Carl Jung
Carl Gustav Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist, psychotherapist, and psychologist who founded the school of analytical psychology. He was a prolific author of over twenty books, illustrator, and correspondent, and academic, best known for his concept of archetypes. Widely considered one of the most influential psychologists of the early 20th century, and of all time, Jung's work has fostered not only scholarship, but also popular interest. His work has been influential in the fields of psychiatry, anthropology, archaeology, literature, philosophy, psychology, and religious studies.
Jung worked as a research scientist at the Burghölzli psychiatric hospital in Zurich, under Eugen Bleuler. He established himself as an influential mind, developing a friendship with Freud, founder of psychoanalysis, and conducting a lengthy correspondence regarding their joint vision of human psychology. Freud saw the younger Jung not only as the heir he had been seeking to take forward his "new science" of psychoanalysis, but as a means to legitimise his own work: Freud and other contemporary psychoanalysts were Jews facing rising antisemitism in Europe, while Jung was raised as Christian, although he did not strictly adhere to traditional Christian doctrine, seeing religion, including Christianity, as a powerful expression of the human psyche and its search for meaning. Freud secured Jung's appointment as president of Freud's newly founded International Psychoanalytical Association. Jung's research and personal vision, however, made it difficult to follow his older colleague's doctrine, and they parted ways. This division was painful for Jung and resulted in the establishment of Jung's analytical psychology, as a comprehensive system separate from psychoanalysis.
Among the central concepts of analytical psychology is individuation—the lifelong psychological process of differentiation of the self out of each individual's conscious and unconscious elements. Jung considered it to be the main task of human development. He created some of the best-known psychological concepts, including synchronicity, archetypal phenomena, the collective unconscious, the psychological complex, and extraversion and introversion. His treatment of American businessman and politician Rowland Hazard in 1926 with his conviction that alcoholics may recover if they have a "vital spiritual experience" played a crucial role in the chain of events that led to the formation of Alcoholics Anonymous. Jung was an artist, craftsman, builder, and prolific writer. Many of his works were not published until after his death, and some remain unpublished.
Biography
Early life
Childhood
Carl Gustav Jung was born 26 July 1875 in Kesswil, in the Swiss canton of Thurgau, as the first surviving son of Paul Achilles Jung and Emilie Jung . His birth was preceded by two stillbirths and that of a son named Paul, born in 1873, who survived only a few days.Paul Jung, Carl's father, was the youngest son of a noted German-Swiss physician and professor of medicine at Basel, Karl Gustav Jung. Karl Jung became Rector of Basel University and Master of the Swiss Lodge of Freemasons. It was rumoured that he was the illegitimate son of Goethe, but this is likely a legend. Paul Jung was a rural pastor in the Swiss Reformed Church.Jung considered his father reliable, but weak and powerless.
Emilie Preiswerk, Carl's mother, grew up in a large family whose Swiss roots went back five centuries. She was the youngest child of a distinguished Basel churchman and academic, Samuel Preiswerk, and his second wife. Samuel Preiswerk was an Antistes as well as a Hebraist, author, and editor, who taught Paul Jung as his professor of Hebrew at Basel University. He was an early advocate of Zionism and was interested in the occult.
Eight of Carl Jung's uncles were also clergymen.
In contrast to his father, Carl saw his mother as unreliable and inconsistent, which caused him to associate women more broadly as having an "innate unreliability". Emilie was an eccentric and depressed woman; she spent considerable time in her bedroom, where she said spirits visited her at night. Though she was normal during the day, Jung recalled that at night his mother became strange and mysterious. He said that one night, he saw a faintly luminous and indefinite figure coming from her room, with a head detached from the neck and floating in the air in front of the body. Jung had a better relationship with his father.
Jung's father was appointed to a more prosperous parish in Laufen when Carl was six months old. Whilst there, tensions between Jung's father and mother had developed. When Jung was three years old, his mother left Laufen for several months of hospitalisation near Basel for some unspecified physical ailment, which he later attributed to problems in their marriage. His father took Carl to be cared for by Emilie Jung's unmarried sister in Basel, but he was later brought back to his father's residence. Carl developed generalised eczema in response. In his memoir, Jung would remark that this parental influence was the "handicap I started off with".
After three years living in Laufen, Paul Jung requested a transfer. In 1879, he was called to Klein-Hüningen, next to Basel, where his family lived in a church parsonage. The relocation brought Emilie closer to contact with her family and lifted her melancholy.
When Jung was nine, his sister Johanna Gertrud was born. Known in the family as "Trudi", she later became a secretary to her brother.
