Carl Gustav Jung (1875 – 1961) was a Swiss psychologist who developed a new form of psychology called analytic psychology. This is in reaction to the work of fellow psychologist, Sigmund Freud.
Jung was born into a family of scholars and pastors. Jung seemed destined to become a minister because there were clergymen on both sides of his family. At the age of 16, he discovered philosophy and read extensively on the subject. This, combined with the disappointments of his childhood, led him to abandon his family’s traditional career path and study medicine and become a psychiatrist.
He attended two universities, Basel and Zürich, and studied medicine. He was lucky to be hired as a Psychiatric Technician at the Burghölzli Asylum in Zurich around 1900, when it was under the direction of Dr. Eugen Bleuler. Bleuler’s psychological interests had sparked a new wave of research into mental illness, which is now considered to be a classic field of study. Jung began to use association tests at the Burghölzli hospital.
These studies, which have made him an expert in psychiatry, have led him to understand Freud’s investigations; his findings support many of Freud’s ideas, and for a period of five years (between 1907 and 1912), he was Freud’s close collaborator.
In 1912, two different schools of thought about how to treat mental health problems emerged. One group of people believed in the work of Dr. Sigmund Freud, while another group believed in the work of Dr. Carl Jung. This disagreement led to some very serious disagreements between the two groups of people. Although Jung had been elected president of the International Psychoanalytic Society in 1911, he resigned from the society in 1914. His first big accomplishment was figuring out how people behave based on introversion and extraversion. The results of this study were found to be related to different psychological types. Jung also wrote about the subconscious mind in his book “The Psychology of the Unconscious.”
In 1912, two prominent psychoanalysts met in Munich to discuss the publication of their journals. Jung became a full professor at the University of Basel in 1943, but he resigned after a heart attack the next year. He then led a more private life. In 1945, Jung started corresponding with an English Roman Catholic priest, Father Victor White. He became ill again in 1952, but he was able to recover.
Jung continued to write books until the end of his life, including “Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies” (1959), which discusses the possible psychological significance of reports of UFOs. Jung wrote a book in 1964 called “Approaching the Unconscious” which is about how people use symbols to understand the world around them. Jung died on June 6, 1961, as he finally succumbed to his illness.
