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Carl Jung

, Psychiatrist
Carl Jung
Carl Jung
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  • Born: 26 July 1875
  • Birthplace: Kesswil, Switzerland
  • Died: 6 June 1961
  • Best Known As: The founder of analytical psychology

Carl Gustav Jung is the Swiss psychiatrist whose importance in the history of psychoanalysis rivals that of Sigmund Freud. Early in his career Jung worked at the Burghözli mental clinic in Zurich (1900-09), and he later he held professorships in Zurich (1933-41) and Basel (1944-61). His early working relationship with the elder Freud, begun around 1906, deteriorated as Jung became increasingly critical of Freud's insistence on the psychosexual origins of neuroses. After Jung published The Psychology of the Unconscious in 1912, their theories diverged and Jung developed his own school of "analytical psychology." His world travels led to an interest in ideas from Eastern philosophies and religions, which he integrated into his theories of the "collective unconscious." His most famous books include Psychology and Religion (1937), The Undiscovered Self (1957) and his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962).

The name is pronounced yoong... His work introduced the concepts of "introvert" and "extrovert."

 
 
Scientist: Carl Gustav Jung

Swiss psychologist and psychiatrist (1875–1961)

Born the son of a pastor in Kesswil, Switzerland, Jung (yuung) studied medicine at the universities of Basel (1895–1900) and Zurich, where he obtained his MD in 1902. From 1902 until 1909 he worked under the direction of Eugen Bleuler at the Burghölzi Psychiatric Clinic, Zurich, while at the same time lecturing in psychiatry at the University of Zurich (1905–13). In 1907 Jung met Sigmund Freud, whose chief collaborator he became. Following the formation of the International Psycho-Analytical Association (1910) he served as its first president from 1911 until his break with Freud in 1912.

Jung continued to practice in Zurich and to develop his own system of analytical psychology. He became professor of psychology at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (1933–41) and was appointed professor of medical psychology at the University of Basel in 1943 but was forced to resign almost immediately for health reasons. He continued however to write, hold regular seminars, and treat patients until he was well over 80.

Like Alfred Adler, who had broken away from Freudian orthodoxy earlier, Jung minimized the sexual cause of neuroses but, unlike Adler, he continued to emphasize the role of the unconscious. His final break with Freud followed publication of his Wandlungen und Symbole de Libido (1912) translated into English in 1916 as Psychology of the Unconscious. To the ‘personal’ unconscious of the Freudian he added the ‘collective unconscious’ stocked with a number of ‘congenital conditions of intuition’ or archetypes. In search of such archetypes Jung spent long periods with the Pueblo of Arizona, and visited Kenya, North Africa, and India, and also sought for them in dreams, folklore, and the literature of alchemy.

Jung also emphasized the importance of personality and in his Psychologische Typen (1921; Psychological Types) introduced the distinction he made between introverts and extroverts.

 
Biography: Carl Gustav Jung

The Swiss psychologist and psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) was a founder of modern depth psychology.

Carl Jung was born on July 26, 1875, in Kesswil, the son of a Protestant clergyman. When he was 4, the family moved to Basel. As he grew older, his keen interest in biology, zoology, paleontology, philosophy, and the history of religion made the choice of a career quite difficult. However, he finally decided on medicine, which he studied at the University of Basel (1895-1900). He received his medical degree from the University of Zurich in 1902. Later he studied psychology in Paris.

In 1903 Jung married Emma Rauschenbach, his loyal companion and scientific collaborator until her death in 1955. The couple had five children. They lived in Küsnacht on the Lake of Zurich, where Jung died on June 6, 1961.

Jung began his professional career in 1900 as an assistant to Eugen Bleuler at the psychiatric clinic of the University of Zurich. During these years of his internship, Jung, with a few associates, worked out the so-called association experiment. This is a method of testing used to reveal affectively significant groups of ideas in the unconscious region of the psyche. They usually have a disturbing influence, promoting anxieties and unadapted emotions which are not under the control of the person concerned. Jung coined the term "complexes" for their designation.

Association with Freud

When Jung read Sigmund Freud's Interpretation of Dreams, he found his own ideas and observations to be essentially confirmed and furthered. He sent his publication Studies in Word Association (1904) to Freud, and this was the beginning of their collaboration and friendship, which lasted from 1907 to 1913. Jung was eager to explore the secrets of the unconscious psyche expressed by dreaming, fantasies, myths, fairy tales, superstition, and occultism. But Freud had already worked out his theories about the underlying cause of every psychoneurosis and also his doctrine that all the expressions of the unconscious are hidden wish fulfillments. Jung felt more and more that these theories were scientific presumptions which did not do full justice to the rich expressions of unconscious psychic life. For him the unconscious not only is a disturbing factor causing psychic illnesses but also is fundamentally the seed of man's creativeness and the roots of human consciousness. With such ideas Jung came increasingly into conflict with Freud, who regarded Jung's ideas as unscientific. Jung accused Freud of dogmatism; Freud and his followers reproached Jung for mysticism.

Topology and Archetypes

His break with Freud caused Jung much distress. Thrown back upon himself, he began a deepened self-analysis in order to gain all the integrity and firmness for his own quest into the dark labyrinth of the unconscious psyche. During the years from 1913 to 1921 Jung published only three important papers: "Two Essays on Analytical Psychology" (1916, 1917) and "Psychological Types" (1921). The "Two Essays" provided the basic ideas from which his later work sprang. He described his research on psychological typology (extro-and introversion, thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition as psychic functions) and expressed the idea that it is the "personal equation" which, often unconsciously but in accordance with one's own typology, influences the approach of an individual toward the outer and inner world. Especially in psychology, it is impossible for an observer to be completely objective, because his observation depends on subjective, personal presuppositions. This insight made Jung suspicious of any dogmatism.

