Psychiatrist of Dream and Myth
Zurich psychiatrist who timed hesitations in word tests, then mined dreams, myths and his own visions for an influential, contested psychology.
Psychiatrist & Founder of Analytical Psychology
Jung began in a hospital laboratory, timing how long people took to answer a single word, and ended reading alchemy, scripture and his own visions. Between the two lies an influential, unfinished psychology: a way of taking dreams and images seriously, a vocabulary of complexes, introverts and archetypes that escaped into everyday speech, and a record in the 1930s that his readers still have to reckon with.
Jung was born on 26 July 1875 in Kesswil, on Lake Constance, the son of a Reformed pastor, Paul Jung, and Emilie Preiswerk. He studied medicine at Basel from 1895 to 1900 and then joined the Burghölzli, Zurich’s university psychiatric clinic, under Eugen Bleuler. His 1902 dissertation examined the psychology of so-called occult phenomena; he went on to study with Pierre Janet in Paris, and in 1903 married Emma Rauschenbach.
At the Burghölzli he made his name with a laboratory test. The experimenter reads out a list of stimulus words; the subject answers each with the first word that comes to mind while the delay is timed; then the list is repeated and the subject tries to recall the earlier answers. Jung and his colleague Franz Riklin published a long study of the associations of healthy subjects, and Jung later measured skin conductance and breathing with Frederick Peterson and Charles Ricksher. What interested him were the disturbances: an unusually long pause, no answer at all, a repeated stimulus word, a forgotten reply on the second run, or trouble that spilled into the next few words. He read them as signs that a word had touched a cluster of feeling-charged ideas, which he called a complex.
In the lectures he gave at Clark University in 1909 he described using the test after a theft on a hospital ward. Words connected with the theft were mixed among neutral ones and given to three nurses; the nurse whose reactions were most disturbed confessed that evening. The test earned him his 1905 habilitation and a lectureship at the University of Zurich. It also gives a concrete beginning to a thinker usually met through symbols alone: his later theories grew from clinical measurement and observation, even where they travelled far beyond what any experiment could establish.
The association studies brought Jung into alliance with Sigmund Freud. The Burghölzli became a centre of psychoanalysis; Jung helped found the International Psychoanalytical Association and was its president from 1909 to 1913. In 1909 he left his post at the Burghölzli and settled at Küsnacht on Lake Zurich, where he lived for the rest of his life.
Psychology of the Unconscious (Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido, 1912) is the book in which the break becomes visible. Jung takes the published fantasies of a young woman and sets them beside the hero myth and other mythological parallels, treating libido as psychic energy in general rather than as sexual desire alone. That method of setting an image beside its parallels in myth and history, known in his vocabulary as amplification, would remain his signature. Freud rejected both the wider libido and the idea of a collective layer of the unconscious, and Jung resigned from the association in 1913 and from his Zurich lectureship in 1914.
One case became a founding exhibit for that collective layer. A Burghölzli patient, later known as the Solar Phallus Man, told Jung of a phallus coming from the sun that produced the wind. Jung matched it with what he took to be the same image in an ancient text and treated the parallel as evidence of an inherited layer of the psyche. The psychologist and Jungian analyst Christian Roesler, reviewing archetype theory in the Journal of Analytical Psychology in 2012, points to the difficulty: to treat such images as inherited, Jung had to rule out earlier contact with the idea in every case, which he could not prove, and Raya Jones has asked why a truly archetypal image should appear in only one patient and one text. The ambition and the evidential difficulty belong in the same story.
In the winter of 1913, as the break with Freud became final, Jung deliberately gave free rein to his fantasy thinking and wrote down what followed. The Black Books, the notebooks he kept from 1913 to 1932, record these waking fantasies and the dialogues he held with their figures. The Philemon Foundation’s editors stress that they are not diaries but records of a self-experiment. This was the practice he later called active imagination: let an image move while awake, then answer it.
Jung transcribed the main fantasies into a manuscript and recopied it, in Gothic lettering with painted initials, borders and many paintings, into a large red leather folio modelled on medieval manuscripts. He worked on this Red Book for sixteen years and never published it. About half of its text comes almost directly from the Black Books of 1913 to 1916. Sonu Shamdasani’s edition, translated with Mark Kyburz and John Peck, appeared in 2009, and the Black Books followed in 2020. They let readers see the struggle behind concepts that otherwise sound polished and inevitable. The Red Book records one man’s encounter with imaginative experience; it is not a manual for interpreting anyone else’s dreams.
