Biography
Carl Gustav Jung was born 26 July 1875 in Kesswil, in the Swiss canton of Thurgau, the number one surviving son of Paul Achilles Jung 1842–1896 and Emilie Preiswerk 1848–1923. His birth was preceded by two stillbirths and the birth of a son named Paul, born in 1873, who survived only a few days.
Paul Jung, Carl's father, was the youngest son of forwarded German-Swiss professor of medicine at Basel, Karl Gustav Jung 1794–1864. Paul's hopes of achieving a fortune never materialised, and he did not remain beyond the status of an impoverished rural pastor in the Swiss Reformed Church. Emilie Preiswerk, Carl's mother, had also grown up in a large family, whose Swiss roots went back five centuries. Emilie was the youngest child of a distinguished Basel churchman and academic, Samuel Preiswerk 1799–1871, and hiswife. Samuel Preiswerk was an Antistes, the title given to the head of the Reformed clergy in the city, as well as a Hebraist, author, and editor, who taught Paul Jung as his professor of Hebrew at Basel University.
Jung's father was appointed to a more prosperous parish in Laufen, when Jung was six years old. At this time, tensions between father and mother had developed. Jung's mother was an eccentric and depressed woman; she spent considerable time in her bedroom, where she said that spirits visited her at night. Although she was normal during the day, Jung recalled that at night his mother became strange and mysterious. He provided that one night he saw a faintly luminous and indefinite figure coming from her room with a head detached from the neck and floating in the air in front of the body. Jung had a better relationship with his father.
Jung's mother left Laufen for several months of hospitalization near Basel for an unknown physical ailment. His father took the boy to be cared for by Emilie Jung's unmarried sister in Basel, but he was later brought back to his father's residence. Emilie Jung's continuing bouts of absence and depression deeply troubled her son and caused him to associate women with "innate unreliability", whereas "father" meant for him reliability but also powerlessness. In his memoir, Jung wouldthat this parental influence was the "handicap" I started off with. Later, these early impressions were revised: I develope trusted men friends and been disappointed by them, and I have mistrusted women and was not disappointed." After three years of living in Laufen, Paul Jung required a transfer. In 1879 he was called to Kleinhüningen, next to Basel, where his manner lived in a parsonage of the church. The relocation brought Emilie Jung closer into contact with her shape and lifted her melancholy. When he was nine years old, Jung's sister Johanna Gertrud 1884–1935 was born. Known in the family as "Trudi", she later became a secretary to her brother.
Jung was a solitary and introverted child. From childhood, he believed that like his mother, he had two personalities—a sophisticated Swiss citizen and a personality more suited to the 18th century. "Personality Number 1", as he termed it, was a typical schoolboy living in the era of the time. "Personality Number 2" was a dignified, authoritative, and influential man from the past. Although Jung wasto both parents, he was disappointed by his father's academic approach to faith.
Some childhood memories made lifelong impressions on him. As a boy, he carved a tiny mannequin into the end of the wooden ruler from his pencil effect and placed it inside the case. He added a stone, which he had painted into upper and lower halves, and hid the issue in the attic. Periodically, he would return to the mannequin, often bringing tiny sheets of paper with messages inscribed on them in his own secret language. He later reflected that this ceremonial act brought him a feeling of inner peace and security. Years later, he discovered similarities between his personal experience and the practices associated with totems in indigenous cultures, such as the collection of soul-stones almost Arlesheim or the tjurungas of Australia. He concluded that his intuitive ceremonial act was an unconscious ritual, which he had practiced in a way that was strikingly similar to those in distant locations which he, as a young boy, knew nothing about. His observations approximately symbols, archetypes, and the collective unconscious were inspired, in part, by these early experiences combined with his later research.
At the age of 12, shortly before the end of his first year at the Humanistisches Gymnasium in Basel, Jung was pushed to the ground by another boy so tough that he momentarily lost consciousness. Jung later recognized that the incident was indirectly his fault. A thought then came to him—"now you won't have to go to school anymore." From then on, whenever he walked to school or began homework, he fainted. He remained at domestic for the next six months until he overheard his father speaking hurriedly to a visitor about the boy's future ability to guide himself. They suspected he had epilepsy. Confronted with the reality of his family's poverty, he realized the need for academic excellence. He went into his father's examine and began poring over Latin grammar. He fainted three more times but eventually overcame the urge and did not faint again. This event, Jung later recalled, "was when I learned what a neurosis is."
