Jung, Carl Gustav

   (1875–1961)

   The creator of a system of psychotherapy that once aspired to rival psychoanalysis, Jung was born in Kesswil, Switzerland, into a pastor’s family. He finished his medical studies in Basel in 1900. (Jung’s M.D. degree was from Zurich in 1902, with a dissertation on The Psychology and Pathology of So-called Occult Phenomena (Zur Psychologie und Pathologie sog. Okkulter Phänomene). After studying with Pierre Janet in Paris, in 1900 he entered training in psychiatry at the University Psychiatric Clinic (Burghölzli) in Zurich under Eugen Bleuler, and finished his Habilitation in 1905, which was published in 1907 as The Psychology of Dementia praecox (Über die Psychologie der Dementia praecox). In 1909, Jung gave up university teaching to enter private practice and to dedicate himself to his writing. Jung had become inspired by Freud’s ideas in 1903 after re-reading The Interpretation of Dreams (Die Traumdeutung, 1900), and in 1906 began corresponding with Freud. Freud and Jung met in Vienna in 1907. As early as 1906, Jung was doing empirical research on word association in an effort to confirm Freud’s ideas (which his article that year in the volume Diagnostische Assoziationsstudien claimed to do). Yet in 1914, Jung resigned from the presidency of the International Psychoanalytic Association and broke with Freud.

   Jung went on to develop his own "analytical psychology," in which infant sexuality played virtually no role but instead symbols of the "collective unconscious" occupied center stage. The symbols in the patient’s psyche do not stem from the patient’s personal experience, Jung said, but from the collective experiences of the human race. For these experiences, Jung chose the term "archetypes." In a Jungian analysis, the patient ultimately comes to realize that symbols previously perceived as personal and individual are in reality expressions of the collective unconscious. Jung began to articulate these notions in "Transformations and Symbols of the Libido: Contributions to the Developmental History of Thought," published in the Psychoanalytic Yearbook in 1911 ("Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido: Beiträge zur Entwicklungsgeschichte des Denkens," Jahrbuch für Psychoanalyse und psychopathologische Forschung). The first comprehensive statement of his ideas was The Psychology of Unconscious Processes: An Overview of the Modern Theory and Method of Analytical Psychology (Die Psychologie der unbewussten Prozesse: ein Überblick über die moderne Theorie und Methode der analytischen Psychologie, 1917).

   Jung is also known for his typology of personality types. In his book Psychological Types (Psychologische Typen, 1921), he elaborated the difference between extraverted individuals, whose energy flows toward the outer world, and introverts, whose energy flows inward. For each type, there were four basic modes of functioning: thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition, yielding an eight-box grid on which to classify personality variation.

   Although Jung’s analytical psychology was much overshadowed by psychoanalysis, it retained a certain international audience during the first half of the twentieth century, becoming more of a curiosity thereafter. Jung’s reputation also suffered because of his sympathy with the National Socialist regime in Germany.