Carl Jung

"Jung" redirects here. For his grandfather, a professor of medicine, see Karl Gustav Jung. For other uses, see Jung (disambiguation).

Carl Jung
Jung, c. 1935
Born	Carl Gustav Jung (1875-07-26)26 July 1875 Kesswil, Thurgau, Switzerland
Died	6 June 1961(1961-06-06) (aged 85) Küsnacht, Zürich, Switzerland
Alma mater	University of Basel University of Zurich
Known for	Analytical psychology Psychological Types Collective unconscious Complex Archetypes Anima and animus Enantiodromia Synchronicity Shadow Extraversion and introversion
Spouse	Emma Rauschenbach ​ ​ (m. 1903; died 1955)​
Children	5
Relatives	Karl Gustav Jung (grandfather)
Scientific career
Fields	Psychiatry psychology
Institutions	Burghölzli
Doctoral advisor	Eugen Bleuler
Signature

Carl Gustav Jung (/jʊŋ/ YUUNG; German: [kaʁl ˈjʊŋ]; 26 July 1875 – 6 June 1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist, psychotherapist, psychologist and pioneering evolutionary theorist who founded the school of analytical psychology. He was a prolific author, illustrator, and correspondent, and a complex and controversial character, perhaps best known through his "autobiography" Memories, Dreams, Reflections.

Jung's work has been influential in the fields of psychiatry, anthropology, archaeology, literature, philosophy, psychology, religious studies and evolutionary theory. He worked as a research scientist at the Burghölzli psychiatric hospital, in Zurich, under Eugen Bleuler. Jung established himself as an influential mind, developing a friendship with Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis, conducting a lengthy correspondence paramount to their joint vision of human psychology. Jung is widely regarded as one of the most influential psychologists in history.

Freud saw the younger Jung not only as the heir he had been seeking to take forward his "new science" of psychoanalysis, but as a means to legitimize his own work: Freud and other contemporary psychoanalysts were Jews facing rising antisemitism in Europe, and Jung was Christian. Freud secured Jung's appointment as president of Freud's newly founded International Psychoanalytical Association. Jung's research and personal vision, however, made it difficult to follow his older colleague's doctrine and they parted ways. This division was painful for Jung and resulted in the establishment of Jung's analytical psychology, as a comprehensive system separate from psychoanalysis. Scholar Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi believed Jung's later antisemitic remarks may be a clue to the schism.

Among the central concepts of analytical psychology is individuation—the lifelong psychological process of differentiation of the self out of each individual's conscious and unconscious elements. Jung considered it to be the main task of human development. He created some of the best known psychological concepts, including synchronicity, archetypal phenomena, the collective unconscious, the psychological complex, and extraversion and introversion. His belief that some alcoholics may recover if they have a 'spiritual or religious experience' indirectly influenced the later founding of Alcoholics Anonymous. Jung was an artist, craftsman, builder, and prolific writer. Many of his works were not published until after his death and some remain unpublished.

Biography

Early life

Childhood

Carl Gustav Jung was born 26 July 1875 in Kesswil, in the Swiss canton of Thurgau, as the first surviving son of Paul Achilles Jung (1842–1896) and Emilie Preiswerk (1848–1923). His birth was preceded by two stillbirths and that of a son named Paul, born in 1873, who survived only a few days.

Paul Jung, Carl's father, was the youngest son of noted German-Swiss professor of medicine at Basel, Karl Gustav Jung (1794–1864). Paul's hopes of achieving a fortune never materialised, and he did not progress beyond the status of an impoverished rural pastor in the Swiss Reformed Church. Emilie Preiswerk, Carl's mother, had also grown up in a large family, whose Swiss roots went back five centuries. Emilie was the youngest child of a distinguished Basel churchman and academic, Samuel Preiswerk (1799–1871), and his second wife. Samuel Preiswerk was an Antistes, the title given to the head of the Reformed clergy in the city, as well as a Hebraist, author, and editor, who taught Paul Jung as his professor of Hebrew at Basel University.

The clergy house in Kleinhüningen, Basel, where Jung grew up

Jung's father was appointed to a more prosperous parish in Laufen when Jung was six months old. Tensions between father and mother had developed. Jung's mother was an eccentric and depressed woman; she spent considerable time in her bedroom, where she said spirits visited her at night. Though she was normal during the day, Jung recalled that at night his mother became strange and mysterious. He said 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. Jung had a better relationship with his father.

Jung's mother left Laufen for several months of hospitalization near Basel, for an unknown physical ailment. His father took Carl to be cared for by Emilie Jung's unmarried sister in Basel, but he was later brought back to his father's residence. Emilie Jung's continuing bouts of absence and depression deeply troubled her son and caused him to associate women with "innate unreliability", whereas "father" meant for him reliability, but also powerlessness. In his memoir, Jung would remark that this parental influence was the "handicap I started off with". Later, these early impressions were revised: "I have trusted men friends and been disappointed by them, and I have mistrusted women and was not disappointed." After three years of living in Laufen, Paul Jung requested a transfer. In 1879 he was called to Kleinhüningen, next to Basel, where his family lived in a parsonage of the church. The relocation brought Emilie Jung closer into contact with her family and lifted her melancholy. When he was 9, Jung's sister Johanna Gertrud (1884–1935) was born. Known in the family as "Trudi", she became a secretary to her brother.

Memories of childhood

Jung was a solitary and introverted child. From childhood, he believed that, like his mother, he had two personalities—a modern Swiss citizen and a personality more suited to the 18th century. "Personality Number 1", as he termed it, was a typical schoolboy living in the era of the time. "Personality Number 2" was a dignified, authoritative, and influential man from the past. Though Jung was close to both parents, he was disappointed by his father's academic approach to faith.

Young Jung, early 1880s

Some childhood memories made lifelong impressions on him. As a boy, he carved a tiny mannequin into the end of the wooden ruler from his pencil case and placed it inside the case. He added a stone, which he had painted into upper and lower halves, and hid the case in the attic. Periodically, he would return to the mannequin, often bringing tiny sheets of paper with messages inscribed on them in his own secret language. He later reflected that this ceremonial act brought him a feeling of inner peace and security. Years later, he discovered similarities between his personal experience and the practices associated with totems in indigenous cultures, such as the collection of soul-stones near Arlesheim or the tjurungas of Australia. He concluded that his intuitive ceremonial act was an unconscious ritual, which he had practiced in a way that was strikingly similar to those in distant locations which he, as a young boy, knew nothing about. His observations about symbols, archetypes, and the collective unconscious were inspired, in part, by these early experiences combined with his later research.

At the age of 12, shortly before the end of his first year at the Humanistisches Gymnasium in Basel, Jung was pushed to the ground by another boy so hard he momentarily lost consciousness. (Jung later recognized the incident was indirectly his fault.) A thought then came to him—"now you won't have to go to school anymore". From then on, whenever he walked to school or began homework, he fainted. He remained at home for the next six months until he overheard his father speaking hurriedly to a visitor, about the boy's future ability to support himself. They suspected he had epilepsy. Confronted with the reality of his family's poverty, he realized the need for academic excellence. He went into his father's study and began poring over Latin grammar. He fainted three more times, but eventually overcame the urge and did not faint again. This event, Jung later recalled, "was when I learned what a neurosis is".

University studies and early career

The University of Basel, where Jung studied between 1895 and 1900

Initially, Jung had aspirations of becoming a preacher or minister. There was a strong moral sense in his household and several of his family were clergymen. Jung had wanted to study archaeology, but his family could not afford to send him further than the University of Basel, which did not teach it. After studying philosophy in his teens, Jung decided against the path of religious traditionalism and decided to pursue psychiatry and medicine. His interest was captured—it combined the biological and spiritual, exactly what he was searching for. In 1895 Jung began to study medicine at the University of Basel. Barely a year later, his father Paul died and left the family near destitute. They were helped by relatives who also contributed to Jung's studies. During his student days, he entertained his contemporaries with the family legend that his paternal grandfather was the illegitimate son of Goethe and his German great-grandmother, Sophie Ziegler. In later life, he pulled back from this tale, saying only that Sophie was a friend of Goethe's niece.

It was during this early period, when Jung was an assistant at the Anatomical Institute at Basel University, that he took an interest in palaeoanthropology and the revolutionary discoveries of Homo erectus and Neanderthal fossils. These formative experiences contributed to his fascination with the evolutionary past of humanity and his belief that an ancient evolutionary layer in the psyche, represented by early fossil hominins, is still evident in the psychology of modern humans.

In 1900, Jung moved to Zürich and began working at the Burghölzli psychiatric hospital under Eugen Bleuler. Bleuler was already in communication with the Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud. Jung's dissertation, published in 1903, was titled On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena. It was based on the analysis of the supposed mediumship of Jung's cousin Hélène Preiswerk, under the influence of Freud's contemporary Théodore Flournoy. Jung studied with Pierre Janet in Paris in 1902 and later equated his view of the complex with Janet's idée fixe subconsciente. In 1905, Jung was appointed as a permanent 'senior' doctor at the hospital and became a lecturer Privatdozent in the medical faculty of Zurich University. In 1904, he published with Franz Riklin their Diagnostic Association Studies, of which Freud obtained a copy. In 1909, Jung left the psychiatric hospital and began a private practice in his home in Küsnacht.

