To understand C.G. Jung (1875–1961), you have to go further back than psychoanalysis. Jung himself knew this. His path led beyond Freud into a depth older than modern psychology: into the natural philosophy of the Romantics, into Schelling’s treatise on freedom, Goethe’s morphology, and Romantic medicine. He is, one could say, a late heir to the Romantic discovery of the unconscious.
#How does Jung’s unconscious differ from Freud’s?
The break with Sigmund Freud in 1913 was not a personal quarrel, even though it manifested as one. The disagreement lay in the matter itself. Freud wanted to erect a dogma (his own words) against what he called the “black tide of the occult.” The unconscious was to be made controllable, reducible to the libidinal conflict, dissectable through interpretation. Jung saw something different. In his clinical work at the Burghölzli hospital in Zurich, particularly through the word association experiment, he encountered a layer that lies beyond personal biography.
In the word association experiment, 100 words are presented one after another while reaction times are measured. This method led Jung to discover what he called feeling-toned complexes: entanglements of psychic impressions that interfere with thinking, and whose emotional charge reaches far beyond the personal. Henning Weyerstraß, for 19 years a board member of the C.G. Jung Society, describes the method this way in conversation with Gwendolin Kirchhoff: what matters is not what the subject says, but when they say it. The hesitation reveals the complex. And behind the complex lies an archetypal energy that generates an image — one we project onto the world without knowing it (cf. Kirchhoff & Weyerstraß, 2024, 30:46–32:52 and 56:36–56:53).
Freud wanted to talk the unconscious away. Jung wanted to enter into communication with it — not by manipulative intervention, but by listening, by receiving. Weyerstraß, drawing on Jung, captures the difference precisely: the unconscious is something like a being within my being that feels and thinks quite differently and has a far broader experiential basis than I do (cf. Kirchhoff & Weyerstraß, 2024, 41:35). Not to straighten out the psyche, but to let it speak: this attitude marks the core of Jungian psychology, and at the same time the point where it becomes philosophy.
#What became of Freud’s seduction theory, and what did Ferenczi see?
On 21 September 1897, Freud wrote to Wilhelm Fliess that he no longer believed in his previous theory of the neuroses, the seduction theory, which traced hysteria and later neuroses to sexual abuse in early childhood; he declared himself ready to give up certain knowledge of their causes in childhood and wrote that he now did not know where he stood at all (cf. Freud, 1897). Gwendolin Kirchhoff recounts the circumstances of this turn in her conversation with Henning Weyerstraß, before she asks what the goal of healing is for Jung (Kirchhoff & Weyerstraß, 2024, 22:18–25:03).
According to her account, Freud had assumed in 1895 and 1896 that later neuroses and so-called hysteria were connected with sexual abuse in early childhood. Within a year of his father’s death he changed his mind: the patient, as Kirchhoff renders Freud’s new reading, “is lying and imagining it all” (transl.; Kirchhoff & Weyerstraß, 2024, 22:56) and pins it on the father; the father was innocent, Freud’s own included. Yet Freud, Kirchhoff says, had shortly before revealed in a letter to Wilhelm Fliess that his father had abused his siblings. In the days of his father’s funeral he dreamed of a sign asking him to close his eyes; Kirchhoff reads this dream as a subconscious command that Freud carried out a year later, after an inner crisis (cf. ibid., 23:19–23:44).
Sándor Ferenczi, Freud’s pupil, returned to the same subject toward the end of his career. When he lectured on it at the psychoanalytic congress of 1932, he met, according to Kirchhoff, with “icy rejection” (transl.; ibid., 24:00) from Freud, who by then held that patients could not be helped anyway. The lecture was published in 1933 as Sprachverwirrung zwischen den Erwachsenen und dem Kind. In the end, Kirchhoff says, Ferenczi arrived at the thought that the goal of analysis should be for the superego eventually to fall away. She puts his reason in one sentence: the superego is “the repressed perpetrator, whose introjects break a person” (transl.; ibid., 24:39). The reverse question, how a person faces their own perpetration, is the subject of the entry Perpetrator Confrontation. The whole passage of the conversation is in the video from 22:18.
#The collective unconscious and the archetypes
In Symbols of Transformation (1912), Jung formulated the thesis that led to the final break with Freud: there exists a layer of the unconscious where personal matters no longer play a role. Here, primordial images hold sway — what Jung calls archetypes — and they recur in the myths, fairy tales, religions, and dreams of all cultures. The archetype is not itself an image but a disposition that generates images. It works like a projector: Shadow, Anima, Animus, and Self appear without the conscious mind having summoned them.
#What is the Jungian shadow?
The Jungian shadow is the archetype of those sides of a person that they do not want to see in themselves. For Henning Weyerstraß, who served on the board of the C.G. Jung Society for 19 years, it is something like “all my negative traits” (transl.; Kirchhoff & Weyerstraß, 2024, 59:42), and in his conversation with Gwendolin Kirchhoff he describes it as a guardian who stands before a door and bars the way to where you actually want to go (cf. ibid., 59:16–59:40).
