Carl Jung of Zurich
by Paul A. Schons

Originally published by the Germanic-American Institute in January, 2003.

Modern analytical psychology was developed and popularized in the 20th century by the trio of Freud, Jung and Adler. Freud and Adler did their work in Vienna. Carl Jung worked in his native Switzerland. Freud and Adler were Austrian Jews. Jung was a staunch Swiss Protestant with occasional strong attractions to Catholicism, albeit with unique tendencies to Asian and European mysticism. Both Jung and Adler broke with Freud after their early strong attachments to him. Jungian psychology and Adlerean psychology would develop in contrast to Freudian psychology.

Karl Gustav Jung was born in Kesswil, Switzerland on July 26, 1875. His father, Paul Jung, was a Protestant pastor. His parents had provided him with the name Karl with its normal German spelling with a K, but as a youth he decided he liked his name spelled with a C rather than a K and remained Carl for the rest of his life. He attended high school in Basel and studied medicine at Basel University. At the university he encountered the work of an evolutionary biologist, Ernst Haeckel. Haeckel’s views on biological development (ontogenesis recapitulates phylogenesis) would be dismissed before long by biologists, but Jung’s association of the idea to psychology continued to color his thinking throughout his career. During the course of his medical studies Jung was first attracted to psychology through his readings of Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Lehrbuch der Psychiatrie (Introduction to Psychiatry). He finished his initial studies in 1900 and gained experience with mental illness at the Burghözli mental hospital in Zurich as medical assistant to Eugen Bleuler.

Jung would continue at the Burghölzi hospital until 1909 when he developed a private practice and lectured at the University of Zurich. While at the hospital he encountered Freud’s Über den Traum (The Dream) and concluded that Freud “had it right”. The first contact with Freud was through a series of letters beginning in 1906. The two psychologists would develop a close friendship, a very nearly father and son relationship and collaboration during the following years. Both Jung and Freud, though, were powerful personalities and the early very positive relationship faded quickly. The break began in 1909. Freud and Jung were to lecture at Clark University in the United States that fall. During the long sea journey they began analyzing each other’s dreams “for amusement”. The amusement soon became too personal and Freud became irritated and broke it off. Their relationship would then decline very quickly. During his lectures at Fordham University in New York Jung began to criticize Freud publicly. All contact ended between the two in 1913, after increasingly hostile exchanges.

Jung continued to develop his theories of psychology independently in Switzerland. He made frequent trips to the United States, and very actively tried to establish widespread interest in his kind of analysis in the U.S. As a part of that process he quite actively tried to counteract interest in Freudian psychology. The contacts he made in America led to a number of (very wealthy) American clients seeking his services in Switzerland.

Jung had developed a fascination with mysticism fairly early on in his life. As time went on that fascination grew stronger. He investigated Gnosticism, kabala, Hinduism, Buddhism and alchemy. He was very interested in the symbolism of alchemy and symbolic elements from other mystic, magical and mythological systems. Those symbolic experiences became an integral part of his analytical system which he named Archetypes. In that connection he also developed a notion of the human psyche which he termed the collective unconscious. Dream interpretation, which he had learned from Freud, continued to play a key role in his new system of analysis. He perceived that there are common elements in the very structure of the human mind which lead to common images and experiences (archetypes) which are often revealed in dreams and in fantasies.

Jung was often able to effect cures and nearly always able to develop a guru-like devotion from his patients, especially his women patients. Many of his wealthy patients were quite generous in offering from their resources to the promotion of his activities and in the funding of the Jung foundations. A notable exception to the ongoing loyalty (even dependence) he developed was the case of the Nobel Prize winning author, Hermann Hesse, who after early sessions with Jung, lost faith in him.

Jung was a very religious man (though religious in his own rather idiosyncratic sense). Throughout his life he remained a staunchly loyal Protestant but was very attracted to Catholicism. At times he was even angry at the split in Christianity and dreamed he might be able personally to effect reconciliation. He was convinced though that neither of the Christian religions would be able to be successful into the future without making use of his understanding of analytic psychology.

Jung died in June of 1961 at the age of 85. He seemed prepared for death and had a series of dreams which he interpreted as foretelling the end. He was quite calm and made it clear that he anticipated continuing life “on the other side”. As the end approached, he suffered an embolism which robbed him of much of his ability to formulate words. He collapsed on May 30 during tea and died on June 6.  He left us with a still popular and wide-spread system of psychology and a series of concepts and terms which have entered popular vocabulary such as, archetypes, the persona, the anima and animus, the shadow, introverted and extroverted and the collective unconscious.