Carl Gustav Jung was one of the greatest explorers of the human mind, his ideas having profoundly influenced such varied disciplines as art, anthroplogy, atomic physics, philosophy, mythology, theology and parapsychology, as well as the development of psychology and psychotherapy. He was the most enigmatic and controversial disciple of Sigmund Freud, introducing to psychoanalysis crucial questions about religion and the soul which Freud neglected. He was a prolific writer leaving behind 18 volumes of work. His theories of the life cycle, dream symbolism and the collective unconscious, and even his terminology, have entered our language in a way that is only paralleled by Freud. Our perception of Jung today as a quasi-religious sage overlooks the fact that he was primarily a scientist and a scholar, occupied as he was with making objective and knowable to consciousness the inner, subjective world.

The Formative Years

Jung was born on July 26, 1875, in the village of Kesswil by Lake Constance, Switzerland. His family, although limited in means, were deeply concerned with medicine and religion. He was the only son of the Reverend Paul Achilles Jung (1842-96), a country pastor and oriental and classical scholar, and his wife Emilie, youngest daughter of Samuel Preiswerk (1799-1871), a distinguished theologian and Hebraist. Carl was named after his paternal grandfather, a German-born physician and professor of surgery at the University of Basel, as well as a Grand Master of the Freemasons of Switzerland. It was even rumoured his grandfather was the illegitimate son of Goethe, to whom he bore a physical resemblance.

At the age of 6, Carl's father began to instruct him in Latin. He continued his study of the language as he grew older and learned to read old texts with ease. The skill facilitated his lifelong study of the classics, history, anthropology, and religion. It was said that he liked reading about exotic oriental religions, in particular studying pictures of Hindu gods.

In 1879, the family moved to the environs of Basel where, living in an old parsonage, his father ministered to the local parishioners. In 1884, Carl's sister, Gertrud, was born. Carl entered school in Basel and completed his formal education there. When aged 11, he had a personal experience of the negative powers of the unconscious mind. Carl hated school. One day he was knocked down by a fellow student, so he struck his own head to the ground. He began having fainting spells and had to stay at home; doctors thought he had epilepsy. One day he overheard his father expressing grave concerns about his future. This galvanised Carl into action and, feeling somewhat guilty, he set about the task of 'curing' himself through hard work, becoming a solitary, bookish, intellectual youth, who continued to puzzle over religious and philosophical questions

Around the same time, Carl had a mystical experience. Walking home from school, he suddenly felt he had emerged from a cloud, and had a feeling: 'Now I am myself.'¹ This strong sense of 'I' had imparted a sense of 'authority' in him. Thereafter, Jung (aged 12) became aware of two distinct personalities within himself. As number 1 personality he perceived himself as a moderately gifted young man with vaulting ambition. Conversely, his number 2 personality was someone in high authority, a wise old man who lived in the 18th century.

Despite an intense interest in philosophy and archaeology, Jung (influenced by a dream) decided to study natural science, then medicine, in Basel University. Graduating in 1900, and having decided to specialise in psychiatry, Jung was appointed as an assistant physician at the Burghölzli Mental Hospital, a public psychiatric institution in Zürich, of which Eugen Bleuler was then director. Five years later, in 1905, Jung was appointed senior physician at the hospital and lecturer in psychiatry at the University of Zürich.

In 1903, he married Emma Rauschenbach (1882-1955), daughter of a rich Schaffhausen industrialist. Between 1904-1914 they had five children: four daughters and a son. Until her death in 1955, Emma collaborated closely with her husband in his work. By 1909, Jung's private practice had become sufficiently remunerative to enable him to resign his hospital post; four years later he resigned from the University also. From then on, he spent considerable time writing and travelling.

Jung was interested in dreams from early childhood, considering his inner life more eventful then his outer one. This interest in dreams increased with his psychological studies and practice. Another lifelong interest was the occult, which was aroused following his father's death in 1896, and continued during his student years. While studying at home one day, he heard a loud noise like a pistol shot coming from the dining room. On entering there, he found that a 70-year-old, solid walnut table has mysteriously split in two. No explanation could be found for the occurrence. Another incident involved a breadknife in a drawer which shattered into several pieces.² Jung took these experiences to be poltergeist phenomena.

