Carl Jung

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Carl Jung bigraphy, stories - Swiss psychiatrist, influential thinker, and founder of analytical psychology

Carl Jung : biography

26 July 1875 – 6 June 1961

Carl Gustav Jung ( ; 26 July 1875 – 6 June 1961) was a Swiss psychotherapist and psychiatrist who founded analytical psychology. Jung proposed and developed the concepts of the extraverted and the introverted personality, archetypes, and the collective unconscious. His work has been influential in psychiatry and in the study of religion, literature, and related fields.

The central concept of analytical psychology is individuation – the psychological process of integrating the opposites, including the conscious with the unconscious, while still maintaining their relative autonomy.Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 209. Jung considered individuation to be the central process of human development. Retrieved on 2009-2-20

Jung created some of the best known psychological concepts, including the archetype, the collective unconscious, the complex, and synchronicity. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), a popular psychometric instrument, has been developed from Jung’s theories.

Jung saw the human psyche as "by nature religious",Aniela Jaffe, foreword to Memories, Dreams, Reflections, . and made this religiousness the focus of his explorations. Jung is one of the best known contemporary contributors to dream analysis and symbolization.

Though he was a practicing clinician and considered himself to be a scientist, much of his life’s work was spent exploring tangential areas, including Eastern and Western philosophy, alchemy, astrology, and sociology, as well as literature and the arts. His interest in philosophy and the occult led many to view him as a mystic.

Early life and career

Youth

Birth

Carl Jung was born Karl Gustav II Jung in Kesswil, in the Swiss canton of Thurgau, on 26 July 1875, as the fourth but only surviving child of Paul Achilles Jung and Emilie Preiswerk. Emilie Preiswerk was the youngest child of Samuel Preiswerk who was also Paul Achilles Jung’s professor of Hebrew. His father was a poor rural pastor in the Swiss Reformed Church, while his mother came from a wealthy and established Swiss family.

When Jung was six months old his father was appointed to a more prosperous parish in Laufen. Meanwhile, the tension between his parents was growing. An eccentric and depressed woman, Emilie Jung spent much of the time in her own separate bedroom, enthralled by the spirits that she said visited her at night. Jung had a better relationship with his father because he thought him to be predictable and thought his mother to be very problematic. Although during the day he also saw her as predictable, at night he felt some frightening influences from her room. At night his mother became strange and mysterious. Jung claimed that one night he saw a faintly luminous and indefinite figure coming from her room, with a head detached from the neck and floating in the air in front of the body.

His mother left Laufen for several months of hospitalization near Basel for an unknown physical ailment. Young Carl Jung was taken by his father to live with Emilie Jung’s unmarried sister in Basel, but was later brought back to the pastor’s residence. Emilie’s continuing bouts of absence and often depressed mood influenced her son’s attitude towards women — one of "innate unreliability," a view that he later called the "handicap I started off with"Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 8. and that resulted in his sometimes patriarchal views of women. After three years of living in Laufen, Paul Jung requested a transfer and was called to Kleinhüningen in 1879. The relocation brought Emilie Jung in closer contact to her family and lifted her melancholy and despondent mood.

Childhood memories

A solitary and introverted child, Jung was convinced from childhood that, like his mother, he had two personalities — a modern Swiss citizen and a personality more at home in the eighteenth century. "Personality Number 1," as he termed it, was a typical schoolboy living in the era of the time, while "Personality Number 2" was a dignified, authoritative and influential man from the past. Although Jung was close to both parents he was rather disappointed in his father’s academic approach to faith.