Experimental Studies on Associations of Healthy Persons
About this ebook
This edition is a new 2023 translation from the original German manuscript with an Afterword by the Translator, a philosophic index of Jung's terminology and a timeline of his life and works.
This essay was published in the Scientific Psychology Journal "Diagnostische Assoziationsstudien" (Diagnostic Association Studies) and it represents one of his earlier forays into experimental psychology. The publication, co-authored with Franz Riklin, aimed to investigate and understand the unconscious processes affecting an individual's conscious responses to stimuli. It marked an important phase in Jung's exploration of the unconscious mind. Through word association tests, he identified the presence of emotionally charged complexes that affect conscious thought, laying the groundwork for many of his later theories. Here we see Jung fully under the influence of Frued's 1901 work "The Psychopathology of Everyday Life".
In contrast to his predecessors, who did not use the association experiment to study association disorders, but attributed them to external factors and regarded them as errors, it was these errors that attracted Jung's attention. By attributing them to internal factors, he developed the concept of "affective complexes". Their discovery later contributed to the creation of his typology of introversion and extraversion. These terms were later developed in academic psychology and are now part of the standard model for describing personality traits (the Big Five).
