Have you ever thought about how people might seem to fall into a few types, psychologically speaking? If so, you may have experienced the synchronicity of connecting with the collective unconscious, where the ideas of Carl Jung resonate. Especially today, the anniversary of his birth in 1875 in Switzerland.
Jung was one of the first modern psychologists, along with his friend Sigmund Freud. Where Freud founded psychoanalysis, Jung founded analytical psychology. He was a prolific writer, and his ideas have influenced not only psychology, but philosophy and literature. You can even find references to his work in books and articles about anthropology, archeology, philosophy, and religious studies.
You might think that a good way to start out if you’re going to help create the whole field of psychology would be to grow up as a pretty weird kid. In this case you’d be right; as a boy Jung was pretty weird. One night he said he saw a “faintly luminous and indefinite figure” coming from his mother’s room. The figure’s head wasn’t attached, but was floating in the air. He had a pencil case, which was typical for school kids at the time, but Jung took the wooden ruler from his case and carved a little mannequin. He put the mannequin back in the case and hid the thing in the attic of his house — and then he invented a secret language, wrote messages in it, and took those messages to the mannequin. It’s not clear how he managed in school without his pencil case.
But he evidently didn’t like school very much, because when he was 12 he got into some sort of scuffle and was thrown to the ground so hard he momentarily passed out. When he came to, he thought “now I don’t have to go to school any more.” And the thought turned out to be true; after that whenever he started walking to school or began any homework, he would faint. This may have started out as an act, but after several months became something that happened to him, rather than something he did intentionally. This kept up for six months, and only stopped when he overheard his father telling a visitor about suspecting Carl might have epilepsy and wouldn’t be able to support himself in the future.
Carl was aware of his family’s relative poverty, and resolved right there to get good at his studies. He started with Latin grammar, as I guess one would around 1887, and didn’t faint any more. Jung later said that his fainting experience “was when I learned what a neurosis is.” It was also the point at which he (mostly) stopped being such a weird kid, and turned into a pretty good student.
He studied medicine in the University of Basel, and after graduating worked in a psychiatric hospital. The founder of the hospital, Eugen Bleuler, was a colleague of Sigmund Freud — and Jung began corresponding with Freud and for a while became sort of a junior partner (Freud was about 20 years older than Jung).
The collaboration between Jung and Freud ended in 1912 when Jung published Psychology of the Unconscious, which broke with Freud’s theoretical ideas. Both men stated that the other was wrong, but unable to admit it. They never worked together again. But they both flourished professionally, and had successful private practices. Jung’s income was substantially bolstered by income from the International Watch Company (IWC), which his wife was half-owner of by inheritance. You can still buy an IWC watch — it’s one of those watches that cost more than my car.
In his long career, Jung published ideas and theories that influenced lots of people and fields. Synchronicity is the mysterious connection between events that seem like coincidences, but are meaningful to people. The collective unconscious is the set of mental concepts that nearly everybody shares; Jung said it was the reason why myths from different times and places are often similar. He came up with the idea of psychological types, like extraverts, introverts, and the like. If you’ve ever taken a psychological test that assigned you to a category like “INTJ” or “ESFP”, that’s based on Jung’s work (that particular test has also been debunked as unscientific, invalid nonsense). Jung also came up with anima and animus, but since those are described as “a syzygy of dualistic Jungian archetypes,” you’ll have to look them up on your own; I don’t have a clue. If you’ve heard of a “persona,” that’s also straight out of Jung, and the modern practices of art therapy, movement therapy, and dance therapy were all his ideas. He’s also credited as one of the inspirations behind Alcoholics Anonymous.
Jung’s bibliography is extremely long, and includes some very readable titles, including Man and His Symbols and, believe it or not, Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies. (Jung was interested in everything.) His lectures have been published in at least two different volumes, and at least one of his seminars has been compiled and published. But despite all his publications — which also include several posthumous works — a substantial portion of his work is said to still await publishing. You could spend an entire career studying Jung’s work — and many folks do, The guy is practically mythical.
