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Every Theory of Laughter Explained—and Superseded

A gorilla and a human laughing

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

I’ve been searching for years for a unified theory of laughter. I still haven’t found one. Lol.

Philosophers and psychologists have proposed any number of explanations for why we laugh. We laugh because we feel superior, because tension has been released, because something is incongruous… Each theory explains something. None explains everything.

And that may be because laughter is more complicated than we think.

Is Laughter Good or Bad?

When looking for romance on dating sites and apps, people often ask for, or promise to offer, a good sense of humour (GSOH).

Today, we tend to think of laughter as a good thing, but historically, this has not always been the case. Laughter seldom features in Plato’s dialogues, and, when it does, it is usually in the mouths of sophists and fools. In Plato’s Republic, Socrates suggests that, to set a good example, heroes in myths and stories should never be portrayed as being overcome with laughter.

The Stoics, too, frowned upon laughter, as did, for many centuries, the monasteries. Even the mild Rule of St Benedict condemns laughter in the strongest terms, for example, in Chapter VI, Of Silence: ‘Coarse jests, and idle words or speech provoking laughter, we condemn everywhere to eternal exclusion.’

Nowadays, most people associate laughter with happiness, health, and a virtuous attitude. But if laughter were that innocent, it wouldn’t be so fun.

The Superiority Theory

The notion that laughter can overcome reason or corrupt moral character finds an echo in the superiority theory of laughter, according to which laughter is a way of raising oneself by putting others down.

The superiority theory is most closely associated with the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who conceived of laughter as ‘a sudden glory arising from sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our own formerly’.

When we think of mediaeval mobs jeering at people in stocks, or, closer to our time, Candid Camera, we can see that Hobbes had at least half a point. But the superiority theory is unable to account for all cases of laughter, such as laughter arising from joy, surprise, or relief.

The Relief Theory

According to the relief theory of laughter, most often associated with Sigmund Freud, laughter represents a release of pent-up nervous energy.

Like dreams, jokes are able to bypass our inner censor, enabling a repressed emotion such as xenophobia (or, at least, the nervous energy associated with the repression) to surface—explaining why, at times, we can be embarrassed by our own laughter. By the same token, a comedian might raise a laugh by conjuring some costly emotion, such as admiration or indignation, and then suddenly puncturing it.

More flexible than the superiority theory, the relief theory is able to account for how we might use laughter as a form of release, or to tell or reveal some uncomfortable truth. Upon awakening on her deathbed to see her entire family around her, Nancy Astor quipped, ‘Am I dying, or is this my birthday?’ But not all laughter arises from a release of pent-up energy—not, for example, laughter at a pun or word play—and those who laugh the hardest at offensive jokes are not generally the most decorous or repressed of people.

The Incongruity Theory

Much more popular today is a third theory, the incongruity theory of laughter, associated with the likes of Immanuel Kant and Søren Kierkegaard, according to which the comedian raises a laugh, not by conjuring an emotion and then killing it, but by creating an expectation and then contradicting it.

In the Critique of Judgement, Kant shares a few jokes to illustrate his theory of laughter, for example:

A merchant returning from India to Europe with all his wealth in merchandise was forced to throw it overboard in a heavy storm, and grieved thereat so much that his wig turned grey the same night!

In the Poetics, Aristotle states that ‘the ridiculous may be defined as a mistake or deformity not productive of pain or harm to others…’ Leaning on Aristotle, Kierkegaard highlights that the violation of an expectation is the core not only of comedy but also of tragedy—the difference being that, in tragedy, the violation leads to pain or harm.

Possibly, it is not the incongruity itself that we enjoy, but the light that it sheds, in particular, on the difference between what lies inside and outside our heads. Kant compares the pleasure of laughter, the free play of thought, to the pleasure of music, the free play of sound, and to the pleasure of gambling, the free play of fortune.

Perhaps the only difference between the comedian, the psychologist, and the philosopher is that you can’t pretend to be a comedian.

