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Jung, Carl Gustav (1875-1961)

Swiss psychologist who made the study of various occult ideas valid within the framework of psychology. Jung was born on July 26, 1875, at Kesswil, Thurgau, Switzerland. He studied medicine at the University of Basel, Switzerland, (1895-1900) and completed his M.D. at the University of Zürich (1902). While still a student he became fascinated with the occult, on which he read a number of books. He also attended several Spiritualist séances. Jung's first publication was an essay on the psychology and pathology of occult phenomena.

Jung became a physician and assisted Eugene Bleuler at the Burghölzi Mental Hospital in Zürich. In 1905 he joined the faculty at the University of Zürich; about the same time he became interested in the new psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud. He became a leading student of Freud and in 1911 served as president of the International Psychoanalytic Society. In 1913, however, he went his own way as a result of what he regarded as Freud's overemphasis on sexual theories and opposition to occult ideas.

Jung's break with Freudian theory was marked by his paper "Symbols of the Libido," written in 1913. He resigned from the university that year, and for the next twenty years engaged in private practice, which allowed him to develop the approach he termed "analytic psychology." In his 1921 text Psychological Types he introduced his understanding of personality based on a set of polarities—introvert/extrovert, feeling/thinking, and sensation/intuition. Jung saw individual personality as determined by the balance or imbalance of these polarities.

Jung developed a view of the individual as consisting of a set of personality aspects he termed the ego (self-awareness), the persona (the expected social role played by each person), the shadow (a dark side), the animus (in a female) or anima (in a male) (the unconscious attitude toward the opposite sex), the self (soul or spirit), and the unconscious. He believed the development of a healthy personality, a process called "individuation," occurs as the various opposites in the personality are differentiated and then balanced.

Out of this basic understanding of the self several concepts of particular relevance to the modern occult community emerged. For example, Jung saw the unconscious as consisting of two layers—the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious. The collective unconscious, he said, is a deposit of archetypes or fundamental modes of apprehension that are common to all humanity because of the universality of certain underlying experiences. Archetypes manifest themselves in ancient (and not so ancient) myths, dreams, symbols, and artistic productions. One important appearance of archetypes is in the god forms of the ancient polytheistic religions. Thus one can speak of the archetype of the sky god or the mother goddess. Also from his concept of archetype, Jung speculated on the nature of flying saucers, about which he wrote a short book.

He also introduced the concept of synchronicity, the connecting principle between events, as distinct from conventional cause and effect, an important idea in modern astrology, which has attempted to break out of its deterministic mode of conceptualizing the relationship between humans and the zodiac.

Jung returned to teaching in 1933 as a professor of psychology at the Federal Polytechnical University, Zürich (1933-41) and professor of medical psychology at the University of Basel (1943-44). He spent his last years as a consultant and lecturer at the C. G. Jung Institute (1948-61). His many writings wore compiled in Collected Works (1953).

Jung's perception covered every major area of human experience. His occult experiences are indicated in his book VII Sermones ad Mortuoso, published anonymously, which dramatizes Jung's journey into the unconscious. Some of his reminiscences are recorded in Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1963). He died June 6, 1961, at Kuessnacht, Zürich.