Eventually, a close friendship and strong professional association developed between the elder Freud and Jung, which left a sizeable correspondence. In late summer 1909, the two sailed for the U.S., where Freud was the featured lecturer at the twentieth anniversary celebration of the founding of Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, the Vicennial Conference on Psychology and Pedagogy, September 7–11. Jung spoke as well and received an honorary degree.

It was during this trip that Jung first began separating psychologically from Freud, his mentor, which occurred after intense communications around their individual dreams. And it was during this visit that Jung was introduced to the elder philosopher and psychologist William James, known as the "Father of American psychology," whose ideas Jung would incorporate into his own work. Jung connected with James around their mutual interests in mysticism, spiritualism and psychical phenomena. James wrote to a friend after the conference stating Jung "left a favorable impression," while "his views of Freud were mixed." James died about eleven months later.

The ideas of both Jung and James, on topics including hopelessness, self-surrender and spiritual experiences, were influential in the development and founding of the international altruistic, self-help movement Alcoholics Anonymous on June 10, 1935, in Akron, Ohio, a quarter of a century after James' death and in Jung's sixtieth year.

For six years, Jung and Freud cooperated in their work. In 1912, however, Jung published Psychology of the Unconscious, which made manifest the developing theoretical divergence between the two. Consequently, their personal and professional relationship fractured—each stating the other was unable to admit he could be wrong. After the culminating break in 1913, Jung went through a difficult and pivotal psychological transformation, exacerbated by the outbreak of the First World War. Henri Ellenberger called Jung's intense experience a "creative illness" and compared it favorably to Freud's own period of what he called neurasthenia and hysteria.

Marriage

Emma Jung in 1911. She assisted her husband in his early research before becoming a psychoanalyst and author.

In 1903, Jung married Emma Rauschenbach (1882–1955), seven years his junior and the elder daughter of a wealthy industrialist in eastern Switzerland, Johannes Rauschenbach-Schenck. Rauschenbach was the owner, among other concerns, of IWC Schaffhausen—the International Watch Company, manufacturer of luxury time-pieces. Upon his death in 1905, his two daughters and their husbands became owners of the business. Jung's brother-in-law—Ernst Homberger—became the principal proprietor, but the Jungs remained shareholders in a thriving business that ensured the family's financial security for decades. Emma Jung, whose education had been limited, evinced considerable ability and interest in her husband's research and threw herself into studies and acted as his assistant at Burghölzli. She eventually became a noted psychoanalyst in her own right. The marriage lasted until Emma died in 1955. They had five children:

• Agathe Niehus, born on December 28, 1904
• Gret Baumann, born on February 8, 1906
• Franz Jung-Merker, born on November 28, 1908
• Marianne Niehus, born on September 20, 1910
• Helene Hoerni, born on March 18, 1914

None of the children continued their father's career. The daughters, Agathe and Marianne, assisted in publishing work.

During his marriage, Jung engaged in at least one extramarital relationship: his affair with his patient and, later, fellow psychoanalyst Sabina Spielrein. A continuing affair with Toni Wolff is also alleged.

Relationship with Freud

See also: Psychoanalysis

Meeting and collaboration

Group photo 1909 in front of Clark University. Front row, Sigmund Freud, G. Stanley Hall, Carl Jung. Back row, Abraham Brill, Ernest Jones, Sándor Ferenczi.

Jung and Freud influenced each other during the intellectually formative years of Jung's life. Jung had become interested in psychiatry as a student by reading Psychopathia Sexualis by Richard von Krafft-Ebing. In 1900, Jung completed his degree and started work as an intern (voluntary doctor) under the psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler at Burghölzli Hospital. It was Bleuler who introduced him to the writings of Freud by asking him to write a review of The Interpretation of Dreams (1899). In the early 1900s psychology as a science was still in its early stages, but Jung became a qualified proponent of Freud's new "psycho-analysis". Freud needed collaborators and pupils to validate and spread his ideas. Burghölzli was a renowned psychiatric clinic in Zurich and Jung's research had already gained him international recognition. Jung sent Freud a copy of his Studies in Word Association in 1906. The same year, he published Diagnostic Association Studies, a copy of which he later sent to Freud—who had already purchased a copy. Preceded by a lively correspondence, Jung met Freud for the first time in Vienna on 3 March 1907. Jung recalled the discussion between himself and Freud as interminable, unceasing for 13 hours. Six months later, the then 50-year-old Freud sent a collection of his latest published essays to Jung in Zurich. This marked the beginning of an intense correspondence and collaboration that lasted six years. In 1908, Jung became an editor of the newly founded Yearbook for Psychoanalytical and Psychopathological Research.

In 1909, Jung travelled with Freud and Hungarian psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi to the United States; in September they took part in a conference at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. The conference at Clark University was planned by the psychologist G. Stanley Hall and included 27 distinguished psychiatrists, neurologists, and psychologists. It represented a watershed in the acceptance of psychoanalysis in North America. This forged welcome links between Jung and influential Americans. Jung returned to the United States the next year for a brief visit.

In 1910 Freud proposed Jung, "his adopted eldest son, his crown prince and successor", for the position of lifetime President of the newly formed International Psychoanalytical Association. However, after forceful objections from his Viennese colleagues, it was agreed Jung would be elected to serve a two-year term of office.

Divergence and break

Jung outside Burghölzli in 1910

While Jung worked on his Psychology of the Unconscious: a study of the transformations and symbolisms of the libido, tensions manifested between him and Freud because of various disagreements, including those concerning the nature of libido. Jung de-emphasized the importance of sexual development and focused on the collective unconscious: the part of the unconscious that contains memories and ideas that Jung believed were inherited from ancestors. While he did think that libido was an important source for personal growth, unlike Freud, Jung did not believe that libido alone was responsible for the formation of the core personality.

In 1912 these tensions came to a peak because Jung felt severely slighted after Freud visited his colleague Ludwig Binswanger in Kreuzlingen without paying him a visit in nearby Zurich, an incident Jung referred to as "the Kreuzlingen gesture". Shortly thereafter, Jung again traveled to the US and gave the Fordham University lectures, a six-week series, which were published later in the year as Psychology of the Unconscious, subsequently republished as Symbols of Transformation. While they contain remarks on Jung's dissenting view on the libido, they represent largely a "psychoanalytical Jung" and not the theory of analytical psychology, for which he became famous in the following decades. Nonetheless, it was their publication which, Jung declared, "cost me my friendship with Freud".

Another disagreement with Freud stemmed from their differing concepts of the unconscious. Jung saw Freud's theory of the unconscious as incomplete and unnecessarily negative and inelastic. According to Jung, Freud conceived the unconscious solely as a repository of repressed emotions and desires. Jung's observations overlap to an extent with Freud's model of the unconscious, what Jung called the "personal unconscious", but his hypothesis is more about a process than a static model and he also proposed the existence of a second, overarching form of the unconscious beyond the personal, that he named the psychoid—a term borrowed from neo-vitalist philosopher and embryologist Hans Driesch (1867–1941)—but with a somewhat altered meaning. The collective unconscious is not so much a 'geographical location', but a deduction from the alleged ubiquity of archetypes over space and time.

In November 1912, Jung and Freud met in Munich for a meeting among prominent colleagues to discuss psychoanalytical journals. At a talk about a new psychoanalytic essay on Amenhotep IV, Jung expressed his views on how it related to actual conflicts in the psychoanalytic movement. While Jung spoke, Freud suddenly fainted and Jung carried him to a couch.

Jung and Freud personally met for the last time in September 1913 for the Fourth International Psychoanalytical Congress in Munich. Jung gave a talk on psychological types, the introverted and extraverted type in analytical psychology.

Midlife isolation

It was the publication of Jung's book The Psychology of the Unconscious in 1912 that led to the final break with Freud. The letters they exchanged show Freud's refusal to consider Jung's ideas. This rejection caused what Jung described in his posthumously-published autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962) as a "resounding censure". Everyone he knew dropped away from him, except two of his colleagues. After the Munich congress he was on the verge of a suicidal psychosis that precipitated his writing of his Red Book, his seven-volume personal diaries that were only published partially and posthumously in 2009. Eleven years later, in 2020, they were published in their entirety as his Black Books. Jung described his 1912 book as "an attempt, only partially successful, to create a wider setting for medical psychology and to bring the whole of the psychic phenomena within its purview". The book was later revised and retitled Symbols of Transformation in 1952.

London 1913–14

Jung spoke at meetings of the Psycho-Medical Society in London in 1913 and 1914. His travels were soon interrupted by the war, but his ideas continued to receive attention in England primarily through the efforts of Constance Long who translated and published the first English volume of his collected writings.

The Black Books and The Red Book

Main articles: The Red Book (Jung) and Black Books (Jung)

The Red Book resting on Jung's desk

In 1913, at the age of 38, Jung experienced a horrible "confrontation with the unconscious". He saw visions and heard voices. He worried at times that he was "menaced by a psychosis" or was "doing a schizophrenia". He decided that it was valuable experience and, in private, he induced hallucinations or, in his words, a process of "active imagination". He recorded everything he experienced in small journals, which Jung referred to in the singular as his Black Book, considering it a "single integral whole", even though some of these original journals have a brown cover. The material Jung wrote was subjected to several edits, hand-written and typed, including another, "second layer" of text, his continual psychological interpretations during the process of editing. Around 1915, Jung commissioned a large red leather-bound book, and began to transcribe his notes, along with painting, working intermittently for sixteen years.

