Carl-Jung
Carl Jung | Biography

Quick Wiki

  • Full Name Carl Gustav Jung
  • Nationality Swiss
  • Birthplace Thurgau, Switzerland
  • Birth Date July 26, 1875
  • Place Of Death Zurich, Switzerland
  • Death Date June 6, 1961
  • Occupation Psychiatrist, Psychologist, Psychotherapist
  • Age At Death 85
Pioneer of Analytical Psychology

Carl Jung | Biography

One of the First People to Define the Terms Introvert and Extrovert

After reading Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of dreams, Jung realized his ideas and observations to be confirmed and could be further investigated. So, he sent a copy of his book, ‘Studies in Word- Association,’ to Freud in 1906 to work with him. Eventually, Freud and Jung became great friends, and they started working together, sharing the common interest of understanding the effects of unconscious forces in people’s behavior. But after some years of collaboration, they shared conflicting viewpoints on the fundamentals and derivatives of dreams. For instance, Freud believed that dreams could access repressed thoughts, mainly sexual desires. On the other side, Jung believed that dreams represent the unconscious mind and are not related to a repressed sexual desire.


Carl Jung was a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who is known for his contributions in finding analytical psychology. His contribution to the field of psychology has been influential across psychiatry, anthropology, archaeology, literature, philosophy, arts and religious studies.

Who is Carl Jung?

Carl Jung was a psychoanalyst who created some of the best-known psychological concepts, including archetypal phenomena, synchronicity, and the psychological complex.

In 1907, Jung started working with Sigmund Freud to develop their theories together as they initially shared a common interest in the unconscious. But they parted ways in 1913 due to some major disagreements in their beliefs. Then Jung introduced several psychological theories such as the collective unconscious, introvert and extrovert personalities, and the process of individuation.

Jung was also an artist, craftsman, and prolific writer. Many of Jung’s works were not published until after his death, and some are still awaiting publication.

Early Life & Education

Carl Jung was born on 26 July 1875 in Kesswil, a village near Lake Constance, Switzerland. He was the first surviving son of clergyman Johann Paul Achilles Jung and Emilie Preiswerk. His mother had given birth to their first child, Paul, in 1873, but he passed away right after birth.

Jung grew up as an only child for nine years until the birth of his sister in 1884. During his childhood, he was quiet and observant who preferred to be left alone. He used to observe and experience nature and people’s behavior.

His childhood was also influenced by the unusual experiences at his home. His mother had a mental illness, and confrontation with her behavior led him to have a sense of double personality—one of an average Swiss child and the other of a mature person.

In his teenage years, Jung explored and studied religion and philosophy. Later, he developed an interest in science, especially in zoology, geology, and paleontology. But realizing those subjects would not give him a desirable income in the future, he eventually chose to study medicine. In 1900, Jung graduated in medicine from the University of Basel. After that, he obtained a medical degree in psychiatry from the University of Zurich in 1902. 

In 1997, Jung published a dissertation entitled ‘On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena.’ The same year, he went to Paris to broaden his knowledge about psychopathology.

Early Career

After graduating in medicine, Jung moved to Zurich in 1900 and began his professional career as an assistant physician under Eugen Bleuler at the Burgholzli Asylum, the psychiatric clinic of the University of Zurich.

While working there, he investigated patients’ emotional responses to different words, and he coined the term “complexes” to describe the conditions. He incorporated his findings in his book ‘Studies in Word-Association’ in 1904. Later, he was appointed as a senior staff physician at the asylum. He also worked as a lecturer at the same university from 1905 to 1913.

Collaboration with Freud

After reading Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of dreams, Jung realized his ideas and observations to be confirmed and could be further investigated. So, he sent a copy of his book, ‘Studies in Word- Association,’ to Freud in 1906 to work with him.

Eventually, Freud and Jung became great friends, and they started working together, sharing the common interest of understanding the effects of unconscious forces in people’s behavior.

