120 Facts About Carl Jung

Carl Jung was a prolific author, illustrator, and correspondent, and a complex and controversial character, in certain ways best known through his autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections.

Carl Jung worked as a research scientist at the Burgholzli psychiatric hospital in Zurich, under Eugen Bleuler.

Carl Jung established himself as an influential mind, developing a friendship with Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis, conducting a lengthy correspondence paramount to their joint vision of human psychology.

Carl Jung is widely regarded as one of the most influential psychologists in history.

Carl Jung considered it to be the main task of human development.

Carl Jung created some of the best-known psychological concepts, including synchronicity, archetypal phenomena, the collective unconscious, the psychological complex, and extraversion and introversion.

Carl Gustav Jung was born 26 July 1875 in Kesswil, in the Swiss canton of Thurgau, as the first surviving son of Paul Achilles Jung and Emilie Preiswerk.

Carl Jung's birth was preceded by two stillbirths and that of a son named Paul, born in 1873, who survived only a few days.

Emilie Preiswerk, Carl Jung's mother, had grown up in a large family whose Swiss roots went back five centuries.

Carl Jung's father was appointed to a more prosperous parish in Laufen when Carl Jung was six months old.

Carl Jung's mother was an eccentric and depressed woman; she spent considerable time in her bedroom, where she said spirits visited her at night.

Carl Jung said that one night, he saw a faintly luminous and indefinite figure coming from her room, with a head detached from the neck and floating in the air in front of the body.

Carl Jung's mother left Laufen for several months of hospitalization near Basel for an unknown physical ailment.

Carl Jung's father took Carl to be cared for by Emilie Jung's unmarried sister in Basel, but he was later brought back to his father's residence.

Emilie Carl Jung's continuing bouts of absence and depression deeply troubled her son and caused him to associate women with "innate unreliability", whereas "father" meant for him reliability, but powerlessness.

Carl Jung added a stone, which he had painted into upper and lower halves, and hid the case in the attic.

Carl Jung later reflected that this ceremonial act brought him a feeling of inner peace and security.

Carl Jung concluded that his intuitive ceremonial act was an unconscious ritual, which he had practiced in a way that was strikingly similar to those in distant locations which he, as a young boy, knew nothing about.

At the age of 12, shortly before the end of his first year at the Humanistisches Gymnasium in Basel, Carl Jung was pushed to the ground by another boy so hard he momentarily lost consciousness.

Carl Jung remained home for six months until he overheard his father speaking hurriedly to a visitor about the boy's future ability to support himself.

Carl Jung entered his father's study and began poring over Latin grammar.

Carl Jung fainted three more times but eventually overcame the urge and did not faint again.

Carl Jung's household had a strong moral sense, and several of his family were clergy.

Carl Jung had wanted to study archaeology, but his family could not afford to send him further than the University of Basel, which did not teach it.

In 1895 Carl Jung began to study medicine at the University of Basel.

In 1900, Carl Jung moved to Zurich and began working at the Burgholzli psychiatric hospital under Eugen Bleuler.

Carl Jung's dissertation, published in 1903, was titled On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena.

Carl Jung studied with Pierre Janet in Paris in 1902 and later equated his view of the complex with Janet's.

In 1905, Carl Jung was appointed as a permanent 'senior' doctor at the hospital and became a lecturer Privatdozent in the medical faculty of Zurich University.

In 1909, Carl Jung left the psychiatric hospital and began a private practice in his home in Kusnacht.

Carl Jung connected with James around their mutual interests in mysticism, spiritualism and psychical phenomena.

In 1912 Carl Jung published Psychology of the Unconscious, which manifested the developing theoretical divergence between the two.

In 1903, Carl Jung married Emma Rauschenbach, seven years his junior and the elder daughter of a wealthy industrialist in eastern Switzerland, Johannes Rauschenbach-Schenck.

Carl Jung eventually became a noted psychoanalyst in her own right.

In 1900, Carl Jung completed his degree and started work as an intern under the psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler at Burgholzli Hospital.

Burgholzli was a renowned psychiatric clinic in Zurich, and Carl Jung's research had already gained him international recognition.

Carl Jung sent Freud a copy of his Studies in Word Association in 1906.

Carl Jung recalled the discussion between himself and Freud as interminable and unceasing for 13 hours.

In 1908, Carl Jung became an editor of the newly founded Yearbook for Psychoanalytical and Psychopathological Research.

In 1909, Carl Jung traveled with Freud and Hungarian psychoanalyst Sandor Ferenczi to the United States; in September, they took part in a conference at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Carl Jung returned to the United States the next year for a brief visit.

In 1910, Freud proposed Carl Jung, "his adopted eldest son, his crown prince, and successor," for the position of lifetime President of the newly formed International Psychoanalytical Association.

However, after forceful objections from his Viennese colleagues, it was agreed Carl Jung would be elected to serve a two-year term of office.

