Carl Jung

Carl Jung

Carl Jung


Carl Jung was born on July 26, 1875 in Switzerland. He was the son of a Lutheran pastor, he struggled with the religious differences between him and his father. His feelings of isolation as a child would later play a part in his developing a theory on psychological growth. When he went to university he studied medicine. In 1900 he did a psychiatric internship in Zurich. By 1905 he was lecturing psychiatry at the University of Zurich. After some time he contacted Freud and expressed his interest in his ideas. When the two first met, they spoke for a total of thirteen hours. He died at age 86.

His theory on personality differs from Freud’s, primarily regarding the unconscious. On a conscious level he talked about the ego, which is the conscious way we think, and also the persona which is the way we choose to present ourselves to the world. Both of these are a part of the self which is the totality of the person (conscious and unconscious).

Jung’s view of the unconscious was that some of the unconscious was related to the individuals past experiences, he called this the personal unconscious. At the same time, there is a part of the unconscious which reflects universal, not individual, experiences. This portion he called the collective unconscious. The collective unconscious is a product of evolution (just as the body adapts to the environmental challenges, so does the brain).

The collective unconscious consists of archetypes. They don’t contain any content, but serve to organize the individuals’ experiences. The four most significant archetypes are the anima, the animus, the self and the shadow. Archetypes are basically innate, universal prototypes used to interpret observations. They are like psychological organs.

He thought, like Freud, that the unconscious expresses itself in symbolic forms. This is related to Jung’s theory of development, which he chose to call individuation. He believed that one can come to terms with ones unconscious...