Jung left no posthumous instructions about the final disposition of what he called the Liber Novus or Red Book. Sonu Shamdasani, a historian of psychology from London, tried for three years to persuade Jung's resistant heirs to have it published. Ulrich Hoerni, Jung's grandson who manages the Jung archives, decided to publish it when the necessary additional funds needed were raised through the Philemon Foundation. Up to September 2008, fewer than about two dozen people had ever seen it.

In 2007, two technicians for DigitalFusion, working with New York City publishers W. W. Norton & Company, scanned the manuscript with a 10,200-pixel scanner. It was published on 7 October 2009, in German with a "separate English translation along with Shamdasani's introduction and footnotes" at the back of the book. According to Sara Corbett, reviewing the text for The New York Times, "The book is bombastic, baroque and like so much else about Carl Jung, a willful oddity, synched with an antediluvian and mystical reality."

The Rubin Museum of Art in New York City displayed Jung's Red Book leather folio, as well as some of his original "Black Book" journals, from 7 October 2009 to 15 February 2010. According to them, "During the period in which he worked on this book Jung developed his principal theories of archetypes, collective unconscious, and the process of individuation." Two-thirds of the pages bear Jung's illuminations and illustrations to the text.

Wartime army service

During World War I, Jung was drafted as an army doctor and soon made commandant of an internment camp for British officers and soldiers. The Swiss were neutral and obliged to intern personnel from either side of the conflict, who crossed their frontier to evade capture. Jung worked to improve the conditions of soldiers stranded in Switzerland and encouraged them to attend university courses.

Travels

Jung emerged from his period of isolation in the late nineteen-tens with the publication of several journal articles, followed in 1921 with Psychological Types, one of his most influential books. There followed a decade of active publication, interspersed with overseas travels.

England (1920, 1923, 1925, 1935, 1938, 1946)

Constance Long arranged for Jung to deliver a seminar in Cornwall in 1920. Another seminar was held in 1923, this one organized by Jung's British protégé Helton Godwin Baynes (known as "Peter") (1882–1943), and another in 1925.

Beatrice Ensor and Jung in Montreux, Switzerland, 1923, for the Second International New Education Fellowship Conference

In 1935, at the invitation of his close British friends and colleagues, H. G. Baynes, E. A. Bennet and Hugh Crichton-Miller, Jung gave a series of lectures at the Tavistock Clinic in London, later published as part of the Collected Works.

In 1938, Jung was awarded an honorary degree by the University of Oxford. At the tenth International Medical Congress for Psychotherapy held at Oxford from 29 July to 2 August 1938, Jung gave the presidential address, followed by a visit to Cheshire to stay with the Bailey family at Lawton Mere.

In 1946, Jung agreed to become the first Honorary President of the newly formed Society of Analytical Psychology in London, having previously approved its training programme devised by Michael Fordham.

United States 1909–1912, 1924–25, 1936–37

During the period of Jung's collaboration with Freud, both visited the US in 1909 to lecture at Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts where both were awarded honorary degrees. In 1912 Jung gave a series of lectures at Fordham University, New York which were published later in the year as Psychology of the Unconscious. Jung made a more extensive trip westward in the winter of 1924–5, financed and organized by Fowler McCormick and George Porter. Of particular value to Jung was a visit with Chief Mountain Lake of the Taos Pueblo near Taos, New Mexico. Jung made another trip to America in 1936, receiving an honorary degree at Harvard and giving lectures in New York and New England for his growing group of American followers. He returned in 1937 to deliver the Terry Lectures at Yale University, later published as Psychology and Religion.

East Africa

In October 1925, Jung embarked on his most ambitious expedition, the "Bugishu Psychological Expedition" to East Africa. He was accompanied by his English friend, "Peter" Baynes and an American associate, George Beckwith. On the voyage to Africa, they became acquainted with an English woman named Ruth Bailey, who joined their safari a few weeks later. The group traveled through Kenya and Uganda to the slopes of Mount Elgon, where Jung hoped to increase his understanding of "primitive psychology" through conversations with the culturally isolated residents of that area. Later he concluded that the major insights he had gleaned had to do with himself and the European psychology in which he had been raised. One of Jung's most famous proposed constructs is kinship libido. Jung defined this as an instinctive feeling of belonging to a particular group or family and Jung believed it was vital to the human experience and used this as an endogamous aspect of the libido and what lies amongst the family. This is similar to a Bantu term called Ubuntu that emphasizes humanity and almost the same meaning as kinship libido, which is, "I am because you are."

India

Jung in about 1935

In December 1937, Jung left Zurich again for an extensive tour of India with Fowler McCormick. In India, he felt himself "under the direct influence of a foreign culture" for the first time. In Africa, his conversations had been strictly limited by the language barrier, but in India, he was able to converse extensively. Hindu philosophy became an important element in his understanding of the role of symbolism and the life of the unconscious, though he avoided a meeting with Ramana Maharshi. He described Ramana as being absorbed in "the self". During these travels he visited the Vedagiriswarar Temple where he had a conversation with a local expert about the symbols and sculptures on the gopuram of this temple. He later wrote about this conversation in his book Aion. Jung became seriously ill on this trip and endured two weeks of delirium in a Calcutta hospital. After 1938, his travels were confined to Europe.

Later life and death

Jung in a 1955 interview

Jung became a full professor of medical psychology at the University of Basel in 1943, but resigned after a heart attack the next year to lead a more private life. In 1945, he began corresponding with an English Roman Catholic priest, Father Victor White, who became a close friend, regularly visiting the Jungs at the Bollingen estate. Jung became ill again in 1952.

Jung continued to publish books until the end of his life, including Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies (1959), which analyzed the archetypal meaning and possible psychological significance of the reported observations of UFOs. In 1961, he wrote his last work, a contribution to Man and His Symbols entitled "Approaching the Unconscious" (published posthumously in 1964). Jung died on 6 June 1961 at Küsnacht after a short illness. He had been beset by circulatory diseases.

Awards

Among his principal distinctions are honorary doctorates from:

• Clark University 1909
• Fordham University 1912
• Harvard University 1936
• University of Allahabad 1937
• University of Benares 1937
• University of Calcutta 1938
• University of Oxford 1938
• University of Geneva 1945
• Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich 1955 on his 80th birthday

In addition, he was:

• given a Literature prize from the city of Zurich, 1932
• made Titular Professor of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, ETH 1935
• appointed Honorary Member of the Royal Society of Medicine 1939
• given a Festschrift at Eranos 1945
• appointed President of the Society of Analytical Psychology, London, 1946
• given a Festschrift by students and friends 1955
• named Honorary citizen of Kűsnacht 1960, on his 85th birthday.

Thought

Jung's family c. 1895: l to r. father Paul, sister Gertrud, mother Emilie and Carl

Jung's thought derived from the classical education he received at school and from early family influences, which on the maternal side were a combination of Reformed Protestant academic theology with an interest in occult phenomena. On his father's side was a dedication to academic discipline emanating from his grandfather, the physician, scientist and first Basel Professor of Medicine, Karl Gustav Jung, a one time student activist and convert from Catholicism to Swiss Reformed Protestantism. Family lore suggested there was at least a social connection to the German polymath, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, through the latter's niece, Lotte Kestner, known as "Lottchen" who was a frequent visitor in Jung senior's household.

Carl Jung, the practicing clinician, writer and founder of analytical psychology, had, through his marriage, the economic security to pursue interests in other intellectual topics of the moment. His early celebrity as a research scientist through the Word Association Test, led to the start of a prolific correspondence and world-wide travel. It opened academic as well as social avenues, supported by his explorations into anthropology, quantum physics, vitalism, Eastern and Western philosophy. He delved into epistemology, alchemy, astrology, and sociology, as well as literature and the arts. Jung's interest in philosophy and spiritual subjects led many to label him as a mystic, although his preference was to be seen as a man of science. Jung, unlike Freud, was deeply knowledgeable about philosophical concepts and sought links between epistemology and emergent theories of psychology.

Key concepts

C. G. Jung Institute, Küsnacht, Switzerland

Within the field of analytical psychology, a brief survey of major concepts developed by Jung include (alphabetical):

• Anima and animus—(archetype) the contrasexual aspect of a person's psyche. In a woman's psyche, her inner personal masculine is conceived both as a complex and an archetypal image; comparably in a man's psyche, his inner personal feminine is conceived both as a complex and an archetypal image.
• Archetype—a concept "borrowed" from anthropology to denote supposedly universal and recurring mental images or themes. Jung's descriptions of archetypes varied over time.
• Archetypal images—universal symbols that can mediate opposites in the psyche, often found in religious art, mythology, and fairy tales across cultures.
• Collective unconscious—aspects of unconsciousness experienced by all people in different cultures.
• Complex—the repressed organisation of images and experiences that governs perception and behaviour.
• Extraversion and introversion—personality traits of degrees of openness or reserve contributing to psychological type.
• Individuation—the process of fulfilment of each individual "which negates neither the conscious or unconscious position but does justice to them both".
• Interpersonal relationship—the way people relate to others is a reflection of the way they relate to their own selves. This may also be extended to relations with the natural environment.
• Persona—element of the personality that arises "for reasons of adaptation or personal convenience"—the "masks" one puts on in various situations.
• Psychological types—a framework for consciously orienting psychotherapists to patients, by raising to consciousness particular modes of personality, differentiation between analyst and patient.
• Shadow—(archetype) the repressed, therefore unknown, aspects of the personality including those often considered to be negative.
• Self—(archetype) the central overarching concept governing the individuation process, as symbolised by mandalas, the union of male and female, totality, and unity. Jung viewed it as the psyche's central archetype.
• Synchronicity—an acausal principle as a basis for the apparently random concurrence of phenomena.

