Forewords to Jung: “Uber Psychische Energetik Und Das Wesen Der Traume”
In this volume, the second of the Psychologische Abhandlungen, I am publishing four papers of which three have so far appeared only in English.
One of the papers deals with the still unsolved problem of dream interpretation, while the others are concerned with—in my view—a question of central importance: the fundamental Psychic factors, the dynamic images, which it seems to me express the nature of Psychic Energy.
My Concept of psychic energy, first put forward in Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (1912), has met with so much opposition and misunderstanding that it seemed to me worth working over the problems of psychic energetics once again, this time not from the practical but from the theoretical side.
The reader, therefore, need fear no repetitions. Kusnacht-Zurich J928 Second Edition (1948)
The papers in this volume are attempts to introduce some order into the chaotic profusion of psychic phenomena by means of concepts that are current in other fields of research besides psychology.
Since our psychological knowledge is still in its infancy, our primary concern must be with elementary concepts and groups of facts, and not with the individual complications in which our case histories abound, and which can never be completely elucidated.
The Freudian “model” of neurosis and dreams gives only a partial explanation of the empirical material.
As medical psychologists, we must seek to refine our methods as well as our psychological concepts, more particularly because the “academic” psychologists have abandoned the attempt to investigate the unconscious empirically.
It falls to the lot of the medical psychologist to probe more deeply into the compensatory relationship between conscious and unconscious which is so vital for an understanding of the psyche as a whole.
Except for some improvements I have made no drastic alterations to the text.
The number of papers has been increased to six, as I have added a short “Review of the Complex Theory” and some recent. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Pages 459-460
