Jung, Carl Gustav
Geb. Kesswil bei Romanshorn 26.7. 1875, gest. Küsnacht bei Zürich 6.6. 1961,
schweizer. Psychoanalytiker. Entwickelte in Auseinandersetzung mit S.)Freud eine neue
tiefenpsycholog. Richtung, die analyt. Psychologie (auch komplexe Psychologie); stellte
neben das persönl. Unbewußte das kollektive Unbewußte, dem er entscheidende Bedeutung
zuschrieb.
Werke
Psycholog. Typen (1921), Die Beziehungen zw. dem Ich und dem Unbewußten (1928), Von
den Wurzeln des Bewußtseins (1954).
(c) LexiROM (Meyers Lexikonverlag).
Jung, Carl Gustav (1875-1961),
Swiss psychiatrist who founded the analytical school of psychology. Jung broadened the
work of Sigmund Freud on psychoanalysis, interpreting mental and emotional disturbances as
an attempt to find personal and spiritual wholeness.
Born on July 26, 1875, in Kesswil, Switzerland, the son of a Protestant clergyman, Jung
developed during his lonely childhood an inclination for dreaming and fantasy that greatly
influenced his adult work. After graduating in medicine in 1902 from the universities of
Basel and Zurich, with a wide background in biology, zoology, palaeontology, and
archaeology, he began his work on word association, in which a patient's responses to
stimulus words revealed what Jung called "complexes"-a term that has since
become universal. These studies brought him international renown and led him to a close
collaboration with Freud.
With the publication of Psychology of the Unconscious (1912; trans. 1916), however, Jung
declared his independence from Freud's narrowly sexual interpretation of the libido by
showing the close parallels between ancient myths and psychotic fantasies and by
explaining human motivation in terms of a larger creative energy. He gave up the
presidency of the International Psychoanalytic Society and cofounded a movement called
analytical psychology.
During his remaining 50 years Jung developed his theories, drawing on a wide knowledge of
mythology and history; on his travels to diverse cultures in New Mexico, India, and Kenya;
and especially, on the dreams and fantasies of his childhood. In 1921 he published a major
work, Psychological Types (trans. 1923), in which he dealt with the relationship between
the conscious and unconscious and proposed the now well-known personality types-extrovert
and introvert.
He later made a distinction between the personal unconscious, or the repressed feelings
and thoughts developed during an individual's life, and the collective unconscious, or
those inherited feelings, thoughts, and memories shared by all humanity. The collective
unconscious, according to Jung, is made up of what he called "archetypes", or
primordial images. These correspond to such experiences as confronting death or choosing a
mate and manifest themselves symbolically in religions, myths, fairy tales, and fantasies.
Jung's therapeutic approach aimed at reconciling the diverse states of personality, which
he saw divided not only into the opposites of introvert and extrovert, but also into those
of sensing and intuiting, and of feeling and thinking. By understanding how the personal
unconscious integrates with the collective unconscious, a patient can achieve a state of
individuation, or wholeness of self.
Jung wrote voluminously, especially on analytical methods and the relationships between
psychotherapy and religious belief. He died on June 6, 1961.
"Jung, Carl Gustav," Microsoft(R) Encarta(R) 96 Encyclopedia. (c) 1993-1995
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