Taking an active interest in mediumistic activity, Jung began attending family seances over a four year period³. Observing the manifestation of 'split-off' unconscious processes, the subject of occult phenomena became the subject of his doctoral dissertation in 1902.

Word Association Test

At the Burghölzli Hospital, Jung sought to discover the causes of mental illness by examining brain tissue, and to cure such illnesses by hypnosis. With some colleagues, he developed a word association test (WAT), making a major contribution in standardizing the methods of administration and interpretation. He used several diagnostic indicators: the type of response (eg a synonym of the stimulus word), incorrect reproduction of the response word, reaction-time, and other test behaviour. By studying verbal behaviour and cognitive processes, Jung's interest was in clinical diagnosis and his theory of what he called 'emotionally toned complexes' (later shortened to 'complexes').

Though Francis Galton (1822-1911) devised the WAT, it was Jung who had the insight that thoughts, feelings, and memories group themselves into dynamic clusters ('complexes'), which function like sub-personalities. Jung was convinced that complexes are evident in both healthy and abnormal states of mind. The voives heard by schizophrenics, the 'spirits' which 'control' mediums in the trance state, and multiple personalities apparent in hysterics were seen as expressions of autonomous complexes. In fact, Jung was the first to apply this knowledge in the treatment of schizophrenia.

Jung's work on the WAT and theory of complexes contributed to his study of unconscious contents. Later, his observations of the contents of patient's dreams, hallucinations and delusions provided data for his hypothesis of the existence of collective (archetypal) material in the unconscious psyche: complexes being the means through which archetypes manifest themselves in the personal unconscious.

It was through studying the polarity and dynamics of the psyche, and the relationship between the movements of psychic energy along certain paths and their differences in their effect on individual personalities and human interactions, that gave rise to Jung's psychological typology⁴.

Freud and Jung

In 1900, Jung (aged 25) read Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams, the year of its publication. But it was three years later before he realised how Freud's work linked up with the mechanism of repression which he had noted in his word association experiments. Freud was persona non grata in the academic world at the time and Jung was warned of endangering his own academic career, and risking ridicule from colleagues, should he decide to ally himself with and defend Freud's theories. Though having serious misgivings about Freud's dogmatic idea that all neuroses were caused by sexual repression or trauma (Jung believing it played a subordinate part), it was in the spirit of seeking empirical truth that Jung began a seven year period of collaboration with Freud, mostly by correspondence.

The two men eventually met in February 1907, in Vienna, where they talked virtually non-stop for 13 hours. Thereafter, Freud began to groom Jung as his successor and leader of the psychoanalytic movement. Jung, in turn, viewed Freud as a positive 'father' figure who was intellectually courageous, something his own father was not. However, this father-son relationship was fated not to last, especially since the prospect of becoming the 'crown prince' meant sacrificing his intellectual independence. Nevertheless, Jung became the first president of the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) and chief editor of the Jahrbuch, the first psychoanalytic journal.

During subsequent meetings - including the journey, in 1909, to Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts and at Congresses of the IPA - Jung became increasingly aware that his conceptions significantly differed from Freud's. Jung found Freud's theory of dream interpretation too rigid and reductive, making him blind towards the paradox and ambiguity of unconscious contents. His intellectual doubts concerned the way Freud overgeneralised his theories, especially the theory that all neuroses had their roots in polymorphous, perverse, infantile sexuality.

Four years after becoming president of the IPA in 1910, Jung resigned his office, after irreconcilable differences with Freud over the 'heretical' publication of his The Psychology of the Unconscious⁵. This book, on the nature of the libido, was an outright rejection of Freud's view of it as exclusively sexual. It consisted of Jung's reflections on a series of fantasies of an American patient, named Miss Miller, and used mythological parallels related to these fantasies. Jung hypothesised that libido is non-specific psychic energy, arguing that sexuality was but one form in which this energy can be chanelled⁶.

