Early life and career
Carl Gustav Jung was born on 26 July 1875 in Kesswil, Switzerland, the son of a Protestant pastor. A solitary and introspective child, he was drawn early to the questions of religion, myth and the inner life that would occupy him for the rest of his career. He studied medicine at the University of Basel and then specialised in psychiatry, joining the staff of the Burghölzli, the psychiatric hospital of the University of Zürich, in 1900, under the eminent psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler.
At the Burghölzli, Jung carried out pioneering research using word association tests, measuring the delays and disturbances in patients’ responses. From this work he developed his early theory of the complex: an emotionally charged cluster of ideas and memories, gathered around a core theme, operating largely outside conscious awareness. It was work that made his international reputation and brought him into contact with Sigmund Freud.
The friendship and break with Freud
Jung and Freud met in 1907 and formed an intense collaboration. Freud, more than nineteen years Jung’s senior, came to regard him as his intellectual heir and the future of the psychoanalytic movement. For several years they were close.
The friendship broke down around 1913, over a difference that went to the foundations of their work. Freud understood the unconscious and the libido in essentially sexual terms. Jung came to see the unconscious as far broader, a source of creativity, meaning and spiritual life, not only of repressed drives. The split was painful and permanent, and it opened one of the most important periods of Jung’s life.
The confrontation with the unconscious and the Red Book
In the years after the break, Jung underwent a prolonged and deliberate exploration of his own unconscious, working with the images, fantasies and dreams that rose up in him. He recorded this inner journey in a large illuminated manuscript, The Red Book (Liber Novus), which was only published in 2009. Much of his later theory grew directly out of this period of self-experiment.
The structure of the psyche
Jung described the psyche as made up of three broad regions. The ego is the centre of conscious awareness, our sense of “I”. The personal unconscious holds everything forgotten or repressed by the individual, including the complexes. Beneath both lies the collective unconscious, a deeper layer shared by all human beings, inherited rather than personally acquired, and made up of the archetypes.
Archetypes and the collective unconscious
The archetypes are universal, inherited patterns, predispositions to experience and imagine the world in certain recurring ways. They appear across cultures in myth, fairy tale, religion and dream. Among the archetypes Jung described are the persona, the social mask we present to the world; the shadow, everything in ourselves we disown or refuse to see; the anima and animus, the contrasexual images within the psyche; and the Self, the archetype of wholeness and the organising centre of the whole personality. These patterns are also the ground of projection, where we see disowned parts of ourselves in others.
The Self and individuation
At the heart of Jung’s psychology is individuation: the lifelong process of becoming who one most fully is, by bringing unconscious material into consciousness and integrating the opposites within the psyche. It is not about perfection but wholeness, a gradual reconciliation of conscious and unconscious that Jung associated with the Self and with the transcendent function, the psyche’s capacity to hold tension between opposites until something new emerges. Individuation is the deep aim of Jungian analysis.
Synchronicity
In his later years Jung developed the idea of synchronicity, which he defined as meaningful coincidence: the falling together in time of an inner state and an outer event that are connected by meaning rather than by cause. Set out most fully in his 1952 paper, it was Jung’s attempt to describe the kinds of connectedness that ordinary causal thinking cannot explain, and it remains one of his most discussed and debated concepts.
Psychological types
In Psychological Types (1921), Jung introduced the distinction between introversion and extraversion, two fundamental orientations of the psyche, along with four functions: thinking, feeling, sensation and intuition. This typology became one of his most widely applied ideas, and later formed the basis of popular instruments such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.
Dreams, symbols and myth
For Jung, dreams were not disguised wishes to be decoded but genuine communications from the unconscious, expressed in the language of symbol and image. He drew throughout his work on mythology, alchemy, religion and fairy tale as records of the same archetypal patterns that appear in dreams. Symbol, for Jung, was the natural language of the psyche.
Later years and legacy
Jung continued to write and practise until the end of his life, his final contribution being to the accessible volume Man and His Symbols. He died at his home in Küsnacht, near Zürich, on 6 June 1961, aged 85.
His influence is hard to overstate. Analytical psychology, the school he founded, continues worldwide, carried on by figures such as Marie-Louise von Franz, James Hillman and Erich Neumann. Words he brought into common use, archetype, complex, introvert, extravert, the collective unconscious, are now part of everyday language, and his understanding of the psyche remains at the heart of depth-oriented psychotherapy.
Working with Jung’s ideas today
Jung’s psychology is not only a body of theory but a way of working, one that takes dreams, symbols and the unconscious seriously as guides to a fuller life. That is the work of a Jungian analyst: to help a person listen to what the unconscious is expressing and move, over time, toward greater wholeness. The Jungian Confrerie is the practice of Dr Philippe Jacquet, offering Jungian analysis in central London and online worldwide.