But after some years of collaboration, they shared conflicting viewpoints on the fundamentals and derivatives of dreams. For instance, Freud believed that dreams could access repressed thoughts, mainly sexual desires. On the other side, Jung believed that dreams represent the unconscious mind and are not related to a repressed sexual desire.

In 1912, Jung published ‘Psychology of the Unconscious,’ expressing diverged viewpoints from Freud’s beliefs of a sexual basis for neurosis. Jung then went on to create the separate school of psychology called analytical psychology to distinguish his beliefs from Freud’s psychoanalysis. As a consequence, Freud and Jung’s friendship and collaboration ended in 1913.

Development of Jungian/ Analytical Psychology

The drift with Freud led Jung to a period of personal crisis. He suffered an emotional breakdown and was haunted by stirring fantasies and dreams. He recorded his strange experience in a big red leather book for about 16 years. He believed this period of his life was a confrontation with the unconscious. He experimented with his experiences to understand the fantasies and dreams that arose from his unconscious state of mind. He also induced hallucinations—in his words, active imaginations.

Eventually, Jung linked his experience to the collective unconscious, which he believed was the human psyche’s inherent component. Then, in 1919, he combined this concept with archetypes’ theory, which he described as universal and inherited human behavior patterns. After that, he traveled across the world to validate his theory. Later, he explained four major archetypes—persona, shadow, the anima or animus, and the self.

Research on Personality

Jung was one of the pioneers to interpret introversion and extraversion. In 1921, Jung published ‘Psychologische Typen,’ which was later translated into English in 1923 entitled Psychological Types. In the book, Jung differentiated two major types of people according to attitude—extrovert and introvert. He also described four functions of consciousness such as thinking, feeling, sensation and intuition.

Jung also further defined the term individuation as transforming personal and unconscious into consciousness to achieve complete personality.

Analytical Psychotherapy

Jung also introduced his own psychotherapy called analytical psychotherapy. Jungian therapy emphasized finding the root cause of problems rather than symptoms and behaviors to achieve individuation. His therapy’s goal was to help people experience self-discovery and become better, healthier, and more productive.

Jung was a professor of psychology at the Federal Polytechnical University in Zurich between 1933 and 1942. Later, he worked as a professor of medical psychology at the University of Basel in 1943. But he discontinued his profession as a professor after experiencing a severe heart attack in 1944.

In 1957, Jung started writing about his own life, and it was published as ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’ in 1961.

Foundations

Jung was involved in a couple of foundations dedicated to the fields of psychoanalysis. 

Jung was a professor at the University of Zurich from 1905 to 1913 and was also a co-founder of the International Psychoanalytic Society (IPS), co-founded in 1911. Later, he resigned from the position in 1914 after his relationship with Freud worsened. Jung had challenged a number of Freud theories. As a result, Freud excluded Jung from his inner group, and others in the psychoanalytic community shunned him as well.

In 1946, the Society of Analytical Psychology (SAP) was established under Jung’s leadership. He would also serve as the first president of the community. The association comprised a group of Jungian analysts and psychotherapists who formed professional analytical standards in psychology. The founders of the SAP convened for the first time in 1936; however, due to World War II, the organization’s constitution was not finalized until 1946.  

In 1955, the International Association of Analytical Psychology (IAAP) was created by a group of analysts close to Jung. It was a legitimate worldwide organization that governed a growing interest in Jung’s depth psychology system. The institution worked to maintain training standards and ensure ethical, analytical psychology coined by Jung.

The IAAP eventually got a breakthrough by holding a triennial worldwide congress and providing support to various regional and professional events. After that, IAAP went on to fund relevant research projects and fostered the translation and distribution of major contributions to Jungian literature.

In 2002, the International Association for Jungian Studies was established. In later years, the history of Jungian studies as an academic subject would become inextricably entwined with the origins of IAJS.

