Carl Jung

Pueblo Indian

Carl Jung  was a psychiatrist  and psychotherapist from Swiss born in 1875. He wrote a great number of Works, most of them published after his death, that where influential in fields so varied as literature, anthropology and archeology. He is best known for the studies of the human psyche, analysis of dreams and the collective unconscious.  His two main interests when he was young were medicine and spiritual phenomena, which led him to the field of psychiatry. One of his Works is titled Memories, Dreams, Reflections, a text, which we analyzed in a series of exercise in class. Being such a prolific writer Carl Jung probably had many journals on which he could base this autobiography, so it could be said that as far as autobiographies go it’s pretty truthful and descriptive. But as we know human memory, unfortunately, is not a perfect mechanism so many of the things contained on this book may be hyperbolized or created thoughts. Mainly what we analyzed in class is Jung’s point of view as a traveler and the subtext of this work. It’s evident that he has an Eurocentric view on a lot of aspects, although he is trying to evaluate European’s from an outside standing point, in the subtext of what he writes it’s simple to see that sometimes he recurs to a judgmental opinion on the natives he encounter on his travels. He sometimes even feels superior as we can observe from what he describes in his visit to the Pueblo Indians. In some parts of his text he describes how he feels that his European reasoning is superior to the Indians. I would recommend this work to anyone who wishes to see the world from an intelligent, white, Europeans man viewpoint.  Also as far as traveling topics and subtext analysis goes this work is rich in examples and very interesting so anyone can digest it.