The first split in the orthodoxy of psychoanalysis came when Freud’s colleague and disciple, Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), split from Freud to form his own school after the First World War. Where Freud was a secular Jew, Jung was the son of a protestant pastor, and the flavour of his theories is explicitly spiritual, if not exactly religious. Jung was fascinated by mythology and in non-European philosophy and devised a theory which in many ways turned Freud’s ideas upside down. Instead of being driven by animalistic drives from below, said Jung, man was driven ‘from above’ by spiritual demands and ambitions and by the drive to become a more whole and complete person than he was now.

Jung called this process ‘individuation’ and said the spiritual desires were embodied in a series of cultural associations or collections of symbols he called ‘archetypes’ which tended to appear again and again in mythology, stories and dreams. He was so fascinated by the way human minds from many different cultures had similar ‘stories’ to explain themselves that he devised a theory of a ‘collective unconscious’. This has been misunderstood to say that human beings were telepathically connected; in fact what Jung was saying was that the similarity in our myths and stories about ourselves is evidence of our common genetic and cultural legacy – another idea later borne out by scientific discoveries.

Jungian therapy is very interested in the client’s creativity and in their dreams. It is in some ways one of the few therapeutic traditions which looks to making sense of the future rather than the past and in maximising the person’s potential rather than helping them understand the legacy of past traumas as something that holds that potential back. For this reason it often seems to be particularly effective for fairly well-established people in the second half of life who are trying to ‘make sense of’ their lives.

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