The Psychogenesis of Mental Disease

Jung began his career as a psychiatrist in 1900, when he was twenty five as an assistant in the cantonal mental hospital and clinic of the University of Zurich. It was only six years later, after he had become senior staff physician of the Burgholzi Hospital and an associate of Dr Eugene Bleuler, that Jung wrote his famous monograph 'On the Psychology of Dementia Praecox'. A.A. Brill has called this work indispensable for every student of psychiatry - 'the work which firmly established Jung as a pioneer and scientific contributor to psychiatry'. Ernest Jones described it as 'a book that made history in psychiatry and extended many of Freud's ideas into the realm of the psychosis proper'. An earlier translation by Dr Brill has been out of print for many years. This volume of the Collected Works of C.G. Jung now makes this key study in medical psychology again available, in an entirely new translation by R.F. C. Hull. Grouped together with it are nine other papers in psychiatry, the earliest being 'The Content of the Psychoses', written in 1908, when Jung was a leading member of the early psychoanalytical movement.The latest are two papers written in 1956 and 1958 , which embody his conclusions after many years of experience in the psychotherapy of schizophrenia (the term introduced by Professor Bleuler for dementia praecox). These studies reflect the original techniques especially associated with Jung's name.

'Psychotic contents, especially in paranoid cases, show close analogies with the type of dream that the primitive aptly calls a 'big dream'. Unlike ordinary dreams, such a dream is highly impressive, numinous, and its imagery frequently makes use of motifs analagous to or even identical with those of mythology. I call these structures archetypes because they function in a way similar to instinctual patterns of behaviour. ' The importance of this volume of Jung's writings on psychosis can scarcely be overrated both in historical terms and for the understanding of Jung's psychology. It begins with his famous work, 'The Psychology of Dementia Praecox'. It was this work that established his reputation as a psychiatric investigator of the first rank and it was this work also that engaged Freud's interest and led to their eventual famous meeting. The research in this work contains the seed of his theoretica divergence form psychoanalysis. Following on from this are a further nine papers on psychopathology and schizophrenia revealing Jung's original thinking in this area and providing valuable insight into the development of his later concepts such as the archetypes and the collective unconscious.

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