The incongruity theory is arguably more basic than the relief and superiority theories. When someone laughs, our inclination is to search for an incongruity; and though we may laugh for superiority or relief, even then, it helps if we can pin our laughter on some real or imagined incongruity.

But although the incongruity theory takes us closer to a general theory, it struggles to explain why incongruity should produce laughter rather than, say, surprise, confusion, or mere indifference.

The Social Corrective Theory

In Umberto Eco’s novel, The Name of the Rose, the monk Jorge de Burgos commits a string of murders to prevent the sole surviving copy of Aristotle’s treatise on comedy (the lost second book of the Poetics), hidden in the abbey’s labyrinthine library, from ever coming to light. For Jorge, the book is dangerous, because laughter, once understood, could undermine the very foundations of religion and society.

After Aristotle, the first major philosopher to write a book specifically on laughter was Henri Bergson.

In On Laughter (1900), Bergson begins by making three observations:

  • Laughter is a human preserve. ‘Many philosophers have defined man ‘a laughing animal’, but they could also have said a ‘laughable animal’—for if another animal can make us laugh, this is only insofar as it reminds us of man.’
  • More than that, laughter is a social activity. Even when we laugh alone, it is because we have conjured up a social context, a gathering of ghosts—‘for laughter implies a certain complicity with others, whether real or imaginary.’
  • Emotion is the enemy of laughter, inasmuch as laughter presupposes a certain distance, a certain indifference, even if it is only momentary—and, in fact, manufacturing this distance can be one of the purposes of humour.

Life, wrote Horace Walpole, is a comedy to those who think, and a tragedy to those who feel.

These, then, are Bergson’s conditions for laughter: a human dimension, a social aspect, and a detached attitude.

But what is laughter, all laughter, actually about? It is, says Bergson, about a kind of mechanical rigidity, either in body or mind.

Nature is full of vital energy and never exactly repeats itself, but we human beings tend to fall short, to fall into patterns and habits, to ossify, to lose ourselves to ourselves—and laughter is how we point this out to one another, how we up our collective game.

For example, we may laugh at one who falls into a hole through absentmindedness, or at one who constantly repeats the same gesture or phrase. More subtly, we may laugh at a pun or a literal interpretation of a figure of speech; or at a misunderstanding that arises from a scene so formulaic that it is able to belong at the same time to two completely independent series of events.

I would add that we may also laugh at, or from, an unusual or unexpected lack of rigidity, as, for instance, when we break a habit or have an original idea—although this kind of divine laughter, as I call it, may only arise out of the contrast with our customary rigidity.

Ultimately, says Bergson, we are laughable to the extent that we are a machine or an object, to the extent that we lack self-awareness, that we are invisible to ourselves while being visible to everyone else.

Thus, the laughter of others usually draws attention to our unconscious processes, to our modes or patterns of self-deception, and to the gap, or gulf, between our fiction and the reality. This gap is narrowest in poets and artists, who have to transcend themselves if they are to be worthy of the name.

Zen masters teach that it is much easier to laugh at ourselves once we have transcended our ego. At the highest level, laughter is the sound of the shattering of the ego. It is a means of gaining (and revealing) perspective, of rising beyond ourselves and our lives, of achieving a kind of immortality, a kind of divinity.

Bergson has taken us further than Hobbes or Freud. Laughter is no longer merely an expression of superiority or a discharge of nervous energy: it has become a mechanism by which human beings police rigidity and preserve adaptability. Still, Bergson’s theory cannot explain all laughter, such as the laughter of a baby or a primate.

Evolutionary Theory

Another way to understand laughter is to look at it like a biologist or anthropologist might.

Laughter is evolutionarily much older than language, and we share its precursors with other animals. Primates in particular produce laughing sounds when playfighting, play-chasing, or tickling.

As with human children, it seems that their laughter functions as a signal that the danger is not for real—which may be why characters such as Batman’s Joker, who send a misleading signal, are so unsettling.

Perhaps, then, the basic evolutionary meaning of laughter is extraordinarily simple: this is only play, or the danger is not real.

