Carl Jung's Most Controversial Theories, Explained

A fifteen-minute animated explainer that introduces Carl Jung (born 1875, Freud’s collaborator and then his rival) and walks through six of his ideas, light in tone and sympathetic to most of them.

The first is God’s dark side. In Answer to Job (1952) Jung rejected the doctrine that evil is only the absence of good and read God as a union of opposites, and the video draws the psychological lesson: deny your own shadow and it runs you from the blind spot. The second is synchronicity, Jung’s “acausal connecting principle” for coincidences linked by meaning rather than cause, told through his patient’s dream of a golden scarab and the beetle at his window, and widened to his idea of an underlying unity of mind and matter, the unus mundus. The third is Flying Saucers (1958), where Jung set aside whether the discs were real and asked why people saw round, glowing shapes during the Cold War, answering that a split world was projecting a mandala, a symbol of wholeness, onto the sky. The fourth is active imagination: deliberately engaging figures from the unconscious, such as his inner guide Philemon, and recording the results in the Red Book, with the difference from psychosis being whether consciousness stays in charge. The fifth is his claim that the Trinity is incomplete, because wholeness needs a fourth and the Trinity leaves out the feminine and the dark. The sixth is his racial essentialism, which the video calls racist and sets against his own claim that the collective unconscious is universal.

The outline checks out, with one thing underplayed. Jung brought “introvert” and “extrovert” into psychology: he used the terms in print from about 1910, defined the types in Psychological Types (1921), and credited the psychiatrist Otto Gross as an influence. The scarab story is Jung’s own account, the insect a rose chafer; Flying Saucers appeared in 1958 and the Red Book was published only in 2009. The whip episode (1925, on Mount Elgon) and the phrase “going black” come from Jung’s own memoir. What the video passes over in a sentence is his record in the 1930s: he became president of the General Medical Society for Psychotherapy in 1933, under the new German regime, and in 1934 wrote that the “Aryan” unconscious had a higher potential than the Jewish. Two standard objections also go unmentioned: synchronicity has no test that could fail, and statisticians (Diaconis and Mosteller, 1989) have shown that striking coincidences are what large numbers of everyday events should produce.