Two small professional duties, and as much pleasures as duties, have recently overlapped in an unexpected way. I’ve read a colleague’s book on genetics; and I’ve recorded a BBC programme on the psychoanalyst C.G. Jung. I know of no evidence that Jung took a close interest in genetics; and I imagine a typical modern geneticist would regard Carl Jung’s work as mystical mumbo-jumbo and a branch more of literature than of science; but in the overlap there may be something of interest to both disciplines.
Jung was the choice of my guest Ruby Wax for a programme we were recording for future broadcast in my BBC Radio 4 Great Lives series. The writer, broadcaster, interviewer and comedienne has lurched, mid-life, into a serious interest in the study of psychotherapy, and Jung was her choice of a great life.
Ruby is one of those deeply serious people who just cannot help distracting her audience and herself by her talent to amuse, and I must allow her to speak for herself (our transmission date is Tuesday 28 April); but I think it’s fair to say that central to what has drawn her to Jung’s work was Freud’s great disciple’s fascination with the individual’s reconciling himself to — meshing himself harmoniously with — the underlying human being that he is but may not know much about.
Jung, who called this process ‘individuation’, coined the term ‘collective unconscious’, but its popular use, to mean the things that everybody in a group knows without necessarily being conscious of knowing, rather distorts what he meant.
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