Derivative Uses

Most laughter is not directed at jokes, but at creating and maintaining social bonds. Humour is a social lubricant, a signal of acceptance and belonging.

It is also a way of communicating, of making a point emphatically, or conveying a sensitive message without incurring the usual social costs.

On top of that, it can be turned into a weapon, a sublimed form of aggression, serving, like antlers or plumes, to pull rank or attract a mate.

The subtlety and ambiguity involved is in itself a form of play, and we know that laughter is associated with stress reduction and other health benefits.

If laughter began as a signal of play or safety, it has, in human beings, evolved a number of other functions, none of which are mutually incompatible. Humour is shaped by culture and education, and, if people laugh differently in Berlin or Tokyo, imagine how differently they must have laughed in Ancient Greece or Ancient India.

The same may be true of complex, elaborated emotions such as Schadenfreude and, indeed, romantic love, which build on primitive mechanisms, or ‘basic emotions’. Evolution lays the foundations; culture builds the house.

Why Can’t I Stop Laughing?

This may be where the search for a unified theory begins to go wrong. Superiority, relief, incongruity, social correction, play, and bonding need not be rival explanations. They operate at different levels and, in many cases, answer different questions.

The incongruity theory is principally cognitive; the relief theory is psychological and physiological; the superiority theory is interpersonal; the social corrective theory is social; the play or danger theory is evolutionary; and theories of bonding and aggression are functional. If someone slips on a banana skin, several of these theories could provide an account of the ensuing laughter.

But laughter often admits of several accounts, and, in fact, the more accounts it admits of, the harder we may laugh, as our mind flits from one account to another. Next time you laugh hysterically, pay attention to this flitting and its cascading effect.

When the teacher asks you to tell the class why you were laughing, you’d have to be a genius to explain it.

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If this essay spoke to you, you might look into Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions.

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Finding the Right Distance Between Self and Others

Freud kept a model porcupine on his desk—a reminder of Schopenhauer's famous dilemma. (AI-generated image.)
Freud kept a model porcupine on his desk—a reminder of Schopenhauer’s famous dilemma. (AI-generated image.)

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Schopenhauer compared humans to hedgehogs who huddle for warmth, but in so doing prick one another with their quills.

The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer was born on February 22, 1788, at 114 Heiliggeistgasse in the free city of Danzig (present-day Gdańsk, Poland).

Arthur’s father, Heinrich Floris, was one of the city’s most prominent merchants. Heinrich Floris was determined that his only son should become a merchant, and regularly upbraided him for his poor posture and even worse handwriting.

In 1793, when Arthur was five years old, Prussia annexed Danzig. The Schopenhauer family moved to the free Hanseatic city of Hamburg, where Arthur’s sister, Adèle, was born.

Arthur’s French Brother, Jean Anthime

In 1797, the nine-year-old Arthur was sent from Hamburg to Le Havre to live with the family of his father’s business associate, Grégoire de Blésimaire, who had a son, Jean Anthime, of Arthur’s age.

The two years that Arthur spent in Le Havre were, Schopenhauer claimed, among the happiest of his life. He became fluent in French, learned to play the flute, and forged a lifelong friendship with Jean Anthime. As a grown man, Schopenhauer would play the flute every day—leading Nietzsche to wonder whether he was indeed such a pessimist.

From these common beginnings, the lives of Arthur and Jean Anthime would diverge, with Jean Anthime becoming a successful merchant and family man and Arthur growing into a philosopher (‘the Sage of Frankfurt’) and celibate recluse.

The Brothers’ Final Meeting

A lifetime later, in 1845, Jean Anthime travelled to Frankfurt and met his ‘German brother’ for the last time.

In Frankfurt, Schopenhauer took all his meals at the Englischer Hof. He sat alone, dressed in white tie, at a large common table. At every meal, he would place a gold coin on the table. When a waiter enquired into this practice, he replied that he had vowed to himself to give the coin to charity on the first occasion that the other diners discussed something more substantial than ‘horses, women, or dogs’. In thirty years, he never lost his coin.

