Carl Gustav Jung

Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychologist born in Kesswil, in the canton of Thurgau, who is among the founding figures of modern psychology. He studied medicine at the University of Basel and began his career at the Burghölzli psychiatric clinic in Zurich under Eugen Bleuler, where he developed word association experiments that provided early empirical evidence for the existence of unconscious complexes. From 1906 he worked closely with Sigmund Freud; the two men broke definitively in 1912, when Jung published Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (Symbols of Transformation), which departed from Freudian orthodoxy on the nature of the libido and on incest.

Jung subsequently developed what he called analytical psychology, centered on distinct concepts: the collective unconscious (a layer of the psyche shared across humanity, distinct from the personal unconscious), archetypes (universal symbolic figures recurring across cultures and dreams), individuation (the process of psychological integration over a lifetime), and psychological types (introversion/extraversion; the thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition functions — elaborated in Psychological Types, 1921). He drew extensively on mythology, alchemy, Gnosticism, and Eastern religion as systems of symbolic thought that gave form to unconscious processes. His Collected Works, published in German from 1958 and in English from 1953, run to twenty volumes. Key texts include The Red Book (Liber Novus), his illustrated personal manuscript begun in 1913 and published posthumously in 2009, and Aion (1951), Answer to Job (1952), and Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955–56).