Who Was Carl Jung? Life, Work and Legacy
Carl Gustav Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology. The concepts he introduced, from the collective unconscious and the archetypes to introversion and extraversion, shaped psychotherapy, literature, religious studies and everyday language.
Early life and education
Jung was born on 26 July 1875 in Kesswil, a village on Lake Constance in Switzerland, and grew up near Basel. His father, Paul Jung, was a pastor of the Swiss Reformed Church; his mother, Emilie Preiswerk, came from a family with a long interest in spiritualism. In his memoir he describes a lonely childhood with a rich inner life, and a lasting sense of having two personalities: an ordinary schoolboy and an older, timeless figure he called “No. 2”.
He studied medicine at the University of Basel from 1895. Reading Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s textbook of psychiatry convinced him that psychiatry was the one field where the natural sciences and the life of the spirit met. His doctoral dissertation of 1902, On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena, analyzed séances held by his young cousin Helene Preiswerk and already looked at how split-off parts of the personality can speak with their own voice.
The Burghölzli years and the word association test
In December 1900 Jung joined the Burghölzli, the psychiatric hospital of the University of Zurich, under Eugen Bleuler, the psychiatrist who later coined the term schizophrenia. With his colleague Franz Riklin he ran word association experiments: a patient hears a list of words and answers each with the first word that comes to mind. Long hesitations, odd answers and bodily reactions revealed emotionally charged clusters of memories, which Jung called complexes.
This work made him internationally known. His book The Psychology of Dementia Praecox (1907) argued that even severe psychotic symptoms have psychological meaning. In 1903 he married Emma Rauschenbach; they had five children, and Emma Jung later became an analyst and author in her own right.
Friendship and break with Freud
Jung saw in his experiments a confirmation of Sigmund Freud’s theory of repression and defended Freud publicly at a time when this was risky for a young academic. They began writing to each other in 1906 and met in Vienna in March 1907. Freud came to see Jung as his successor, and in 1910 Jung became the first president of the International Psychoanalytical Association.
The friendship broke down over the nature of libido, the role of sexuality and the value of religion and myth. After Jung published Transformations and Symbols of the Libido (1911 to 1912), the two men ended their personal relationship in early 1913. The full story is told in Jung and Freud.
The confrontation with the unconscious and The Red Book
The years after the break were the most turbulent of Jung’s life. From late 1913 he deliberately let fantasies and visions rise, wrote them down in a series of notebooks now known as the Black Books and later copied them, with paintings and calligraphy, into a large illuminated volume he called Liber Novus. Known as The Red Book, it remained in the family’s possession and was only published in 2009, edited by the historian Sonu Shamdasani.
Jung later said that all of his later work grew out of these years. From them came the method of active imagination and his idea of the Self. In 1918 and 1919, while serving as commandant of a camp for interned British soldiers at Château d’Oex, he drew a small circular drawing in his notebook almost every day, which led him to his studies of mandalas and of individuation.
Mature work, travels and books
In 1921 Jung published Psychological Types, where he introduced introversion, extraversion and the four functions. From 1923 he built a stone tower at Bollingen on Lake Zurich, a retreat without electricity where he wrote, carved stone and painted. He travelled to North Africa (1920), to the Taos Pueblo in New Mexico (1925), to Mount Elgon in East Africa (1925 to 1926) and to India (1937 to 1938), looking for the psyche outside European culture.
From the late 1920s he turned to alchemy, which he read as a projected record of psychological transformation. His commentary on The Secret of the Golden Flower, a Chinese text translated by his friend Richard Wilhelm, appeared in 1929. Major books followed: Psychology and Alchemy (1944), Aion (1951), Answer to Job (1952), the essay on synchronicity (1952) and Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955 to 1956). He lectured at the Eranos conferences in Ascona from 1933, taught at the ETH in Zurich, and in 1948 the C. G. Jung Institute was founded in Zurich to train analysts.
The controversy of the 1930s
In 1933 Jung became president of the International General Medical Society for Psychotherapy, whose German section was being brought under Nazi control, and editor of its journal. Remarks he published in 1934 contrasting a “Jewish” and a “Germanic” psychology were criticized at the time and have been criticized since.
His defenders point out that he reorganized the society so that Jewish psychotherapists excluded from the German section could remain members as individuals, that he helped several Jewish colleagues, and that he resigned in 1940. Historians continue to debate how to weigh these facts. Any honest account of Jung includes this chapter.
Death and legacy
Jung died at his home in Küsnacht, near Zurich, on 6 June 1961. Memories, Dreams, Reflections appeared the following year. It is often read as his autobiography, but it was compiled and partly written by his secretary Aniela Jaffé, so scholars treat it with some caution. Man and His Symbols (1964), written with his close collaborators, was his last project for a general readership.
His influence is wide. Jungian analysis is practiced worldwide through the International Association for Analytical Psychology, founded in 1955. Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey, the Myers Briggs Type Indicator, sandplay therapy, art therapy and archetypal literary criticism all draw on him. Academic psychology, on the other hand, has largely set his work aside, because many of his concepts are hard to test experimentally. Both facts are part of his legacy.
Frequently asked questions
What is Carl Jung best known for?
Jung is best known for the ideas of the collective unconscious and the archetypes, for the concepts of introversion and extraversion, for complexes, the shadow, synchronicity and individuation, and for his long friendship and dramatic break with Sigmund Freud.
What is analytical psychology?
Analytical psychology is the name Jung gave to his own approach from about 1913, to distinguish it from Freud’s psychoanalysis. It treats the psyche as self-regulating, gives a central place to symbols, dreams and the collective unconscious, and sees the goal of development as individuation, becoming a whole person.
Was Jung a student of Freud?
Not in the usual sense. When they met in 1907 Jung was already an established psychiatrist at the Burghölzli with his own research. He was Freud’s closest ally for about six years, but he was never formally Freud’s student or patient.
Which Jung book should I read first?
Man and His Symbols was written for general readers and is the easiest way in. Memories, Dreams, Reflections gives the story of his inner life. For his own theory, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (Collected Works, Vol. 9i) is the core text. Anthony Stevens’s Jung: A Very Short Introduction is a reliable modern summary.
Was Jung a mystic or a scientist?
Jung insisted that he was an empiricist describing psychological facts, not a metaphysician. His deep interest in religion, alchemy, astrology and the paranormal led critics to call him a mystic. Most scholars today see him as a psychiatrist whose method was empirical in intention but whose ideas often went beyond what could be tested.
Sources and further reading
- C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, recorded and edited by Aniela Jaffé (1962)
- C. G. Jung, The Red Book: Liber Novus, ed. Sonu Shamdasani (2009)
- William McGuire (ed.), The Freud/Jung Letters (1974)
- Deirdre Bair, Jung: A Biography (2003)
- Sonu Shamdasani, Jung and the Making of Modern Psychology (2003)
- Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press)
Last reviewed November 3, 2026. Written from Jung’s Collected Works and standard scholarship; summaries, not interpretations.