When Arthur received news of Jean Anthime’s visit, he booked two rooms at the Englischer Hof, one for Jean Anthime and another for Jean Anthime’s daughter by his second marriage.

But Arthur arrived late and in a foul mood to their dinner meeting. In his travel diary, Jean Anthime wrote: ‘He is of such disagreeable character that we quarrelled quite seriously. He professes, he says, the religion of the Hindu. It’s an eccentricity to add to all the others. He is considered mad, and indeed he must be [Il passe pour fou et il doit l’être en effet].’

The Hedgehog Dilemma (or Porcupine Dilemma)

A few years later, in Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), Schopenhauer would reflect upon the increasing isolation that accompanies old age, positing that the older we become, the more we diverge from others, and the less we need, or think we need, from them.

This is most true of the genius or man of intellect, who finds his own thoughts a lot more interesting and fulfilling than ‘the fuss created by fools’. If we must mingle with fools, we should carry our solitude inside us so as to be ‘not quite in their company, though in their midst’. ‘To be alone’ he wrote, ‘is the fate of all great minds—a fate deplored at times, but still always chosen as the less grievous of two evils.’

Schopenhauer famously compared humans to hedgehogs who huddle for warmth, but in so doing prick one another with their quills. Thus, the hedgehogs need to find just the right degree of closeness between feeling warm and being injured. But in old age, aided by a waning of the Will (the primeval life force in Schopenhauer’s philosophy), we finally have a coat thick enough to keep us warm:

Profound peace of heart and perfect peace of mind, these highest earthly goods after health, are to be found in solitude alone, and, as a permanent disposition, only in the deepest seclusion. And if our own self is great and rich, we enjoy the happiest state that can be found on this miserable earth.

When Freud read Parerga and Paralipomena, he picked up on the hedgehog dilemma and quoted the passage in a footnote to his own 1921 work, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. He used the metaphor to explain the ambivalence of human emotions and the necessity of ‘good manners’ or a ‘proper distance’ in social interactions.

Schopenhauer originally wrote about porcupines, which have longer, more dangerous quills, rather than hedgehogs. Freud was so fond of Schopenhauer’s analogy that, for the rest of his life, he kept a model porcupine on his desk.

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Schopenhauer was the first major Western philosopher to engage seriously with Indian thought. The German Greeks explores his philosophy alongside those of Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche, tracing the remarkable development of German philosophy from the Enlightenment to modernity.

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Whatever is done for love always occurs beyond good and evil. – Nietzsche

Splitting is a very common ego defense mechanism; it can be defined as the division or polarization of beliefs, actions, objects, or persons into good and bad by focusing selectively on their positive or negative attributes. This is often seen in politics, for example, when members of the Labour Party portray members of the Conservative Party as narrow-minded and self-interested, and conversely when members of the Conservative Party caricature members of the Labour Party as self-righteous hypocrites. Other examples of splitting are the deeply religious person who thinks of others as being either blessed or damned, the child of divorced parents who idolises one parent and shuns the other, and the hospital in-patient who sees the doctors as helpful and dedicated and the nurses as lazy and incompetent. An example of splitting in literature can be found in JD Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. The main protagonist, Holden Caulfield, is mystified by adulthood. To help cope with his fear of becoming an adult, he thinks of adulthood as a world of entirely bad things such as superficiality and hypocrisy (‘phoniness’) and of childhood as a world of entirely good things such as innocence, curiosity, and honesty. He tells his younger sister Phoebe that he imagines childhood as an idyllic field of rye in which children romp and play, and himself as the ‘catcher in the rye’ who stands on the edge of a cliff, catching the children as they threaten to fall over (and presumably die/become adults).

Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around – nobody big, I mean – except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff – I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be.

