Back to Jung

I first became interested in Jung when a friend at university, Helen Scholes (now Chatterton – a textile maker living in Liverpool), bought me “Memories, Dreams and Reflections” for my birthday. This was Jung’s memoir written towards the end of his life. I was instantly captivated by the things he wrote about. Many years later a PhD gave me the opportunity to read much more of his work and grasp many of his concepts in more detail.

Between 1997 and 2004 I worked on my PhD. The thesis I produced was called “Working with Archetypes”. The focus of the thesis was organisational change in healthcare. I took the work of Carl Jung on archetypes, alchemy and individuation. From this I then explored the work of the Archetypal Psychologists, a group founded by James Hillman who had studied with Jung in Zurich. This group comprised a diverse range of thinkers who took archetypal principles and applied them to their own fields. Hillman emphasised the importance of metaphor and image in helping us to understand the world. He also stressed the need for a poly-theistic view of the world.

Within the PhD I developed a set of techniques to make organisational change easier to understand and easier to endure.

The problem with doing a PhD is that when you reach the end of the journey you can find yourself not wanting to revisit the material again for a long time. Having immersed in it for 7 years and become an expert in a very narrow field, it’s time for a break!

So, here I am 9 years later and finally interested in revisiting the writings of Carl Jung, James Hillman, Daryl Sharp, Marie Louise von Franz and Barbarah Hannah amongst others. I am saddened to hear that Hillman died a couple of years ago. Towards the end of his life his writings had received a relatively wide exposure and become big sellers. Work has begun to publish a collected works which I will be keen to get hold of (although I do already have a dozen of his books in separate volumes). Dipping back into the original Jung is also refreshing.