Rare presentation from The Centerpoint Foundation and Carl Jung Studies of The Rev. Elsom Eldridge's Orientation to Carl Gustav Jung at the Concordia Seminary in St. Louis, MO in February, 1973 (Introductory remarks)

1. Carl Gustav Jung Orientation
Rev. Elsom Eldridge| Concordia Seminary in February, 1973

2. Introduction:
FIRST OF ALL, I THINK I SHOULD SAY THAT:
• I AM NOT A PSYCHOLOGIST
• I AM NOT A PSYCHIATRIST
• I AM NOT AN ANALYST
I AM A CLERGYMAN WHO HAS BEEN DOING A VARIETY OF THINGS
THROUGH THE LAST MANY YEARS, AND WHEN I WAS IN COLLEGE I
DID GO SO FAR AS TO TAKE A COURSE IN PSYCHOLOGY. AND I
LEARNED ABOUT FREUD AND THE SEX DRIVE; AND ADLER AND THE
POWER DRIVE; AND THE THIRD MAN’S NAME WAS JUNG, THE THIRD
OF THE SO-CALLED BIG THREE.

3. Carl Gustav JungWhat Jung was talking about was never
mentioned. That was in 1934, I think.
Fifteen years ago through a set of
somewhat accidental circumstances, we
began to discover up at the Educational
Center here that Carl Jung, while he was
not the great innovator in one way, he
was not the great pioneer that Freud
had been, he was a tremendous person
in his own right and to the sex drive and
to the power drive, with which he did
not disagree with Freud or Adler, except
in their emphasis upon them; he said
there is a third major drive which is the
drive toward... for meaning and
wholeness.

4. Carl Gustav Jung
And increasingly through the last 15
years we have found his work and the
work of his whole school to be of more
and more use to us in our work in
religious education. And so what we are
going to do tonight is try to give you a
very brief identification of Dr. Jung’s
identification of the psyche. It is a
pretty complicated thing as he always
admitted. There is nothing more
mysterious in the whole universe, as far
as he was concerned, than the
unconscious. And he set out in his early
work as a psychiatrist to explore this
very mysterious realm.

5. Carl Gustav Jung
I rather suspect that when the definitive
book is written on the 20th century,
there will be certainly an important
chapter in it on the exploration of outer
space, but I suspect that 20 more
chapters will be given to the exploration
of inner space, because I think the
elements which we will touch upon
tonight have so much more depth of
meaning for mankind than moon rocks;
I think that is probably about the right
balance. This is my own view at the
moment.

6. Carl Gustav Jung
Jung himself, didn’t base his theories on
sitting up in an ivory tower thinking up how
things might be, but on... he based the
development of his thinking on his work with
analysands, his work in the consulting room
and working through and trying to discover
the meaning of 67,000 dreams. That’s a lot of
dreams. And he kept finding certain common
elements in dreams of people from all over the
world, because he was working with people
from all over the world, that he began to
identify certain forces and factors for which he
began to try to find some way to describe. And
he picked some rather strange terms and he
would never have absolutized any of them as
terms. But he had to find some sort of
language, some sort of new language to try to
identify factors and forces in the psyche of
men and women that needed some sort of
definition; even though in many ways they
remain forever mysterious.

7. Carl Gustav Jung
Jung was an amazing guy. He never stopped.
He worked at this business right up until the
age of 83 or 84 when he died in 1961. He was
always willing to go back and revise. He was
always extremely willing to have his
followers... his students, build on what he had
done. He was a pioneer. He recognized in
particular areas that he was very much a brand
new pioneer and he never absolutized
anything that he said. And he very much
encouraged, I say, those of his followers to
build on and go beyond where he was. This
was one area where he differed radically from
Freud, because once Freud had said
something, that was the end of it. And he
didn’t want anybody deviating from pure
Freud.

8. Carl Gustav Jung
This was his big battle originally with Adler
who had been his pupil. It became also a
source of a major break with Jung who had
never been his pupil, but had been his friend,
had traveled with him, had worked with him.
They had analyzed each other’s dreams and
so forth and so on. But Jung went a couple of
steps in the early days beyond Freud and by
1912 their friendship ended which was a sad
thing for both of them.

9. Carl Gustav Jung
What I am going to try to do here... Jung
himself was often annoyed at his own
followers, pupils who he would hear…. He
would say something, say, in 1915 and in 1920
he would have developed that further, but he
would hear one of his followers pounding the
table and absolutizing something which he
had said earlier and his final response to this
was, “Thank God I am Jung and not a
Jungian.” And he refused to let his name be
applied to his school. The school technically is
known as the school of analytical psychology,
even though it is still called Jungian
psychology, in a more popular vein.

10. The Centerpoint
FoundationI am going to try to rush through two basic
areas tonight and then discuss any of them
that you want to and you can raise any kind of
questions you want to. And if I don’t know the
answer I will say I don’t know the answer,
because I am not an analyst. I am merely a guy
who got caught with him about 15 years ago
and has done a lot of reading and used a lot of
his material and the various kinds of things we
are doing at the Center.
The first thing I want to do is that of trying to
identify the nature of a man’s psyche as Jung
identified it in terms of the various basic
concepts. And the second thing I want to do
when I finish that is to talk about his whole
theory of psychological types which, again, is
an extremely important area in which he did
the most important work that has ever been
done as far as I know.

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