Home > International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis > Jung, Carl Gustav (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.

THOMAS KIRSCH

Works discussed: Psychology of Dementia præcox; Psychology of the Unconscious, The.

See also: AllgemeineÄrztliche Gesellschaft fürPsychotherapie; Analytical psychology; "Autobiographical Study, An"; Belief; Bleuler, Paul Eugen; Burghölzli asylum; Clark University; Complex; Cryptomnesia; Deferred action; Delusions and Dreams in Jensen's "Gradiva"; Ego-libido/object-libido; First World War: The effect on the development of psychoanalysis; Free association; "From the History of an Infantile Neurosis" (Wolf Man); Great Britain; Gross, Otto Hans Adolf; Hirschfeld, Elfriede, Imago; International Psychoanalytical Association; Jahrbuch der Psychoanalyse; Libido; Mother goddess. Midlife crisis; Mysticism; "On Narcissism: An Introduction"; "On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement"; Primal scene; Psychoanalysis of Fire, The; "Psycho-Analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides)"; Religion and psychoanalysis; Schizophrenia; Self-consciousness; Spielrein, Sabina; Splits in psychoanalysis; Switzerland (German-speaking); Symbolization, process of; Telepathy; Totem and Taboo.