Next to his typology, Jung's main contribution was his discovery that man's fantasy life, like the instincts, has a certain structure. There must be imperceptible energetic centers in the unconscious which regulate instinctual behavior and spontaneous imagination. Thus emerge the dominants of the collective unconscious, or the archetypes. Spontaneous dreams exist which show an astonishing resemblance to ancient mythological or fairy-tale motifs that are usually unknown to the dreamer. To Jung this meant that archetypal manifestations belong to man in all ages; they are the expression of man's basic psychic nature. Modern civilized man has built a rational superstructure and repressed his dependence on his archetypal nature - hence the feeling of self-estrangement, which is the cause of many neurotic sufferings.

In order to study archetypal patterns and processes, Jung visited so-called primitive tribes. He lived among the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico and Arizona in 1924/1925 and among the inhabitants of Mt. Elgon in Kenya during 1925/1926. He later visited Egypt and India. To Jung, the religious symbols and phenomenology of Buddhism and Hinduism and the teachings of Zen Buddhism and Confucianism all expressed differentiated experiences on the way to man's inner world, a world which was badly neglected by Western civilization. Jung also searched for traditions in Western culture which compensated for its one-sided extroverted development toward rationalism and technology. He found these traditions in Gnosticism, Christian mysticism, and, above all, alchemy. For Jung, the weird alchemical texts were astonishing symbolic expressions for the human experience of the processes in the unconscious. Some of his major works are deep and lucid psychological interpretations of alchemical writings, showing their living significance for understanding dreams and the hidden motifs of neurotic and mental disorders.

Process of Individuation

Of prime importance to Jung was the biography of the stages of inner development and of the maturation of the personality, which he termed the "process of individuation." He described a strong impulse from the unconscious to guide the individual toward its specific, most complete uniqueness. This achievement is a lifelong task of trial and error and of confronting and integrating contents of the unconscious. It consists in an ever-increasing self-knowledge and in "becoming what you are." But individuation also includes social responsibility, which is a great step on the way to self-realization.

Jung lived for his explorations, his writings, and his psychological practice, which he had to give up in 1944 due to a severe heart attack. His academic appointments during the course of his career included the professorship of medical psychology at the University of Basel and the titular professorship of philosophy from 1933 until 1942 on the faculty of philosophical and political sciences of the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. In 1948 he founded the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich. Honorary doctorates were conferred on him by many important universities all over the world.

Further Reading

Jung's writings are being assembled in the 18-volume Collected Works (1953 - ). Studies of Jung's life and work include Gerhard Adler, Studies in Analytical Psychology (1948); Frieda Fordham, An Introduction to Jung's Psychology (1953); Ira Progoff, Jung's Psychology and Its Social Meaning (1953); Richard I. Evans, Conversations with Carl Jung (1964); E. A. Bennett, What Jung Really Said (1967); and Aniela Jaffé, From the Life and Work of C. G. Jung (1970).

 

Carl Jung
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Carl Jung (credit: Leni Iseley – Nancy Palmer Agency)
(born July 26, 1875, Kesswil, Switz. — died June 6, 1961, Küsnacht) Swiss psychiatrist. As a youth he read widely in philosophy and theology. After taking his medical degree (1902), he worked in Zürich with Eugen Bleuler on studies of mental illness. From this research emerged Jung's notion of the complex, or cluster of emotionally charged (and largely unconscious) associations. Between 1907 and 1912 he was Sigmund Freud's close collaborator and most likely successor, but he broke with Freud over the latter's insistence on the sexual basis of neuroses. In the succeeding years Jung founded the field of analytic psychology, a response to Freud's psychoanalysis. Jung advanced the concepts of the introvert and extravert personality, archetypes, and the collective unconscious (the pool of human experience passed from generation to generation). He went on to formulate new psychotherapeutic techniques designed to reacquaint the person with his unique "myth" or place in the collective unconscious, as expressed in dream and imagination. Sometimes dismissed as disguised religion and criticized for its lack of verifiability, Jung's perspective nonetheless remains influential in religion and literature as well as psychiatry. His important works include The Psychology of the Unconscious (1912; revised as Symbols of Transformation), Psychological Types (1921), Psychology and Religion (1938), and Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962).

For more information on Carl Gustav Jung, visit Britannica.com.

 
German Literature Companion: Carl Gustav Jung

Jung, Carl Gustav (Kesswyl, Switzerland, 1875-1961, Zurich), Swiss psychiatrist, and leading figure in the Zurich school of analytical psychology, studied medicine at Basel University. Having specialized in psychiatry, he was appointed in 1900 to a post at Burghölzli Hospital, Zurich. He acquired a large private practice, and resigned from the hospital in 1909. In 1903 Jung was impressed by the dream psychology in Traumdeutung by S. Freud, whom he visited in Vienna in 1907. Jung remained under Freud's influence until 1912, when he published Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido in which he expressed strongly independent views, which resulted in a permanent breach.

Jung was unable to accept Freud's view of sex as the sole determinant of action, and greatly widened the meaning of libido. He also attached less importance to repression as a factor in neurosis. He developed a psychology of the ‘collective-unconscious’ originating in the most primitive ages. The patterns of its life and thought, termed ‘archetypes’, survive in modern man and make up a substantial element in the unconscious of each individual. The personal elements of the unconscious in men develop by a process which he terms ‘individuation’. Jung's horizon includes religious, mystical, mythical, and occult phenomena, and his views have been rejected by some specialists as unscientific. His influence is nevertheless considerable. Like Freud, he was eminently successful in the treatment of neuroses, and acquired a world-wide reputation. The familar words ‘extravert’ and ‘introvert’ were introduced by Jung.

