Jung, Carl (Gustav)

Carl Jung

(credit: Leni Iseley–Nancy Palmer Agency)

(born July 26, 1875, Kesswil, Switz.—died June 6, 1961, Küsnacht) Swiss psychiatrist. As a youth he read widely in philosophy and theology. After taking his medical degree (1902), he worked in Zürich with Eugen Bleuler on studies of mental illness. From this research emerged Jung's notion of the complex, or cluster of emotionally charged (and largely unconscious) associations. Between 1907 and 1912 he was Sigmund Freud's close collaborator and most likely successor, but he broke with Freud over the latter's insistence on the sexual basis of neuroses. In the succeeding years Jung founded the field of analytic psychology, a response to Freud's psychoanalysis. Jung advanced the concepts of the introvert and extravert personality, archetypes, and the collective unconscious (the pool of human experience passed from generation to generation). He went on to formulate new psychotherapeutic techniques designed to reacquaint the person with his unique “myth” or place in the collective unconscious, as expressed in dream and imagination. Sometimes dismissed as disguised religion and criticized for its lack of verifiability, Jung's perspective nonetheless remains influential in religion and literature as well as psychiatry. His important works include The Psychology of the Unconscious (1912; revised as Symbols of Transformation), Psychological Types (1921), Psychology and Religion (1938), and Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962).