Carl Gustav Jung was born on July 26, 1875, in Kesswil, a town on Lake Constance in Switzerland. His paternal grandfather, the elder Carl Gustav Jung, was a promi- nent physician in Basel and one of the best-known men of that city. A local rumor suggested that the elder Carl Jung was the illegitimate son of the great German poet Goethe. Although the elder Jung never acknowledged the rumor, the younger Jung, at least sometimes, believed himself to be the great-grandson of Goethe (Ellen- berger, 1970).
Both of Jung’s parents were the youngest of 13 children, a situation that may have contributed to some of the difficulties they had in their marriage. Jung’s father, Johann Paul Jung, was a minister in the Swiss Reformed Church, and his mother, Emilie Preiswerk Jung, was the daughter of a theologian. In fact, eight of Jung’s ma- ternal uncles and two of his paternal uncles were pastors, so both religion and med- icine were prevalent in his family. Jung’s mother’s family had a tradition of spiritu- alism and mysticism, and his maternal grandfather, Samuel Preiswerk, was a believer in the occult and often talked to the dead. He kept an empty chair for the ghost of his first wife and had regular and intimate conversations with her. Quite understandably, these practices greatly annoyed his second wife.
Jung’s parents had three children, a son born before Carl but who lived only 3 days and a daughter 9 years younger than Carl. Thus, Jung’s early life was that of an only child.
Jung (1961) described his father as a sentimental idealist with strong doubts about his religious faith. He saw his mother as having two separate dispositions. On one hand, she was realistic, practical, and warmhearted, but on the other, she was un- stable, mystical, clairvoyant, archaic, and ruthless. An emotional and sensitive child, Jung identified more with this second side of his mother, which he called her No. 2 or night personality (Alexander, 1990). At age 3 years, Jung was separated from his mother, who had to be hospitalized for several months, and this separation deeply troubled young Carl. For a long time after, he felt distrustful whenever the word
“love” was mentioned. Years later he still associated “woman” with unreliability, whereas the word “father” meant reliable—but powerless (Jung, 1961).
Before Jung’s fourth birthday, his family moved to a suburb of Basel. It is from this period that his earliest dream stems. This dream, which was to have a profound effect on his later life and on his concept of a collective unconscious, will be de- scribed later.
During his school years, Jung gradually became aware of two separate aspects of his self, and he called these his No. 1 and No. 2 personalities. At first he saw both personalities as parts of his own personal world, but during adolescence he became aware of the No. 2 personality as a reflection of something other than himself—an old man long since dead. At that time Jung did not fully comprehend these separate powers, but in later years he recognized that No. 2 personality had been in touch with
feelings and intuitions that No. 1 personality did not perceive. In Memories, Dreams, Reflections,Jung (1961) wrote of his No. 2 personality:
I experienced him and his influence in a curiously unreflective manner; when he was present, No. 1 personality paled to the point of nonexistence, and when the ego that became increasingly identical with No. 1 personality dominated the scene, the old man, if remembered at all, seemed a remote and unreal dream.
(p. 68)
Between his 16th and 19th years, Jung’s No. 1 personality emerged as more domi- nant and gradually “repressed the world of intuitive premonitions” (Jung, 1961, p.
68). As his conscious, everyday personality prevailed, he could concentrate on school and career. In Jung’s own theory of attitudes, his No. 1 personality was ex- traverted and in tune to the objective world, whereas his No. 2 personality was in- troverted and directed inward toward his subjective world. Thus, during his early school years, Jung was mostly introverted, but when the time came to prepare for a profession and meet other objective responsibilities, he became more extraverted, an attitude that prevailed until he experienced a midlife crisis and entered a period of extreme introversion.
Jung’s first choice of a profession was archeology, but he was also interested in philology, history, philosophy, and the natural sciences. Despite a somewhat aris- tocratic background, Jung had limited financial resources (Noll, 1994). Forced by lack of money to attend a school near home, he enrolled in Basel University, a school without an archeology teacher. Having to select another field of study, Jung chose natural science because he twice dreamed of making important discoveries in the natural world (Jung, 1961). His choice of a career eventually narrowed to medicine.
That choice was narrowed further when he learned that psychiatry deals with sub- jective phenomena (Singer, 1994).
While Jung was in his first year of medical school, his father died, leaving him in care of his mother and sister. Also while still in medical school, Jung began to at- tend a series of seances with relatives from the Preiswerk family, including his first cousin Helene Preiswerk, who claimed she could communicate with dead people.