In addition to the work mentioned above (the title of which was changed in 1952 to Symbole der Wandlung), Jung's principal writings include Psychologische Typen (1921), Die Beziehungen zwischen dem Ich und dem Unbewußten (1928), Psychologie und Religion (1939), Psychologie und Alchemie (1944), Die Psychologie der Übertragung (1946), Über psychische Energetik und das Wesen der Träume (1948), Symbolik des Geistes (1948), Aion. Untersuchungen zur Symbolgeschichte (1951), Antwort auf Hiob (1952), Synchronizität als ein Prinzip akausaler Zusammenhänge (1952), Von den Wurzeln des Bewußtseins (1954), Welt der Psyche (1954), Versuch einer Darstellung der psychoanalytischen Theorie (1954), Mysterium conjunctionis (with M. L. von Franz, 3 vols., 1955-7), and Ein moderner Mythus (1958).

Jung's collected works (Gesammelte Werke, 16 vols.) began to appear in 1958. The autobiography, written in his last years, 1957-61, with the assistance of Aniela Jaffé and edited by her (Posthume Autobiographie), was published in 1962. Septem sermones ad murtuos by ‘Philemon’ (a mythical figure created by Jung) were privately printed in 1916.

 
Philosophy Dictionary: Carl Gustav Jung

Jung, Carl Gustav (1875-1961) Swiss psychoanalyst. Born at Kesswil in Switzerland, Jung took his degree in medicine at Basel and subsequently studied with the Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler (1857-1939). He met Freud in 1907, and collaborated with him until 1912. Jung's subsequent work centred upon the process of ‘individuation’ whereby a person undergoes a developmental journey littered with myth, archetypes, and symbols pointing towards the final destiny, which may be a religious wholeness and integration (see collective unconscious). Jung is not a systematic philosophical thinker, but his religious and spiritual vision in general, and his interest in oriental religion in particular, have had their own influence.

 
Spotlight: Carl Jung

From our Archives: Today's Highlights, July 26, 2006

Carl Jung, the father of analytical psychology, was born on this date in 1875. Jung believed that extroversion and introversion were integral in the study of personality types. He also theorized that there is a female element in the unconscious of men – the anima – and a male element in the unconscious of women – the animus. Jung believed that people share a collective unconscious, appearing as archetypes, including mythology, and symbols and patterns that appear in dreams.
 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Jung, Carl Gustav
(kärl gʊs'täf yʊng) , 1875–1961, Swiss psychiatrist, founder of analytical psychology. The son of a country pastor, he studied at Basel (1895–1900) and Zürich (M.D., 1902). After a stint at the University Psychiatric Clinic in Zürich, Jung worked (1902) under Eugen Bleuler at the Burgholzli Clinic. He wrote valuable papers, but more important was his book on the psychology of dementia praecox (1906), which led to a meeting (1907) with Sigmund Freud. Finding that their theoretical positions had much in common, the two formed a close relationship for a number of years: Jung edited the Jahrbuch für psychologische und psychopathologische Forschungen and was made (1911) president of the International Psychoanalytic Society. However, a formal break with Freud came with the publication of Jung's revolutionary work The Psychology of the Unconscious (1912), which disagreed with the Freudian emphasis on sexual trauma as the basis for all neurosis and with the literal interpretation of the Oedipus complex.

Prior to World War II, Jung became president of the Nazi-dominated International General Medical Society for Psychotherapy. As the Nazis forced their Aryan ideology on the association, Jung became increasingly uncomfortable and resigned. In addition, in 1943 he aided the Office of Strategic Services by analyzing Nazi leaders for the United States. Questions have arisen, however, regarding his alleged racial theories of the unconscious. While Jung's work is of little importance in contemporary psychoanalytic practice, it remains widely influential in such fields as religious studies and literary criticism.

Jungian psychology is based on psychic totality and psychic energism. He postulated two dimensions in the unconscious—the personal (repressed or forgotten content of an individual's mental and material life) and the archetypes (images, patterns, and symbols that are often seen in dreams and fantasies and appear as themes in mythology and religion) of a collective unconscious (those acts and mental patterns shared by members of a culture or universally by all human beings). In Psychological Types (1921) Jung elucidated the concepts of extroversion and introversion for the study of personality types. He also developed the theory of synchronicity, the coincidence of causally unrelated events having identical or similar meaning. Additionally, he was the first person to introduce into the language such terms and concepts as “anima” and “New Age.” For Jung the most important and lifelong task imposed upon any person is fulfillment through the process of individuation, the achievement of harmony of conscious and unconscious, which makes a person one and whole. Jung's many works are compiled in H. Read, M. Fordham, and G. Adler, ed., Collected Works of C. G. Jung (20 vol., 1953–79).

Bibliography

See his autobiographical Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1963, repr. 1989); his letters, ed. by G. Adler (2 vol., 1973); his correspondence with Sigmund Freud, ed. by R. Manheim and R. F. Hull (1974); biographies by F. McLynn (1997), R. Hayman (2001), and D. Bair (2003); studies by J. Jacobi (rev. ed. 1973), M. A. Mattoon (1985), A. Samuels (1986), and M. Pauson (1989); M. Stein, ed., Jungian Analysis (1982); R. Noll, The Jung Cult (1994) and The Aryan Christ (1997).

 
Psychoanalysis: Carl Gustav Jung

1875-1961

A Swiss physician and psychiatrist, Carl Gustav Jung, founder of analytical psychology, was born on July 26, 1875, in a little village on the shores of Lake Constanz on the Swiss-German border. He died on June 6, 1961, in Kussnacht, Switzerland.

Jung's father was a rural Protestant minister. When Jung was one year old, the family moved to a rural village just outside Basel, where Jung spent the remainder of his childhood. A sister was born when Jung was nine.

When Jung was three his mother became depressed and was unavailable for several months. Jung always felt much closer to his mother than to his father. He experienced his father as having lost the faith, whereas he experienced his mother as having a deeply intuitive and religious nature.