In contrast to JD Salinger, Miguel de Cervantes uses splitting to great comical effect as his main protagonist, the self-styled Don Quixote de la Mancha, guides us through a world that he has repopulated with heroes and villains, princesses and harlots, giants and dwarves – with the heroes being the greatest, the villains the most cruel, the ladies the fairest and most virtuous, and so on. ‘Take care, your worship,’ cries Sancho Pancha, Don Quixote’s peasant-turned-squire, ‘those things over there are not giants but windmills.’ Splitting diffuses the anxiety that arises from our inability to grasp the nuances and complexities of a given situation or state of affairs by simplifying and schematising the situation and thereby making it easier to think about; it also reinforces our sense of self as good and virtuous by effectively demonizing all those who do not share in our opinions and values. On the other hand, such a compartmentalization of opposites leaves us with a distinctly distorted picture of reality and a restricted range of thoughts and emotions; it also affects our ability to attract and maintain relationships, not only because it is tedious and unbecoming, but also because it can easily flip, with friends and lovers being thought of as personified virtue at one time and then as personified vice at another (and back and forth). Splitting also arises in groups, when members of the in-group are seen to have mostly positive attributes, whereas members of out-groups are seen to have mostly negative attributes – a phenomenon that contributes to groupthink. Finally, it is worth noting that both fairy tales and the Church feature a number of sharp splits, for example, heroes and villains, good and evil, heaven and hell, angels and demons, and saints and sinners; and that the greatest characters of literature, such as the Achilles or the Odysseus of Homer and the Anthony or the Cleopatra of Shakespeare, contain large measures of both good and bad, with the one being intimately related to the other.

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Inauthenticity involves pretending to be something other than one is and so, by implication, casting off the freedom to create, express, and fulfil one’s own self. Inauthenticity is often reinforced by sociocultural forces such as peer pressure and advertising, and is motivated by the subconscious desires to fit in, avoid criticism, and minimise or put off the existential anxiety associated with choice and responsibility. Examples include the teenager who acts ‘cool’, the person who takes an interest in something because others do, and the person who gets married because he has arrived at the ripe old age of 30, 35, or 40 years old.

The 20th century philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre calls such inauthenticity mauvaise foie, ‘bad faith’. His paradigmatic example of bad faith is that of a waiter who does his utmost to conform to the archetype of the waiter, that is, to everything that a waiter should or is expected to be. For Sartre, the waiter’s exaggerated behaviour is evidence that he is play-acting at being a waiter, an automaton whose essence is to be a waiter. By sticking with the safe, easy, default ‘choice’ and failing to entertain or even recognise the multitude of other choices that are open to him, the waiter places himself at the mercy of his external circumstances. In this important respect, he is more akin to an object – ‘a waiter’ – than to a conscious human being who is able to transcend his existence to give shape to his essence. As Freud himself commented in his book, Civilization and its Discontents, ‘Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.’

The concept of authenticity does not begin with Sartre or Freud, and stretches at least as far back as Plato. In the Greater Alcibiades, Socrates asks a young and foolish Alcibiades how one is to go about gaining self-knowledge. Socrates maintains that, if one were to say to the eye, ‘See yourself,’ the eye should look into a mirror to see itself. Since the pupil of the eye is just like a mirror, the eye could see itself by looking into an eye. Similarly, the soul can see itself by looking into the soul, and particularly into that part of the soul which has most to do with wisdom and which is therefore most akin to the divine. Self-knowledge, Socrates concludes, is, in fact, no other than wisdom; unless Alcibiades finds wisdom, he will never be able to know his own good and evil, nor that of others, nor the affairs of states. If Alcibiades were to become a statesman – as indeed he intends – without first having found wisdom, he would fall into error and be miserable, and make everybody else miserable too. What is more, he who is not wise cannot be happy, and it is better for such a person to be commanded by a superior in wisdom; since that which is better is also more becoming, slavery is more becoming to such a person. Socrates’ conclusions may seem abhorrent to modern sensitivities, but it does stand to reason that the person who unconsciously defines himself according to the likes and expectations of others and, by extension, of society also condemns himself to by far the most dishonourable kind of slavery, the slavery of the mind.