Collective unconscious

Main article: Collective unconscious

Since the establishment of psychoanalytic theory, the notion and meaning of individuals having a personal unconscious has gradually come to be commonly accepted. This was popularised by both Freud and Jung. Whereas an individual's personal unconscious is made up of thoughts and emotions which have, at some time, been experienced or held in mind, but which have been repressed or forgotten, in contrast, the collective unconscious is neither acquired by activities within an individual's life, nor a container of things that are thoughts, memories or ideas which are capable of being conscious during one's life. The contents of it were never naturally "known" through physical or cognitive experience and then forgotten.

The collective unconscious consists of universal heritable elements common to all humans, distinct from other species. However, this does not necessarily imply a genetic cause. It encapsulates fields of evolutionary biology, history of civilization, ethnology, brain and nervous system development, and general psychological development. Considering its composition in practical physiological and psychological terms, "it consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes, which can only become conscious secondarily and which give definite form to certain psychic contents." Jung writes about causal factors in personal psychology, as stemming from, influenced by an abstraction of the impersonal physical layer, the common and universal physiology among all humans. Jung considers that science would hardly deny the existence and basic nature of "instincts", existing as a whole set of motivating urges. The collective unconscious acts as the frame where science can distinguish individual motivating urges, thought to be universal across all individuals of the human species, while instincts are present in all species. Jung contends, "the hypothesis of the collective unconscious is, therefore, no more daring than to assume there are instincts."

Archetype

Main article: Jungian archetypes

Common archetypal motifs: Devourer, Great/Benevolent Mother, Wise Old Man, Hero/Self

The archetype is a concept "borrowed" from anthropology to denote a process of nature. Jung's definitions of archetypes varied over time and have been the subject of debate as to their usefulness. Archetypal images, also referred to as motifs in mythology, are universal symbols that can mediate opposites in the psyche, are often found in religious art, mythology and fairy tales across cultures. Jung saw archetypes as pre-configurations in nature that give rise to repeating, understandable, describable experiences. In addition the concept takes into account the passage of time and of patterns resulting from transformation. Archetypes are said to exist independently of any current event, or its effect. They are said to exert influence both across all domains of experience and throughout the stages of each individual's unique development. Being in part based on heritable physiology, they are thought to have "existed" since humans became a differentiated species. They have been deduced through the development of storytelling over tens of thousands of years, indicating repeating patterns of individual and group experience, behaviors, and effects across the planet, apparently displaying common themes.

The concept did not originate with Jung but with Plato who first conceived of primordial patterns. Later contributions came from Adolf Bastian, and Hermann Usener among others. In the first half of the twentieth century it proved impossible to objectively isolate and categorize the notion of an archetype within a materialist frame. According to Jung, there are "as many archetypes as there are typical situations in life", and he asserted that they have a dynamic mutual influence on one another. Their alleged presence could be extracted from thousand-year-old narratives, from comparative religion and mythology. Jung elaborated many archetypes in "The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious" and in "Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self". Examples of archetypes might be the shadow, the hero, the self, anima, animus, mother, father, child, and trickster.

Shadow

See also: shadow (psychology)

The shadow exists as part of the unconscious mind and is composed of the traits individuals instinctively or consciously resist identifying as their own and would rather ignore, typically: repressed ideas, weaknesses, desires, instincts, and shortcomings. Much of the shadow comes as a result of an individual's adaptation to cultural norms and expectations. Thus, this archetype not only consists of all the things deemed unacceptable by society but also those that are not aligned with one's own personal morals and values.

Jung argues that the shadow plays a distinctive role in balancing one's overall psyche, the counter-balancing to consciousness—"where there is light, there must also be shadow". Without a well-developed shadow (often "shadow work", "integrating one's shadow"), an individual can become shallow and extremely preoccupied with the opinions of others; that is, a walking persona. Not wanting to look at their shadows directly, Jung argues, often results in psychological projection. Individuals project imagined attitudes onto others without awareness. The qualities an individual may hate (or love) in another, may be manifestly present in the individual, who does not see the external, material truth. In order to truly grow as an individual, Jung believed that both the persona and shadow should be balanced.

The shadow can appear in dreams or visions, often taking the form of a dark, wild, exotic figure.

Extraversion and introversion

Main article: Extraversion and introversion

See also: Apollonian and Dionysian

Jung was one of the first people to define introversion and extraversion in a psychological context. In Jung's Psychological Types, he theorizes that each person falls into one of two categories: the introvert or the extravert. Jung compares these two psychological types to ancient archetypes, Apollo and Dionysus. The introvert is likened to Apollo, who shines a light on understanding. The introvert is focused on the internal world of reflection, dreaming, and vision. Thoughtful and insightful, the introvert can sometimes be uninterested in joining the activities of others. The extravert is associated with Dionysus, interested in joining the activities of the world. The extravert is focused on the outside world of objects, sensory perception, and action. Energetic and lively, the extravert may lose their sense of self in the intoxication of Dionysian pursuits. Jungian introversion and extraversion is quite different from the modern idea of introversion and extraversion. Modern theories often stay true to behaviourist means of describing such a trait (sociability, talkativeness, assertiveness, etc.), whereas Jungian introversion and extraversion are expressed as a perspective: introverts interpret the world subjectively, whereas extraverts interpret the world objectively.

Persona

See also: Persona (psychology)

In his psychological theory—which is not necessarily linked to a particular theory of social structure—the persona appears as a consciously created personality or identity, fashioned out of part of the collective psyche through socialization, acculturation and experience. Jung applied the term persona, explicitly because, in Latin, it means both personality and the masks worn by Roman actors of the classical period, expressive of the individual roles played.

The persona, he argues, is a mask for the "collective psyche", a mask that 'pretends' individuality, so that both self and others believe in that identity, even if it is really no more than a well-played role through which the collective psyche is expressed. Jung regarded the "persona-mask" as a complicated system which mediates between individual consciousness and the social community: it is "a compromise between the individual and society as to what a man should appear to be". But he also makes it quite explicit that it is, in substance, a character mask in the classical sense known to theatre, with its double function: both intended to make a certain impression on others, and to hide (part of) the true nature of the individual. The therapist then aims to assist the individuation process through which the client (re)gains their "own self"—by liberating the self, both from the deceptive cover of the persona, and from the power of unconscious impulses.

Jung has influenced management theory; because managers and executives create an appropriate "management persona" (a corporate mask) and a persuasive identity, and they have to evaluate what sort of people the workers are, to manage them (for example, using personality tests and peer reviews).

Evolutionary Thought

Of his early years, Jung wrote that ‘mentally my greatest adventure had been the study of Kant and Schopenhauer. The great news of the day was the work of Charles Darwin.’ While Jung’s conception of human psychology is grounded in Darwinian evolutionary theory it is important to note that his evolutionary thought had a distinctively German quality to it. This is because the idiosyncratic reception of Darwin in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Germany resulted in the integration of Darwin's ideas with German embryological and developmental traditions formulated by the Naturphilosophen and theorists such as Ernst Haeckel. It was these traditions that formed the intellectual background of Jung’s evolutionary thought.

The result was that Jung's evolutionary conception of mind focused on embryology and development. From this perspective, the emergence of consciousness both in ontogeny (development) and phylogeny (evolution) was built upon much more archaic, affect based subcortical brain systems. It was this developmental approach to evolution that underpinned his "archaeological" conception of the human psyche consisting of different evolutionary layers, from the deeply archaic to the more evolutionarily recent. Those more archaic structures in the brain Jung believed to be the basis of the “collective unconscious” - an aspect of human psychology shared by all members of the species Homo sapiens.

In commenting on humanity's evolution from an ancient primate ancestor Jung wrote: 'We keep forgetting that we are primates and that we have to make allowances for these primitive layers in our psyche.' Jung also developed the notion of different evolutionary layers in the psyche in his discussion of fossil hominins such as Pithecanthropus (Homo erectus). As he writes:

For just as a man has a body which is no different in principle from that of an animal, so also his psychology has a whole series of lower storeys in which the spectres from humanity’s past epochs still dwell, then the animal souls from the age of Pithecanthropus and the hominids, then the “psyche” of the cold-blooded saurian.

Jung’s notion of different evolutionary layers in the human mind has been compared with the work of neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp, particularly as outlined in his book The Archaeology of Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotions. Of these affinities it has been suggested that ‘Jung and Panksepp have, independently it seems, developed similar metaphors of an archeologically layered psyche in which jewels and treasures are discoverable in the deepest phylogenetically ancient regions of the brain – for Jung they are archetypal structures for Panksepp cross-species homologies.'

