ABSTRACT
Carl Gustav Jung was born on 26 July 1875 in Kesswil, a small town on Lake Constance in Switzerland. Six months later the family moved to Laufen, close to the Falls of the Rhine where his father was the vicar, and then in 1879 to Klein-Hüningen, a small village close to Basel. He was educated at the Gymnasium in Basel, and from there went on to study medicine at the University of Basel (1895-1900). In 1900 he became assistant to Eugen Bleuler at the Burghölzli Mental Hospital in Zurich, with one term at the Salpêtrière in Paris studying psychopathology with Pierre Janet. In 1903 Jung married Emma Rauschenbach, the daughter of a rich industrialist, with whom he had fallen in love seven years before, and at first sight, when she was a young girl of fourteen. Together they built a house at Küsnacht on the Lake of Zurich-in 1923 they were to build a country retreat, the Tower at Bollingen-and from here Jung established a private practice so extensive that he left the Burghölzli in 1909. Meantime, in 1906, Jung had sent Freud his publication on word association, and then in 1907 his important book, The Psychology of Dementia Praecox. This brought an invitation from Freud to visit him in Vienna in the same year. Their first conversation lasted without interruption for thirteen hours. In 1908, at Freud’s instigation, Jung became chief editor of the first psychoanalytic periodical, the Jahrbuch für psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen (with Freud and Bleuler as directors); in 1909 they travelled together to the USA, where both received honorary degrees from Clark University, Massachusetts; and in 1910 Jung became the first president of the International Psychoanalytic Association. However, in 1911 Jung published the first part of his The Psychology of the Unconscious (later translated as Symbols of Transformation) in which he made clear that he did not agree with Freud’s views on sexuality and the Oedipus complex. In September 1912 Jung travelled again to the USA, and there openly criticized Freud and psychoanalysis. Their association became increasingly difficult on both a personal and academic level, and came to an acrimonious end in 1913. With the outbreak of war in 1914 Jung was called upon for military service and was in charge of camps for interned officers and other ranks of the British and Indian Armies. Jung’s
international reputation largely depends on work completed after this period, most notably Psychological Types (1921), which is his principal contribution to the psychology of the unconscious mind, and in which he distinguishes between two attitudes to life, the introverted and the extraverted. This study of the structure and activity of the unconscious led to an extensive analysis of other activities of the unconscious, most notably that of the ‘collective unconscious,’ ‘archetypes’ and the ‘individuation process,’ together with their associated phenomena: mythology, gnosis, kabbala and alchemy. Specific theological problems also fascinated Jung, as is clear from his Terry lectures of 1938, Psychology and Religion, and his highly controversial Answer to Job of 1952. Jung’s research was also greatly enriched by his interest in other cultures, particularly those of the East, and by several trips abroad, to Kenya, India and to the Pueblo Indians of Arizona and New Mexico. He died on 6 June 1961.
