Early life and career.
Jung was the son of a philologist and pastor. His childhood
was lonely, though enriched by a vivid imagination, and from
an early age he observed the behaviour of his parents and
teachers, which he tried to resolve. Especially concerned
with his father's failing belief in religion, he tried to
communicate to him his own experience of God. Though the elder
Jung was in many ways a kind and tolerant man, neither he
nor his son succeeded in understanding each other. Jung seemed
destined to become a minister, for there were a number of
clergymen on both sides of his family. In his teens he discovered
philosophy and read widely, and this, together with the disappointments
of his boyhood, led him to forsake the strong family tradition
and to study medicine and become a psychiatrist. He was a
student at the universities of Basel (1895–1900) and
Zürich (M.D., 1902).
He was fortunate in joining the staff of the Burghölzli
Asylum of the University of Zürich at a time (1900)
when it was under the direction of Eugen Bleuler, whose
psychological interests had initiated what are now considered
classical researches into mental illness. At Burghölzli,
Jung began, with outstanding success, to apply association
tests initiated by earlier researchers. He studied, especially,
patients' peculiar and illogical responses to stimulus words
and found that they were caused by emotionally charged clusters
of associations withheld from consciousness because of their
disagreeable, immoral (to them), and frequently sexual content.
He used the now famous term complex to describe such conditions.
Association with Freud.
These researches, which established him as a psychiatrist
of international repute, led him to understand Freud's investigations;
his findings confirmed many of Freud's ideas, and, for a
period of five years (between 1907 and 1912), he was Freud's
close collaborator. He held important positions in the psychoanalytic
movement and was widely thought of as the most likely successor
to the inventor of psychoanalysis. But this was not to be
the outcome of their relationship. Partly for temperamental
reasons and partly because of differences of viewpoint,
the collaboration ended. At this stage Jung differed with
Freud largely over the latter's insistence on the sexual
bases of neurosis. A serious disagreement came in 1912,
with the publication of Jung's Wandlungen und Symbole der
Libido (Psychology of the Unconscious, 1916), which ran
counter to many of Freud's ideas. Though Jung had been elected
president of the International Psychoanalytic Society in
1911, he resigned from the society in 1914.
His first achievement was to differentiate two classes
of people according to attitude types: extroverted (outward-looking)
and introverted (inward-looking). Later he differentiated
four functions of the mind—thinking, feeling, sensation,
and intuition—one or more of which predominate in any
given person. The results of this study were embodied in
Psychologische Typen (1921; Psychological Types, 1923).
Jung's wide scholarship was well manifested here, as it
also had been in The Psychology of the Unconscious.
As a boy Jung had remarkably striking dreams and powerful
fantasies that had developed with unusual intensity. After
his break with Freud, he deliberately allowed this aspect
of himself to function again and gave the irrational side
of his nature free expression. At the same time, he studied
it scientifically by keeping detailed notes of his strange
experiences. He later developed the theory that these experiences
came from an area of the mind that he called the collective
unconscious, which he held was shared by everyone. This
much contested conception was combined with a theory of
archetypes that Jung believed were of fundamental importance
for the study of the psychology of religion. In Jung's terms,
archetypes are instinctive patterns, having a universal
character, expressed in behaviour and images.
Character of his psychotherapy.
The rest of his life was given over to the development of
his ideas, especially those on the relation between psychology
and religion. In his view, obscure and often neglected texts
of writers in the past shed unexpected light not only on
Jung's own dreams and fantasies but also on those of his
patients; he thought it necessary for the successful prosecution
of their art that psychotherapists become familiar with
writings of the old masters.
Besides the development of new psychotherapeutic methods
that derived from his own experience and the theories developed
from them, Jung gave fresh importance to the so-called Hermetic
tradition. He conceived that the Christian religion was
part of a historic process necessary for the development
of consciousness, but he thought that the heretical movements,
starting with Gnosticism and ending in alchemy, were manifestations
of unconscious archetypal elements not adequately expressed
in the varying forms of Christianity. He was particularly
impressed with his finding that alchemical-like symbols
could be found frequently in modern dreams and fantasies,
and he thought that alchemists had constructed a kind of
textbook of the collective unconscious. He drove this home
in four large volumes of his Collected Works.
His historical studies aided him in pioneering the psychotherapy
of the middle-aged and elderly, especially those who felt
their lives had lost meaning. He helped them to appreciate
the place of their lives in the sequence of history. Most
of these patients had lost their religious belief; Jung
found that if they could discover their own myth as expressed
in dream and imagination they would become more complete
personalities. He called this process individuation.
In later years he became professor of psychology at the
Federal Polytechnical University in Zürich (1933–41)
and professor of medical psychology at the University of
Basel (1943). His personal experience, his continued psychotherapeutic
practice, and his wide knowledge of history placed him in
a unique position to comment on current events. As early
as 1918 he had begun to think that Germany held a special
position in Europe; the Nazi revolution was, therefore,
highly significant for him, and he delivered a number of
hotly contested views that led to his being wrongly branded
as a Nazi sympathizer. Jung lived to the age of 85.
The authoritative English collection of all Jung's published
writings is Herbert Read, Michael Fordham, and Gerhard Adler
(eds.), The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, trans. by R.F.C.
Hull, 20 vol., 2nd ed. (1966– ). Jung's The Psychology
of the Unconscious appears in revised form as Symbols of
Transformation in the Collected Works. His other major individual
publications include Über die Psychologie der Dementia
Praecox (1907; The Psychology of Dementia Praecox); Versuch
einer Darstellung der psychoanalytischen Theorie (1913;
The Theory of Psychoanalysis); Collected Papers on Analytical
Psychology (1916); Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (1928);
Das Geheimnis der goldenen Blüte (1929; The Secret
of the Golden Flower); Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933),
a collection of essays covering topics from dream analysis
and literature to the psychology of religion; Psychology
and Religion (1938); Psychologie und Alchemie (1944; Psychology
and Alchemy); and Aion: Untersuchungen zur Symbolgeschichte
(1951; Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self).
Jung's Erinnerungen, Träume, Gedanken (1962; Memories,
Dreams, Reflections) is fascinating semiautobiographical
reading, partly written by Jung himself and partly recorded
by his secretary.
Additional reading
Vincent Brome, Jung (1978); and Gerhard Wehr, Jung (1987),
are biographies. His theories are clearly presented in Anthony
Storr, C.G. Jung (1973; also published as Jung, 1973, reprinted
1991); and Anthony Stevens, On Jung (1990).
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