Toni Wolff and the Construction of Complex Psychology
The Absence of a Reference
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21901/2448-3060/self-2025.vol-10.222Keywords:
analytical psychotherapy, historiography, Jung, Carl Gustav, 1875-1961Abstract
This article aimed to make a fair historical reparation by restoring the prominent role that was denied to Toni Wolff (1888-1953) in the development of Complex Psychology. To achieve this, we drew upon acclaimed texts in the historiography of Jungian thought, such as “Jung and the Construction of Modern Psychology“ , as well as writings by Toni Wolff herself. In this article, we primarily used her text titled “Fundamentals of Complex Psychology” (1935), which has never been published in Portuguese and appears in a collection of articles celebrating the 60th anniversary of C. G. Jung, titled “Die Kulturelle Bedeutung der Komplexe Psychologie”, edited in 1935 by Springer-Verlag. If there is one thing that the method of Psychology does, it is to organize Jungian thought, a task that Jung himself neither had the disposition nor the attitude to undertake. Therefore, the provisional answer to the rhetorical subtitle at this moment is as follows: there is no way to avoid being Complex Psychology if Jungian concepts are considered with the necessary rigor and historicity. It is important to reaffirm that this historical-methodological link is due to a great thinker, psychotherapist, and woman: Toni Wolff.
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