Strobel, H. (Zürich). ‘Das “Menschenbild” in der Analytischen Psychologie von C. G. Jung’ (The human image in C. G. Jung's analytical psychology). Schleswig-Holsteinisches Aerzteblatt,  10, (1976).

In this lecture, given in Kiel to the ‘Norddeutsche Gesellschaft für angewandte Tiefenpsychologie’

(North German Society for applied depth psychology), Strobel states that Jung's Collected Works are the best source for studying the human image. Throughout the centuries catastrophies happened whenever ideas about people were more highly valued than actual people. Guided in his youth by Goethe's idealistic mottoes, Strobel was stunned to find the oak tree under which Goethe held his famous conversations with Eckermann inside Buchenwald concentration camp. The author sees this as confirmation of Jung's view that an idealised human image constellates its shadow aspects.

Strobel holds with Jung that each human being is a unique phenomenon and that we cannot be objective in our judgment of people since the observer is part of the experiment. ‘Like physicists, we tend to replace the unobservable with philosophy’, overvalue intellect and produce stereotypical explanations. Based on numerous quotations, mostly from Jung's ‘Undiscovered self’, the author discusses modern man's conflict between collective and individual values, the autonomy of the unconscious psyche and the constellation of opposites in the unconscious of people with one-sided conscious attitudes. He sees the driving force of man's orientation in the self and, like Jung, considers consciousness a precondition of being. The child is ‘nourished by the gradual awakening of consciousness’. He illustrates this with the case of a three-year-old boy with an elephant phobia. This phobia disappeared when the boy changed from talking about himself in the third person to the first person. He brings further examples of self representations in children from his own work, Jung's seminars and a communication by M. L. von Franz.