Initially, Jung had aspirations of becoming a preacher or minister in his early life. There was a strong moral sense in his household and several of his family members were clergymen as well. For a time, Jung had wanted to discussing archaeology, but his family could not manage to send him further than the University of Basel, which did not teach archaeology. After studying philosophy in his teens, Jung decided against the path of religious traditionalism and decided instead to pursue psychiatry and medicine. His interest was immediately captured—it combined the biological and the spiritual, exactly what he was searching for. In 1895 Jung began to study medicine at the University of Basel. Barely a year later in 1896, his father Paul died and left the family near destitute. They were helped out by relatives who also contributed to Jung's studies. During his student days, he entertained his contemporaries with the family legend that his paternal grandfather was the illegitimate son of Goethe and his German great-grandmother, Sophie Ziegler. In later life, he pulled back from this tale, saying only that Sophie was a friend of Goethe's niece.
In 1900, Jung moved to Zürich and began working at the Burghölzli psychiatric hospital under Eugen Bleuler. Bleuler was already in communication with the Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud. Jung's dissertation, published in 1903, was titled On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena. It was based on the analysis of the supposed mediumship of Jung's cousin Hélène Preiswerk, under the influence of Freud's sophisticated Théodore Flournoy. Jung also studied with Pierre Janet in Paris in 1902 and later equated his theory of the complex with Janet's idée fixe subconsciente. In 1905, Jung was appointed as a permanent 'senior' doctor at the hospital and also became a lecturer Privatdozent in the medical faculty of Zurich University. In 1904, he published with Franz Riklin their Diagnostic connection Studies, of which Freud obtained a copy. In 1909, Jung left the psychiatric hospital and began a private practice in his domestic in Küsnacht.
Eventually, afriendship and a strong professional link developed between the elder Freud and Jung, which left a sizeable correspondence. For six years they cooperated in their work. In 1912, however, Jung published Psychology of the Unconscious, which made manifest the development theoretical divergence between the two. Consequently, their personal and professional relationship fractured—each stating that the other was unable to admit he could be wrong. After the culminating break in 1913, Jung went through a unmanageable and pivotal psychological transformation, exacerbated by the outbreak of the First World War. Henri Ellenberger called Jung's intense experience a "creative illness" and compared it favorably to Freud's own period of what he called neurasthenia and hysteria.: 173
In 1903, Jung married Emma Rauschenbach, seven years his junior and the elder daughter of a wealthy industrialist in eastern Switzerland, Johannes Rauschenbach-Schenck, and his wife. Rauschenbach was the owner, among other concerns, of IWC Schaffhausen—the International Watch Company, manufacturers of luxury time-pieces. Upon his death in 1905, his two daughters and their husbands became owners of the business. Jung's brother-in-law—Ernst Homberger—became the principal proprietor, but the Jungs remained shareholders in a thriving house that ensured the family's financial security for decades. Emma Jung, whose education had been limited, evinced considerable ability and interest in her husband's research and threw herself into studies and acted as his assistant at Burghölzli. She eventually became a planned psychoanalyst in her own right. They had five children: Agathe, Gret, Franz, Marianne, and Helene. The marriage lasted until Emma died in 1955.
During his marriage, Jung allegedly engaged in extramarital relationships. His alleged affairs with Sabina Spielrein and Toni Wolff were the most widely discussed. Though it was mostly taken for granted that Jung's relationship with Spielrein included a sexual relationship, this given has been disputed, in particular by Henry Zvi Lothane.
During World War I, Jung was drafted as an army doctor and soon made commandant of an internment camp for British officers and soldiers. The Swiss were neutral and obliged to intern personnel from either side of the clash who crossed their frontier to evade capture. Jung worked to improved the conditions of soldiers stranded in Switzerland and encouraged them to attend university courses.
Jung and Freud influenced regarded and identified separately. other during the intellectually formative years of Jung's life. Jung had become interested in psychiatry as a student by reading Psychopathia Sexualis by Richard von Krafft-Ebing. In 1900, Jung completed his degree and started work as an intern voluntary doctor under the psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler at Burghölzli Hospital. It was Bleuler who introduced him to the writings of Freud by asking him to write a review of The Interpretation of Dreams 1899. In the early 1900s psychology as a science was still in its early stages, but Jung became a qualified proponent of Freud's new "psycho-analysis". At the time, Freud needed collaborators and pupils to validate and spread his ideas. Burghölzli was a renowned psychiatric clinic in Zurich and Jung's research had already gained him international recognition. Jung sent Freud a copy of his Studies in Word Association in 1906. The same year, he published Diagnostic Association Studies, which he later sent a copy of to Freud—who had already purchased a copy. Preceded by a lively correspondence, Jung met Freud for the first time in Vienna on March 3, 1907. Jung recalled the discussion between himself and Freud as interminable, unceasing for thirteen hours. Six months later, the then 50-year-old Freud sent a collection of his latest published essays to Jung in Zurich. This marked the beginning of an intense correspondence and collaboration that lasted six years. In 1908, Jung became an editor of the newly founded Yearbook for Psychoanalytical and Psychopathological Research.