In 1912, these tensions came to a peak because Carl Jung felt severely slighted after Freud visited his colleague Ludwig Binswanger in Kreuzlingen without paying him a visit in nearby Zurich, an incident Carl Jung referred to as "the Kreuzlingen gesture".

Shortly thereafter, Carl Jung again traveled to the US and gave the Fordham University lectures, a six-week series, which were published later in the year as Psychology of the Unconscious, subsequently republished as Symbols of Transformation.

Nonetheless, it was their publication which, Carl Jung declared, "cost me my friendship with Freud".

Carl Jung saw Freud's theory of the unconscious as incomplete, unnecessarily negative, and inelastic.

At a talk about a new psychoanalytic essay on Amenhotep IV, Carl Jung expressed his views on how it related to actual conflicts in the psychoanalytic movement.

Carl Jung gave a talk on psychological types, the introvert and extraverted types, in analytical psychology.

Carl Jung described his 1912 book as "an attempt, only partially successful, to create a wider setting for medical psychology and to bring the whole of the psychic phenomena within its purview".

Carl Jung spoke at meetings of the Psycho-Medical Society in London in 1913 and 1914.

Carl Jung's travels were soon interrupted by the war, but his ideas continued to receive attention in England primarily through the efforts of Constance Long, who translated and published the first English volume of his collected writings.

In 1913, at the age of 38, Carl Jung experienced a horrible "confrontation with the unconscious".

Carl Jung decided that it was a valuable experience and, in private, he induced hallucinations or, in his words, a process of "active imagination".

Carl Jung recorded everything he experienced in small journals, which Jung referred to in the singular as his Black Book, considering it a "single integral whole", even though some of these original journals have a brown cover.

The material Carl Jung wrote was subjected to several edits, hand-written and typed, including another, "second layer" of text, his continual psychological interpretations during the process of editing.

Around 1915, Carl Jung commissioned a large red leather-bound book, and began to transcribe his notes and paint, working intermittently for sixteen years.

Carl Jung left no posthumous instructions about the final disposition of what he called the Liber Novus or Red Book.

Carl Jung worked to improve the conditions of soldiers stranded in Switzerland and encouraged them to attend university courses.

Carl Jung emerged from his period of isolation in the late nineteen-tens with the publication of several journal articles, followed in 1921 with Psychological Types, one of his most influential books.

Constance Long arranged for Carl Jung to deliver a seminar in Cornwall in 1920.

In 1935, at the invitation of his close British friends and colleagues, H G Baynes, E A Bennet and Hugh Crichton-Miller, Jung gave a series of lectures at the Tavistock Clinic in London, later published as part of the Collected Works.

In 1938, Carl Jung was awarded an honorary degree by the University of Oxford.

At the tenth International Medical Congress for Psychotherapy held at Oxford from 29 July to 2 August 1938, Carl Jung gave the presidential address, followed by a visit to Cheshire to stay with the Bailey family at Lawton Mere.

In 1946, Carl Jung agreed to become the first Honorary President of the newly formed Society of Analytical Psychology in London, having previously approved its training programme devised by Michael Fordham.

In 1912, Carl Jung gave a series of lectures at Fordham University, New York, which were published later in the year as Psychology of the Unconscious.

Carl Jung made another trip to America in 1936, receiving an honorary degree at Harvard and giving lectures in New York and New England for his growing group of American followers.

Carl Jung returned in 1937 to deliver the Terry Lectures at Yale University, later published as Psychology and Religion.

In October 1925, Carl Jung embarked on his most ambitious expedition, the "Bugishu Psychological Expedition" to East Africa.

Carl Jung was accompanied by his English friend, "Peter" Baynes, and an American associate, George Beckwith.

The group traveled through Kenya and Uganda to the slopes of Mount Elgon, where Carl Jung hoped to increase his understanding of "primitive psychology" through conversations with the culturally isolated residents of that area.

Carl Jung defined this as an instinctive feeling of belonging to a particular group or family and believed it was vital to the human experience and used this as an endogamous aspect of the libido and what lies amongst the family.

In December 1937, Carl Jung left Zurich again for an extensive tour of India with Fowler McCormick.

Carl Jung described Ramana as being absorbed in "the self".

Carl Jung later wrote about this conversation in his book Aion.

Carl Jung became seriously ill on this trip and endured two weeks of delirium in a Calcutta hospital.

Carl Jung became a full professor of medical psychology at the University of Basel in 1943 but resigned after a heart attack the next year to lead a more private life.

Carl Jung continued to publish books until the end of his life, including Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies, which analyzed the archetypal meaning and possible psychological significance of the reported observations of UFOs.

Carl Jung died on 6 June 1961 at Kusnacht after a short illness.

Carl Jung's thought derived from the classical education he received at school and from early family influences, which on the maternal side were a combination of Reformed Protestant academic theology with an interest in occult phenomena.

Carl Jung, the practicing clinician, writer, and founder of analytical psychology, had, through his marriage, the economic security to pursue interests in other intellectual topics of the moment.

Carl Jung delved into epistemology, alchemy, astrology, and sociology, as well as literature and the arts.

