The psychology of Jung

The psychology of Jung by James Oppenheim is a concise popular introduction to analytical psychology written in the early 20th century. It surveys the new psychology of psychoanalysis and presents a clear account of Jung’s approach—especially the collective unconscious, archetypal myth, personality types, and the goal of individuation.

The book begins with Freud’s account of repression, the unconscious, dream symbolism, transference, sublimation, and the Oedipus complex; it then outlines Adler’s rival view of inferiority, the “guiding fiction,” and will‑to‑power. Turning to Jung, it narrates the break with Freud and introduces the collective unconscious, universal myths of death and rebirth, and religion as projection, with introversion described as a perilous but creative descent. Oppenheim contrasts extraversion and introversion and explains Jung’s four functions—thinking, feeling, intuition, sensation—combining them into eight psychological types; he illustrates how one‑sided development breeds neurosis. He frames the age’s conflict as love/extraversion versus power/introversion, interprets Faust and Spitteler’s Prometheus and Epimetheus to show the clash and its resolution, and presents Jung’s “transcendent function” and guiding phantasy as the way to reconcile opposites. The book closes by defining individuation as the aim of analysis and urging an individualized, forward‑looking cure, with notes for further reading. (This is an automatically generated summary.)