ABSTRACT
Given the powerful nature and dynamics congregating around the sexual impulse, a critical understanding of Jung’s approach to the psyche emerges through an exploration of his cautionary directions to analysts and psychotherapists about sexual phenomena. His guidance and directives are presented on the following pages. Jung’s wide-ranging views on sex and sexuality are structured around four central themes in his writings: (a) his direction about the conflict in the patient between natural instincts and social norms or morality; (b) his opposition to simplification or reductionism of sexual symptoms; (c) his cautions to therapists in five areas, including patient resistance to complexes, the difficulty of treatment, the prevalence of erotic material in the psyche, the sexual as a means of disguising deeper issues, and the challenges of erotic transferences; and (d) his views on how these symptoms point toward the challenges of individuation and the power of the unconscious, which are revealed through sexual phenomena. Placing Jung’s work in proper context is essential. He termed analytical psychology as a special “trend” in the development of psychology with its primary concern being “complex psychic phenomena” (1931/1969a, p. 363). Jung (1931/1969a) distinguished this type of psychology from other types of psychology, which attempted to reduce complex phenomena to their foundational elements (p. 363). Jung’s foremost principle was to be non-reductive when approaching the complex psyche and its various expressions, including sexual phenomena, “in contrast to physiological or experimental psychology, which strives to reduce complex phenomena as far as possible to their elements” (p. 363). He explained,
The term “analytical” derives from the fact that this branch of psychology developed out of the original Freudian psychoanalysis. Freud identified psychoanalysis with his theory of sex and repression, and thereby riveted it to a doctrinaire framework. For this reason I avoid the expression “psychoanalysis” when I am discussing other than merely technical matters.
