Chapter I: The Psychology of the Future

The origin of the new psychology, with its technic universally known as psycho-analysis, lies in the effort which man has always made to cure those ills “not of the body.” When we speak of the ills of the “soul,” we do not, however, mean that the mind is not a part of the body. We merely mean that there is a difference, for instance, between the illness that might arise from receiving bad news, and that which was caused, say, by being knocked down by a motor car. The first we call a mental ill, a spiritual malady, the second a physical.

The old shaman of the savage tribe did not only attempt to cure gangrene and malaria and sore throat; he also treated people who were “possessed by demons” or had “lost their souls”; he treated people who had lost hope, who were despairing, who wanted a charm to conquer the object of love or hate, who desired success, who heard voices, saw visions and were afraid to live.

From the beginning, therefore, man has attempted to bring a healing to the mind. Every religion has been such an attempt.

The trouble with this, however, from our modern standpoint, is that a religion demands faith, not only in the natural, but the supernatural; and not only, let it be added, in the supernatural, but a very definite and dogmatic supernatural, some set of stories and brand of divinities. There are Gods, Devils and ghosts to which we must submit. But modern science, which has steadfastly discredited mythology and sought to explain life and its phenomena by natural causes, or laws of nature, has seriously undermined the old religions, and we see them beginning to topple in all places of the earth.

However, the science of medicine, which sought to discover the causes of sickness, reached a limit beyond which it could not pass. If there is no medicine for a broken heart, there is also none for a man with a fixed idea or one with a sense of utter inferiority. The insane cannot be cured by drugs or by operations, except in those rare curable cases which have an indubitable physical origin. The thousands creeping and stumbling around the world, victims of neurosis, cannot be reached by serums or diets.

It was therefore necessary for medicine to go beyond itself, to invade the wide and dark realm of religion and preempt the creeds, by applying the technic of science to what had hitherto been understood darkly through intuition, guess-work and “revelation.”

It is not my intention to give a history of the origin and rise of psycho-analysis. That, in itself, is a book. It is merely necessary to say that the first genius in this field was Sigmund Freud, that Freud made the first great discoveries, that he traced the first chart of the unconscious mind, and that he originated the first technic of psycho-analysis.

If Freud, however, was the pioneer, it remained for two of his pupils to carry the work forward to the point where it has become one of the vital contributions to the race. The work of Adler, the first of these, came as a revolt against Freud and gave rise to a rival theory. The work of Jung, however, not only brought a synthesis of the work of Adler and Freud, but went beyond both. It is for this reason, then, that I call his work “the psychology of the future.”

In order to come to a clear understanding of Jung, it will be necessary first to summarize the theories of both Freud and Adler. We can then see how Jung, accepting both, has transcended both, and laid out the first tracings of a complete psychology.