Jung attended these seances mostly as a family member, but later, when he wrote his medical dissertation on the occult phenomenon, he reported that these seances had been controlled experiments (McLynn, 1996).
After completing his medical degree from Basel University in 1900, Jung be- came a psychiatric assistant to Eugene Bleuler at Burghöltzli Mental Hospital in Zürich, possibly the most prestigious psychiatric teaching hospital in the world at that time. During 1902–1903, Jung studied for 6 months in Paris with Pierre Janet, successor to Charcot. When he returned to Switzerland in 1903, he married Emma Rauschenbach, a young sophisticated woman from a wealthy Swiss family. Two years later, while continuing his duties at the hospital, he began teaching at the Uni- versity of Zürich and seeing patients in his private practice.
Jung had read Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams(Freud, 1900/1953) soon after it appeared, but he was not much impressed with it (Singer, 1994). When he reread the book a few years later, he had a better understanding of Freud’s ideas and was moved to begin interpreting his own dreams. In 1906, Jung and Freud began a steady correspondence (see McGuire & McGlashan, 1994, for the Freud/Jung letters). The
following year, Freud invited Carl and Emma Jung to Vienna. Immediately, both Freud and Jung developed a strong mutual respect and affection for one another, talking during their first meeting for 13 straight hours and well into the early morn- ing hours. During this marathon conversation, Martha Freud and Emma Jung busied themselves with polite conversation (Ferris, 1997).
Freud believed that Jung was the ideal person to be his successor. Unlike other men in Freud’s circle of friends and followers, Jung was neither Jewish nor Viennese.
In addition, Freud had warm personal feelings for Jung and regarded him as a man of great intellect. These qualifications prompted Freud to select Jung as the first pres- ident of the International Psychoanalytic Association.
In 1909, G. Stanley Hall, the president of Clark University and one of the first psychologists in the United States, invited Jung and Freud to deliver a series of lectures at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. Together with Sándor Ferenczi, another psychoanalyst, the two men journeyed to America, the first of Jung’s nine visits to the United States (Bair, 2003). During their 7-week trip and while they were in daily contact, an underlying tension between Jung and Freud slowly began to simmer. This personal tension was not diminished when the two now-famous psychoanalysts began to interpret each other’s dreams, a pastime likely to strain any relationship.
In Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung (1961) claimed that Freud was un- willing to reveal details of his personal life—details Jung needed in order to inter- pret one of Freud’s dreams. According to Jung’s account, when asked for intimate de- tails, Freud protested, “But I cannot risk my authority!” (Jung, 1961, p. 158). At that moment, Jung concluded, Freud indeed had lost his authority. “That sentence burned itself into my memory, and in it the end of our relationship was already foreshad- owed” (p. 158).
Jung also asserted that, during the trip to America, Freud was unable to inter- pret Jung’s dreams, especially one that seemed to contain rich material from Jung’s collective unconscious. Later, we discuss this dream in more detail, but here we merely present those aspects of the dream that may relate to some of the lifelong problems Jung had with women. In this dream, Jung and his family were living on the second floor of his house when he decided to explore hitherto unknown levels of his house. At the bottom level of his dwelling, he came upon a cave where he found
“two human skulls, very old and half disintegrated” (p. 159).
After Jung described the dream, Freud became interested in the two skulls, but not as collective unconscious material. Instead, he insisted that Jung associate the skulls to some wish. Whom did Jung wish dead? Not yet completely trusting his own judgment and knowing what Freud expected, Jung answered, “My wife and my sister-in-law—after all, I had to name someone whose death was worth the wishing!”
“I was newly married at the time and knew perfectly well that there was noth- ing within myself which pointed to such wishes” (Jung, 1961, pp. 159–160).
Although Jung’s interpretation of this dream may be more accurate than Freud’s, it is quite possible that Jung did indeed wish for the death of his wife. At that time, Jung was not “newly married” but had been married for nearly 7 years, and for the previous 5 of those years he was deeply involved in an intimate relationship with a former patient named Sabina Spielrein. Frank McLynn (1996) claimed that Jung’s “mother complex” caused him to harbor animosity toward his wife, but a
more likely explanation is that Jung needed more than one woman to satisfy the two aspects of his personality.
However, the two women who shared Jung’s life for nearly 40 years were his wife Emma and another former patient named Antonia (Toni) Wolff (Bair, 2003).
Emma Jung seemed to have related better to Jung’s No. 1 personality while Toni Wolff was more in touch with his No. 2 personality. The three-way relationship was not always amiable, but Emma Jung realized that Toni Wolff could do more for Carl than she (or anyone else) could, and she remained grateful to Wolff (Dunne, 2000).
