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In this article Dr Gordon combines a personal statement of the factors which led her to choose the Jungian rather than the Freudian school with an account of some
essential differences between Freud and Jung and with an overview of some of the developments in analytical psychology and in psychoanalysis since the death of their founders. It is a broad-ranging article which spans both the cultural and the clinical relevance of Jung's ideas. This brief review inevitably omits certain important themes.
Dr Gordon's title was inspired by a remark which, according to Mircea Eliade, Freud is said to have made of Jung following the publication of the latter's first studies on the collective unconscious: ‘At first he was a great scholar, but now he has become a prophet.’ Although bristling with ambiguity, the remark itself has an intuitively prophetic quality. Gordon demonstrates how many of Jung's ideas contain the germ of major lines of development in psychoanalysis, as well as in analytical psychology.
A fundamental area of disagreement between Freud and Jung was the nature of the unconscious. To regard it as merely a repository for unwanted contents was grossly insufficient for Jung. He sought a further dimension, in the concepts of the collective unconscious and of the archetypes, which would offer a more satisfactory explanation both of psychotic phenomena and of the universal themes he was discovering in myths and dreams, and which would also uphold the value of these contents.
Gordon notes a remarkable parallelism between, on the one hand, Jung's ‘psychic triad’ of the self as totality, the archetypes and deintegrates, and the ego as the centre of consciousness, and, on the other hand, a triad which in her anthropological studies she has observed in certain African cosmologies: a supreme being beyond human comprehension or language, God's sons or messengers, fragments containing something of the divine essence, and man himself. For Jung it was essential to foster a rel