He entered the University of Basel in 1895 to study medicine, and completed his medical studies in the winter of 1900. He then began his psychiatric studies at the Burghölzli Clinic under the direction of Eugen Bleuler. His father died in 1896. His medical school thesis, The Psychology of So-Called Occult Phenomena, a study of spiritualistic seances of his cousin, was published in 1902. That same year, he spent several months in Paris as a student of Pierre Janet.

Jung began his scientific work with word-association experiments while at the Burghölzli Clinic. He discovered consistent patterns of expression and inhibition when select words were given to a subject who was instructed to react with the first word that came to mind. Jung coined the term "complex" for the cluster of images and emotion revealed when he inquired closely about the subject's experience of inhibition. He interpreted the results using Freud's theory of repression. In 1906 Jung broadened his studies to include patients at the Burghölzli, out of which experience came his classic monograph on The Psychology of Dementia Praecox.

In 1903 he married Emma Rauschenbach, the daughter of a prominent family in Schauffhausen. They had five children, four daughters and one son. Jung relied on her strong character and native intelligence, and later on she became an analyst in her own right. He remained at the Burghölzli until 1909, when he opened a private practice in the village of Kussnacht just outside Zurich where he remained for the rest of his life.

The work on complexes led to a correspondence with Freud and then to a meeting in 1907. The next six years saw their intense friendship and professional collaboration. Jung became the "crown prince," the first president of the International Psychoanalytical Association, editor of the Jahrbuch, and a defender of psychoanalysis. They traveled to Clark University in Massachusetts together in 1909, analyzing each other's dreams on the long ocean voyage. But, as Jung began to delve into mythology, a divergence on the meaning of libido became a central point of conflict between the two men. Jung defined libido as meaning interest in general, and believed that all libido cannot be reduced to sexuality, other instincts such as hunger and culture having equal value. In 1911 Jung published the first half of his work A Study of the Transformations and Symbolisms of the Libido in the Jahrbuch. The second half came out in 1913. Here Jung focused on incest in terms of the mother-son pattern, and the need for the son to be delivered from the poser of the maternal unconscious. By this time the relationship between Freud and Jung had become so strained that Freud urged Jung to leave the psychoanalytic fold,

From 1913 until 1918 Jung withdrew into a period of intense self-analysis, resigning his position at the University of Zurich. He called this his "confrontation with the unconscious." All his later writings were an assimilation and understanding of his inner experiences during those years.

Jung's first major work of his post-Freudian phase was Psychological Types, in which he formulated the concepts of introversion and extroversion, along with the function types: sensation, thinking, feeling, and intuition. For Jung this work continued his struggle for identity in relationship to Freud and Adler. Also, in the appendix he defined all the concepts for which his work would become most famous; collective unconscious, archetypes, individuation, dreams, psychic energy, etc. Furthermore, during this period he explicated his notions of psychotherapy as a dialectic between therapist and patient, who are equal partners in the psychological transformation.

As his fame spread he began to receive analysands from many parts of the world. He also traveled widely, to the American Southwest, North Africa, Central Africa, and India. He received honorary doctorates from many institutions, including Harvard and Oxford Universities.

Jung's most controversial episode occurred in 1933. He replaced Ernst Kretschmer as president of the German Society of Psychotherapy and immediately made it into an International Society, so that Jewish members could retain membership. He remained president until 1940, which meant he had to work closely with the Nazis. Some of his statements during this period have been construed as anti-Semitic, and those who have wished to discredit his work seized upon them as a pretext for their dismissal. This issue has surfaced periodically for the past fifty years, but there is no definitive evidence that Jung ever was a Nazi sympathizer.

On the other hand, we do know that he warned repeatedly against the dangers of mass movements, and that in 1936 he published Wotan, an uncompromising analysis of the psychological, and specifically archetypal, reasons for Nazism and of the risks it represented for the individual.

In 1944 Jung had a massive, nearly fatal heart attack. He describes his visions during the attack in Memories, Dreams, and Reflections (1962/1966). His recovery was complete, but he retired from practice, continuing his research into alchemical studies, and writing two important books, The Psychology of the Transference and Mysterium Conjunctionis. Jung had become interested in alchemy in 1928 when a good friend, Richard Wilhelm, introduced him to the Chinese alchemical text, The Secret of the Golden Flower. Noting the similarities between alchemy and the unconscious patterns he observed in his analysands, he saw alchemy as the missing link between the mythology of the pre-Christian psyche and modern dreams.

Jung valued his introversion greatly, and beginning in 1923 he built a tower in Bollingen, where he would spend solitary weeks. He died after a brief illness on June 6, 1961, in the house in which he had lived since 1908.

Bibliography

Jung, Carl Gustav. (1916). The structure of the unconscious. Coll. Works (Vol. 7). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

——. (1966). Memories, dreams, reflections. London: Routledge. (Original work published at 1962)

McGuire William. (1974) The Freud-Jung letters: The correspondence between Sigmund Freud and C.G. Jung. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Wehr, Gerhard. (1987) Jung. Boston and London: Shambhala.

Further Reading

Mijolla, Alain de. (1989). Images of Freud: From his correspondence. International Forum for Psychoanalysis, 5, 87-110.

—THOMAS KIRSCH

 
(1875-1961)

Swiss psychologist who made the study of various occult ideas valid within the framework of psychology. Jung was born on July 26, 1875, at Kesswil, Thurgau, Switzerland. He studied medicine at the University of Basel, Switzerland, (1895-1900) and completed his M.D. at the University of Zürich (1902). While still a student he became fascinated with the occult, on which he read a number of books. He also attended several Spiritualist séances. Jung's first publication was an essay on the psychology and pathology of occult phenomena.

