Carl Jung was born in 1875, near Lake Constance in Switzerland. He was a son of Paul Jung, an Evangelical minister, and Emille Freiswerk Jung. The family moved to Basel, where the son obtained a medical degree at the university in 1900. For a doctoral thesis in philosophy, he selected the case of a girl affected by somnambulism and professing to be a spiritualist medium.
He married in 1903 and had five children. Jung trained as a psychiatrist and worked at the Burghölzli hospital in Zürich, where he came across Sigmund Freud’s work, in which he was immediately interested.
Their friendship lasted until 1913, at which time they parted ways due to a difference in academic opinion. Jung agreed with Freud’s theory of the unconscious, but Jung also believed in the existence of a deeper collective unconscious and representative archetypes. Carl Jung founded analytical psychology, advancing the idea of introvert and extrovert personalities, archetypes and the power of the unconscious.
Carl Jung became a lecturer in psychiatry at the University of Zurich and with Dr. Eugen Bleuler, founded the "Zurich School" of depth psychology. In time, this school came to be thought of as opposing the "Vienna School" established by Freud.
Carl Jung traveled throughout the world to teach and influence others with his psychoanalytical theories. He published many books relating to psychology, and others that seemed outside the realm science.
He died in Küsnacht, Switzerland in 1961, however his legacy lives on with the SAP (Society of Analytical Psychology), and across the world where his ideas remain a part of society’s collective thinking.
Carl Jung: Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst
