Carl Jung

Carl Gustav Jung was born in Kesswil on Lake Constance in 1875 and studied medicine at the Universities of Basel and Zürich, receiving his medical degree in 1900. Early in his career he worked at the Burghölzli psychiatric hospital under Eugen Bleuler, where his research on word-association tests and 'complexes' established his reputation as an innovative clinician and researcher. After reading Freud’s work, Jung began a correspondence and intellectual collaboration with Sigmund Freud, which initially was close and collegial and led to Jung’s appointment to prominent positions within emerging psychoanalytic organizations. The two men ultimately split—largely over theoretical disagreements such as Freud’s emphasis on sexual drives—after which Jung developed his own system, which he called analytical psychology, placing greater weight on symbolism, myth, spirituality, and collective structures of the psyche. Over the 1910s–1930s, Jung formulated core concepts including the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious, populated by universal archetypes, and published foundational works such as Psychological Types (1921) and many essays on symbols and religion. In later decades, Jung lectured and traveled widely, influencing multiple disciplines, and produced a large collected corpus of works; his ideas such as individuation and synchronicity have continued to shape psychotherapy, cultural studies, and popular conceptions of personality. Jung died in 1961 in Küsnacht, Switzerland; since then, his work has been institutionalized through Jung Institutes and international associations dedicated to training and research in analytical psychology.