Carl Jung's father was a minister of the Protestant church who increasingly struggled with keeping his faith while his son was growing up. A lonely boy with a vivid imagination, Carl closely observed the members of his family and his teachers.Psychologist and psychiatrist, b. 26 July 1875 (Kesswil, Switzerland), d. 6 June 1961 (Küssnacht).
Carl Jung's father was a minister of the Protestant church who increasingly struggled with keeping his faith while his son was growing up. A lonely boy with a vivid imagination, Carl closely observed the members of his family and his teachers.
As an adolescent Jung discovered philosophy. When leaving high school he decided not to follow the family's tradition of serving as a minister and enrolled as a student of medicine specializing in psychiatry. He studied at the universities of Basel 1895 - 1900 and Zürich, where he received his M.D. in 1902.
Working at the Burghölzli Asylum of the University of Basel from 1900, Jung came into contact with patients and observed their often illogical responses to stimulus words which in their subconscious were associated with disagreeable or in their view immoral content. His observations opened an understanding of Freud's investigations, and during 1907 - 1912 he was Freud's close collaborator.
By 1912 Jung had become well known internationally and appeared the natural successor to the older Freud. But with the publication in 1912 of Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (English as "Psychology of the Unconscious" 1916) Jung turned away from the psychoanalysis of Freud and his emphasis on the sexual basis of neuroses. In 1914 he resigned from his position as president of the International Psychoanalytic Society, a position he had held since 1911, and developed his own psychotherapy based on the differentiation of archetypes (instinctive patterns) and the "collective subconscious" that he believed was shared by all.
As time went on Jung moved more and more towards religion and mysticism. He gave free reign to dreams and fantasies - as a boy he had always had unusually strong dreams - and began to read what he called neglected writers. He rediscovered medieval alchemy, which he said had developed a kind of textbook of the collective unconscious and wrote extensively about it.
In his psychotherapy practice Jung was successful with patients who had lost their religious belief or felt that their lives had lost their meaning by giving them new spirituality. He was professor of psychology at the Federal Polytechnical University in Zürich from 1933 until 1941 and professor of medical psychology at the University of Basel in 1943.
Jung's ideas of archetypes and character led him to believe as early as 1918 that Germany held a special position in Europe. His reaction to the rise of fascism brought him frequent accusations of support of Nazi ideology. Among his works are
Fordham, M. S. M. and F. Fordham (1995) Carl Gustav Jung. Encyclopaedia Britannica 15th ed.