Historical Context

Jung's thinking, like Freud's, was shaped by the time and place of his upbringing. Many of Jung's attitudes, such as his views of women and his fascination with the occult, reflect the intellectual and cultural currents of his time.

The disintegration of Western culture in the nineteenth century

One of the intellectual developments that affected most educated Europeans in the nineteenth century was a loss of cultural unity. This fragmentation resulted from several broad social and technological developments. One was the sheer accumulation of information in all fields of human knowledge, requiring people to specialize in relatively small areas of expertise rather than sharing a common body of knowledge. The second was the steady movement of population from the countryside into the cities. As people...