Jung also challenged another basic tenet of psychoanalytic theory, notably the Oedipus or Electra complex. While acknowledging that boys become powerfully attached to their mothers, and potentially bring them into conflict with their fathers, Jung denied that either attachment or conflict was inevitably sexual. On the contrary, the son's longing for his mother (through incestuous desires) was spiritual rather than physical or sexual, reflecting a need for a kind of psychological renewal.⁷. By way of illustration, Jung examined the archetypal theme of the hero's struggle for deliverance from the 'terrible' mother. He used the solar myth of 'the night sea journey' to show how the masculine heroic ego, by entering the darkness of the mother's womb, undergoes a rebirth or transformation of consciousness. Jonah and the whale, Osiris cast adrift in a chest, and Noah's journey over the flood are all mythological dramas that symbolise this necessary but terrifying ordeal in the body of the mother. Jung instinctively knew that only by facing this ordeal of initiation, only by entering the womb of change and dying to the past, can a new pathway to life be opened.

Jung concluded that our deepest needs are for meaning and purpose; that is, humans are by nature religious⁸, and that psychological, rather than actual, incest was the means to channel libido into new forms and to develop spiritually. Over time, Jung saw religious practice as a fundamental archetypal need and, deprived of its symbolism, individuals were cut off from meaning, and societies were doomed to die. To Jung the problem of the second half of life was essentially religious.

Total disillusionment with Freud came during the trip to Clark University. Lasting seven weeks, the two men spent time analysing each other's dreams. On one occasion, Freud refused to share his associations to a dream, stating that it would undermine his authority. To Jung, placing personal authority over truth foreshadowed the end of their relationship. On another important occasion, Freud's attempt to interpret one of Jung's dreams as wish fulfillment conflicted with Jung's view that the dream contained collective content. The dream was of a two storey house that Jung did not know, but was 'his house'. The upper storey was furnished in rococo style; the lower 'darker' floor had medieval furnishings. There was also a cellar containing the remains of a primitive culture, including two skulls⁹. In looking for the wish fulfillment, Freud assumed that the skulls represented wishes for the death of two persons close to Jung. In contrast, Jung associated the skulls with two he had studied in paleontology, and he saw the house as an image of the psyche that included beneath 20th century culture a primitive level 'which can scarcely be reached or illuminated by consciousness.'¹⁰

This dream was his first inkling of a collective a priori beneath the personal psyche, which he later recognised as forms of instincts or archetypes. The concept of the collective psyche, or unconscious, was the subject of the book, The Psychology of the Unconscious, that so alienated Freud. By contributing both to the development of Jung's theory of the unconscious and to his controversy with Freud, this single dream was instrumental in the subsequent break.

Confrontation with the Unconscious

After the traumatic parting with Freud, Jung (now aged 37) was able to pursue more freely his unique approach to the unconscious contents of the mind, and particularly his interest in archetypal symbolism. For the next six years or so he dedicated his time to working on both his own and his patients dreams and fantasies. However, Jung firstly had to endure a prolonged period of 'inner uncertainty' and 'disorientation'
¹¹ - his own 'dark night of the soul' - in order to formulate a new approach to his work and discover his personal myth¹². His fascination with the unconscious and his 'creative illness' helped develop a capacity for visions and waking dreams, which he called active imagination. Jung describes one of these in his autobiography: One night I awoke and saw, bathed in bright light at the foot of the bed, the figure of Christ on the Cross. It was not quite life-size, but extremely distinct; and I saw that his body was made of greenish gold.¹³ In 1913, Jung also had several overpowering visions that pointed to the 1st World War, seeing 'rivers of blood' in the northern landscape.¹⁴

Further dreams¹⁵ confirmed that unconscious contents are not dead, outmoded forms (as Freud believed), but belong to our living being. Rather than individuals starting life as a blank slate (a tabula rasa, he believed that the whole personality is present, in potentia, from birth and that the environment brings out what is already there¹⁶. It is these primordial images or archetypes¹⁷ in the collective unconscious that predispose us to approach life and to experience it in certain ways, according to patterns already laid down in the psyche. Jung said that there are as many archetypes as there are typical situations in life. There are archetypal figures (eg, mother, child, father, God), archetypal events (eg, birth, death, relationships, marriage), and archetypal objects (eg, water, sun, moon, fish, snakes). Archetypes are therefore the total endowment granted by evolution in order to facilitate adaptation to life. Each finds expression in the psyche, in behaviour, and in mythology.

