal) Unconscious,” and proceeds in Chapter VII to “The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious.” “The Relations Between the Ego and the Unconscious” opens with the same architecture made more explicit — Part One, Chapter I: “The Personal and the Collective Unconscious” — and proceeds through the assimilation of the unconscious, the persona as a segment of the collective psyche, negative attempts to free the individuality (regressive restoration of the persona; identification with the collective psyche), and Part Two’s exposition of individuation, anima and animus, the technique of differentiation, and the mana-personality.

The volume is also the historical document of Jung’s separation from Freud. Its jacket copy announces: “these famous essays… sum up [Jung’s] attempt to integrate the psychological schools of Freud and Adler into a comprehensive framework. Historically they mark the end of Jung’s intimate association with Freud.” In the Preface to the Second Edition, Jung dates the independence of his position to 1902. The volume is, on its own self-understanding, both synthesis and break — the text in which the architecture of analytical psychology stands forth as no longer Freudian.

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