I wander thro’ each charter’d street,
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow.
And mark in every face I meet,
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,
In every Infant’s cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear.
…
– William Blake, London

As noted by the 20th century psychoanalyst and philosopher Erich Fromm, the authentic person does not necessarily need to resemble some kind of freak outsider. If a person engages in a frank and thorough appraisal of the universal and personal implications of the prevailing social norms and then decides to adopt some or most of them en toute connaissance de cause, then he cannot be taxed with inauthenticity. Conversely, it should not be assumed that every eccentric is an authentic. Genuine authenticity lies in the method and not in the madness.

Jean-Paul Sartre on Bad Faith

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Psychiatrist, Mystic, Visionary

When Jung met Freud
On their first meeting in Vienna, Jung and Freud exchanged for 13 hours straight.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Article substantially revised on 1 August 2026.

Carl Jung transformed psychology by exploring symbols, myths, dreams, and the hidden depths of the unconscious. Breaking with Sigmund Freud, he developed some of the most influential—and controversial—ideas in modern psychology, including the collective unconscious, archetypes, the shadow, and individuation.

An Extraordinary Family

Carl Gustav Jung was born in 1875 to Paul Jung, a poor rural pastor in the Swiss Reformed Church, and Emilie Preiswerk, a melancholic who claimed to be visited by spirits.

His paternal grandfather, after whom he was named, was a physician who was rumoured to be the illegitimate son of Goethe, and rose to become Rector of Basel University and Grand Master of the Swiss Lodge of Free Masons.

His maternal grandfather, Samuel Preiswerk, was a theologian who had visions, conversed with the dead, and devoted his life to learning Hebrew in the belief that it was the language spoken in Heaven (actually, it’s Greek).

When Jung was just three years old, his mother had a nervous breakdown and spent several months in hospital. In his memoirs of 1961, he wrote: ‘From then on I always felt mistrustful when the word ‘love’ was spoken. The feeling I associated with ‘woman’ was for a long time that of innate unreliability.’

Jung’s father was kind but weak-willed, and, in Jung’s mind, too accepting of the religious dogma in which he had long lost all faith.

Childhood Years

Jung was a solitary child who imagined that he had two personas, that of a schoolboy of his time, and that of an authority from the past.

He once carved a tiny mannequin into the end of a wooden ruler, which he kept together with a painted stone in a pencil case in the attic. He periodically returned to the mannequin, bringing to it scrolls inscribed in a secret language of his own making.

Needless to say, he was bullied at school. At the age of 12, he received a blow to the head. He lay on the ground for much longer than necessary, and thought, ‘Now you won’t have to go to school anymore.’

For the next six months, he avoided going to school by fainting each time his parents tried to make him—an episode that gave him an early insight into hysteria.

Medicine, Psychiatry, and the Shadow

In 1895, inspired by a dream, Jung went to the University of Basel to study natural science and medicine. His father’s premature death one year later prompted his mother to comment, rather eerily, that ‘he died in time for you’.

During his studies, he had a dream in which he was battling against dense fog, with a tiny light in the cup of his hands and a giant black figure chasing after him. When he awoke, he realised that the black figure was his own shadow, brought into being by the light that he was carrying: ‘…this light was my consciousness, the only light that I have. My own understanding is the sole treasure I possess, and the greatest.’

This dream helped to inspire Jung’s concept of the ‘shadow’, which comprises those aspects of ourselves that we reject or repress. For Jung, the more we deny the shadow, the more power it gains over us. To become more fully ourselves, we must reckon with our shadow.

After presenting a paper on The Limits of the Exact Sciences, Jung spent two years recording the séances of a young medium, his cousin, Hélène Preiswerk. He submitted his observations in the form of a doctoral thesis entitled On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena.

As he neared the end of his studies, a reading of Krafft-Ebing’s textbook of psychiatry led him straight into psychiatry. The preface alone had such a profound impact on him that he had to stand up to catch his breath: ‘Here alone the two currents of my interest could flow together and in a united stream dig their own bed. Here was the empirical field common to biological and spiritual facts, which I had everywhere sought and nowhere found.’

