Development and Similarities, 1935-1980

THERE IS SOMETHING about the beginning of a new decade that leads to looking back to the past as well as to looking forward to the future. Both Freud and Jung found the very distant past, archaeology, a gripping subject. Freud's consulting-room contained many Egyptian and Greek statuettes, and it is said that he even used to place one on the dining-table and gaze at it in preference to conversation with his family. Jung hesitated between archaeology and medicine when he first entered university. The desire to understand our past is one of the important strands in the re-parative wishes that can inform a therapist's motivation. Much of the past is with us in the present, and one aim in studying history is to further the understanding of conflict, the psychology of the attackers and of the attacked.

1980 is 45 years, or nearly half a century, after Jung gave what came to be known as the Tavistock Lectures, to some 200 doctors assembled under the auspices of that Clinic—they were psychiatrists, psychotherapists, analysts (mainly medical ones then) and general practitioners. As well as the lectures, the discussions which followed were reported verbatim, and the whole was published under the title of Analytical psychology, its theory and practice (JUNG 12). Someone picking up the book now could perhaps assume that it constituted a definitive statement by Jung and that it is a description of present theory and practice. But between 1935 and Jung's death in 1961, much happened in the world and he himself did a great deal more, and very sophisticated, work. Added to that, during the years since the lectures thousands of hours of analysis have been lived, reflected upon, and thought about. Those are the hours from which I hope to distil something in this paper, but that does not mean that the milestone quality of those pre-World War II lectures should be disregarded.

I am focusing at the moment on some of what Jung said at that particular time, to a mixed, but not