The investigation of his inner reality finally laid the foundation for many of his psychological theories and concepts - notably, on the development of personality, the archetype and complex, and the Self and individuation.

Jung eventually developed his own therapeutic system called analytical psychology, so as to distinguish it from Freudian psychoanalysis. Its central feature is that mental health (or illness) depends on the functional relationship, achieved in the course of individual development, between conscious and unconscious processes. Moreover, this conscious-unconscious interaction is important in the achievement of all creative activity, whether artistic, literary or scientific - leading to the development of personality or individuation. Jung describes this goal as 'the self-realisation of the unconscious.'

The Transcendent Function

The main conviction that emerged from these years of 'soul searching' was that we each have a 'transcendent function,' a yearning to evolve, to transcend oneself and that it is the blocking of this function that leads to mental illness. Jung believed that God can become whole only through a creative confrontation with the opposites and through their synthesis in the Self - the wholeness of the individual human personality. The transcendent function is an archetypal process which mediates opposites and enables the transition from one attitude or condition to another, by the utilisation of symbols. It is activated whenever consciousness is engaged in the tension of opposites, and only the living symbol has the power to unite opposites and mutually supplement one another. The function, therefore, has a healing effect by bridging the conscious and unconscious, facilitating movement beyond one-sidedness. In this respect, the choice of psychiatry helped Jung to reconcile the opposites within himself - the rational with the irrational, the objective with the subjective, the biological with the spiritual, his number 1 with his number 2 personality, etc. It is this reconciliation of opposites within, and the principle of compensation between inner and outer realms of experience, that formed the cornerstone of Jungian theory.

As Jung began to emerge from 'the darkness' he went through a period of drawing mandalas¹⁸. Jung interpreted mandalas as expressions of the Self and wholeness, corresponding to the microcosmic nature of the psyche. As psychological phenomena they appear spontaneously in dreams, often under conditions of psychic disorientation and in order to compensate the disorder and confusion of the psychic state. Jung, who found inner peace in drawing and contemplating mandalas, saw their appearance as an attempt by nature at self-healing.

In later life, Jung applied these observations to his interest in UFO's. In 1958, in his essay Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth, he considered that they were a compensation by the collective unconscious for our rational scepticism and our need for symbols of wholeness in a deeply divided world.

In 1928, Jung received from the eminent Sinologist, Richard Wilhelm, a manuscript of a Tao-alchemical treatise entitled The Secret of the Golden Flower.¹⁹ He found in the text confirmation of his ideas about the mandala and the circumambulation of the centre.²⁰ Further, he began experimenting with the I Ching or Book of Changes, the ancient Chinese oracle dating back to the 4th millenium BC. Finding 'meaningful connections' between the psychic and physical sequence of events, this led to the formulation of his theory of synchronicity.

Several crucial dreams, which typically followed such events, stirred in Jung a desire to become better acquainted with alchemy. He began to collect alchemical works and, though struggling to decipher them, eventually came to realise that alchemy was the historical counterpart of depth psychology rather than a precursor of modern chemistry. The alchemist in attempting to transmute base matter into gold, was really working symbolically on the transformation of his own psyche. Jung had discovered in alchemy a metaphor of individuation.

Between 1919 and 1944, Jung wrote his major works, many in the form of individual essays. He also conducted a large psychotherapeutic practice, held seminars in German and English, and made numerous long journeys, including anthropological expeditions to the Pueblo Indians in New Mexico in 1924-5, and to the Elgoni of Kenya in 1925-6. He also travelled to North Africa, India and Ceylon in later life.

The Tower at Bollingen

Though valuing his family, and as an introvert, Jung had a great need for solitude. In 1922, following the death of his mother, he bought some land at Bollingen, beside the upper lake of Zürich, and began to build a primitive stone dwelling that was to become his 'Tower.' This was his spiritual retreat, a place where he could escape the demands of his worldly life and spend time in great simplicity. With no electricity, telephone, or central heating, and with water fetched from a well and food cooked on a wood-burning stove, it put him in touch with nature. At Bollingen, he loved to sail his boats on the lake, carve inscriptions in stone, chop wood, paint murals and entertain close friends and family. It was also a place where he could pay homage and commmune with his ancestors.

