The 21 best books by Carl Jung

Carl Jung’s books take us to a sphere that goes far beyond the simple analysis of human behavior.. He was a pioneer of depth psychology and his prolific work contains a wonderful alchemy between psychoanalysis, spirituality, religion, philosophy and the world of dreams. Few personalities arouse as much interest as this great analyst of the psyche.

They say of Jung that Just over five minutes were enough for him to impress anyone.. This is explained by Graham Collier, RAF pilot in World War II and professor of philosophy at the University of Georgia, who had the opportunity to meet the famous Swiss psychoanalyst when he was 75 years old. She was impressed by his ironic, almost mischievous look and the respectful silences that he always kept waiting for the response of his interlocutor.

Dr. Collier also explains that during a part of his life Jung experienced a certain feeling of rejection by the scientific community after publishing more than one book on the study of consciousness and delving into concepts that dealt more with spiritual than analytical fields. Nonetheless, The interest aroused by his theories was such that the BBC wanted to attract the audience of the time by placing a Labor politician in front of Jung. critical enough for both of them to debate on a program called “Face to Face.”

The result of that television meeting was something simply amazing. Jung’s poise, naturalness, conviction and charm were such that more than an interview it became an improvised conference. That politician, John Freeman, who had initially come to give a critical version of his theories, was so captivated that he established a lasting friendship with him. In fact, It was he who encouraged Carl Jung to write one of his best-known books: “The man and his symbols”.

We could undoubtedly explain many more anecdotes, such as his infinite travels, his complex relationship with Freud or his broad influence on our literature, our cinema and our culture in general. However, one way to get to Jung is through his books and through that vast legacy in which it is worth immersing yourself from time to time, navigating through his theories, his symbols, his personal reflections and in that personality that without a doubt forever marked the history of psychology.

The best books by Carl Jung

Jung’s work is quite extensive and includes both his own autobiography and books of essays and personal reflections. Likewise, we can even find the correspondence exchanged between Jung and Freud between 1906 and 1913, where we can delve deeper into the development of the psychoanalytic movement and the relationship between these two personalities mentioned above.

However, In our article on the best books by Carl Jung we seek above all to cite those most representative works of his work, with which both “Jungian” neophytes and the most experts will delight in each of his lines, concepts and theories.

1. Man and his symbols

Right at the beginning we have explained the origin of this book. After his interview on the BBC, a well-known politician asked Jung to bring part of his theoretical conceptions to the general public in the simplest and most didactic way possible. He did so, and This was in fact the last of Carl Jung’s books, the posthumous work he wrote before his death in 1961.

Thus, in The man and the symbols The first thing that will catch our attention is its more than 500 illustrations. Through them we fully immerse ourselves in the theory of symbolism and the importance that these have in our dreams, in art and even in our daily behavior.

2. Archetypes and collective unconscious

Essential. This is one of Carl Jung’s most interesting books and they undoubtedly define one of his most controversial topics: archetypes..

We are facing a compilation of essays where we delve, on the one hand, into the collective unconscious as such and, on the other, into the nature of the archetype: that psychic expression of the structures inherited from our peers that undoubtedly forms the cornerstone of much of the work. Jungian.

3. The relationships between the Ego and the Unconscious

As we already know, Carl Jung was the founder of the analytical psychological school and this book is undoubtedly the best representation of this approach and, in essence, the reflection of a small part of the history of psychology.

In its pages Jung will guide us through a much more novel conception of the psyche than Freud had offered us until then.. His continuous studies and reviews on the subject give us, for example, a richer vision of the unconscious, establishing, for example, that duality between the collective unconscious and its influence on the individual unconscious.

4. Synchronicity as a principle of acausal connections

Synchronicity as a principle of acausal connections It is a little gem that Carl Gustav Jung wrote together with Wolfgang Pauli, a Nobel Prize winner in physics and one of the fathers of quantum mechanics. In this book we can delve into one of the most interesting and well-known Jungian concepts. We talk, of course, about synchronicity.