Significantly, in a 2017 article entitled "The Affective Core of the Self: A Neuro-Archetypical Perspective on the Foundations of Human (and Animal) Subjectivity", when noting Jung’s belief that archetypes may be related to evolutionarily ancient subcortical brain systems, Panksepp and colleagues wrote that ‘such assertions by Jung were not only quite farsighted, but they actually open ways to connect his theory of the psyche with the most advanced scientific theories and discoveries of our day’

Spirituality

Further information: Jungian interpretation of religion

Jung's work on himself and his patients convinced him that life has a spiritual purpose beyond material goals. The main task for people, he believed, is to discover and fulfill their deep, innate potential. Based on his study of Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Gnosticism, Taoism, and other traditions, Jung believed this journey of transformation, which he called individuation, is at the mystical heart of all religions. It is a journey to meet the self and at the same time to meet the Divine. Unlike Freud's atheistic worldview, Jung's pantheism may have led him to believe that spiritual experience was essential to well-being, as he specifically identifies individual human life with the universe as a whole.

In 1959, Jung was asked by host John Freeman on the BBC interview program Face to Face whether he believed in God, to which Jung answered, "I do not need to believe. I know." Jung's ideas on religion counterbalance Freudian skepticism. Jung's idea of religion as a practical road to individuation is still treated in modern textbooks on the psychology of religion, though his ideas have been criticized.

Jung recommended spirituality as a cure for alcoholism, and is considered to have had an indirect role in establishing Alcoholics Anonymous. Jung once treated an American patient (Rowland Hazard III), who had chronic alcoholism. After working with the patient for some time and achieving no significant progress, Jung told the man that his alcoholic condition was near to hopeless, save only the possibility of a spiritual experience. Jung noted that, occasionally, such experiences had been known to reform alcoholics when all other options had failed. Hazard took Jung's advice seriously and set about seeking a personal, spiritual experience. He returned to the United States and joined a Christian evangelical movement known as the Oxford Group. He told other alcoholics what Jung had told him about the importance of a spiritual experience. One of the alcoholics he brought into the Oxford Group was Ebby Thacher, a long-time friend and drinking buddy of Bill Wilson, later co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous. Thacher told Wilson about the Oxford Group, and, through them, Wilson became aware of Hazard's experience with Jung. The influence of Jung thus indirectly found its way into the formation of Alcoholics Anonymous, the original twelve-step program.

The above claims are documented in the letters of Jung and Bill Wilson. Though the detail is disputed by some historians, Jung discussed an Oxford Group member, who may have been the same person, in talks given around 1940. The remarks were distributed privately in transcript form, from shorthand taken by an attender (Jung reportedly approved the transcript), and later recorded in his Collected Works, "For instance, when a member of the Oxford Group comes to me in order to get treatment, I say, 'You are in the Oxford Group; so long as you are there, you settle your affair with the Oxford Group. I can't do it better than Jesus.'" Jung goes on to state he has seen similar cures among Roman Catholics. The 12 step program of Alcoholics Anonymous has a psychological backdrop, involving the human ego and dichotomy between the conscious and unconscious mind.

Inquiries into the paranormal

Jung had an apparent interest in the paranormal and occult. For decades he attended seances and claimed to have witnessed "parapsychic phenomena". Initially, he attributed these to psychological causes, even delivering a 1919 lecture in England for the Society for Psychical Research on "The Psychological Foundations for the belief in spirits". However, he began to "doubt whether an exclusively psychological approach can do justice to the phenomena in question" and stated that "the spirit hypothesis yields better results". But he retained some skepticism toward his own postulation, as he could not find material evidence of the existence of spirits.

Jung's ideas about the paranormal culminated in "synchronicity". This is the idea that certain coincidences manifest in the world, have exceptionally intense meaning to observers. Such coincidences have great effect on the observer from multiple cumulative aspects: from the immediate personal relevance of the coincidence to the observer; from the peculiarities of (the nature of, the character, novelty, curiosity of) any such coincidence; from the sheer improbability of the coincidence, having no apparent causal link (hence Jung's essay subtitle "An Acausal Connecting Principle"). Despite his own experiments failing to confirm the phenomenon he held on to the idea as an explanation for apparent ESP. In addition, he proposed it as a functional explanation for how the I-Ching worked, although he was never clear about how synchronicity worked.

Interpretation of quantum mechanics

Jung influenced one philosophical interpretation (not the science) of quantum physics with the concept of synchronicity regarding some events as non-causal. That idea influenced the physicist Wolfgang Pauli (with whom, via a letter correspondence, Jung developed the notion of unus mundus in connection with the notion of nonlocality) and some other physicists.

Alchemy

The mythic alchemical philosopher's stone as pictured in Atalanta Fugiens Emblem 21

Jung's acquaintance with alchemy came between 1928 and 1930, when he was introduced to a manuscript of The Secret of the Golden Flower, translated by Richard Wilhelm. The work and writings of Jung from the 1930s onwards shifted to a focus on the psychological significance of alchemy.

In 1944 Jung published Psychology and Alchemy, in which he analyzed the alchemical symbols and came to the conclusion that there is a direct relationship between them and the psychoanalytical process. He argued that the alchemical process was the transformation of the impure soul (lead) to perfected soul (gold), and a metaphor for the individuation process.

In 1963 Mysterium Coniunctionis first appeared in English as part of The Collected Works of C. G. Jung. Mysterium Coniunctionis was Jung's last major book and focused on the "Mysterium Coniunctionis" archetype, known as the sacred marriage between sun and moon. Jung argued that the stages of the alchemists, the blackening, the whitening, the reddening, and the yellowing, could be taken as symbolic of individuation—his chosen term for personal growth (75).

Art therapy

Further information: Art therapy

Jung proposed that art can be used to alleviate or contain feelings of trauma, fear, or anxiety and also to repair, restore and heal. In his work with patients and his own personal explorations, Jung wrote that art expression and images found in dreams could help recover from trauma and emotional distress. At times of emotional distress, he often drew, painted, or made objects and constructions which he recognized as more than recreational.

Dance/movement therapy

Dance/movement therapy as active imagination was created by Jung and Toni Wolff in 1916 and practiced by Tina Keller-Jenny and other analysts, but remained largely unknown until the 1950s when it was rediscovered by Marian Chace and therapist Mary Whitehouse. Whitehouse, after studying with Martha Graham and Mary Wigman, became a dancer and teacher of modern dance, as well as Swiss dancer Trudy Schoop in 1963, who is considered one of the founders of dance/movement therapy in the US.

Political views

The state

Jung stressed the importance of individual rights in a person's relation to the state and society. He saw that the state was treated as "a quasi-animate personality from whom everything is expected" but that this personality was "only camouflage for those individuals who know how to manipulate it", and referred to the state as a form of slavery. He also thought that the state "swallowed up [people's] religious forces", and therefore that the state had "taken the place of God"—making it comparable to a religion in which "state slavery is a form of worship". Jung observed that "stage acts of [the] state" are comparable to religious displays:

Brass bands, flags, banners, parades and monster demonstrations are no different in principle from ecclesiastical processions, cannonades and fire to scare off demons.

From Jung's perspective, this replacement of God with the state in a mass society leads to the dislocation of the religious drive and results in the same fanaticism of the church-states of the Dark Ages—wherein the more the state is 'worshipped', the more freedom and morality are suppressed; this ultimately leaves the individual psychically undeveloped with extreme feelings of marginalization.

Service to the Allies during World War II

Jung was in contact with Allen Dulles of the Office of Strategic Services (predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency) and provided valuable intelligence on the psychological condition of Hitler. Dulles referred to Jung as "Agent 488" and offered the following description of his service: "Nobody will probably ever know how much Professor Jung contributed to the Allied Cause during the war, by seeing people who were connected somehow with the other side". Jung's service to the Allied cause through the OSS remained classified after the war.

Relationship to Nazism and antisemitism

In "The State of Psychotherapy Today", published in 1934 in the Zentralblatt für Psychotherapie, Jung wrote: "The Aryan unconscious has a greater potential than the Jewish unconscious" and "The Jew, who is something of a nomad, has never yet created a cultural form of his own and as far as we can see never will". Andrew Samuels argues that his remarks on the "Aryan unconscious" and the "corrosive character" of Freud's "Jewish gospel" demonstrate an antisemitism "fundamental to the structure of Jung's thought" but also argues that there is a "pioneering nature of Jung's contributions" and that "his intuition of the importance of exploring difference remains intact."

In 1933, after the Nazis gained power in Germany, Jung became the president of the new International General Medical Society for Psychotherapy (Allgemeine Ärztliche Gesellschaft für Psychotherapie), a professional body which aimed to have affiliated organizations in different countries. The German affiliated organization, the Deutsche Allgemeine Ärztliche Gesellschaft für Psychotherapie, led by Matthias Göring, an Adlerian psychotherapist and a cousin of the prominent Nazi Hermann Göring, excluded Jews. In 1933, the society's Zentralblatt für Psychotherapie journal published a statement endorsing Nazi positions and Hitler's book Mein Kampf. In 1934, Jung wrote in a Swiss publication, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, that he experienced "great surprise and disappointment" when the Zentralblatt associated his name with the pro-Nazi statement. He did not end his relationship with the Zentralblatt at this time, but he did arrange the appointment of a new managing editor, Carl Alfred Meier of Switzerland. For the next few years, the Zentralblatt under Jung and Meier maintained a position distinct from that of the Nazis, in that it continued to acknowledge contributions of Jewish doctors to psychotherapy. In the face of energetic German attempts to Nazify the international body, Jung resigned from its presidency in 1939, the year the Second World War started.

