Kristine Mann - Jungian Psychology

Jungian Psychology

At Vassar College Mann developed lifelong friendships with three of her students, Cary Fink, Elizabeth Goodrich and Eleanor Bertine, who like Mann, all played major roles in the early history of analytical psychology. In 1920 Bertine traveled to London, England to begin analysis with Constance Long, the first British psychoanalyst to follow Jung's methods. Long had studied with Jung at his Küsnacht home, and this encounter lead Mann and Bertine to travel to Zürich from 1921-1922. They then returned to New York, New York where they established their own practices, becoming the second and third Jungians to treat patients in the United States. They became staunch aliies of Jung and regularly traveled to Europe to attend his lectures and to continue their analysis with him. A small determined band of Jungians emerged in New York, and in 1924 Mary Esther Harding, a distinguished disciple of Jung, emigrated from England to join them.

Beginning around 1918 Jung wrote that Christianity had suppressed the animal element in the human psyche, and as a result when it broke out it was uncontrolled and unregulated. This inevitably lead to catastrophe, such as with World War I. In 1923 after his interactions with Mann (1921–1922), Jung spoke of the historical effects of Ecclesiastical Christianity upon the unconscious mind. Jung's critique of Christianity was now limited to Ecclesiastical Christianity, which he now approached with greater scrutiny.

Mann, Harding and Bertine spent summers at Mann's ancestral summer community at Bailey Island (Maine) where they established their practices in the summer and saw patients from all parts of the United States. In 1936 Jung traveled to Bailey Island to present his Bailey Island Seminar, the first of his two part American seminar Dream Symbols. The second part, known as his New York Seminar was held in New York one year later. The Dreamer in this seminar has been identified as the prominent physicist Wolfgang Pauli, and the seminars were published in volume 12 of Jung's Collected Works as Individual Dream Symbolism in Relation to Alchemy.

The three women doctors created a powerful trio. In 1936 they created the Analytical Psychology Club of New York and actively lead the educational programs there. At her death in 1945 Mann left her personal library to the Club, the beginning of the Kristine Mann Library that is now the most extensive collection in analytical psychology in the world.