A fight with the shadow, in Weyerstraß’s view, is a poor idea: it “parries every blow exactly the way you strike it” (transl.; ibid., 1:03:18). Weyerstraß recalls Gilgamesh and Enkidu, who realise in combat that they are equally strong and cannot defeat each other; with the other self, he concludes, you have to enter into dialogue, ask it questions and give it tasks (cf. ibid., 1:03:31–1:04:00). In his image the shadow “simply wants to be respected”, and to the degree that you respect it, it turns out “that this gatekeeper also opens the door” (transl.; ibid., 1:00:41–1:00:58).
Gwendolin Kirchhoff criticises an unspoken basic image at work in many therapeutic and accompanying practices: the human being is not yet ready for life and must first be healed; this produces a culture of endless deferral, of the repair ideal (cf. Kirchhoff, seminar “Vom Sinn und Unsinn der Therapie”). Her counter-thesis reads: “Healing is not a repair process — it is a birth.” (ibid.)
#What does philosophy have to say about the collective unconscious?
Jung’s discovery does not stand in isolation. It belongs to a tradition of thought reaching back to Romantic philosophy. Carl Gustav Carus (1789–1869) had already written in Psyche (1846) that the key to understanding conscious psychic life lies in the region of the unconscious. Eduard von Hartmann (1842–1906) developed a metaphysics in his Philosophy of the Unconscious (1869) that assigned the unconscious a world-constitutive role. Yet both stopped at theory: Carus described, Hartmann speculated. Jung knew both and went beyond them by making the archetypal not a metaphysical postulate but something empirically accessible — through the word association experiment, dream analysis, and the method of active imagination.
The connection to Schelling’s natural philosophy runs deeper than mere intellectual history. Schelling (1775–1854) had posited in his 1809 treatise on freedom an unconscious ground in God himself — a dark will that precedes consciousness and presses toward awareness in the human being. Jung’s collective unconscious can be read as a secular parallel: a layer older than the individual, one that comes to expression in the individual and whose images carry an order that consciousness alone could never produce.
Jochen Kirchhoff pointed out in Spaces, Dimensions, World Models (2007) the kinship between Jung’s theory of archetypes and Romantic natural philosophy: both work from the insight that reality is layered and resists reductionist approaches. What Jung calls the individuation process — the movement by which a person becomes who they are — touches upon what is understood in philosophical accompaniment as a birth process: a transformation that does not repair but brings forth.
#Individuation and the question of wholeness
Become who you are. This is Jung’s ethical imperative — not as a program of self-perfection, but as a response to the archetypal disposition that seeks to be realized in the individual. Individuation means not defeating the split-off parts of the psyche (Shadow, Anima, Animus) but entering into relationship with them. Jung himself put it in a formula: I’d rather be whole than good.
This wholeness is not a harmonious final state. It includes the dark sides that consciousness would prefer to overlook. It demands the capacity to endure contradictions, because at a higher level they are contradictions no longer — an attitude that runs through Jung’s entire typology. The unconscious, says Jung, is simultaneously greater and smaller than consciousness, younger and older. Whoever cannot bear such paradoxes remains on the surface. Whoever accepts them enters the field where genuine insight occurs.
What Jung describes here has immediate philosophical practicability. For working with people who stand at inner thresholds, this thought carries direct significance. What appears in a therapeutic context as a layer beneath the layer — the layer model of truth lying deeper than what is presented — can be understood with Jung as a movement of the unconscious seeking expression. What makes something unconscious? It is like a turning away from a particular feeling-core, a turning away from a perception that happens automatically because there is so much we cannot bear (cf. interview with Gwendolin Kirchhoff, 2026 (unpublished)). The question then becomes: what do we leave behind, and how can it be integrated again?
C.G. Jung did not answer this question conclusively. He gave it a space: the space of active imagination, of dialogue with inner figures, of attentiveness to what rises from the depths. This space is not foreign to philosophical work. Whoever listens in a consultation to what is at work behind a person’s words is working in a tradition that reaches through Jung to the Romantics and from the Romantics back to Schelling, Goethe, and the pre-Socratic philosophers.
#Sources
- Ferenczi, S. (1933). Sprachverwirrung zwischen den Erwachsenen und dem Kind. Die Sprache der Zärtlichkeit und der Leidenschaft. Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse, 19. Lecture at the International Psychoanalytic Congress, Wiesbaden 1932. English: Confusion of Tongues between Adults and the Child.
- Freud, S. (1897). Letter to Wilhelm Fliess, 21 September 1897. In: Sigmund Freud. Briefe an Wilhelm Fließ 1887–1904, ed. J. M. Masson. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1986. https://www.freudedition.net/briefe/freud-sigmund/fliess-wilhelm/1897/09/21
- Kirchhoff, G. (2026). Vom Sinn und Unsinn der Therapie. Ein Seminar über Wunde, Geburt und die Ethik souveräner Begleitung. Seminar description, /en/seminars.
- Kirchhoff, G. & Weyerstraß, H. (2024). C.G. Jung – Das Unbewusste, eine Einführung (Teil 1) – Ein Gespräch mit Henning Weyerstraß. YouTube: Gwendolin Kirchhoff [gJU52qS8gxg], https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJU52qS8gxg, 22:18–25:03 and 59:14–1:04:00.