The International Society's constitution permitted individual doctors to join it directly, rather than through one of the national affiliated societies, a provision to which Jung drew attention in a circular in 1934. This implied that German Jewish doctors could maintain their professional status as individual members of the international body, even though they were excluded from the German affiliate, as well as from other German medical societies operating under the Nazis. Jung went on to say "the main point is to get a young and insecure science into a place of safety during an earthquake".

Scholar Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi believed that Jung's antisemitism may have contributed to the schism from Freud and his circle of psychoanalysts, who were predominantly Jews.

Jung's interest in European mythology and folk psychology was shared by the Nazis. Richard Noll describes Jung's own reaction to this connection:

Jung clearly identifies himself with the spirit of German Volkstumsbewegung throughout this period and well into the 1920s and 1930s, until the horrors of Nazism finally compelled him to reframe these neopagan metaphors in a negative light in his 1936 essay on Wotan.

Various statements made by Jung in the 1930s have been cited as evidence of both contempt for Nazism and sympathy for Nazism. In the 1936 essay "Wotan", Jung described the influence of Adolf Hitler on Germany as "one man who is obviously 'possessed' has infected a whole nation to such an extent that everything is set in motion and has started rolling on its course towards perdition." He would later say, during a lengthy interview with H. R. Knickerbocker in October 1938:

Hitler seemed like the 'double' of a real person, as if Hitler the man might be hiding inside like an appendix, and deliberately so concealed in order not to disturb the mechanism ... You know you could never talk to this man; because there is nobody there ... It is not an individual; it is an entire nation.

In an interview in 1949 Carl Jung said,

It must be clear to anyone who has read any of my books that I have never been a Nazi sympathizer and I never have been anti-Semitic, and no amount of misquotation, mistranslation, or rearrangement of what I have written can alter the record of my true point of view. Nearly every one of these passages has been tampered with, either by malice or by ignorance. Furthermore, my friendly relations with a large group of Jewish colleagues and patients over a period of many years in itself disproves the charge of anti-Semitism.

Jung is also known to have possessed an interest in the Jewish mystic tradition of Kabbalah.

Views on homosexuality

Jung addressed homosexuality in his published writings, in one comment specifying that homosexuality should not be a concern of legal authorities nor be considered a crime. He also stated that homosexuality does not reduce the value of a person as a member of society. Jung also said that homosexuality is a result of psychological immaturity, but only if one's sexuality is not an aspect of their constitutional characteristics.

Psychedelics

Jung's theories are considered to be a useful therapeutic framework for the analysis of unconscious phenomena that become manifest in the acute psychedelic state. This view is based on correspondence Jung had with researchers involved in psychedelic research in the 1950s, as well as more recent neuroimaging research where subjects who are administered psychedelic compounds seem to have archetypal religious experiences of "unity" and "ego dissolution" associated with reduced activity in the default mode network.

This research has led to a re-evaluation of Jung's work, and particularly the visions detailed in The Red Book, in the context of contemporary psychedelic, evolutionary and developmental neuroscience. For example, in a chapter entitled "Integrating the Archaic and the Modern: The Red Book, Visual Cognitive Modalities and the Neuroscience of Altered States of Consciousness", in the 2020 volume Jung's Red Book for Our Time: Searching for Soul Under Postmodern Conditions, Volume 4, it is argued Jung was a pioneer who explored uncharted "cognitive domains" that are alien to Western modes of thought. While such domains of experience are not part of mainstream Western culture and thought, they are central to various Indigenous cultures who use psychedelics such as Iboga and Ayahuasca during rituals to alter consciousness. As the author writes: "Jung seems to have been dealing with modes of consciousness alien to mainstream Western thought, exploring the terrain of uncharted cognitive domains. I argue that science is beginning to catch up with Jung who was a pioneer whose insights contribute a great deal to our emerging understanding of human consciousness." In this analysis Jung's paintings of his visions in The Red Book were compared to the paintings of Ayahuasca visions by the Peruvian shaman Pablo Amaringo.

Commenting on research that was being undertaken during the 1950s, Jung wrote the following in a letter to Betty Eisner, a psychologist who was involved in LSD research at the University of California: "Experiments along the line of mescaline and related drugs are certainly most interesting since such drugs lay bare a level of the unconscious that is otherwise accessible only under peculiar psychic conditions. It is a fact that you get certain perceptions and experiences of things appearing either in mystical states or in the analysis of unconscious phenomena."

An account of Jung and psychedelics, as well as the importance of Jungian psychology to psychedelic-assisted therapies, is outlined in Scott Hill's 2013 book Confrontation with the Unconscious: Jungian Depth Psychology and Psychedelic Experience. A 2021 article discusses Jung's attitude towards psychedelics, as well as the applicability of his ideas to current research. As the author writes Jung's "...legitimate reservations about the clinical use of psychedelics are no longer relevant as the field has progressed significantly, devising robust clinical and experimental protocols for psychedelic assisted therapies. That said Jung's concept of individuation—that is the integration of the archaic unconscious with consciousness—seems extremely pertinent to modern psychedelic research." The author also uses work in evolutionary and psychedelic neuroscience, and specifically the latter's ability to make manifest ancient subcortical brain systems, to illuminate Jung's concept of an archaic collective unconscious that evolved prior to the ego complex and the uniquely human default mode network.

Legacy

The Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), a psychometric instrument mostly popular with non-psychologists, as well as the concepts of socionics, were developed from Jung's model of psychological types. The MBTI is considered pseudoscience and is not widely accepted by researchers in the field of psychology.

Jung is considered a "godparent" of the altruistic, mutual self-help movement, Alcoholics Anonymous. Jung told Rhode Island businessman and politician Rowland Hazard III, who had come under his care for the first time in 1926, that the only chance he might have to recover was through a "spiritual or religious experience" or "genuine conversion," which Hazard later had, through the Oxford Group and the Emmanuel Movement, and, according to some sources, never drank again.

Hazard, in turn, helped Ebby Thatcher, another alcoholic, get sober, with help from the Oxford Group. Thatcher brought Jung's ideas to a third alcoholic, Bill W., who consequently cofounded Alcoholics Anonymous with Dr. Bob. Years later, Bill W. corresponded with Jung, in 1961, thanking him for helping to inspire the organization. Of Hazard, the alcoholic who came under his care, Jung wrote: "His craving for alcohol was the equivalent, on a low level, of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness, expressed in medieval language: the union with God."

Jung concludes his letter to Bill W.:

"You see, "alcohol" in Latin is spiritus, and you use the same word for the highest religious experience as well as for the most depraving poison. The helpful formula therefore is: spiritus contra spiritum."

Jung saw the human psyche as "by nature religious" and made this idea a principal focus of his explorations. Jung is one of the best known contemporary contributors to dream analysis and symbolization. His influence on popular psychology, the "psychologization of religion", spirituality and the New Age movement has been immense. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Jung as the 23rd most cited psychologist of the 20th century. The list however focused on U.S. journals and was made by the psychology department of Arkansas State University.

Although psychoanalysis is still studied in the humanities, a 2008 study in The Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association found that psychology departments and textbooks treat it as "desiccated and dead". Similarly, Alan Stone noted, "As academic psychology becomes more 'scientific' and psychiatry more biological, psychoanalysis is being brushed aside."

In a 2024 book length reappraisal of Jung’s theories entitled Carl Jung and the Evolutionary Sciences: A New Vision for Analytical Psychology, it has been suggested that Jung was far ahead of his time in his evolutionary conception of the human mind. This thesis asserts that recent work in developmental biology, as well as experimental and psychedelic neuroscience, have provided empirical evidence that supports some of Jung’s central claims about the nature and evolution of consciousness. More specifically, trance states or altered states of consciousness (what Jung often referred to as the numinous) have become a central concern in contemporary neuroscientific investigation of the nature and origins of consciousness. In this sense, as an evolutionary theorist of the mind, Jung was far ahead of his own time. It is only during the first decades of the 21st Century, as scientists began investigating altered, trance and psychedelic states, that Jung’s far seeing and wide ranging theories have found increasing support from the empirically based mind sciences. In this sense we can now appreciate how revolutionary and prescient Jung’s evolutionary conception of human psychology really was.

