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Analytic formulation and contribution to treatment of psychotic disorders have little application in modern psychiatry. The medical model, largely based on psychopharmacology and biological conceptualisation of illness, particularly dominates the treatment of psychosis. While many analysts have worked with patients in psychotic states, it is rare to find analytic approaches to psychosis within the national health service (NHS) in the UK. We feel this a detriment to a sometimes difficult to treat patient group. Jung spent his early working years devoted to patients with psychosis at the Burgholzli hospital in Zurich. Later on in his career, Jung had personal experience of psychotic symptoms, interacting with visions and voices within his own mind, that are noted in his posthumous Red Book. Jung is, therefore, arguably one of the most experienced analysts and depth psychologists in the realm of psychosis. In this paper we describe Jung's in-depth psychological approach to the genesis of psychosis. We then discuss parallels with our contemporary understanding of the aetiology of psychosis. Our aim is to highlight the importance of an analytical approach and thinking in a) understanding the aetiology and b) contribution to treatment of such a complex and intractable disorder as psychosis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

C. G. Jung wrote very little about psychedelic drugs and he took a sceptical view of them. However, he was sufficiently impressed by Aldous Huxley's 1954 account of taking mescaline, The Doors of Perception, to invite Huxley to visit him in Switzerland. Huxley declined Jung's invitation but Huxley's collaborator Humphry Osmond met Jung instead. This paper documents Jung's contact with the British pioneers of psychedelics research and presents the scant material illuminating his views about these drugs. It also determines the efforts of British psychiatrist Ronald Sandison, who was the first to develop an "explicitly Jungian approach" to psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy (Hill, 2013), and it highlights a connection between Sandison's initiative and the Society of Analytical Psychology (SAP) through the involvement of two SAP members: Margot Cutner, Sandison's colleague, and Michael Fordham, who supervised a trainee working with one of Sandison's former patients. Despite Jung's objections to the use of psychedelics, Sandison and Cutner developed ground-breaking protocols during the 1950s and they were among the first to document the phenomenon of "spiritual rebirth symbolized in the birth experience known to many LSD therapists" (Sandison, 2001). In two companion papers, I consider Jung's treatment of the rebirth motif in his commentary on The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which later became a central text in the psychedelic movement, and I chart the evolution in psychedelics research from an association with schizophrenia during the 1950s to the mystical paradigms of the 1960s and beyond., (© 2024 The Society of Analytical Psychology.)

In his late historical and autobiographical writings (the late writings) Ernest Jones makes two interrelated claims. The first, which he passes off as an historical fact, is that by 1904 there were 'three sources of information available to [him]' about Freud (Jones, 1945b, p. 9). The second, which he makes by way of an autobiographical statement, is that he was already practising 'the new therapy' of psychoanalysis by 1906. Contemporaneous sources challenge the unspoken assumptions that run through Jones's late writings: that there was little or no discussion of Freud's ideas in Britain between 1904, when Jones claims he first started reading Freud, and November 1913 when he founded the London Psycho-Analytic Society. For reasons difficult to fathom Jones's version of history has been accepted almost without question. Lifting Jones's historical and autobiographical veils reveals a very different story: that when Jones first returned from Canada, in 1911, there was already a vibrant debate concerning the merits, or otherwise, of the new Freudian psychology and there were a number of doctors already treating patients with psychoanalysis or its variants. The paper concludes with a re-examination of Jones's relationship with M.D. Eder. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]