ABSTRACT
Jung’s synthesis of the stages of psychotherapy provides confirmation of the cycle of creative change. He creates a synthesis of the cathartic approach of the early mesmerists and hypnotists as consolidated in Charcot’s school as the theory of abreaction; with Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis; Adler’s theory of individual psychology; and his own theory of analytical psychology. Jung’s understanding of the stages of psychotherapy is of particular interest, since it is only in a field such as depth psychology that the outer, or world cycle of creative change could be compared with the inner-directed development of an individual in psychotherapy. What we see then in the stages of psychotherapy is the kind of circumambulation that Jung speculated about so much, particularly in his late writings on such subjects as the fourfold nature of the carbon atom and its innate circulatory process, as well as his fourfold figure of the pyramid structure of the evolution of life and consciousness. It seems to me highly likely that all of the world cycles of creative change, in science, politics, the arts, the religions and psychology, are of necessity projections of the innate individuation process on to the plane of society.