Jung became a physician and assisted Eugene Bleuler at the Burghölzi Mental Hospital in Zürich. In 1905 he joined the faculty at the University of Zürich; about the same time he became interested in the new psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud. He became a leading student of Freud and in 1911 served as president of the International Psychoanalytic Society. In 1913, however, he went his own way as a result of what he regarded as Freud's overemphasis on sexual theories and opposition to occult ideas.

Jung's break with Freudian theory was marked by his paper "Symbols of the Libido," written in 1913. He resigned from the university that year, and for the next twenty years engaged in private practice, which allowed him to develop the approach he termed "analytic psychology." In his 1921 text Psychological Types he introduced his understanding of personality based on a set of polarities—introvert/extrovert, feeling/thinking, and sensation/intuition. Jung saw individual personality as determined by the balance or imbalance of these polarities.

Jung developed a view of the individual as consisting of a set of personality aspects he termed the ego (self-awareness), the persona (the expected social role played by each person), the shadow (a dark side), the animus (in a female) or anima (in a male) (the unconscious attitude toward the opposite sex), the self (soul or spirit), and the unconscious. He believed the development of a healthy personality, a process called "individuation," occurs as the various opposites in the personality are differentiated and then balanced.

Out of this basic understanding of the self several concepts of particular relevance to the modern occult community emerged. For example, Jung saw the unconscious as consisting of two layers—the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious. The collective unconscious, he said, is a deposit of archetypes or fundamental modes of apprehension that are common to all humanity because of the universality of certain underlying experiences. Archetypes manifest themselves in ancient (and not so ancient) myths, dreams, symbols, and artistic productions. One important appearance of archetypes is in the god forms of the ancient polytheistic religions. Thus one can speak of the archetype of the sky god or the mother goddess. Also from his concept of archetype, Jung speculated on the nature of flying saucers, about which he wrote a short book.

He also introduced the concept of synchronicity, the connecting principle between events, as distinct from conventional cause and effect, an important idea in modern astrology, which has attempted to break out of its deterministic mode of conceptualizing the relationship between humans and the zodiac.

Jung returned to teaching in 1933 as a professor of psychology at the Federal Polytechnical University, Zürich (1933-41) and professor of medical psychology at the University of Basel (1943-44). He spent his last years as a consultant and lecturer at the C. G. Jung Institute (1948-61). His many writings wore compiled in Collected Works (1953).

Jung's perception covered every major area of human experience. His occult experiences are indicated in his book VII Sermones ad Mortuoso, published anonymously, which dramatizes Jung's journey into the unconscious. Some of his reminiscences are recorded in Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1963). He died June 6, 1961, at Kuessnacht, Zürich.

Sources:

Charet, F. X. Spiritualism and the Foundations of C. G. Jung's Psychology. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993.

Franz, Marie-Louise von. On Divination and Synchronicity: The Psychology of Meaningful Chance. Toronto: Inner City Books, 1980.

Merkur, Daniel. Gnosis: An Esoteric Tradition of Mystical Visions and Unions. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993.

Pleasants, Helene, ed. Biographical Dictionary of Parapsychology. New York: Helix Press, 1964.

 
(yoong)

A Swiss psychologist of the twentieth century, who broke with his teacher Sigmund Freud and developed his own theories. Jung denied that sexuality is the basic driving urge for people. He classified people as extroverts and introverts, put forth a theory of the feminine principle in men (the anima) and the masculine principle in women (the animus), and argued that people share a collective unconscious, made up of symbols called archetypes.

 
Quotes By: Carl Jung

Quotes:

"From the middle of life onward, only he remains vitally alive who is ready to die with life."

"We deem those happy who from the experience of life have learnt to bear its ills without being overcome by them."

"It is on the whole probably that we continually dream, but that consciousness makes such a noise that we do not hear it."

"An inflated consciousness is always egocentric and conscious of nothing but its own existence. It is incapable of learning from the past, incapable of understanding contemporary events, and incapable of drawing right conclusions about the future. It is hypnotized by itself and therefore cannot be argued with. It inevitably dooms itself to calamities that must strike it dead."

"There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion."

"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate."

See more famous quotes by Carl Jung

 
Wikipedia: Carl Jung
Carl Gustav Jung
Mem_dream_reflec_Jung.jpg
A recent edition of Jung's partially autobiographical work Memories, Dreams, Reflections.
Born July 26 1875(1875--)
Kesswil, Thurgau, Switzerland
Died June 6 1961 (aged 85)
Zürich, Switzerland
Residence Flag of Switzerland Switzerland
Citizenship Swiss
Field Psychiatry, Psychology, Psychotherapy, Analytical psychology
Institutions Burghölzli
Academic advisor   Eugen Bleuler, Sigmund Freud
Known for Analytical psychology

Carl Gustav Jung (IPA: [ˈkarl ˈgʊstaf ˈjʊŋ]) (July 26, 1875, KesswilJune 6, 1961, Küsnacht) was a Swiss psychiatrist, influential thinker, and founder of analytical psychology.

Jung's unique and broadly influential approach to psychology has emphasized understanding the psyche through exploring the worlds of dreams, art, mythology, world religion and philosophy. Although he was a theoretical psychologist and practicing clinician for most of his life, much of his life's work was spent exploring other realms, including Eastern and Western philosophy, alchemy, astrology, sociology, as well as literature and the arts. His most notable contributions include his concept of the psychological archetype, the collective unconscious, and his theory of synchronicity.

Jung emphasized the importance of balance and harmony. He cautioned that modern humans rely too heavily on science and logic and would benefit from integrating spirituality and appreciation of the unconscious realm.