Although Jung and Wolff made no attempt to hide their relationship, the name Toni Wolff does not appear in Jung’s posthumously published autobiography, Mem- ories, Dreams, Reflections. Alan Elms (1994) discovered that Jung had written a whole chapter on Toni Wolff, a chapter that was never published. The absence of Wolff ’s name in Jung’s autobiography is probably due to the lifelong resentments Jung’s children had toward her. They remembered when she had carried on openly with their father, and as adults with some veto power over what appeared in their fa- ther’s autobiography, they were not in a generous mood to perpetuate knowledge of the affair.
In any event, little doubt exists that Jung needed women other than his wife.
In a letter to Freud dated January 30, 1910, Jung wrote: “The prerequisite for a good marriage, it seems to me, is the license to be unfaithful” (McGuire, 1974, p. 289).
Almost immediately after Jung and Freud returned from their trip to the United States, personal as well as theoretical differences became more intense as their friendship cooled. In 1913, they terminated their personal correspondence and the following year, Jung resigned the presidency and shortly afterward withdrew his membership in the International Psychoanalytic Association.
Jung’s break with Freud may have been related to events not discussed in Mem- ories, Dreams, Reflections(Jung, 1961). In 1907, Jung wrote to Freud of his “bound- less admiration” for him and confessed that his veneration “has something of the character of a ‘religious’ crush” and that it had an “undeniable erotic undertone”
(McGuire, 1974, p. 95). Jung continued his confession, saying: “This abominable feeling comes from the fact that as a boy I was the victim of a sexual assault by a man I once worshipped” (p. 95). Jung was actually 18 years old at the time of the sexual assault and saw the older man as a fatherly friend in whom he could confide nearly everything. Alan Elms (1994) contended that Jung’s erotic feelings toward Freud—coupled with his early experience of the sexual assault by an older man he once worshipped—may have been one of the major reasons why Jung eventually broke from Freud. Elms further suggested that Jung’s rejection of Freud’s sexual the- ories may have stemmed from his ambivalent sexual feelings toward Freud.
The years immediately following the break with Freud were filled with loneli- ness and self-analysis for Jung. From December of 1913 until 1917, he underwent the most profound and dangerous experience of his life—a trip through the under- ground of his own unconscious psyche. Marvin Goldwert (1992) referred to this time in Jung’s life as a period of “creative illness,” a term Henri Ellenberger (1970) had used to describe Freud in the years immediately following his father’s death.
Jung’s period of “creative illness” was similar to Freud’s self-analysis. Both men began their search for self while in their late 30s or early 40s: Freud, as a reaction to the death of his father; Jung, as a result of his split with his spiritual father, Freud.
Both underwent a period of loneliness and isolation and both were deeply changed by the experience.
Although Jung’s journey into the unconscious was dangerous and painful, it was also necessary and fruitful. By using dream interpretation and active imagina- tion to force himself through his underground journey, Jung eventually was able to create his unique theory of personality.
During this period he wrote down his dreams, drew pictures of them, told him- self stories, and then followed these stories wherever they moved. Through these pro- cedures he became acquainted with his personalunconscious. (See Jung, 1979, and Dunne, 2000, for a collection of many of his paintings during this period.) Prolong- ing the method and going more deeply, he came upon the contents of the collective unconscious—the archetypes. He heard his anima speak to him in a clear feminine voice; he discovered his shadow, the evil side of his personality; he spoke with the wise old man and the great mother archetypes; and finally, near the end of his jour- ney, he achieved a kind of psychological rebirth called individuation(Jung, 1961).
Although Jung traveled widely in his study of personality, he remained a citi- zen of Switzerland, residing in Küsnacht, near Zürich. He and his wife, who was also an analyst, had five children, four girls and a boy. Jung was a Christian, but did not attend church. His hobbies included wood carving, stone cutting, and sailing his boat on Lake Constance. He also maintained an active interest in alchemy, archeology, gnosticism, Eastern philosophies, history, religion, mythology, and ethnology.
In 1944, he became professor of medical psychology at the University of Basel, but poor health forced him to resign his position the following year. After his wife died in 1955, he was mostly alone, the “wise old man of Küsnacht.” He died June 6, 1961, in Zürich, a few weeks short of his 86th birthday. At the time of his death, Jung’s reputation was worldwide, extending beyond psychology to include philosophy, religion, and popular culture (Brome, 1978).