Carl Gustav Jung

Jung, Carl Gustav 

Born July 26, 1875, in Kesswil, near Basel; died June 6, 1961, in Küsnacht, near Zürich. Swiss psychologist and psychiatrist; founder of one of the schools of depth psychology—“analytical psychology.”

In 1900, Jung began working with E. Bleuler in Zürich; he developed the technique of free association, which he turned into one of the chief methods of psychiatric analysis. From 1907 to 1912 he worked in very close collaboration with S. Freud, and from 1911 to 1914 he served as the first president of the International Psychoanalytic Society. The break between Jung and Freud resulted from Jung’s revision of the basic tenets of psychoanalysis, including his interpretation of libido as psychic energy in general, his rejection of the sexual etiology of neuroses, and his concept of the psyche as a closed autonomous system that functions in accordance with the principle of compensation.

In Symbols and Transformations of the Libido (1912), Jung studied the spontaneous appearance of folkloric and mythological themes in his patients’ dreams. On the basis of these findings, he postulated the existence in the human psyche of a deeper layer in addition to the individual unconscious—namely, the collective unconscious, which Jung viewed as the reflection of the experience of previous generations imprinted in the structures of the brain. The collective unconscious consists of universal prototypes—or archetypes, such as the image of Mother Earth, the hero, the wise old man, and the demon—whose dynamics form the basis of myths, of artistic symbolism, and of dreams.

Jung’s archetypes are not accessible to direct perception; they are recognized through their projection onto external objects. The archetype of the self (das Selbst) represents the potential center of the personality, in contrast to the ego as the center of consciousness. The goal of the personality’s coming-into-being (that is, self-realization, or individuation) is to integrate the contents of the collective unconscious.

Psychotherapy, according to Jung, must aim primarily at the restoration of broken connections between the various levels of the psyche; in traditional cultures, the psyche’s dynamic equilibrium is achieved through myths, ceremonies, and rituals, which are used as means to activate the archetypes. In his overall treatment of the nature of archetypes and the collective unconscious, Jung combines positivist ideas with metaphysical notions bordering on occultism—for example, the notion of the psyche as a kind of impersonal substance.

Jung developed a typology of personality (Psychological Types, 1921; Russian translation, 1924) based on identification of the dominant psychic function—thinking, feeling, intuition, or sensation—and dominant orientation toward the external or internal world (extrovert and introvert personality types).

Jung greatly influenced the comparative study of religions, mythology, and folklore (as exemplified by the work of K. Kerényi and M. Eliade and by the international yearbook on cultural questions Eranos-Jahrbuch, published in Zürich from 1933), as well as aesthetics and literary and artistic criticism (such as that of H. Read in Great Britain). The Jung Institute was founded in Zürich in 1948. The Journal of Analytical Psychology has been published in London since 1955, and the International Association of Analytical Psychology was founded in 1958.

WORKS

Gesammelte Werke, 17 vols. Zürich-Stuttgart, 1958–.
Posthume Autobiographie, 4th ed. Zürich, 1967.
In Russian translation:
Psikhoz i ego soderzhanie. St. Petersburg, 1909.

REFERENCES

Averintsev, S. S. “‘Analiticheskaia psikhologiia’ K. G. Iunga i zakonomernosti tvorcheskoi fantazii.” Voprosy literatury, 1970, no. 3.
Fordham, F. An Introduction to Jung’s Psychology. London [1953].
Jacobi, J. Die Psychologie von C. G. Jung, 5th ed. Zürich-Stuttgart, 1967.
Meier, C. A. Experiment und Symbol: Arbeiten zur komplexen Psychologie C. G. Jungs. Zürich, 1975.

D. N. LIALIKOV