Biography

Early years

Carl Jung was born Karl Gustav II Jung[1] on July 26, 1875 in Kesswil, in the Swiss canton (state) of Thurgau, as the fourth but only surviving child of Paul Achilles Jung and Emilie Preiswerk. His father, Paul Jung, was a poor rural parson in the Swiss Reformed Church while his mother, Emilie, came from a wealthy, established Swiss family.

Six-year old Jung.
Enlarge
Six-year old Jung.

At six months, Paul Jung acquired a position at a better parsonage in Laufen and the family moved there. Meanwhile, the tension between Paul and Emilie was growing. An eccentric and depressed woman, Emilie spent much of the time in her own separate bedroom, enthralled by the spirits that she said visited her in the night. Emilie left Laufen for several months of hospitalization near Basel for an unknown physical ailment. Young Carl was taken by his father to live with Emilie's single sister in Basel, but later brought back to the vicarage. Emilie's continuing bouts of absence and often depressed mood influenced his attitude towards women — one of "innate unreliability," a view that he later called the "handicap I started off with."[2] After three years of living in Laufen, Paul Jung requested a transfer and was called to Kleinhüningen in 1879. The relocation brought Emilie in closer contact to her family and lifted her melancholy and despondent mood.

Part of a series of articles on
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Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis
"Beyond the Pleasure Principle"
Civilization and Its Discontents

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A very solitary and introverted child, Jung was convinced from childhood that he had two personalities—a modern Swiss citizen, and a personality more at home in the eighteenth century.[3] "Personality No. 1," as he termed it, was a typical schoolboy living in the era of the time, while No. 2 was a dignified, authoritative, and influential man from the past. Although Jung was close to both parents, he was rather disappointed in his father's academic approach to faith.

A number of childhood memories inspired many of his later theories. As a boy he carved a tiny manikin into the end of the wooden ruler from his pupil's pencil case and placed it inside the case. He then added a stone which he had painted into upper and lower halves of, and hid the case in the attic. Periodically he would come back to the manikin, often bringing tiny sheets of paper with messages inscribed on them in his own secret language. This ceremonial act, he later reflected, brought him a feeling of inner peace and security. In later years, he discovered that similarities existed in this memory and the totems of native peoples like the collection of soul-stones near Arlesheim, or the tjurungas of Australia. This, he concluded, was an unconscious ritual that he did not question or understand at the time, but was practiced in a strikingly similar way in faraway locations that he as a young boy had no way of consciously knowing about.[4] His theories of psychological archetypes and the collective unconscious were inspired in part by this experience.

Shortly before the end of his first year at the Humanistisches Gymnasium in Basel, at age 12, he was pushed unexpectedly by another boy, which knocked him to the ground so hard that he was for a moment unconscious. The thought then came to him that "now you won't have to go to school any more."[5] From then on, whenever he started off to school or began homework, he fainted. He remained at home for the next six months until he overheard his father speaking worriedly to a visitor of his future ability to support himself, as they suspected he had epilepsy. With little money in the family, this brought the boy to reality and he realized the need for academic excellence. He immediately went into his father's study and began poring over Latin grammar. He fainted three times, but eventually he overcame the urge and did not faint again. This event, Jung later recalled, "was when I learned what a neurosis is."[6]

Adolescence and early adulthood

Jung wanted to study archaeology at university, but his family was not wealthy enough to send him further afield than Basel, where they did not teach this subject, so instead Jung studied medicine at the University of Basel from 1894 to 1900. The formerly introverted student became much more lively here. In 1903, Jung married Emma Rauschenbach, from one of the richest families in Switzerland.

Towards the end of studies, his reading of Krafft-Ebing persuaded him to specialize in psychiatric medicine. He later worked in the Burghölzli, a psychiatric hospital in Zürich.

Jung in 1910.
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Jung in 1910.

In 1906, he published Studies in Word Association and later sent a copy of this book to famed psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, after which a close friendship between these two men followed for some 6 years (see section on Jung and Freud). In 1913 Jung published Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (known in English as The Psychology of the Unconscious) resulting in a theoretical divergence between Jung and Freud and result in a break in their friendship, both stating that the other was unable to admit he could possibly be wrong. After this falling-out, Jung went through a pivotal and difficult psychological transformation, which was exacerbated by news of the First World War. Henri Ellenberger called Jung's experience a "creative illness" and compared it to Freud's period of what he called neurasthenia and hysteria.

Later life

Following World War I, Jung became a worldwide traveler, facilitated by his wife's inherited fortune as well as the funds he realized through psychiatric fees, book sales, and honoraria. He visited Northern Africa shortly after, and New Mexico and Kenya in the mid-1920s. In 1938, he delivered the Terry Lectures, Psychology and Religion, at Yale University. It was at about this stage in his life that Jung visited India. His experience in India led him to become fascinated and deeply involved with Eastern philosophies and religions, helping him come up with key concepts of his ideology, including integrating spirituality into everyday life and appreciation of the unconscious.

Jung's marriage with Emma produced five children and lasted until Emma's death in 1955, but she certainly experienced emotional trauma, brought about by Jung's relationships with other women. The most well-known women with whom Jung is believed to have had extramarital affairs are patient and friend Sabina Spielrein[7] and Toni Wolff.[8] Jung continued to publish books until the end of his life, including a work showing his late interest in flying saucers. He also enjoyed a friendship with an English Catholic priest, Father Victor White, who corresponded with Jung after he had published his controversial Answer to Job.[9]


Jung's work on himself and his patients convinced him that life has a spiritual purpose beyond material goals. Our main task, he believed, is to discover and fulfill our deep-innate potential, much as the acorn contains the potential to become the oak, or the caterpillar to become the butterfly. Based on his study of Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Gnosticism, Taoism, and other traditions, Jung perceived that this journey of transformation is at the mystical heart of all religions. It is a journey to meet the self and at the same time to meet the Divine. Unlike Sigmund Freud, Jung thought spiritual experience was essential to our well-being. When asked during a 1959 BBC interview if he believed in the existence of God, Jung replied, "I don't believe — I know" [10]

Jung died in 1961 in Zürich, Switzerland.

