Carl Gustav Jung Add a review

Carl Gustav Jung ( YUUNG; German: [kaʁl ˈjʊŋ]; 26 July 1875 – 6 June 1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist, psychotherapist, psychologist and pioneering evolutionary theorist who founded the school of analytical psychology. He was a prolific author, illustrator, and correspondent, and a complex and controversial character, perhaps best known through his "autobiography" Memories, Dreams, Reflections.

Jung's work has been influential in the fields of psychiatry, anthropology, archaeology, literature, philosophy, psychology, religious studies and evolutionary theory. He worked as a research scientist at the Burghölzli psychiatric hospital, in Zurich, under Eugen Bleuler. Jung established himself as an influential mind, developing a friendship with Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis, conducting a lengthy correspondence paramount to their joint vision of human psychology. Jung is widely regarded as one of the most influential psychologists in history.

Freud saw the younger Jung not only as the heir he had been seeking to take forward his "new science" of psychoanalysis, but as a means to legitimize his own work: Freud and other contemporary psychoanalysts were Jews facing rising antisemitism in Europe, and Jung was Christian. Freud secured Jung's appointment as president of Freud's newly founded International Psychoanalytical Association. Jung's research and personal vision, however, made it difficult to follow his older colleague's doctrine and they parted ways. This division was painful for Jung and resulted in the establishment of Jung's analytical psychology, as a comprehensive system separate from psychoanalysis. Scholar Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi believed Jung's later antisemitic remarks may be a clue to the schism.

Among the central concepts of analytical psychology is individuation—the lifelong psychological process of differentiation of the self out of each individual's conscious and unconscious elements. Jung considered it to be the main task of human development. He created some of the best known psychological concepts, including synchronicity, archetypal phenomena, the collective unconscious, the psychological complex, and extraversion and introversion. His belief that some alcoholics may recover if they have a 'spiritual or religious experience' indirectly influenced the later founding of Alcoholics Anonymous. Jung was an artist, craftsman, builder, and prolific writer. Many of his works were not published until after his death and some remain unpublished.