Jung's Approach to Therapy with Mid-Life Patients

Jung's approach to therapy with mid-life patients is an appropriate topic, since the majority of his writings revolve around the psychology of the second half of life. This fact no doubt stems from his own psychological crisis lasting from his late thirties into his early forties. He gave up his formal academic career and withdrew from all but a few significant relationships, while continuing to work with his patients. His later work — and the greater bulk of his work — stems from his inner journey during that period. At age 83, looking back on his life, Jung wrote (Jung, 1961):

All my works, all my creative activity, has come from those initial fantasies and dreams which began in 1912, almost fifty years ago. Everything that I accomplished in later life was already contained in them, although at first only in the form of emotions and images. My science was the only way I had of extricating myself from that chaos. I took great care to try to understand every single image, every item of my psychic inventory, and to classify them scientifically — so far as this was possible — and, above all, to realize them in actual life ….

Thus, as is clear to anyone who reads his autobiography, Jung made a laboratory of his own psyche. As he entered mid-life, he had experiences which determined the whole future direction of his thinking, as well as his approach to patients. So, much of Jungian psychology is marked by this profound concern with mid-life and older patients, growing out of Jung's own experiences of turmoil and self-cure and the attitudes and activities which enabled him to bring about self-healing.

It is no surprise, therefore, to find that he began to explicitly