Carl Jung considers that science would hardly deny the existence and basic nature of "instincts", existing as a whole set of motivating urges.

Carl Jung saw archetypes as pre-configurations in nature that give rise to repeating, understandable, describable experiences.

Carl Jung elaborated on many archetypes in "The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious" and in "Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self".

Not wanting to look at their shadows directly, Carl Jung argues, often results in psychological projection.

Carl Jung was one of the first people to define introversion and extraversion in a psychological context.

Carl Jung compares these two psychological types to ancient archetypes, Apollo and Dionysus.

Carl Jung applied the term persona explicitly because, in Latin, it means both personality and the masks worn by Roman actors of the classical period, expressive of the individual roles played.

Carl Jung regarded the "persona-mask" as a complicated system that mediates between individual consciousness and the social community: it is "a compromise between the individual and society as to what a man should appear to be".

Carl Jung has influenced management theory because managers and executives create an appropriate "management persona" and a persuasive identity, and they have to evaluate what sort of people the workers are, to manage them.

In commenting on humanity's evolution from an ancient primate ancestor, Carl Jung wrote: 'We keep forgetting that we are primates and that we have to make allowances for these primitive layers in our psyche.

Carl Jung recommended spirituality as a cure for alcoholism, and is considered to have had an indirect role in establishing Alcoholics Anonymous.

Carl Jung treated an American patient named Rowland Hazard III who had chronic alcoholism.

Carl Jung noted that, occasionally, such experiences had been known to reform alcoholics when all other options had failed.

Carl Jung returned to the United States and joined a Christian evangelical movement known as the Oxford Group.

Carl Jung told other alcoholics what Jung had told him about the importance of a spiritual experience.

Carl Jung had an apparent interest in the paranormal and occult.

Carl Jung influenced one philosophical interpretation of quantum physics with the concept of synchronicity regarding some events as non-causal.

In 1944, Carl Jung published Psychology and Alchemy, in which he analyzed the alchemical symbols and came to the conclusion that there is a direct relationship between them and the psychoanalytical process.

Carl Jung argued that the alchemical process was the transformation of the impure soul to perfected soul, and a metaphor for the individuation process.

Carl Jung proposed that art can be used to alleviate or contain feelings of trauma, fear, or anxiety and to repair, restore, and heal.

Carl Jung stressed the importance of individual rights in a person's relation to the state and society.

Carl Jung saw that the state was treated as "a quasi-animate personality from whom everything is expected" but that this personality was "only camouflage for those individuals who know how to manipulate it".

Carl Jung referred to the state as a form of slavery.

Carl Jung observed that "stage acts of [the] state" are comparable to religious displays:.

Carl Jung was in contact with Allen Dulles of the Office of Strategic Services and provided valuable intelligence on the psychological condition of Hitler.

In 1933, after the Nazis gained power in Germany, Carl Jung became the president of the new International General Medical Society for Psychotherapy, a professional body which aimed to have affiliated organizations in different countries.

In 1934, Carl Jung wrote in a Swiss publication, the Neue Zurcher Zeitung, that he experienced "great surprise and disappointment" when the Zentralblatt associated his name with the pro-Nazi statement.

Carl Jung did not end his relationship with the Zentralblatt at this time, but he did arrange the appointment of a new managing editor, Carl Alfred Meier of Switzerland.

The International Society's constitution permitted individual doctors to join it directly rather than through one of the national affiliated societies, a provision to which Carl Jung drew attention in a circular in 1934.

Carl Jung clearly identifies himself with the spirit of German Volkstumsbewegung throughout this period and well into the 1920s and 1930s, until the horrors of Nazism finally compelled him to reframe these neopagan metaphors in a negative light in his 1936 essay on Wotan.

Carl Jung is known to have possessed an interest in the Jewish mystic tradition of Kabbalah.

Carl Jung addressed homosexuality in his published writings, in one comment specifying that homosexuality should not be a concern of legal authorities nor be considered a crime.

Carl Jung stated that homosexuality does not reduce the value of a person as a member of society.

For example, in a chapter entitled "Integrating the Archaic and the Modern: The Red Book, Visual Cognitive Modalities and the Neuroscience of Altered States of Consciousness", in the 2020 volume Carl Jung's Red Book for Our Time: Searching for Soul Under Postmodern Conditions, Volume 4, it is argued Carl Jung was a pioneer who explored uncharted "cognitive domains" that are alien to Western modes of thought.

Carl Jung is considered a "godparent" of the altruistic, mutual self-help movement, Alcoholics Anonymous.

Carl Jung told Rhode Island businessman and politician Rowland Hazard III, who had come under his care for the first time in 1926, that the only chance he might have to recover was through a "spiritual or religious experience" or "genuine conversion," which Hazard later had, through the Oxford Group and the Emmanuel Movement, and, according to some sources, never drank again.

Carl Jung saw the human psyche as "by nature religious" and made this idea a principal focus of his explorations.

Carl Jung is one of the best-known contemporary contributors to dream analysis and symbolization.