He grew up essentially an only child, and the arrival of his sister Gertrude when he was 9 changed little. Jung records that he was never able to trust women again. Described as depressed, and more interested in the occult than in showing any affection to her son, Emilie had to be hospitalized for a period after suffering a breakdown when Carl was about three, an event that made a lasting impression on him. The children’s father, Paul, was a Protestant minister, but he was unhappy both in his profession and in his marriage, which could not have been pleasant for his wife either. Carl was her fourth child, but two daughters had been stillborn and another son had died soon after birth. His birth on July 26, 1875, for instance, was certainly no phantasm, at least so far as his mother, Emilie Preiswerk Jung, must have been concerned. Nevertheless some aspects of a sensible biography of Jung can be collected and narrated. These consisted of his experiences in the form of dreams, visions (some might characterize them as hallucinations), interplay between his two inner “selves” (one of which, dubbed “No. 2,” he described as an authoritative 18 th-century character with a white wig, who traveled in a coach and wore buckled shoes), and other active imaginings that formed inner pathways to what he would later term “individuation,” or the process of becoming who we are by integrating the conscious with the unconscious. “The very things that make up a sensible biography,” said Jung in the autobiography he dictated to Jaffé, had become for him mere “phantasms” compared to one’s inner developments. The experiences that had the most profound effect on him were, by his own account, those that occurred within himself people and the physical trappings of everyday life were relatively uninteresting to him. So who was this ambitious loner? Most biographies focus on the relational history of their subjects-the families into which they are born and the later encounters that influenced their development, but a sketch of Carl Gustav Jung’s life, by necessity, is bound to have a slightly different focus. Jung’s use of religious terms has sometimes encouraged the misconception that his idea of spirituality is somehow compatible with a biblical view but in Jung’s writings, the subjects of God, Christ and religion in general were invariably presented as mythology. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1961) But my encounters with the ‘other’ reality, my bouts with the unconscious, are indelibly engraved upon my memory.”Ĭ.G. “Recollection of the outward events of my life has largely faded or disappeared. Lachman also attributes the psychologist’s reputation as a mystic to the fact that he claimed special, secret knowledge or gnosis “not obtained through the normal methods of cognition.” In fact, “Jung’s link to Gnosticism was so significant,” observes Lachman, “that one of the Gnostic scrolls making up the library was purchased by the Jung Foundation in 1952 and named the ‘Jung Codex’ in honor of the man many saw as a modern Gnostic.”
Likewise Gary Lachman notes in his 2010 biography that despite Jung’s assertion to the contrary, “he would, by his own definition, be a mystic.” He openly admitted to having paranormal experiences and participating in séances. Even his secretary, Aniela Jaffé, acknowledged that “the clear analogies that exist between mysticism and Jungian psychology cannot be overlooked,” although she insisted that “this fact in no way denies its scientific basis.” Stung by his lack of acceptance as a scientist, Jung hated being called a mystic, a label which nevertheless clung to him throughout his life and beyond. Understanding something of his profound influence, however, is critical for anyone who wants to better understand the current state of Western culture.Īfter his departure from Freud’s Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1910, Jung founded an approach he named Analytical Psychology, many tenets of which have not only led some to refer to him as a “founding father of the New Age” but also prevented much of the scientific community from taking him seriously. But beyond that, most people today probably know little about the man. He introduced such terms as introversion and extraversion, the collective unconscious, archetypes and synchronicity into the popular vocabulary. Carl Gustav Jung is best known as one of the fathers of modern psychotherapy alongside his erstwhile associates Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler.
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