Carl Gustav Jung Add a review

Carl Gustav Jung ( YUUNG; Swiss Standard German: [karl jʊŋ]; 26 July 1875 – 6 June 1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist, psychotherapist, and psychologist who founded the school of analytical psychology. A prolific author of over twenty books, illustrator, and correspondent, Jung was a complex and convoluted academic, best known for his concept of archetypes. Alongside contemporaries Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler, Jung became one of the most influential psychologists of the early 20th century and has fostered not only scholarship, but also popular interest.

Jung's work has been influential in the fields of psychiatry, anthropology, archaeology, literature, philosophy, psychology, and religious studies. 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 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 raised as Christian, although he did not strictly adhere to traditional Christian doctrine, he saw religion, including Christianity, as a powerful expression of the human psyche and its search for meaning. 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.

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 treatment of American businessman and politician Rowland Hazard in 1926 with his conviction that alcoholics may recover if they have a "vital spiritual (or religious) experience" played a crucial role in the chain of events that led to the formation 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.