Carl Jung

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Carl Gustav Jung was born on the 26th of July 1875 in Kesswil, a small village in the Swiss canton of Thurgau, the first child his parents would raise to adulthood after two stillbirths and the early death of a son named Paul. That already fragile beginning set a tone. By the time Jung died on the 6th of June 1961 at Küsnacht, he had founded an entirely new school of psychology, coined the concepts of introversion and extraversion, written more than twenty books, and left behind an unpublished leather-bound manuscript so unusual that fewer than two dozen people had laid eyes on it before 2008.

  His ideas spread far beyond the consulting room. A chain of events connecting his work to the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous on the 10th of June 1935 in Akron, Ohio, illustrates just how wide the ripples ran. Physicists, anthropologists, literary scholars, and theologians have all found something indispensable in his writing. And yet Jung himself resisted the label of mystic, insisting he was a man of science, even as he attended seances, corresponded with the physicist Wolfgang Pauli about non-locality and the nature of coincidence, and filled a red leather folio with illuminated visions he called the Liber Novus.

  How did a rural pastor's son from a Swiss village become one of the most contested and influential figures in the history of psychology? What drove him to break with Sigmund Freud, the man who had called him his crown prince and successor? And what lies inside the mind of someone who believed the collective memory of the entire human species is stored in every one of us?

• 2. Roots and Early Formation

  ›

  Paul Achilles Jung, Carl's father, was a rural pastor in the Swiss Reformed Church. He was, by his son's account, reliable but weak and powerless in character. Carl's mother, Emilie Preiswerk, came from five centuries of Swiss roots and was the youngest child of Samuel Preiswerk, an Antistes of the Reformed clergy in Basel, a Hebraist, and one of the early advocates of Zionism. Eight of Carl's uncles were also clergymen. The young boy grew up saturated in theology, and yet formal religious doctrine never satisfied him.

  Emilie was an unsettling presence in the household. She was eccentric and prone to depression, and she spent long stretches in her bedroom, where she said spirits visited her at night. Jung recalled that during the day she seemed normal, but at night she became strange and mysterious. He reported seeing a faintly luminous, indefinite figure emerge from her room, its head detached and floating in the air. Whether vision or dream, the memory never left him.

  When Jung was three, his mother spent several months in hospital near Basel. His father placed him in the care of an unmarried aunt, and Carl developed generalised eczema in response to the separation. In his memoir, he described this parental influence as the "handicap I started off with". At the age of ten or eleven, he moved on to the Basel Gymnasium, where he was deeply unhappy.

  A turning point came at twelve. Another boy shoved Jung to the ground and he struck his head, briefly losing consciousness. A thought arrived immediately: now he would not have to go to school anymore. For six months thereafter, walking toward school or opening a grammar book triggered fainting spells. He stayed home until he overheard his father speaking anxiously to a visitor about the boy's ability to support himself. The family suspected epilepsy and was nearly destitute since Paul Jung's appointment had not been prosperous. That overheard conversation prompted Jung to go to his father's study and open a Latin grammar. He fainted three more times but pushed through. He later recalled that this moment was when he first understood what a neurosis is.

• 3. Medicine, Freud, and the Breaking Point

  ›

  In 1895, Jung began studying medicine at the University of Basel on a grant. His father died barely a year later, leaving the family close to destitute and relying on relatives to help fund Carl's education. Despite showing promise that almost led him toward surgery, a single book changed his direction: Richard von Krafft-Ebing's Textbook of Psychiatry, which convinced him that psychiatry sat exactly at the intersection of the biological and the spiritual he had been searching for.

  In December 1900, he arrived at the Burghölzli psychiatric hospital in Zurich as an intern under Eugen Bleuler. It was Bleuler who introduced him to Freud's work, asking Jung to review The Interpretation of Dreams. Jung sent Freud a copy of his Studies in Word Association in 1906, and the two men met for the first time in Vienna on the 3rd of March 1907. Jung recalled their initial conversation as running unceasing for thirteen hours.

  Freud had a specific purpose in cultivating the younger man. He and other psychoanalysts of the era were Jewish and facing rising antisemitism in Europe; Jung, raised as a Christian, offered a way to legitimise the new science beyond that circle. In 1910, Freud proposed Jung for the position of lifetime President of the newly formed International Psychoanalytical Association, calling him his adopted eldest son, his crown prince, and successor. After objections from Viennese colleagues, Jung was instead elected to a two-year term.

  The cracks widened as Jung worked on his Psychology of the Unconscious. He de-emphasised the role of sexual development and focused instead on what he called the collective unconscious. He saw Freud's model of the unconscious as incomplete, unnecessarily negative, and inelastic, essentially a repository of repressed emotions rather than the dynamic, inherited structure Jung believed it to be. In 1912, Jung felt deeply slighted when Freud visited his colleague Ludwig Binswanger in Kreuzlingen without stopping in nearby Zurich; Jung called this slight "the Kreuzlingen gesture" and it never healed.