Jung and Freud

Group photo 1909 in front of Clark University. Front row: Sigmund Freud, Granville Stanley Hall, C.G.Jung; back row: Abraham A. Brill, Ernest Jones, Sandor Ferenczi.
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Group photo 1909 in front of Clark University. Front row: Sigmund Freud, Granville Stanley Hall, C.G.Jung; back row: Abraham A. Brill, Ernest Jones, Sandor Ferenczi.

Jung was thirty when he sent his work Studies in Word Association to Sigmund Freud in Vienna. The first conversation between Jung and Freud lasted over 13 hours. Half a year later, the then 50 year old Freud reciprocated by sending a collection of his latest published essays to Jung in Zürich, which marked the beginning of an intense correspondence and collaboration that lasted more than six years and ended shortly before World War I in May 1914, when Jung resigned as the chairman of the International Psychoanalytical Association.

Today Jung's and Freud's theories influence different schools of psychiatry, but, more importantly, they influenced each other during intellectually formative years of their lives. In 1906 psychoanalysis as an institution was still in its early developmental stages. Jung, who had become interested in psychiatry as a student by reading Psychopathia Sexualis by Richard von Krafft-Ebing, professor in Vienna, now worked as a doctor under the psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler in the Burghölzli and became familiar with Freud's idea of the unconscious through Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and was a proponent of the new "psycho-analysis". At the time, Freud needed collaborators and pupils to validate and spread his ideas. The Burghölzli was a renowned psychiatric clinic in Zürich at which Jung was an up-and-coming young doctor.

In 1908, Jung became editor of the newly founded Yearbook for Psychoanalytical and Psychopathological Research. The following year, Jung traveled with Freud and Sandor Ferenczi to the U.S. to spread the news of psychoanalysis and in 1910, Jung became chairman for life of the International Psychoanalytical Association. While Jung worked on his Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (Psychology of the Unconscious), tensions grew between Freud and himself, due in a large part to their disagreements over the nature of libido and religion. In 1912 these tensions came to a peak because Jung felt severely slighted after Freud visited his colleague Ludwig Binswanger in Kreuzlingen without paying him a visit in nearby Zürich, an incident Jung referred to as the Kreuzlingen gesture. Shortly thereafter, Jung again traveled to the U.S.A. and gave the Fordham lectures, which were published as The Theory of Psychoanalysis, and while they contain some remarks on Jung's dissenting view on the nature of libido, they represent largely a "psychoanalytical Jung" and not the theory Jung became famous for in the following decades.

In November 1912, Jung and Freud met in Munich for a meeting among prominent colleagues to discuss psychoanalytical journals.[11]. At a talk about a new psychoanalytic essay on Amenhotep IV, Jung expressed his views on how it related to actual conflicts in the psychoanalytic movement. While Jung spoke, Freud suddenly fainted and Jung carried him to a couch.

Jung and Freud personally met for the last time in September 1913 for the Fourth International Psychoanalytical Congress, also in Munich. Jung gave a talk on psychological types, the introverted and the extraverted type, in analytical psychology. This constituted the introduction of some of the key concepts which came to distinguish Jung's work from Freud's in the next half century.

In the following years Jung experienced considerable isolation in his professional life, exacerbated through World War I. His Seven Sermons to the Dead (1917) reprinted in his autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections (see bibliography) can also be read as expression of the psychological conflicts which beset Jung around the age of forty after the break with Freud.

Jung's primary disagreement with Freud stemmed from their differing concepts of the unconscious. Jung saw Freud's theory of the unconscious as incomplete and unnecessarily negative. According to Jung (though not according to Freud), Freud conceived the unconscious solely as a repository of repressed emotions and desires. Jung believed that the unconscious also had a creative capacity, that the collective unconscious of archetypes and images which made up the human psyche was processed and renewed within the unconscious.

Jung and Nazism

Though the field of psychoanalysis was dominated at the time by Jewish practitioners, and Jung had many friends and respected colleagues who were Jewish, a shadow hung over Jung's career due to allegations that he was a Nazi sympathizer. Jung was editor of the Zentralblatt für Psychotherapie, a publication that eventually endorsed Mein Kampf as required reading for all psychoanalysts. Jung claimed this was done to save psychoanalysis and preserve it during the war, believing that psychoanalysis would not otherwise survive because the Nazis considered it to be a "Jewish science." He also claimed he did it with the help and support of his Jewish friends and colleagues.[12] This after-the-fact explanation, however, has been strongly challenged on the basis of available documents.[13] The question remains unresolved.

Jung also served as president of the Nazi-dominated International General Medical Society for Psychotherapy. One of his first acts as president was to modify the constitution so that German Jewish doctors could maintain their membership as individual members even though they were excluded from all German medical societies. Also, in 1934 when he presented his paper "A Review of the Complex Theory," in his presidential address he did not discount the importance of Freud and credited him with as much influence as he could possibly give to an old mentor. Later in the war, Jung resigned. In addition, in 1943 he aided the Office of Strategic Services by analyzing Nazi leaders for the United States.[14] See also ongoing discussion in relation to 'post-Jungian' interpretation[15]

Influence

Jung has had an enduring influence on psychology as well as wider society. He has influenced psychotherapy (see Jungian psychology and analytical psychology).


Spirituality as a cure for alcoholism

Jung's influence can sometimes be found in more unexpected quarters. For example, Jung once treated an American patient (Rowland H.) suffering from chronic alcoholism. After working with the patient for some time, and achieving no significant progress, Jung told the man that his alcoholic condition was near to hopeless, save only the possibility of a spiritual experience. Jung noted that occasionally such experiences had been known to reform alcoholics where all else had failed.