He was taken on at the Burghölzli Psychiatric Hospital in Zürich as an assistant to Eugen Bleuler, the man who coined the term ‘schizophrenia’. Bleuler set him to work on Galton’s word-association test, and in 1906 he published Studies in Word Association, which, he claimed, provided hard evidence for the existence of unconscious complexes.

Freud and the Collective Unconscious

Jung sent a copy of Studies in Word Association to Sigmund Freud, and on their first meeting in Vienna, the pair exchanged for 13 hours straight—with or without toilet breaks, history does not record.

Jung needed a father as much as Freud needed a son, and Freud anointed Jung his ‘son and heir’. But Jung became increasingly dissatisfied with Freud’s assumptions that human motivation is entirely sexual and that the unconscious mind is exclusively personal.

For Jung, sexuality was but one aspect of a broader life force, and beneath the personal unconscious lay a deeper layer that contained the entire psychic heritage of humankind. This ‘collective unconscious’ had been pointed to by his childhood dreams and experiences and by the delusions and hallucinations of his patients, which contained symbols that recurred in myths and legends from all over the world.

Whereas the personal unconscious contains the repressed memories unique to each individual, the collective unconscious is common to all human beings. It is the deepest and oldest layer of the psyche, and the source of humanity’s common symbols and images.

In his book of 1912, Transformations and Symbols of the Libido, Jung replaced Freud’s concept of libido with a much broader concept of undifferentiated psychic energy, which could crystallize into universal symbols such as the hero’s slaying of the dragon, which represents the struggle of the ego for deliverance from parental dominance.

These universal symbols, or archetypes, include such recurring figures as the Hero, the Great Mother, the Wise Old Man, the Trickster, and the Shadow. Archetypes arise from the collective unconscious and recur in dreams, myths, and folk tales from all around the world.

For Jung, life’s purpose was individuation, which involves integrating the conscious and the unconscious by pursuing one’s personal vision of the truth, and, in so doing, realizing one’s fullest potential as a human being. For Jung, the aim of life was neither perfection nor happiness, but wholeness.

If this meant falling out with Freud, then so be it. In 1913, on the eve of the Great War, Jung and Freud broke off their relationship.

Carl Jung 1909 portrait
Carl Jung in 1909. ‘Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.’

Confrontation with the Unconscious

Jung spent the next few years in a troubled state of mind that verged upon psychosis and led him to a ‘confrontation with the unconscious’.

By then, he had had five children with Emma Rauschenbach, the daughter of a rich industrialist. Despite being happily married, he felt that he needed a muse as well as a homemaker, observing that ‘the pre-requisite of a good marriage … is the license to be unfaithful’.

The marital strife that resulted from his affairs, notably with a former patient called Toni Wolff, contributed to his troubled state of mind, and Emma tolerated Toni as much from a concern for Jung’s sanity as from a desire to salvage the remnants of her marriage.

As Europe tore itself apart, Jung gained first-hand experience of psychotic material in which he found ‘a matrix of mythopoeic imagination which has vanished from our rational age’.

Like Gilgamesh, Odysseus, and Herakles before him, he journeyed to an underworld where he conversed with Salome, a mysterious young woman, and with Philemon, an old man with a white beard and the wings of a kingfisher. Although Philemon and Salome were products of his unconscious, they had lives of their own and said things that he had not previously thought. Jung later recorded many of these visions and conversations in what became known as The Red Book, which was not published until 2009.

In Philemon, Jung at long last found the father figure that both Freud and his own father had failed to be. More than that, Philemon was a guru, and prefigured what Jung himself was later to become: the ‘wise old man of Zürich’.

As the war burnt out, Jung re-emerged into sanity, and considered that he had found in his madness ‘the prima materia for a lifetime’s work’.

Continue Exploring

I revisit Jung in The Meaning of Madness and Hide and Seek: The Psychology of Self-Deception.

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