  At a Munich meeting in November 1912, while Jung spoke about a psychoanalytic essay on Amenhotep IV, Freud suddenly fainted. Jung carried him to a couch. In early January 1913, Freud wrote to Jung proposing they abandon their personal relationship entirely. They met for the last time in September 1913 at the Fourth International Psychoanalytical Congress in Munich. Jung described the final rupture in his posthumously published autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections as a "resounding censure".

• 4. The Red Book and the Dark Years

  ›

  After the Munich congress in 1913, Jung stood on the verge of a psychosis. He saw visions and heard voices. He worried at times that he was "doing a schizophrenia". The outbreak of the First World War in August 1914 made things worse. Jung gave up his lectureship at the University of Zurich, although he kept his private practice in Küsnacht.

  He decided his near-psychotic experiences were of value and began deliberately inducing hallucinations through a process he called active imagination. He recorded everything in small private journals he referred to collectively as his Black Book, even though some had brown covers. Around 1915, he commissioned a large red leather-bound volume and began transcribing his notes and painting images inside it, working intermittently for sixteen years.

  Jung left no instructions about what should happen to this manuscript after his death. Sonu Shamdasani, a historian of psychology from London, spent three years trying to persuade Jung's resistant heirs to allow its publication. It was Jung's grandson Ulrich Hoerni, who manages the Jung archives, who eventually agreed when additional funds were raised through the Philemon Foundation. Up to September 2008, fewer than about two dozen people had ever seen the book. In 2007, two technicians for DigitalFusion, working with the New York City publisher W. W. Norton and Company, scanned the manuscript with a 10,200-pixel scanner.

  The Red Book, known formally as the Liber Novus, was published on the 7th of October 2009 in German, with a separate English translation and Sonu Shamdasani's introduction and footnotes. The Rubin Museum of Art in New York City displayed Jung's leather folio alongside some of the original Black Book journals from the 7th of October 2009 to the 15th of February 2010. Two-thirds of its pages bear Jung's own illuminations and illustrations. During the period he worked on this book, Jung developed his principal theories of archetypes, the collective unconscious, and the process of individuation. The wartime years were not entirely solitary; conscripted as an army doctor during the First World War, Jung was made commandant of an internment camp for British officers and soldiers, using quieter periods there to draw spontaneous images that formed into mandalas.

• 5. The Architecture of the Psyche

  ›

  Freud had popularised the idea of the personal unconscious, made up of thoughts and emotions that had once been experienced and then repressed or forgotten. Jung accepted that layer but argued it was only one floor of a much larger building. Below it, he proposed, lay the collective unconscious: a stratum of the psyche that was never personally experienced and therefore never personally forgotten. It consisted of universal, heritable elements common to all humans, shaped by evolutionary biology, the history of civilisation, and the development of the brain and nervous system.

  The functional units of this collective unconscious were archetypes. Jung borrowed the term from anthropology to describe pre-existing patterns in nature that give rise to repeating, recognisable experiences across cultures. He elaborated them in works including The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious and Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self. Examples he named include the shadow, the hero, the self, anima, animus, mother, father, child, and trickster. He argued there were as many archetypes as there are typical situations in life and that they have a dynamic mutual influence on one another.

  The shadow was the archetype of the unconscious's darker side: the traits individuals resist identifying as their own, the weaknesses and desires hidden beneath what Jung called the moral complex, the rough equivalent of Freud's super-ego. He argued that refusing to look at one's shadow led to psychological projection, in which qualities a person disowns are attributed to others. In extreme cases, this projection could underlie prejudice and war.

  Balancing the shadow were the anima and animus: the unconscious feminine element in every man, and the unconscious masculine element in every woman. These came partly from an inherited collective image of the opposite gender and partly from actual contacts with men and women in a person's life. Like the shadow, if a person rejected their anima or animus, it was more likely to be projected outward onto others.

  The overarching goal of psychological life, for Jung, was individuation: the lifelong process of differentiating the self out of both conscious and unconscious elements. He considered it the main task of human development. The concept drew on his evolutionary thinking: he believed the human psyche contained different layers, from the evolutionarily recent to the deeply archaic, and he compared these layers to those studied by neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp, whose 2017 work on subcortical brain systems independently arrived at a similar archaeological metaphor.

• 6. Introversion, Types, and the Word Association Test

  ›

  The foundations of Jung's typology were built at the Burghölzli Hospital through the Word Association Experiment. Presenting patients with a stimulus word and measuring their responses, Jung found that some subjects consistently oriented toward the objective meaning of the word, while others were derailed by internal, subjective associations. He interpreted this as a fundamental divergence in how psychic energy moved in different people.