See also

Houses and institutions

• C. G. Jung House Museum
• Bollingen Tower
• Psychology Club Zürich
• C. G. Jung Institute, Zürich
• Society of Analytical Psychology

Organizations

• International Association for Analytical Psychology
• International Association for Jungian Studies

In popular culture

Literature

Books in which Jung is a character in the narrative

• Laurens van der Post was an Afrikaner author who claimed to have had a 16-year friendship with Jung, from which a number of books and a film were created about Jung. The accuracy of van der Post's claims about his relationship to Jung has been questioned.
• In his novel The World is Made of Glass (1983), Morris West gives a fictional account of one of Jung's cases, placing the events in 1913. According to the author's note, the novel is "based upon a case recorded, very briefly, by Carl Gustav Jung in his autobiographical work Memories, Dreams, Reflections".
• Pilgrim - a supernatural novel in which Jung is a character.
• Possessing the Secret of Joy, a novel in which Jung is a therapist character—
• The Interpretation of Murder - a novel focused on Sigmund Freud in which he solves a murder in New York City.

Fiction which references Jung's theories

• Hermann Hesse, author of works such as Siddhartha and Steppenwolf, was treated by Joseph Lang, a student of Jung. For Hesse this began a long preoccupation with psychoanalysis, through which he came to know Jung personally.
• The Canadian novelist Robertson Davies made Jungian analysis a central part of his 1970 novel The Manticore. He stated in a letter, "There have been other books which describe Freudian analyses, but I know of no other that describes a Jungian analysis" adding "I was deeply afraid that I would put my foot in it, for I have never undergone one of those barnacle-scraping experiences, and knew of it only through reading. So, I was greatly pleased when some of my Jungian friends in Zurich liked it very much."
• The psychological novel E.E. written by Olga Tokarczuk draws from Jung's doctoral dissertation On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena. Jung is not a character in this story, but Jung's views on the occult are extensively cited.

Art

Original statue of Jung in Mathew Street, Liverpool, a half-body on a plinth captioned "Liverpool is the pool of life"

• The visionary Swiss painter Peter Birkhäuser was treated by a student of Jung, Marie-Louise von Franz, and corresponded with Jung about the translation of dream symbolism into works of art.
• American Abstract Expressionist Jackson Pollock underwent Jungian psychotherapy in 1939 with Joseph Henderson. Henderson engaged Pollock through his art, having him make drawings, which led to the appearance of many Jungian concepts in his paintings.
• Contrary to some sources, Jung did not visit Liverpool but recorded a dream in which he did, and of which he wrote, "Liverpool is the pool of life, it makes to live." A plaster statue of Jung was erected in Mathew Street in 1987 that was vandalised and replaced by a more durable version in 1993.

Music

• Musician David Bowie described himself as Jungian in his relationship to dreams and the unconscious. Bowie sang of Jung on his album Aladdin Sane (a pun on "a lad insane") and attended the exhibition of The Red Book in New York with artist Tony Oursler, who described Bowie as "reading and speaking of the psychoanalyst with passion". Bowie's 1967 song "Shadow Man" encapsulates a key Jungian concept, while in 1987 Bowie described the Glass Spiders of Never Let Me Down as Jungian mother figures around which he not only anchored a worldwide tour but also created an enormous onstage effigy.
• British rock band The Police released an album titled Synchronicity in 1983.
• The American rock band Tool was influenced by Jungian concepts in its album Ænima, the title a play on the concepts of anima and animus. In the song "Forty Six & 2", the singer seeks to become a more evolved self by exploring and overcoming his Shadow.
• Argentinian musician Luis Alberto Spinetta was influenced by Jung's texts in his 1975 conceptual album Durazno sangrando, specifically the songs "Encadenado al ánima" and "En una lejana playa del ánimus", which deal with anima and animus.
• Jung appeared on the front cover of The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
• The South Korean band BTS's 2019 album Map of the Soul: Persona is based on Jung's Map of the Soul, which gives the basic principles of Jung's analytical psychology. It includes an intro song titled Persona rapped by group leader RM, who asks, "who am I?", and is confronted with various versions of himself with the words "Persona", "Shadow", and "Ego", referring to Jung's theories. On 21 February 2020, the band released Map of the Soul: 7, which specifically focuses on Jung's "Shadow" and "Ego" theories. As part of the first phase of the band's comeback, Interlude: Shadow, rapped by Suga and released on 10 January, addresses the shadows and the darkness that go hand-in-hand with the light and attention shone on celebrities. The next comeback trailer, "Outro: Ego", performed by J-Hope, ends with his declaration of self and ego as he appears within a colourful city "in which the artist's current image is projected".
• Jung appeared on the cover art of the 2008 single Metanoia by American psychedelic rock band MGMT

Theatre, film, television and radio

Films in which Jung is a character in the narrative

• 2002 saw the release of an Italian film about Jung and Spielrein The Soul Keeper (Prendimi l'Anima) directed by Roberto Faenza. It used English dialogue and English actors, but was never formally released in the United States. Emilia Fox played Sabina Spielrein and Iain Glen was Carl Gustav Jung.
• A Dangerous Method, a 2011 film directed by David Cronenberg, is a fictional dramatisation of the lives of Freud, Jung, and Sabina Spielrein between 1904 and 1913. Spielrein is the Russian woman who became Jung's lover and student and, later, an analyst herself. Michael Fassbender plays Carl Jung. The film is based on the stage play The Talking Cure by Christopher Hampton which was in turn based on the 1993 non-fiction book by John Kerr, A Most Dangerous Method: The Story of Jung, Freud, and Sabina Spielrein.
• In the online animated series, Super Science Friends, Jung, voiced by Tom Park, is featured as one of the recurrent antagonists against Sigmund Freud.
• Soul, a 2020 Pixar film written by Pete Docter, Mike Jones and Kemp Powers, includes brief appearances of Jung as an ethereal cartoon character, "Soul Carl Jung".

Documentaries

• The BBC interviewed Jung for Face to Face with John Freeman at Jung's home in Zurich in 1959.
• Stephen Segaller produced a documentary on Jung as part of his "World of Dreams", Wisdom of the Dream in 1985. It was re-issued in 2018. It was followed by a book of the same title.
• Matter of Heart (1986) is a documentary about Jung featuring interviews with those who knew him and archival footage.
• On 2 December 2004, BBC Radio 4's In Our Time broadcast a program on "the mind and theories" of Jung.

Film, stage, and television influenced by Jung's ideas

• Federico Fellini brought to the screen exuberant imagery shaped by his encounter with Jung's ideas, especially Jungian dream interpretation. Fellini preferred Jung to Freud because Jungian analysis defined the dream not as a symptom of a disease that required a cure but rather as a link to archetypal images shared by all of humanity.
• Stanley Kubrick's 1987 film Full Metal Jacket has an underlying theme about the duality of man. In one scene, a colonel asks a soldier, "You write 'Born to Kill' on your helmet and you wear a peace button. What's that supposed to be, some kind of sick joke?" The soldier replies, "I think I was trying to suggest something about the duality of man, sir...the Jungian thing, sir."
• In the 1994 Frasier episode, "Frasier Crane's Day Off", Niles fills in for his brother, declaring: "Although I feel perfectly qualified to fill Frasier's radio shoes, I should warn you that while Frasier is a Freudian, I am a Jungian. So there'll be no blaming Mother today."
• More recently, Robert Eggers psychological thriller, The Lighthouse has elements strongly influenced by Jung's work with Eggers hoping that "it's a movie where both Jung and Freud would be furiously eating their popcorn".

Video games

• The Persona series of games is heavily based on Jung's theories, representing the shadow, the persona, and archetype.
• The Nights into Dreams series of games is heavily based on Jung's theories.
• Jungian concepts are present in the Xeno series, including Xenogears; its reimagination as the Xenosaga trilogy; and a graphic novel, Perfect Works, published by the game's creator.
• The game Control is heavily influenced by Carl Jung's ideas, particularly synchronicity and shadow selves.
• Alan Wake takes inspiration from Carl Jung's ideas of archetype and individuation.

Bibliography

Main article: Carl Jung publications

Books

• 1910 About the conflicts of a child's soul
• 1912 Psychology of the Unconscious
• 1916 Seven Sermons to the Dead (a part of the Red Book, published privately)
• 1921 Psychological Types
• 1933 Modern Man in Search of a Soul (essays)
• 1944 Psychology and Alchemy
• 1951 Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self
• 1952 Symbols of Transformation (revised edition of Psychology of the Unconscious)
• 1954 Answer to Job
• 1956 Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy
• 1959 Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies (Translated by R. F. C. Hull)
• 1960 Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle
• 1962 Memories, Dreams, Reflections (autobiography, co-written with Aniela Jaffé)
• 1964 Man and His Symbols (Jung contributed one part, his last writing before his death in 1961; the other four parts are by Marie-Louise von Franz, Joseph L. Henderson, Jaffé, and Jolande Jacobi)
• 2009 The Red Book: Liber Novus (manuscript produced c. 1915–1932)
• 2020 Black Books (private journals produced c. 1913–1932, on which the Red Book is based)

Collected Works

Main article: The Collected Works of C. G. Jung

Editors. Herbert Read, Michael Fordham, Gerhard Adler. Executive ed. W. McGuire. Trans R.F.C. Hull. London: Routledge Kegan Paul (1953–1980).

