Carl Jung

Carl Jung was Freud's designated heir and broke with him over whether the unconscious was only personal, and spent the rest of his life arguing that it was not. He was a Swiss pastor's son who trained in psychiatry at the Burghölzli hospital in Zurich under Eugen Bleuler, and made his name young with word-association experiments that measured hesitation and skin response to expose what he called complexes - the first laboratory evidence many psychiatrists accepted for unconscious material. He and Freud corresponded from 1906 and met in 1907 for a conversation that ran thirteen hours. Freud treated him as the successor who would keep psychoanalysis from being dismissed as a Jewish science, and made him first president of the International Psychoanalytical Association. The break came in 1913 over Jung's insistence that libido was general psychic energy rather than sexual, and over the collective unconscious: inherited structures he called archetypes, shared across cultures. He spent the following years in a deliberate confrontation with his own visions, recorded in the Red Book, which his family withheld until 2009. He introduced introversion and extraversion, the complex, the persona, the shadow and synchronicity, and the psychological types underlie the Myers-Briggs indicator, which he had no part in. His conduct and writing in the 1930s, including his editorship of a German psychotherapy journal and remarks distinguishing Jewish from Germanic psychology, are the enduring charge against him and he never satisfactorily answered it. He treated patients until the year he died. He built a stone tower at Bollingen on the upper lake of Zurich largely with his own hands, adding to it over more than thirty years, and used it without electricity as a place to work. He travelled to Kenya, to India and to the Taos Pueblo in New Mexico looking for confirmation that the archetypes were universal, and the accounts of those journeys have since been read as evidence of how easily he found his own theory in what he was shown. Answer to Job, published in 1952, treats God as a figure who must himself develop moral consciousness, and offended believers and analysts equally. His late memoir was dictated to his secretary Aniela Jaffe and he declined to call it an autobiography.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history