ABSTRACT
Leaving in the meantime the question of the wider impact of Jung’s social environment upon his work, let us try to reconstruct some portion of the intellectual world in which as a young medical student and assistant he would naturally live. During the previous hundred years, owing partly to the increasing social conscience of the era and partly to advances in physiology and chemistry which made an attack on mental illness seem more practicable, the superstition which, in spite of individual efforts, had engulfed the mentally ill throughout the centuries gradually receded, at any rate so far as conscious medical attitudes were concerned, and to some extent in legal practice. A Paris committee of inquiry concluded in 1784 that although cures had taken place the magnetic fluid had no existence and results depended solely on imagination. At the same time there was not yet a very clear or detailed psychological explanation of these states.