Over a 12 year period he added three more sections to this 'maternal' building until it became a representation in stone of his inner understanding of the psyche's structure (i.e. a quaternity as symbol of psychic wholeness). The second storey was added after his wife's death in 1955, when he was 80. This symbolised an 'extension of consciousness achieved in old age,' a feeling of being reborn in stone as his own individuation progressed along the path from the ego to the Self, and towards death.

Jung, The Person

To Jung, life was so ephemeral, so insufficient, that he likened it to a plant that lived on its rhizome - its true life being invisible, hidden in the rhizome. What we see is the blossom, which passes. He thus considered the outer events of his life as hollow and insubstantial, understanding himself only in the light of inner happenings. Having mixed feelings about writing his memoir, Jung maintained that what he had to say was to be found in his works, and that he was incapable of recording 'truths' about himself. At best, he could recount his personal myth, only 'tell stories.' It was well known that Jung had a distaste for exposing his personal life to public scrutiny. Consequently, what we know of Jung the person is mainly anecdotal.

For those who knew Jung, he was an intensely human person, with the capacity to enjoy nature, good food and good company. Physically, he was tall, broad-shouldered, strong, and healthy looking, with a cheerful disposition. He was a mountain climber and expert sailor, and - gripped by the imagination of water from an early age - always lived next to a river or lake. He was a good listener and conversationalist, but did not suffer fools gladly. He had a keen sense of humour that was equalled, perhaps, by his quick temper. His power of concentration was prodigious, as his many detailed paintings and encyclopedic knowledge and profuse writings testify.

Jung's Women

A disproportionately large number of Jung's patients and followers were women, being powerfully attracted to him and gathered round him to form a sizeable coterie, known somewhat irreverently as the Jungfrauen. Indeed, this 'cult of women' (including Aniela Jaffé, Jolanda Jacobi, Marie-Louise Von Franz, Barbara Hannah, Esther Harding, Liliane Frey-Rohn et al.) played a key role in the advancement of Jung's career, becoming practitioners and taking positions of power in both the Analytical Psychology Club (founded 1916) and the CG Jung Training Institute (founded 1948). American women, such as Edith Rockefeller McCormick and Mary Mellon, had a strong influence on the early movement, with large donations helping to finance the translation and publication of Jung's Collected Works.

Such an attraction can be attributed to the high value Jung placed on 'feminine consciousness,' at a time when women were generally treated as second-class citizens. His vitality and charismatic authority did not threaten them, but merely added to their attachment to him. Through their experiences of Jung as a person, an analyst and a spiritual father, they found a channel for their own strength and intellectual ambitions, and a closed society that accepted them. On the other hand, many men found him an overwhelming figure, whose force of personality made them feel unimportant.²¹

Jung was always fascinated with Woman and the role she played in Man's psyche. In childhood, he had a powerful attachment to a young maid charged with his care while his mother was hospitalised. He later came to identify the attraction as a personification of the 'anima.' The anima is an inner feminine figure that plays a typical, or archetypal, role in the man's unconscious.²² The contrasexual figure operating in the woman's unconscious he called the 'animus.' These 'soul-images' manifest themselves most typically in dreams and fantasies (eg 'dream lover'), through the mechanism of projection, or in the irrationalities of a man's feeling and a woman's thinking. As regulators of behaviour, and functioning as a bridge leading to the collective unconscious, Jung saw the anima and the animus as two of the most influential archetypes.

Though devoted to his wife and family, Jung confessed to having 'polygamous components' in his nature, with unfulfilled 'anima longings' which caused him to be attracted to other women. It is said that he became intimately involved with several of his patients. Jung made such a mess in one relationship (to the Russian, Sabina Spielrein) he even asked Freud to sort it out for him. In 1911, he became captivated by a former patient and assistant called Toni Wolff,²³ who was then aged 23. In her Jung found his 'anima type' and femme inspiratrice, and a 'creative relationship' developed that was to last some 40 years until her death in 1952. Though Toni Wolff helped Jung come to terms with his own 'anima problem,' the strain on his marriage to Emma was evident, no doubt contributing to his 'breakdown' in 1913. Whether he could have survived this difficult life transition without the dedicated support of both Emma and Toni is questionable.