Jung attended a local village school, and at 10 went to Basel Gymnasium, where he was very unhappy. Between 17 and 18 years old, Jung discovered Philosophy, and was interested in Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Empedocles, Plato, Schopenhauer through hisThe World as Will and Idea, and Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. He also discovered Goethe through Faust and Meister Eckhart, who became life-long favourites.
Memories of childhood
Jung was a solitary and introverted child. From childhood, he believed that, like his mother, he had two personalities—a modern Swiss citizen and a personality more suited to the 18th century. "Personality Number 1", as he termed it, was a typical schoolboy living in the era of the time, his conscious personality. "Personality Number 2" was a dignified, authoritative, and influential man from the past, his unconscious. Though Jung was close to both parents, he was disappointed by his father's academic approach to faith.Some childhood memories made lifelong impressions on him. As a boy, he carved a tiny mannequin into the end of the wooden ruler from his pencil case and placed it inside it. He added a stone, which he had painted into upper and lower halves, and hid the case in the attic. Periodically, he would return to the mannequin, often bringing tiny sheets of paper with messages inscribed on them in his own secret language. He later reflected that this ceremonial act brought him a feeling of inner peace and security. Years later, he discovered similarities between his personal experience and the practices associated with totems in Indigenous cultures, such as the collection of soul-stones near Arlesheim or the tjurungas of Australia. He concluded that his intuitive ceremonial act was an unconscious ritual, which he had practiced in a way that was strikingly similar to those in distant locations which he, as a young boy, knew nothing about. His observations about symbols, archetypes, and the collective unconscious were inspired, in part, by these early experiences combined with his later research.
At the age of 12, shortly before the end of his first year at the Humanistisches Gymnasium in Basel, Jung was pushed to the ground by another boy and hit his head meaning he momentarily lost consciousness. A thought then came to him—"Now you won't have to go to school anymore". From then on, whenever he walked to school or began homework, he fainted. He remained home for six months until he overheard his father speaking hurriedly to a visitor about the boy's future ability to support himself. They suspected he had epilepsy. Confronted with his family's poverty, he realized the need for academic excellence. He entered his father's study and began poring over Latin grammar. He fainted three more times but eventually overcame the urge and did not faint again. This event, Jung later recalled, "was when I learned what a neurosis is".
University studies and early career
Initially, Jung had aspirations of becoming a Christian minister. His household had a strong moral sense, and several of his family were clergy. Jung had wanted to study archaeology, but his family could not afford to send him further than the University of Basel, which did not teach it. After studying philosophy in his teens, Jung decided against the path of religious traditionalism and decided to pursue psychiatry and medicine. His interest was captured—it combined the biological and spiritual, exactly what he was searching for.In 1895, Jung began to study medicine at the University of Basel on a grant. Barely a year later, his father, Paul, died and left the family nearly destitute. The family were helped by relatives who also contributed to Jung's studies.
During his student days, Jung entertained his contemporaries with the family legend that his paternal grandfather was the illegitimate son of Goethe and his German great-grandmother, Sophie Ziegler. In later life, he pulled back from this tale, saying only that Sophie was a friend of Goethe's niece.
Influenced by an earlier study by Freud's contemporary Théodore Flournoy, Jung wrote his doctoral thesis on spiritualism, specifically a young medium, his cousin Hélène Preiswerk whose séances and table turnings he had attended. Titled On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena, it was published in 1903.
It was during this early period when Jung was an assistant at the Anatomical Institute at Basel University, that he took an interest in paleoanthropology and the revolutionary discoveries of Homo erectus and Neanderthal fossils. These formative experiences contributed to his fascination with the evolutionary past of humanity and his belief that an ancient evolutionary layer in the psyche, represented by early fossil hominins, is still evident in the psychology of modern humans. Despite showing promise in medicine and almost choosing to specialise in surgery, to the dismay of his family and professors, Jung decided to become a psychiatrist after reading a Richard von Krafft-Ebing's Textbook of Psychiatry. In December 1900, he moved to Zürich and began as an intern at the Burghölzli psychiatric hospital under the psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler. Bleuler was already in communication with Sigmund Freud, and introduced Jung to his work. At Burghölzli, Jung became interested in 'dementia praecox'. Prior to this he had mainly been interested in neurosis, but psychotic patients would become his primary concern for the rest of his career.
In 1902, on leave from Burghölzli, Jung studied with Pierre Janet in Paris, and later equated his view of the complex with Janet's idée fixe subconsciente. In 1905, Jung was appointed as a permanent 'senior' doctor at Burghölzli and became a lecturer Privatdozent in the medical faculty of Zurich University. In 1904, he published with Franz Riklin their Diagnostic Association Studies, of which Freud obtained a copy. In 1909, Jung left Burghölzli and began a private practice in his home in Küsnacht.