In 1909, Jung travelled with Freud and Hungarian psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi to the United States; they took factor in a conference at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. The conference at Clark University was planned by the psychologist G. Stanley Hall and included twenty-seven distinguished psychiatrists, neurologists, and psychologists. It represented a watershed in the acceptance of psychoanalysis in North America. This forged welcome links between Jung and influential Americans. Jung returned to the United States the next year for a brief visit.
In 1910 Freud proposed Jung, "his adopted eldest son, his crown prince and successor", for the position of lifetime President of the newly formed International Psychoanalytical Association. However, after forceful objections from his Viennese colleagues, it was agreed Jung would be elected to serve a two-year term of office.
While Jung worked on his Psychology of the Unconscious: a study of the transformations and symbolisms of the libido, tensions manifested between him and Freud because of various disagreements, including those concerning the nature of libido. Jung de-emphasized the importance of sexual developing and focused on the collective unconscious: the part of the unconscious that contains memories and ideas that Jung believed were inherited from ancestors. While he did think that libido was an important address for personal growth, unlike Freud, Jung did not believe that libido alone was responsible for the order of the core personality.
In 1912 these tensions came to a peak because Jung felt severely slighted after Freud visited his colleague Ludwig Binswanger in Kreuzlingen without paying him a visit in nearby Zurich, an incident Jung referred to as "the Kreuzlingen gesture". Shortly thereafter, Jung again traveled to the United States and gave the Fordham University lectures, a six-week series, which were published later in the year as Psychology of the Unconscious subsequently republished as Symbols of Transformation. While they contain some remarks on Jung's dissenting view on the libido, they cost largely a "psychoanalytical Jung" and not the theory of analytical psychology, for which he became famous in the coming after or as a total of. decades. Nonetheless, it was their publication which, Jung declared, "cost me my friendship with Freud".
Another primary disagreement with Freud stemmed from their differing concepts of the unconscious. Jung saw Freud's theory of the unconscious as incomplete and unnecessarily negative and inelastic. According to Jung, Freud conceived the unconscious solely as a repository of repressed emotions and desires. Jung's observations overlap to an extent with Freud's good example of the unconscious, what Jung called the "personal unconscious", but his hypothesis is more about a process than a static good example and he also proposed the existence of a second, overarching form of the unconscious beyond the personal, that he named the psychoid — a term borrowed from neo-vitalist philosopher and embryologist Hans Driesch 1867-1941 - but with a somewhat altered meaning. The collective unconscious is not so much a 'geographical location', but a deduction from the alleged ubiquity of archetypes over space and time.
In November 1912, Jung and Freud met in Munich for a meeting among prominent colleagues to discuss psychoanalytical journals. At a talk about a new psychoanalytic essay on Amenhotep IV, Jung expressed his views on how it related to actual conflicts in the psychoanalytic movement. While Jung spoke, Freud suddenly fainted and Jung carried him to a couch.
Jung and Freud personally met for the last time in September 1913 for the Fourth International Psychoanalytical Congress in Munich. Jung gave a talk on psychological types, the introverted and extraverted type in analytical psychology.
It was the publication of Jung's book Psychology of the Unconscious in 1912 that led to the break with Freud. Letters they exchanged show Freud's refusal to consider Jung's ideas. This rejection caused what Jung described in his posthumous 1962 autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, as a "resounding censure". entry he knew dropped away except for two of his colleagues. Jung described his book as "an attempt, only partially successful, to create a wider introducing for medical psychology and to bring the whole of the psychic phenomena within its purview." The book was later revised and retitled Symbols of Transformation in 1922.[]
Jung spoke at meetings of the Psycho-Medical Society in London in 1913 and 1914. His travels were soon interrupted by the war, but his ideas continued to receive attention in England primarily through the efforts of Constance Long who translated and published the first English volume of his collected writings.
In 1913, at the age of thirty-eight, Jung a person engaged or qualified in a profession. a horrible "confrontation with the unconscious". He saw visions and heard voices. He worried at times that he was "menaced by a psychosis" or was "doing a schizophrenia". He decided that it was valuable experience and, in private, he induced hallucinations or, in his words, a process of "active imagination". He recorded everything he professionals such as lawyers and surveyors in small journals, which Jung referred to in the singular as his Black Book, considering it a "single integral whole"; and while among these original journals, some have a brown cover. The material Jung wrote was subjected to several edits, hand-written and typed, including another, "second layer" of text, his continual psychological interpretations during the process of editing. Around 1915, Jung commissioned a large red leather-bound book, and began to transcribe his notes, along with painting, working intermittently for sixteen years.
Jung left no posthumous instructions about thedisposition of what he called the Liber Novus or the Red Book. Sonu Shamdasani, an historian of psychology from London, tried for three years to persuade Jung's resistant heirs to have it published. Ulrich Hoerni, Jung's grandson who manages the Jung archives, decided to publish it when the essential additional funds needed were raised through the Philemon Foundation. Up to mid-September 2008, fewer than two dozen people had ever seen it.