Professor Renos Papadopoulos and Professor Andrew Samuels laid the groundwork for the organization, which began to gather a growing community of scholars in the mid-1990s to encourage and promote the interrelationships between the International Association for Analytical Psychology (IAAP) and the academic community at large. The association’s publication continued to bring Jungian theory and practice into conversation with a wide range of academic and therapeutic fields. This technique arose from Jung’s heritage of being open to and affected by a wide range of intellectual and experiential traditions throughout his life, as he sought to comprehend the human condition.

Books

Jung’s books have been pioneers in the field of psychology. 

‘Psychological Types’

His infamous book Psychological Types’ was published in the German language in 1921 after eight years after his first book. Later, he related the book as his product of over 20 years of work in the sphere of practical psychology. 

“This book emerged mainly from my need to clarify the ways in which my worldview differed from Freud’s and Adler’s,” he said in his autobiography. “In attempting to answer this question, I came across the problem of types; for it is one’s psychological type which from the outset determines and limits a person’s judgment. My book, therefore, was an effort to deal with the relationship of the individual to the world, to people and things. It discussed the various aspects of consciousness, the various attitudes the conscious mind might take toward the world, and thus constitutes a psychology of consciousness regarded from what might be called a clinical angle.”

Routledge first released it in English in the early 1920s. This book popularized the words’ extravert’ and ‘introvert.’ Despite his association with the unconscious, Jung demonstrated in ‘Psychological Types’ that he was a preeminent theorist of the conscious.

‘Modern Man in Search of Soul’

In 1933, Jung’s book ‘Modern Man in Search of Soul’ was published. Even though most of the book was about dreams, it traced a component of human behavior that is complex and restrictive in their conscious lives. He investigated dream analysis, the primordial unconscious, and the relationship between psychology and religion, which were some of the most controversial and essential subjects in the field of analytical psychology.

In the book, Jung also compares and contrasts his beliefs with those of Sigmund Freud, offering a solid foundation for anyone interested in the principles of psychoanalysis. Jung wasn’t looking for conventional sexual fixations that people developed as children. Instead, he desired to trace a map of the present and the context in which his patients lived to comprehend the reasons for their conduct and mental distress.

‘Psychology of the Transference’

Then ‘Psychology of the Transference’ was published in 1946. In the book, Jung employed his symbolic representations to explain the dynamics and relationships that might develop between a physician and a patient, including the frequent converse in psychotherapy that might result in the patients projecting their experiences and feelings onto the therapist, which made the healing process more difficult. He also included an interesting link between alchemy and patient-therapist transference, while was represented through the symbolic illustrations of the sixteenth century alchemical text.

‘Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principal’

In 1952, Jung’s book ‘After that ‘Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principal’ was published. This book was co-written with the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli. This book incorporated a concept called synchronicity.

Jung discussed this concept for the first time at the annual Eranos Conference in Ascona, Switzerland. Those sessions invariably resulted in the publication of an article, essay, and book. And he had offered something as contentious as it was appealing to his colleagues and the rest of the academic world: what we understand as coincidence is not actually due to simple chance, but something that he called synchronicity. 

A prolonged contact and relationship with Pauli prompted him to write a final, mature declaration on synchronicity, which was first published in 1952. The essay outlined an astrological experiment Jung undertook to test his hypothesis, together with a variety of historical and present material. 

In his ‘The Journal of Religious Thought,’ Jung wrote about the correlation of intuition and coincidence rising to synchronicity. “Chance is a statistical concept which ‘explains’ deviations within certain patterns of probability. Synchronicity elucidates meaningful arrangements and coincidence which somehow go beyond the calculations of probability. Pre-cognition, clairvoyance, telepathy, etc. are phenomena that are inexplicable through chance, but become empirically intelligible through the employment of the principle of synchronicity, which suggests a kind of harmony at work in the interrelation of both psychic and physical events.”