1. Psychiatric Studies (1902–1906)

2. Experimental Researches (1904–1910) (trans L. Stein and D. Riviere)

3. Psychogenesis of Mental Disease (1907–1914; 1919–1958)

4. Freud and Psychoanalysis (1906–1914; 1916–1930)

5. Symbols of Transformation (1911–12; 1952)

6. Psychological Types (1921)

7. Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (1912–28)

8. Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche (1916–1952)

9.1 Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (1934–1955)

9.2 Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self (1951)

10. Civilization in Transition (1918–1959)

11. Psychology and Religion: West and East (1932–1952)

12. Psychology and Alchemy (1936–1944)

13. Alchemical Studies (1919–1945):

14. Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955–56):

15. Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature (1929–1941)

16. The Practice of Psychotherapy (1921–1925)

17. The Development of Personality (1910; 1925–1943)

18. The Symbolic Life: Miscellaneous Writings

19. General Bibliography

20. General Index

Supplementary volumes

A. The Zofingia Lectures

B. Psychology of the Unconscious (trans. Beatrice M. Hinckle)

Seminars

Analytical Psychology (1925)

Dream Analysis (1928–30)

Visions (1930-34)

The Kundalini Yoga (1932)

Nietzsche's Zarathustra (1934-39)

Children's Dreams (1936–1940)

References

Sources

• Hoerni, Ulrich; Fischer, Thomas; Kaufmann, Bettina, eds. (2019). The Art of C.G. Jung. W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 978-0-393-25487-7.

Further reading

Introductory texts

• Carl Gustav Jung, Analytical Psychology: Its Theory and Practice (The Tavistock Lectures) (Ark Paperbacks), 1990, ISBN 978-0-7448-0056-2
• Fordham, Frieda (1966). An Introduction to Jung's Psychology. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd. ISBN 978-0-14-020273-1.
• The Basic Writings of C. G. Jung, edited by V. S. de Laszlo (The Modern Library, 1959), ISBN 978-0-679-60071-8
• Edward F Edinger, Ego and Archetype, (Shambhala Publications), ISBN 978-0-87773-576-2
• Robert Hopcke, A Guided Tour of the Collected Works of C. G. Jung, ISBN 978-1-57062-405-6
• Edward C. Whitmont, The Symbolic Quest: Basic Concepts of Analytical Psychology, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1969, 1979, ISBN 978-0-691-02454-7
• O'Connor, Peter A. (1985). Understanding Jung, understanding yourself. New York, NY: Paulist Press. ISBN 978-0-8091-2799-3.
• Stein, Murray (1998). Jung's map of the soul: An introduction. Chicago: Open Court. ISBN 0-8126-9376-0. OCLC 38106161.

Texts in various areas of Jungian thought

• Robert Aziz, C. G. Jung's Psychology of Religion and Synchronicity (1990), currently in its 10th printing, is a refereed publication of State University of New York Press. ISBN 978-0-7914-0166-8
• Robert Aziz, Synchronicity and the Transformation of the Ethical in Jungian Psychology in Carl B. Becker, ed., Asian and Jungian Views of Ethics. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1999. ISBN 978-0-313-30452-1
• Robert Aziz, The Syndetic Paradigm: The Untrodden Path Beyond Freud and Jung (2007), a refereed publication of The State University of New York Press. ISBN 978-0-7914-6982-8
• Robert Aziz, Foreword in Lance Storm, ed., Synchronicity: Multiple Perspectives on Meaningful Coincidence. Pari, Italy: Pari Publishing, 2008. ISBN 978-88-95604-02-2
• Wallace Clift, Jung and Christianity: The Challenge of Reconciliation. New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1982. ISBN 978-0-8245-0409-0
• Edward F. Edinger, The Mystery of The Coniunctio, ISBN 978-0-919123-67-0
• Wolfgang Giegerich, The Soul's Logical Life, ISBN 978-3-631-38225-7
• James A Hall M.D., Jungian Dream Interpretation, ISBN 978-0-919123-12-0
• James Hillman, "Healing Fiction", ISBN 978-0-88214-363-7
• Stanton Marlan, Jung's Alchemical Philosophy. Psyche and the Mercurial Play of Image and Idea, Routledge, 2022, ISBN 9781032105444
• Montiel, Luis, "El rizoma oculto de la psicología profunda. Gustav Meyrink y Carl Gustav Jung", Frenia, 2012, ISBN 978-84-695-3540-0
• Catherine M Nutting, Concrete Insight: Art, the Unconscious, and Transformative Spontaneity, UVic Thesis 2007 214
• Andrew Samuels, Critical Dictionary of Jungian Analysis, ISBN 978-0-415-05910-7
• Vladimir Simosko. Jung, Music, and Music Therapy: Prepared for the Occasion of the C.G. "Jung and the Humanities" Colloquium, 1987. Winnipeg, Man., The Author, 1987
• June Singer, Boundaries of the Soul, ISBN 978-0-385-47529-7. On psychotherapy
• Anthony Storr, Jung (1973) ISBN 978-0-00-633166-7
• — The Essential Jung (1983) ISBN 978-0-691-08615-6
• — The Essential Jung: Selected Writings (1999) ISBN 978-0-00-653065-7
• John R. White, (2023) Adaptation and Psychotherapy. Langs and Analytical Psychology. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. discusses Jung's two concepts of "adaptation" and relates these ideas to the work of psychoanalyst Robert Langs. ISBN 978-1-5381-1794-1
• Marion Woodman, The Pregnant Virgin: A Process of Psychological Transformation, ISBN 978-1-5381-1794-1

Academic texts

• Andrew Samuels, The Political Psyche (Routledge), ISBN 978-0-415-08102-3
• Lucy Huskinson, Nietzsche and Jung: The Whole Self in the Union of Opposites (Routledge), ISBN 978-1-58391-833-3
• Davydov, Andrey. From Carl Gustav Jung's Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious to Individual Archetypal Pattern. HPA Press, 2014. ISBN 978-1-311-82008-2
• Remo, F. Roth: Return of the World Soul, Wolfgang Pauli, C.G. Jung and the Challenge of Psychophysical Reality [unus mundus], Part 1: The Battle of the Giants. Pari Publishing, 2011, ISBN 978-88-95604-12-1
• Remo, F. Roth: Return of the World Soul, Wolfgang Pauli, C.G. Jung and the Challenge of Psychophysical Reality [unus mundus], Part 2: A Psychophysical Theory. Pari Publishing, 2012, ISBN 978-88-95604-16-9

Journals

• The Journal of Analytical Psychology (JAP at John Wiley & Sons)
• International Journal for Jungian Studies (IJJS at Brill)

Jung-Freud relationship

• Kerr, John. A Most Dangerous Method: The Story of Jung, Freud, and Sabina Spielrein. Knopf, 1993. ISBN 978-0-679-40412-5.
• Balakirsky Katz, Maya. Freud, Jung and Jonah: Religion and the Birth of the Psychoanalytic Periodical. Cambridge University Press, 2023.

Others recollections of Jung

• van der Post, Laurens, Jung and the Story of Our Time, New York: Pantheon Books, 1975. ISBN 978-0-394-49207-0
• Hannah, Barbara, Jung, his life and work: a biographical memoir, New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1976. SBN: 399-50383-8
• David Bailey's biography of his Great Aunt, Ruth Bailey, 'The English Woman and C.G.Jung' drawing extensively on her diaries and correspondence, explores the deep and long-lasting friendship between Ruth, Jung, and Jung's wife and family.

Critical scholarship

• Maidenbaum, Aryeh (ed), Jung and the Shadow of Anti-Semitism, Berwick ME: Nicolas-Hays Inc, 2002.
• Dohe, Carrie B. Jung's Wandering Archetype: Race and Religion in Analytical Psychology. London: Routledge, 2016. ISBN 978-1-138-88840-1
• Grossman, Stanley (1979). "C.G. Jung and National Socialism". Jung in Contexts: A Reader. Psychology Press. ISBN 978-0-415-20558-0.
• Hanegraaff, Wouter J. (1997). New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought. Leiden/New York/Koln: E.J. Brill. ISBN 978-1-4384-0565-0.
• Bishop, Paul (2014). Carl Jung (Critical Lives). Reaktion Books.
• Richard Noll, The Aryan Christ: The Secret Life of Carl Jung (Random House, 1997)
• Shamdasani, Sonu (1998). Cult fictions: C.G. Jung and the founding of analytical psychology. London/New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-18614-8. OCLC 560455823.
• Shamdasani, Sonu (2003). Jung and the making of modern psychology: the dream of a science. Cambridge, UK New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-53909-8. OCLC 57509166.
• Shamdasani, Sonu (2005). Jung stripped bare: By his biographers, even. London New York: Karnac. ISBN 978-1-85575-317-4. OCLC 759160070.

External links

• Works by or about Carl Jung at the Internet Archive
• Works by Carl Jung at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• Publications by and about Carl Jung in the catalogue Helveticat of the Swiss National Library
• C.G. Jung Institute, Zurich
• Museum House of C.G. Jung Küsnacht, Zurich (Switzerland)
• Carl Jung Resources
• The Jung Page
• Philemon Foundation
• Carl Jung: Foreword to the I Ching
• The Association Method Full-text article from 1916. Originally Published in the Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology.
• The Seven Sermons to the Dead, 1916 Carl Gustav Jung
• The Theory of Psychoanalysis Full-text article from 1915. Originally published in The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease
• Jung's "Essay on Wotan"
• Bollingen Foundation Collection From the Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress
• The Journal of Analytical Psychology
• International Journal for Jungian Studies