Carl Jung, psychologist: a full introduction

Who was Carl Jung?

Carl Jung (born 26 July 1875 in Kesswil, Switzerland; died 6 June 1961 in Küsnacht) was a Swiss psychologist and psychiatrist who founded analytical psychology, in some ways a response to Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis. Jung introduced and developed the ideas of extraverted and introverted personality, archetypes and the collective unconscious. His work has influenced psychiatry and the study of religion, literature and related fields.

Early in his career Jung worked with Sigmund Freud for about seven years, but they disagreed over theory and went their separate ways from 1913. They differed on what motivates people and how to understand the mind.

Jung is famous for many contributions to psychology. His work on personality types was important, and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator was based on his ideas; the test itself was created by Isabel Myers and Katharine Briggs. Jung's psychology is especially known for the concept of archetypes.

Jung's working life

Jung spent his life learning from observation and from reading in very different fields, such as philosophy, science, anthropology, religion, literature, art and historical texts on alchemy, because he believed they could teach him important things about psychology. He studied them to find their symbols and to understand how people in the past tried to make sense of the world around them. Interestingly, alchemy is seen as a forerunner of modern chemistry.

Jung wrote in academic German for doctors, psychologists and other educated readers. Most people who study Jung begin with Man and His Symbols. Jung planned this book for a general audience; he wrote one chapter himself, and his colleagues wrote the rest under his direction. Another helpful introduction is Memories, Dreams, Reflections, which his assistant Aniela Jaffé compiled from their conversations, with some chapters written by Jung himself.

Jung introduced important terms into psychology, including the collective unconscious, archetypes, extraversion (attention turned towards the outer world) and introversion (attention turned towards the inner world).

Jung's early years

Jung was the son of a philologist and pastor. He spent much of his childhood alone, but he was imaginative, and from an early age he observed and analysed the behaviour of his parents and teachers and tried to make sense of it.

Given his father's religious faith, Jung tried to share his own experience of God with him. The elder Jung was in many ways kind and tolerant, but father and son never managed to understand each other. As a teenager, Jung discovered philosophy and read widely, and this, along with the disappointments of his childhood, led him to break with the strong family tradition, study medicine and become a psychiatrist.

Jung at university

He studied at the universities of Basel (1895–1900) and Zurich (MD, 1902). He was fortunate to join the staff of the Burghölzli psychiatric hospital of the University of Zurich in 1900, when it was led by Eugen Bleuler, whose work began the classic studies of mental illness.

At the Burghölzli, Jung used the word association test, begun by earlier researchers, with remarkable success. He studied patients' strange and illogical responses to stimulus words and found that they came from emotionally charged clusters of associations that were kept out of awareness because their content was unpleasant or, for the person, immoral. Jung popularised the term "complex" to describe this, and it is now a well-known idea in psychology.

Jung's theory

Jung added interesting and practical theories to psychology. Like Freud (and Erikson), he saw the psyche as made up of separate but interacting systems. The three main ones were the ego, the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious.

The personal unconscious

The personal unconscious, a concept Jung developed, refers to all the information and experiences in a person's life that have been forgotten or repressed but still influence their behaviour and attitudes at an unconscious level.

This part of the unconscious holds memories, perceptions and thoughts that may not be consciously available but can potentially become conscious. It also includes clusters of such material, which Jung called "complexes".

These are emotionally charged associations or ideas that strongly influence a person's behaviour and attitudes.

For example, someone may be afraid of dogs because of a forgotten childhood incident. Although the fear is not consciously remembered, it is stored in the personal unconscious and can trigger an irrational reaction whenever the person meets a dog.

In Jung's model, the personal unconscious exists alongside the conscious mind and the collective unconscious.

What is the collective unconscious?

The collective unconscious, a concept of Jung's, refers to unconscious knowledge and experience that is shared and inherited across generations, and that is expressed through universal symbols and archetypes found in all human cultures.

The collective unconscious is made up of pre-existing forms, or archetypes, that can appear in consciousness as dreams, visions or feelings, and that are expressed in culture, art, religion and our symbolic experiences.

These archetypes are universal symbols and themes shared across all cultures and eras. Examples include the mother, the hero, the child, the wise old man and the trickster. Each archetype represents a shared part of human experience.

The collective unconscious is a universal version of the personal unconscious, holding mental patterns or memory traces shared with other members of the human species (Jung, 1928).

These ancestral memories, which Jung called archetypes, appear as universal themes in different cultures and are expressed through literature, art and dreams.

Jung's archetypes

Jungian archetypes are images and themes that, as Jung proposed, come from the collective unconscious.

Archetypes have universal meanings across cultures and may appear in dreams, literature, art or religion.

Jung stressed that an archetype is not an inherited idea but an inherited way of functioning, a pattern of behaviour, much like the instinctive ways in which a chick hatches, a bird builds its nest or an eel finds its way to the Sargasso Sea. In his view, this biological side of the archetype is the proper concern of scientific psychology.

Jung (1947) believed that the symbols of different cultures are often very similar because they arise from archetypes shared by the whole human race, which are part of our collective unconscious.

For Jung, our ancestral past becomes the basis of the human psyche and guides and influences present behaviour. Jung claimed to identify a large number of archetypes but paid special attention to four.

He called these archetypes the self, the persona, the shadow and the anima/animus.