Carl Jung: biography of the father of depth psychology

Carl Jung was one of the most prominent psychologists in history. His legacy is a fascinating alchemy where an itinerary is traced between analytical psychology, the collective unconscious, spirituality, humanism and mythology. For this pioneer of the science of dreams, understanding the psyche meant, above all, revealing the Self, making the unconscious conscious.

When we pronounce Jung’s name, it is common for concepts such as archetypes, synchronicity or the aforementioned collective unconscious to instantly come to mind. However, something we often neglect about these notable figures of 20th century psychology is that above all, they were great thinkers.

Carl Jung was a very notable figure in this same aspect. Almost at the end of his life, he made a series of reflections that we find highly inspiring today.. For him, psychology was a basic tool for human beings. It is that channel of self-knowledge with which to understand the origin of our shadows, of those vetoing fears that limit life.

People are capable of unleashing the most terrible wars and the most irrational conflicts. However, if we managed to know a little more about our psyche, and those energies attached to our deep architecture, we would have, according to Jung, more enlightened, respectful and happy lives. Because knowledge is revelation and it is freedom.

Carl Jung’s childhood: when a dream changes everything

Carl Gustav Jung was born on July 26, 1875 in Kesswil, Switzerland.. Her father was a Protestant clergyman, and her mother, Emilie Preiswerk, spent long periods confined in institutions due to various psychiatric disorders.

He had three brothers, but they died early. In the midst of that scenario that is so complex and desolating at times, It didn’t take long for little Carl to develop a solitary and observant character. He adored nature, history, philosophy and secluding himself in his particular inner world. Thus, something that he was very clear from very early on is that he did not want to follow the same religious path that his father and his grandfather intended to show him. He had his own destiny.

As he revealed years later in various interviews, his life changed as a result of a childhood dream.. For him it was something decisive: he dreamed that he fell into a dark hole, which took him to the royal chamber of a palace with high ceilings and red carpets. In the center of that room there was a human-looking tree, sinister and dark. In the background, his mother’s voice was shouting at him to get away: it was the “man eater”.

Carl Jung, the alienist

Car Jung became clear from that dream that he needed to understand the mystery of the dream world.. She longed to delve deeper into his messages, into his images and symbols. Perhaps, for this reason, he initially thought of studying archaeology. However, due to lack of money in his family, he ended up graduating in 1900 in medicine from the University of Basel.

Just when he was about to work as a doctor’s assistant, chance came into his life again. Only this time it was not a dream that marked his destiny, but a book, a psychiatry manual. In it he explained the origin of psychosis and personality disorders.

Jung thought about his mother and her need to understand the psychological architecture of the human being. So He once again felt a firm determination: to become alienist (remember that at that time psychologists who treated mental problems were called this way). He put aside his future as a medical assistant and enrolled in a science not yet well known and with little prestige, such as psychiatry.

Fascination and disagreements with Sigmund Freud

Between 1900 and 1906, Carl Jung worked with Eugene Bleuler, a pioneering psychologist in the understanding of mental illnesses. It was around this time that he discovered how certain words provoked emotional responses in patients. Something that, in his opinion, represented nothing more nor less than subconscious associations, clues to each person’s own complexes.

He collected all these analyzes in his book Studies in Word Association, a work that he did not hesitate to send to another figure of that time and a true reference for him: Sigmund Freud.Freud soon became Jung’s mentor. That union lasted about 10 years, however, as Jung himself explained years later, Freud had no philosophical education and the conversations with him were rigid, limited and full of discrepancies. Thus, and although both agreed on the relevance of the world unconscious in the human being, Jung defended a collective idea about it, while Freud advocated for an individual unconscious. This difference, added to the theories about sexuality, ended up putting unbridgeable distances between both psychiatrists..

Analytical psychology and psychological types

Breaking with Freud’s personal and theoretical universe had consequences for Carl Jung. The doors were closed to him in the most relevant academic circles, such as the International Psychoanalytic Society. However, after suffering a nervous breakdown, he set out to develop his ideas, defend them, and establish his own personal approach: analytical psychology.

He argued that empirical evidence was not the only way to arrive at psychological or scientific truths. For Jung, the soul also played a key role in understanding the psyche.. Thus, the main contributions of this perspective were the following:

He collective unconscious. It refers to an unconscious fabric that each generation would share equally regardless of culture. It is that psychic scenario where our dreams and nightmares are contained, erected under the same symbology, the same figures and myths that we would all have in common throughout history.The archetypes. They are those psychic constructs that live in our unconscious and that we all inherit. They are like personality marks where figures such as the shadow, the figure of the father, the mother or the hero, also determine our behavior.The analysis of dreams and the interpretation of the symbols of the unconscious, was another key area in the Jungian legacy.Psychological complexes. They refer to that set of unconscious feelings that we acquire in childhood and that determine our personality.The theory of personality. This approach of Jung was based on two approaches that are familiar to all of us: introversion and extroversion. He, in turn, defined the functions that processes such as sensation, thought, intuition and feeling fulfill in each of these personalities.

Carl Jung, an unconventional scientist

Gary Lachman noted in his biography of Jung that Much of the academic community of the time considered him more of a mystic than a scientist.. He spent much of his life navigating between the tangible and the spiritual, investigating primitive cultures, rites, cosmogonies and those mythologies where he delved as much as possible into that psychic night of humanity where, according to him, all the answers were found. .

Much of these revelations were reflected in The red book, a strange, cryptic and fascinating work that was published years after his death, when he was already 85. Despite these gnostic and spiritual currents, Carl Jung He became honorary vice president of the German Psychotherapy Association and one of the most relevant psychologists of the 20th century.

Although he did not found any school of psychology, today we have the Jungian currenta therapeutic approach that applies those analytical keys where we continue to reveal the mysteries of the unconscious and that deep psyche inhabited by our archetypes.

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