Carl Jung Biography and List of Works

Swiss psychiatrist, one of the founding fathers of modern depth psychology. Jung's most famous concept, the collective unconscious, has had a deep influence not only on psychology but also on philosophy and the arts.

"The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purposes through him. As a human being he may have moods and a will and personal aims, but as an artist he is "man" in a higher sense - he is "collective man," a vehicle and moulder of the unconscious psychic life of mankind."
(from 'Psychology and Literature', 1930)

Carl Jung was born in Kesswil, Switzerland. His father, Johannes Paul Achilles Jung (1842-1896), was a priest - a profession that had several representatives in the family. According to family legends, Jung's grandfather was Goethe's illegal son, although there was no real evidence to support the story.

Jung graduated with a medical degree in 1900 from the University of Basel and began his professional career at the University of Zürich. He worked at the Burghöltzi, the Zürich insane asylym and psychiatric clinic until 1909. His first published paper, On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena, appeared in 1902 and formed the basis for his doctoral thesis.

In 1903 Jung married Emma Rauschenbach (1882-1955). In 1907 his study on schizophrenia led him to close collaboration with Sigmund Freud. He also opened a private practice and travelled with Freud in 1909 to the Unites States, lecturing and meeting among others the American philosopher and psychologist William James, whose thoughts attracted Jung deeply. (see the writer Henry James, William James' brother)

"Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism."

Jung's disagreement with Freud started over the latter's emphasis on sexuality alone as the dominant factor in unconscious motivation. The ties were broken with the publication of Jung's Symbols of Transformation (1912), and with his acts as the president of the International Congress of Psycho-Analysis.

The break had profoundly disturbing effect on Jung. He withdrew from the psychoanalytic movement and suffered a six-year-long breakdown during which he had fantasies of mighty floods sweeping over northern Europe - prophetic visions of World War I.

Following his emergence from this period, Jung developed his own theories systematically under the name of Analytical Psychology. His concepts of the collective unconscious and archetypes led him to explore religion in the East and the West, myths, alchemy, and later flying saucers. Jung gathered material for his studies by visits to the Pueblo Indians and the Elgonies at East Africa. Although Jung travelled quite extensively during his life, he never went to Rome. The omission was deliberate; he felt that the associations the place would evoke were too strong.

Jung classified personalities into introvert and extravert types, according to the individual's attitude to the external world. His experience with patients made him define neurosis as 'the suffering of the soul which has not discovered its meaning.' Meaning can be found through dreams and their symbols in the form of archetypical images, arising from the collective unconscious.

Jung's view of literature was ambivalent. He was fascinated by Nietzsche, and wrote a study of Nietzsche's Zarathustra, but a distrust of aestheticism coloured his judgment of literary works. However, he had a special interest in trivial literature: "Indeed. Literary products of highly dubious merits are often of the greatest interest to the psychologist." From H. Rider Haggard's novel She, Jung found an embodiment of the anima. Especially Jung was interested in the mythic and archaic elements in literature. His Symbols of Transformation (1912) contains a lengthy discussion of Longfellow's Hiawatha, which is regarded as a poetic compilation of mythical motifs.

In 1933 Jung was nominated president of the General Medical Society for Psychotherapy. After the death of his wife in 1955, Jung began the final constructions of his Bollingen's house, or rather a castle of stone with towers, and reworked many earlier papers. Among his later publications are Aion (1951), Answer to Job (1952), and Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955-56).

Note: F.Scott Fitzgerald mentions Jung several times in Tender is the Night (1934). When his wife Zelda had a psychotic episode in late 1930, Jung was Fitzgerald's alternative choice of consultant. - Hermann Hesse's novel Demian was inspired by Jung's theory of individuation. - Among Jung's patients in the 1930s was James Joyce's daughter Lucia, who suffered from schizophrenia. Jung had earlier written a hostile analysis of Ulysses, and Joyce was left bitter at Jung's analysis of her daughter. He paid back in Finnegans Wake, joking with Jung's concepts of Animus and Anima. In his essay 'Ulysses' (1934) Jung saw Joyce's famous novel as an exploration of the spiritual condition of modern man, especially the brutalisation of his feelings.

Jung's Pupils: Sabina Spielrein, Jung's patient first, and later mistress according to some sources, practiced psychoanalysis in the USSR after completing her studies. She was killed with her two daughters by German soldiers in 1942.

For further reading: Complex, Archetype, Symbol in the Psychology of C.G. Jung by J. Jacobi (1957); The Myth of Meaning in the Work of C.G. Jung by A, Jaffé (1967); C.G. Jung and Herman Hesse by N. Serrano (1968); The Great Mother by E. Neumann (1972); C.G. Jung Speaking, ed. by W. McGuire and F.R. Hull (1977); Melville's "Moby-Dick": A Jungian Commentary by E.F. Edinger (1978); The Individuated Hobbit by T.R. O'Neill (1979); Joyce between Freud and Jung by S.R. Brivic (1979); Boundaries of the Soul by J. Singer (1994) - see also Jung and the Story of Our Time by Laurens Van der Post and The World Is Made of Glass by Morris L. West, which depicts Jung's life in 1913, when he was suffering from nervous breakdown. West parallels Sherlockian detective work with psychoanalytic process. - For further information: The C.G.Jung Institute of San Francisco.

DIE PSYCHOLOGIE DER DEMENTIA PRAECOX, (1907)