Freud picked Carl Jung as his heir, then lost him
Sigmund Freud hoped the young Swiss psychiatrist would carry psychoanalysis forward and lend it credibility beyond its largely Jewish founders. He made Jung president of the new International Psychoanalytical Association. The partnership broke apart, and from the painful split came analytical psychology, with its archetypes, introverts, extraverts and collective unconscious.
Jung was born in 1875 in Kesswil, in the Swiss canton of Thurgau, the first son of his parents to survive; two stillbirths and a baby named Paul who lived only days came before him. Religion surrounded him. His father was a rural pastor in the Swiss Reformed Church, eight uncles were clergymen, and his maternal grandfather Samuel Preiswerk led Basel's Reformed clergy while dabbling in the occult. A paternal grandfather, the physician Karl Gustav Jung, was rumoured to be Goethe's illegitimate son, a story that is probably legend.
Home life was strange. Jung saw his father as dependable but weak, and his mother Emilie as erratic. Depressed and eccentric, she claimed spirits visited her bedroom at night, and Jung recalled seeing a faint glowing figure drift from her room. For years he viewed women as inherently unreliable, a judgement he later reversed, noting that the men he trusted had disappointed him while the women he doubted had not.
His career began as a researcher for Eugen Bleuler at Zurich's Burghölzli asylum, and his long correspondence with Freud mapped out a shared vision of the mind. Raised Christian though not orthodox, Jung treated religion as a powerful expression of the psyche's hunt for meaning, and his independent ideas made Freud's doctrine impossible to follow.
Analytical psychology centres on individuation, the lifelong process by which a self emerges from conscious and unconscious elements, which Jung saw as the chief task of development. He also gave us synchronicity, the complex and the pairing of introversion and extraversion. In 1926 he treated the American businessman Rowland Hazard, telling him an alcoholic might recover through a vital spiritual experience; that conviction fed into the events that produced Alcoholics Anonymous. Jung wrote more than twenty books, painted, carved and built, and some of his work remains unpublished. He died in 1961.
Source: Carl Jung
