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Turning toward individuation| Carol Sawyer Baumann's interpretation of Jung, 1927-1932

<p> Given an additional 10 volumes that could still be added to his <i> Collected Works</i> and 35,000 unpublished letters, the historical record on Swiss psychiatrist, Carl Gustav Jung, remains incomplete. An example is the unpublished letters between Jung and Carol Sawyer Baumann (1897-1958), an analysand and member of Jung's circle in Zurich for 30 years. The focus of this dissertation is the period of transition between 1927 and 1932, when, after a near-death experience, Baumann shifted her attention from her husband and two children in Cleveland to a search for individuation, first as an analysand under various Jungians, including Cary and H. G. Baynes, then under Jung himself. </p><p> Jung's place in psychology is first assessed, noting that he is either generally ignored or else cast as a mere acolyte of Freud. Alternatively, the dissertation is situated in the New Jung Scholarship, which positions Jung as the 20th century exponent of the symbolic hypothesis, but in the tradition of the late 19th century psychologies of transcendence. </p><p> Jung's emerging conceptions are chronicled using his documents on individuation from 1916 until 1931. The documents show the emergence of the concepts of the persona, the personal and collective unconscious, the anima and animus, attitudinal and functional types, the balancing mechanism of the psyche, the transcendent function, and the self. These conceptions are compared to an abundance of archival evidence available on Baumann, including papers held by her heirs and primary source material from repositories in various libraries. </p><p> The interaction of Jung's theory and Carol Sawyer Baumann's interpretation of individuation reveals to what degree and in what way each influenced the other. The process of collecting, reviewing, and presenting documentary evidence, as an alternative to a hypothesis-driven approach, raises further questions from the material. The extent to which she was successful in her quest can be gauged by Carol Sawyer Baumann's superior intellectual grasp of the principles of analytical psychology, her extensive researches into non-Western cultures, and her ability to communicate her findings on the process of individuation through her lectures and published writings.</p>

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:PROQUEST/oai:pqdtoai.proquest.com:3564246
Date03 August 2013
CreatorsBluhm, Amy Colwell
PublisherSaybrook Graduate School and Research Center
Source SetsProQuest.com
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typethesis

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