Jung spoke for the first time about this idea in those “Eranos” meetings that were organized every year in Ascona and from which, later, an article, essay or book always came out. It was the 1950s, and the Swiss psychiatrist presented to his colleagues and the rest of the academic community something that was as controversial as it was attractive at the same time: a part of What we understand by chance, are not actually due to simple chance, but rather to something that he called synchronicity .

The book delves into this idea where Jung relates this concept to another concept that is equally important in his work: intuition.

5. Complexes and the unconscious

This is one of Carl Jung’s books that best represents his work and which, in turn, will serve as a fabulous excursion through the world of the unconscious. Although a large part of the essay is dedicated to dreams, it is here where we can “track” part of our complexes and those limiting behaviors that we often show in our conscious life.

Jung sought to interpret dreams not with the same Freudian objective, that is, to identify the classic sexual fixations inherited from childhood. On the contrary, what What he wanted was to draw a “map of the present” and the context where his patients lived. to understand the reason for these behaviors and emotional suffering.

We are undoubtedly facing one of Carl Jung’s most essential books to understand his legacy.

6. Conflicts of the child’s soul

Some of our readers may be surprised that the term “soul” appears in a psychology book. It is necessary to remember that in the work of Carl Jung this idea, this concept is very present.

This idea already gives us a clue of that integral approach that Jung had on the human being, where in addition, He conceived childhood and youth as the most important period of the human being and to which much more attention should be paid.. Thus, the possible conflicts, deficiencies and harms experienced in a child’s family context and the parents’ own personality, undoubtedly determine the well-being or possible psychological problems of that child tomorrow.

Interestingly, Sigmund Freud’s daughter dedicated her life to this same purpose, provide psychological assistance to all those children who had childhood trauma. An area that Freud himself neglected and that he never fully developed.

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7. The psychology of transference

In our space we have already talked on some occasions about the always interesting concept of transference, an idea that is always very present in the psychoanalytic or psychodynamic current.

This is one of Carl Jung’s most representative books on the subject and where we makes an interesting equivalence between alchemy and the transference between the patient and his therapist. As we already know, in the daily practice of psychotherapy this phenomenon can occur in which the person comes to project their emotions and experiences onto the professional themselves, which undoubtedly makes progress in the healing process difficult.

In this book Jung once again integrates his symbolic figures to explain the dynamics and the bond that is sometimes built between the doctor and his patient.

8. Psychic energy and essence of sleep

We are facing a book made up of six interesting essays. In them we will know perfectly what we understand as “deep psychology” and which represents Jung’s authentic cornerstone. Something that should be remembered first is that for the Swiss psychiatrist all psychic phenomena are actually forms of energy.

In the first essay, for example, titled About the energy of the soul, offers us an interesting introduction to understand certain dimensions of our personality much better, such as extraversion or introversion.. Later in General considerations about the psychology of sleep and The essence of sleepwill delve deeper into that dream hermeneutics where laymen and experts will be able to understand much more of its most representative concepts.

Likewise, and just as a curiosity, it should be noted that this volume concludes with the essay The psychological foundations of spiritualism where the author explains to us with his usual clarity, objective considerations that Jungian psychology maintains regarding this topic and that, without a doubt, are always more than interesting to take into account.

9. Modern man in search of a soul

This book is an adventure into the depths of the unconscious. Although the book is largely about dreams, it is here that our complexes and limiting behaviors that we manifest in our conscious life can be traced.

When interpreting dreams, Jung differed greatly from Freud, since he did not want to identify sexual fixations developed in childhood, but instead sought to delimit a “map of the present” and the context in which the client lived in order to understand the reasons behind them. their behavior and suffering.

10. Response to Job

Based on the biblical story of the Book of Job, Jung establishes an interesting controversy between the emotional and the rational, the person and the shadow. In this book we can observe the suffering caused by the passions that are manifested in the attempt to make them rational.

11. Writings about…