Carl Gustav Jung was born on July 26, 1875, in Kesswil, Switzerland. As an only child for many years, Jung was considerably influenced by his parents. His father, Paul Achilles Jung, was a Protestant clergymen with a substantial library, where he taught Jung Latin at the age of six. As Jung grew up, he questioned his father in religious matters and was seldom satisfied with the answers he received. He wondered whether his father’s faith was prescribed and learned rather than having experienced the living God. His mother, Emilie Preiswerk, suffered from mental illness, and was hospitalized temporarily when Jung was three years old. This had left a lasting impression on Jung, having felt his mother to be unreliable. He saw his mother had two distinct personalities as she was companionable at times, and uncanny at others. In the latter moments, Jung reflected she seemed to have an archaic nature, a quality he saw in himself as well.
Jung’s extended family was rooted within the Protestant church. With six parsons on his mother’s side of the family, and two on his father’s side, Jung was often privy to religious and theological discussions. Perhaps this contributed to his maturity, recognized by his schoolmates when he was referred to as “Father Abraham.” Although Jung had early aspirations to also become a clergyman, he instead found himself interested in a developing new field, psychology.
Jung graduated the University of Basel in the year 1900, and moved to Zurich to work at the Burgholzli Asylum under Eugene Bleuer. During this time Jung began to observe the patients’ emotional responses to certain words, primarily moral or sexual in nature. This observation led him to develop the term complex as well as the method of word association.
In his personal life, Jung married Emma Rauschenbach in 1903. Together they had five children. Later, Emma would become a Jungian Analyst in her own right. She wrote The Anima and Animus, and co-authored The Grail Legend. They were married for over fifty years, until her death in 1952.
After many years of working in the same field, in 1907 Jung and Sigmund Freud had the fabled initial meeting, which lasted for thirteen uninterrupted hours. Over the next five years they maintained frequent correspondence and held considerable support for each other’s theories and explorations. Jung was considered the heir-apparent to Freud’s psychological legacy. However, Jung began to question Freud’s theory of sexuality as the source of neurosis. By 1912, it was clear there would be no further relationship, as Jung published Psychology of the Unconscious, a work that explored the unconscious and its symbolic contents, a work which directly defied Freud’s theories.
Following the break with Freud, in 1913 Jung experienced what he described as a “confrontation with the unconscious.” Jung recorded these experiences in his Black Books but later transferred them to The Red Book, alongside numerous drawings and mandalas to capture the insights more deeply. Jung found these visionary encounters as foundation to his work, and would use it as a source for all future writing. Over sixty years of writing culminated in the Collected Works, a series of essays ranging in topic from dreams, anthropology, archaeology, art, and religion, and remains the cornerstone of Analytical Psychology or, more commonly known as, Jungian Analysis.