‘Psychic Energy and the Essence of Dreams’

Jung's collection of essays’ Psychic Energy and the Essence of Dreams’ was published. The book consisted of six essays comprehending Jung’s analysis of deep psychology. These essays became one of the true cornerstones of his theories, where he eluded that all mental phenomena are actually forms of energy.

The book gave a fascinating overview of key components of human personality, such as introversion and extroversion. Jung also delved into the study of human and social behaviors and dreams so that both beginners and specialists may understand those key elements of his theory.

‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’

In 1961, he published a portion of the memoir along with Aniela Jaffe. The book discussed his formative years, his contentious but fruitful ties with Sigmund Freud, and how each travel, conversation, discovery, and experience shaped what he refers to as the bottom of his soul. In addition to that, he addressed his thoughts on the human mind, the unconscious, the role of symbolism, and psychotherapy principles. Jung worked on the final stages of the manuscript until his death on 6 June 1961. 

‘The Archetypes and the Collective Unconsciousness’

Followed by that, ‘The archetypes and the Collective Unconsciousness’ was published in 1959. This was one of Jung’s most fascinating publications, as it described one of his most contentious concepts known as archetypes. On the one hand, it delved into the collective unconscious, while on the other hand, it defined the nature of the archetype. 

‘The Red Book’ 

After that, two of his publications, ‘The Red Book’ and ‘Man and His Symbols,’ were released posthumously.

His personal trip of discovery, ‘The Red Book,’ was a record of his 16 years of psychoanalysis. At the age of 11, he began writing and recording about his dreams and intuitive contacts. Psychedelic sketches of mythological characters from his dreams and waking thoughts were among the products of his early compilations. 

However, Jung was afraid that his compilation of subconscious experiences would make people think he was insane. Dr. Sonu Shamdasani, a Jungian expert, took three years to persuade Jung’s family to bring the book out of hiding. It took another 13 years to complete the translation.

‘Man and His Symbols’

Then ‘Man and his Symbols’ was the last book he wrote before his death in 1964. This book had over 500 images that explored the notion of symbolism and the significance of symbols in our dreams, art, and even our daily lives. Jung investigated the entire universe of the unconscious, whose language he believed to be the symbols that appeared in dreams regularly. Jung believed that self-understanding would lead to a full and productive life since dreams provided practical counsel transmitted from the unconscious to the conscious self.

‘Conflicts in the Child’s Soul’

Jung’s book ‘Conflicts in the Child’s Soul’ elaborated that childhood and adolescence are the most crucial stages of a person’s life, to which parents should devote far more attention. In this way, the child’s well-being or potential psychological difficulties later in life were determined by conflicts, deficits, and prejudices that the youngster encountered in their familial context with parents. 

Awards & Honors

Jung earned many honors and awards for his great achievements. He received honorary degrees from many universities such as Clark (1909), Fordham (1912), Harvard (1936), Allahabad (1937), Benares (1937), Calcutta (1938), Oxford (1938), Geneva (1945), and Swiss Federal Institution of Technology in Zurich (1955).

He was also awarded the city of Zurich’s literature prize in 1932. In 1939, he was appointed honorary member of the Royal Society of Medicine in the UK. He was named Honorary citizen of Kusnacht in 1960 on his 85th birthday.

Personal Life

In 1903, Jung married Emma Rauschenbach. The couple had five children, namely Agathe (1904), Gret (1906-1995), Franz (1908-1996), Marianne (1910), and Helene (1914-2014). Jung remained together with Emma until she died in 1955.

Death & Legacy

Jung died aged 85 on 6 June 1961, at his villa in Kussnacht after suffering from several weeks of illness. He was beset by heart and circulatory diseases.

Later, his former residence at the Seestrasse 228, Küsnacht, Switzerland, next to Lake Zürich, was later turned into a place of remembrance of his extraordinary presence known as C. G. Jung House Museum

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