  By 1913, he had concluded these were not merely symptoms of illness but exaggerated versions of normal psychological orientations. The four functions of consciousness, thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition, emerged from his period of intense self-experimentation between 1913 and 1917, documented in The Red Book. Combining two primary attitudinal types with four functions produced the eight-fold system he published in 1921 as Psychological Types, one of his most influential books.

  While the terms introversion and extraversion had appeared in European thought before Jung, he was the first to integrate them into a comprehensive structural theory of personality. He framed them not as social traits but as fundamental directions of psychic energy. In Psychological Types, he compared the introvert to Apollo, shining light inward on reflection and vision, and the extravert to Dionysus, energetically engaged with the outside world of objects, action, and sensation.

  Jung was careful to note that pure types were rare. Most people have a dominant function and a secondary one, which blurs the picture; the secondary type is often linked to the shadow. His formulation differed fundamentally from later models such as the Big Five or Hans Eysenck's PEN model, which defined introversion and extraversion through observable social behaviours. For Jung, they were directional orientations of libido: introverts interpret the world subjectively, extraverts interpret it objectively.

• 7. Spirituality, Alchemy, and Alcoholics Anonymous

  ›

  In 1926, Jung treated Rowland Hazard, an American businessman and politician, for chronic alcoholism. After considerable work with no significant progress, Jung told Hazard that his condition was near hopeless, with one exception: a vital spiritual or religious experience had occasionally been known to reform alcoholics when everything else had failed. Hazard took this seriously, returned to the United States, and joined a Christian evangelical movement called the Oxford Group.

  Hazard told other alcoholics what Jung had said about spiritual experience. One of the men he brought into the Oxford Group was Ebby Thacher, a long-time friend and drinking companion of William Griffith Wilson. Thacher told Wilson about the Oxford Group, and through them Wilson learned of Hazard's experience with Jung. Jung's influence thus found its way into the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous, the original twelve-step program, established on the 10th of June 1935 in Akron, Ohio. The connection is documented in the letters exchanged between Jung and Wilson.

  Jung came to believe that life has a spiritual purpose beyond material goals, and he saw the journey of transformation he called individuation as the mystical core of all religions. His study of Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Gnosticism, and Taoism led him to that conclusion. In 1959, on the BBC program Face to Face, the host John Freeman asked Jung whether he believed in God. Jung replied: "I do not need to believe. I know."

  His interest in alchemy deepened between 1928 and 1930, when he encountered a manuscript of The Secret of the Golden Flower, translated by Richard Wilhelm. In 1944, he published Psychology and Alchemy, arguing that the alchemical process of transforming lead into gold was a metaphor for individuation: the transformation of the impure soul into the perfected one. His last major book, Mysterium Coniunctionis, first appeared in English in 1963 as part of The Collected Works of C. G. Jung. It focused on the archetype of the sacred marriage between sun and moon, and argued that the classic alchemical stages, the blackening, the whitening, the reddening, and the yellowing, could each be read as a phase of personal growth.

• 8. Later Years and Lasting Reach

  ›

  Jung became a full professor of medical psychology at the University of Basel in 1943, but resigned after a heart attack the following year. He retreated to a more private life, continuing to write and maintaining his practice at Küsnacht. His wife Emma, who had become a noted psychoanalyst in her own right and lectured at the Jungian Institute in Zurich, died in 1955. The marriage had lasted more than fifty years and produced five children, none of whom continued in their father's field, though daughters Agathe and Marianne assisted in publishing his work.

  His final years were remarkably productive. In 1959, he published Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies, analysing the archetypal meaning and possible psychological significance of reported UFO sightings. In 1961, he wrote his last work, a contribution to the collection Man and His Symbols entitled Approaching the Unconscious, which was published posthumously in 1964 after his death on the 6th of June 1961.

  Honours accumulated across decades: honorary doctorates from Clark University in 1909, Fordham University in 1912, Harvard in 1936, the University of Oxford in 1938, and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich in 1955, on his eightieth birthday. He was named an honorary citizen of Küsnacht in 1960, on his eighty-fifth birthday, less than a year before he died.

  His influence spread into psychiatry, anthropology, archaeology, literature, philosophy, and religious studies. The concept of dance and movement therapy, developed with Toni Wolff in 1916, was rediscovered in the 1950s by Marian Chace and Mary Whitehouse and became a recognised therapeutic discipline. In a 2017 article, neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp and colleagues wrote that Jung's assertions about archetypes being related to evolutionarily ancient subcortical brain systems were "not only quite farsighted, but they actually open ways to connect his theory of the psyche with the most advanced scientific theories and discoveries of our day".