The Late Years

As he got older, Jung's interest in the world expanded rather than contracted. Though originally eschewing the idea of disciples or any ambition to start a school of psychology, Jung helped found the CG Jung Institute in Zürich, in 1948, and was its first president, serving until he retired in 1950.

After 1945 and until his death in 1961, Jung did, however, see fewer patients, concentrating instead on his alchemical work. In medieval alchemy, Jung found the historical equivalent of his own psychology, and made alchemy accessible by showing how its symbols were similar to archetypal dream and fantasy material. This profound interest in alchemy culminated in the publication of The Psychology of the Transference (1946; In: The Practice of Psychotherapy, 1954; CW 16); Psychology and Alchemy (1953; CW 12); Alchemical Studies (1967; CW 13); and his magnum opus Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955-6; CW 14). Containing dream commentaries and amplifications on the images and symbols of individuation as portrayed in alchemy, these works provided his followers with alchemical insights into the analytical process and relationship.

In an effort to 'popularize' his work, and with the firm conviction that it would be the ordinary people who would carry on his psychology, Jung decided (in his early 80's) to write and get published his autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections, as well as a collaborative work entitled Man and His Symbols. Explaining his psychology in a most fundamental way was an appeal for the public to realise the reality of the unconscious and, above all, to take his/her own soul seriously. To this end he needed to reach a wider public and, in 1959, he agreed to be interviewed by John Freeman for a BBC series of famous living people called Face to Face. The interview was a success, with his much quoted remark about the existence of God - 'I don't believe, I know' - arousing a storm of comment at the time.

Jung had many premonitions of approaching death, and he took these as both a preparation and a reassurance. In one impressive dream he saw the 'other Bollingen' bathed in a glow of light, and a voice told him that it was completed and ready for habitation.²⁴ The golden tower (as vessel of the Self) on 'the other shore of the lake' was now ready for him to move into.'

Jung died in Küsnacht, near Zürich, at a quarter to four on tuesday afternoon, June 6th, 1961. It was synchronistic that about an hour or so afterwards, lightning struck a tall popular tree in his garden at the lake's edge.

Jung himself saw death as paradoxical, an event that had elicited contrasting emotions of grief and joy. He further said that death was a fearful piece of brutality. . . not only as a physical event, but far more so psychically: a human being is torn away from us, and what remains is the icy stillness of death.'²⁵

Postscript

Since Jung's death in 1961, different schools of Jungian psychology have evolved in all the major Western countries, being designated 'classical,' 'developmental' or 'archetypal' according to the emphasis placed on different aspects of Jung's thought (eg use of the transference, amplification, imagination, the development of personality, and so forth)²⁶. Many have common views, but dogmatism and conflict between the recognised schools has inevitably arisen due to the differing structures and priorities, the ordering and weighting, with regard to theoretical areas.

Though there was long-standing obstacles to Jungian psychology gaining recognition in the wider culture or the helping professions, there has been a definite sea change over the last few decades. Jungian books sell well, with Jung's ideas now being used in a routine and down-to-earth way. Though post-Jungians have challenged and attacked aspects of Jung's work, this can be seen as part of Jungian family life with its healthy differences. Indeed, Jung urged that opposites have to be discriminated before they can be brought together.

However, in academic circles the view still persists that Jung was a mystic pre-occupied with religious questions and esoteric material, and, therefore, unscientific. Since depth psychologies deal with natural (metaphysical) phenomena and unprovable areas, matching up to the highest scientific standards will always be wanting. However, Jung saw it as a duty to push the boundaries of knowledge. 'Science,' he said, 'comes to a stop at the frontiers of logic but nature does not - she thrives on ground as yet untrodden by theory.'²⁷

Biographies on Jung

The Collected Works of CG Jung

CG Jung, Collected Works, edited by Sir Herbert Read, Michael Fordham, Gerhard Adler, and William McGuire, Translated by RFC Hull (except for volume 2).

Princeton: Princeton University Press (Bollingen Series XX);

London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Other Writings

Books about Jung's Life, Jungian Theory and Practice