Rowland took Jung's advice seriously and set about seeking a personal spiritual experience. He returned home to the United States and joined a Christian evangelical movement known as the Oxford Group. He also told other alcoholics what Jung had told him about the importance of a spiritual experience. One of the alcoholics he told was Ebby Thacher, a long-time friend and drinking buddy of Bill Wilson, later co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). Thacher told Wilson about Jung's ideas. Wilson, who was finding it impossible to maintain sobriety, was impressed and sought out his own spiritual experience. The influence of Jung thus indirectly found its way into the formation of Alcoholics Anonymous, the original 12-step program, and from there into the whole 12-step recovery movement, although AA as a whole is not Jungian and Jung had no role in the formation of that approach or the 12 steps.

The above claims are documented in the letters of Carl Jung and Bill W., excerpts of which can be found in Pass It On, published by Alcoholics Anonymous.[16] Although the detail of this story is disputed by some historians, Jung himself made reference to its substance -- including the Oxford Group participation of the individual in question -- in a talk that was issued privately in 1954 as a transcript from shorthand taken by an attendee (Jung reportedly approved the transcript), later recorded in Volume 18 of his Collected Works, The Symbolic Life ("For instance, when a member of the Oxford Group comes to me in order to get treatment, I say, 'You are in the Oxford Group; so long as you are there, you settle your affair with the Oxford Group. I can't do it better than Jesus.' I will tell you a story of such a case. A hysterical alcoholic was cured by this Group movement..."[17])

Influences on culture


  • The Aura-Soma color divination system relates many of its bottles to Jungian archetypal constructs.

Literature

  • Jung had a 16-year long friendship with author Laurens van der Post from which a number of books and a film were created about Jung's life.
  • Herman Hesse, author of works such as Siddhartha and Der Steppenwolf, was treated by a student of Jung, Dr. Joseph Lang. This began for Hesse a long preoccupation with psychoanalysis, through which he came to know Carl Jung personally.
  • James Joyce in his Finnegans Wake, asks "Is the Co-education of Animus and Anima Wholly Desirable?" his answer perhaps being contained in his line "anama anamaba anamabapa." The book also ridicules Carl Jung's analytical psychology and Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis, by referring to "psoakoonaloose." Jung had been unable to help Joyce's daughter Lucia, who Joyce claimed was a girl "yung and easily freudened." Lucia was diagnosed as schizophrenic and was eventually permanently institutionalized.[18]
  • Jung's differentiation between sensing, intuition, thinking, and feeling inspired the categorization of two of the four delineating factors in the Myers-Briggs personality test. These are the "N" (intuition) vs. "S" (sensing) and "T" (thinking) vs. "F" (feeling) groupings.
  • Jung's influence on noted Canadian novelist Robertson Davies is apparent in many of Davies's fictional works. In particular, The Cornish Trilogy and his novel The Manticore base their designs on Jungian concepts.
  • Ted Hughes's 1970 collection 'Crow' shows Hughes's interest in Jungian theory.[citation needed]
  • Jung is one of the main characters in Timothy Findley's novel, Pilgrim.
  • Jungian ideas make up a large part of the intellectual foundations of the Earthsea stories, the classic fantasy series written by Ursula K. Le Guin.
  • Jung appears as a major character as a ghost in the novel Between the Bridge and the River by Scottish TV personality Craig Ferguson. He appears as an hallucination to one of the main characters in various parts of the novel.
  • Jung appears as a character in the novel "Possessing the Secret of Joy" by Alice Walker. He appears as the therapist of Tashi, the novel's protagonist. He is usually called "Mzee," but is identified by Alice Walker in the afterword.
  • Jung appears as a major character in the 2006 novel "The Interpretation of Murder" by Jed Rubenfeld.

Television and film

  • Jung's writing was introduced to Italian film maker Federico Fellini in the 1950s and had an effect on the way Fellini incorporated dreams into films after La dolce vita.[citation needed]
  • Dr. Niles Crane on the popular television sitcom Frasier is a devoted Jungian psychiatrist, while his brother Dr. Frasier Crane is a Freudian psychiatrist. This is mentioned a number of times in the series, and from time to time forms a point of argument between the two brothers. One memorable scene had Niles filling in for Frasier on Frasier's call-in radio program, in which Niles introduces himself as the temporary substitute saying, "...and while my brother is a Freudian, I am a Jungian, so there'll be no blaming Mother today."

Music

  • Peter Gabriel's song "Rhythm Of The Heat" (Security , 1982), tells about psychologist Carl Jung's visit to Africa, during which he joined a group of tribal drummers and dancers and became overwhelmed by the fear of losing control of himself. At the time, Jung was exploring the concept of the Collective Unconscious, and was afraid he would come under control of the music, as the drummers and dancers let the music control them in fulfillment of their ritual objectives. Gabriel learned about Jung's journey to Africa from Jung's essay Symbols And The Interpretation Of Dreams (ISBN 0-691-09968-5). In his song, Gabriel tries to capture the powerful feelings the African tribal music evoked in Jung by means of intense use of tribal drumbeats. The original song title was Jung in Africa.[19]

See also

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Notes and references

  1. ^ As a university student Jung changed the modernized spelling of his name to the original family form. Bair, Deirdre (2003). Jung: A Biography. New York: Back Bay Books, pp. 7–8, 53. ISBN 0-316-15938-7. 
  2. ^ Jung, C.G.; Aniela Jaffé (1965). Memories, Dreams, Reflections. New York: Random House, p. 8. 
  3. ^ Memories, Dreams, Reflections, pp. 33–34. 
  4. ^ Memories, Dreams, Reflections, pp. 22–23. 
  5. ^ Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 30. 
  6. ^