The Philemon Foundation, which sponsored the edition, describes the Red Book as the prototype of Jung’s idea of individuation: a long process of becoming more fully oneself by meeting neglected or conflicting parts of experience. From 1916 the Psychological Club in Zurich gave the ideas a circle of patients and pupils. Psychological Types (1921) turned the period outward into a theory: two attitudes, introversion and extraversion, crossed with four functions, thinking, feeling, sensation and intuition. The book is richer and stranger than the personality labels later drawn from it.
In 1923 Jung began building a stone tower at Bollingen on the upper Lake Zurich, and he enlarged it over the following decades as a retreat for writing and solitude. From 1933 he developed many ideas in lectures at the annual Eranos meetings in Ascona, and from 1933 to 1941 he gave public lectures on psychology at the ETH, Zurich’s federal technical university, ranging over the history of psychology, dreams, yoga and meditation, Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises and alchemy. Harvard gave him an honorary doctorate in 1936, as did the universities of Calcutta, Benares and Allahabad in 1938.
The same decade brought the most damaging episode of his public life. In 1933 Jung became president of the General Medical Society for Psychotherapy, a professional body based mainly in Germany that was coming under Nazi control, and editor of its journal, the Zentralblatt für Psychotherapie. Jung said he accepted in order to protect Jewish colleagues. He rewrote the constitution so that the society became an international federation of national groups with a separate individual membership, through which Jewish doctors already excluded from the German section could still join. According to Jung, a pro-Nazi statement of principles by Matthias Heinrich Göring, head of the German section and a cousin of Hermann Göring, was inserted into the Zentralblatt without his knowledge; he also described his editorship as a formality.
Jung’s own words are harder to set aside. In a Zentralblatt editorial he wrote that “the differences which actually do exist between Germanic and Jewish psychology” were “no longer to be glossed over”, and in “The State of Psychotherapy Today” (1934) that “the ‘Aryan’ unconscious has a higher potential than the Jewish.” In his “Rejoinder to Dr Bally” (1934), answering criticism of his position, he confessed his “total inability to understand why it should be a crime to speak of Jewish psychology.” He resigned the presidency and the editorship in 1940. Defenders point to his help for individual Jewish colleagues and patients. The analyst Andrew Samuels argues that this testimony cannot settle the matter, because Jung’s habit of listing supposedly inborn national characteristics was itself the problem: “in C.G. Jung, nationalism found its psychologist.” The Historical Dictionary of Switzerland’s summary is that his stance towards National Socialism is still debated.
In 1943 Jung was appointed professor of medical psychology at Basel, a chair he held only until 1944. On 24 April 1948 the C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich was founded as a training foundation; its first board joined Jung with C. A. Meier, Kurt Binswanger, Jolande Jacobi and Liliane Frey-Rohn. The physicist Wolfgang Pauli became a partner in his most speculative work: with him Jung developed the theory of synchronicity, published in 1952: the idea of meaningful coincidence without a causal connection.
In these years Jung also refined his central concept. From 1947 he distinguished the archetype as such, a disposition without content of its own, from the archetypal images in which it appears, and he stated that the content of those images is shaped by culture. Aion (1951), subtitled Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, applies that framework to the self and the shadow in the history of Christian symbolism. Roesler’s review concludes that there is still “no firm scientific foundation” for the claim that complex symbolic patterns such as the hero myth are transmitted so that every individual has access to them, and suggests that culture and upbringing may do much of the work Jung assigned to inheritance. The images can repay attention without the theory of their origin being accepted as established science.
Jung died at Küsnacht on 6 June 1961. Two posthumous books shaped how most readers first meet him: Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962), recorded and edited by Aniela Jaffé and best read as mediated autobiography, and Man and His Symbols (1964), the illustrated introduction he planned for general readers and completed with Marie-Louise von Franz, Joseph Henderson, Jaffé and Jacobi.
Joseph CampbellMyth and recurring symbols move here from depth psychology into comparative narrative.
Alan MooreMoore turns magic, archetype and symbolic transformation into comics form.
