Carl Jung’s biography shows that he was one of the most notable psychologists in history. His legacy is a fascinating alchemy, including analytical psychology, collective unconsciousness, spirituality, humanism and mythology.
For this pioneer of dream science, understanding the psyche was above all revealing the Self, making the unconscious conscious, that’s why Carl Jung’s biography is so interesting.
- When we pronounce the name Jung.
- It is common for a number of concepts to come to mind immediately.
- Including archetypes.
- Synchronicity or the collective unconscious already mentioned.
However, one thing we often forget about this and other notable figures of 20th-century psychology is that they were mostly great thinkers.
Carl Jung also distinguished himself by this aspect. Towards the end of his life, he made a series of reflections that are still very inspiring today.
For him, psychology is a basic tool for human beings, a channel of self-knowledge through which we can understand the origin of our shadows, the fears that limit our lives.
We are able to trigger the most terrible wars and the most irrational conflicts, however, if we could know a little better our psyche and the energies attached to our deepest architecture, we would have, according to Jung, a more enlightened, respectful vision and happy life.
After all, knowledge is revealing and liberating
“Your vision will only be clarified if you are able to look into your own heart. Who looks at dreams; who looks inside, wakes up?. – Carl Jung-
Carl Gustav Jung was born on 26 July 1875 in Kesswil, Switzerland, his father was a Protestant priest and his mother, Emilie Preiswerk, spent long years in prison in institutions due to various psychiatric treatments.
He had three brothers, but they died when they were little. In the midst of such a complex and desolate scenario, little Carl soon developed a solitary and observant personality.
He loved nature, history, philosophy and loved to lock himself in his inner world, so one thing he was very clear about from the beginning was that he did not want to follow the same religious path as his father and grandfather, despite the will. of both, had its own destiny.
As he revealed years later in several interviews, his life changed after a dream he had as a child, for him this dream was a decisive thing: he dreamed that he would fall into a dark hole, which led him to the royal halls of a palace with high ceilings and red carpets.
In the center of the room in which it was located was a human-looking, sinister and dark-looking tree; in the background, his mother’s voice yelled at him to walk away: he was the man-eater.
“I played alone, and my way. Unfortunately, I can’t remember what I was playing, I just remember not wanting to be disturbed?. – Biography of Carl Gustav Jung, Ronald Hayman-
Carl Jung thought the meaning of this dream was very clear: he needed to understand the mystery of the dream world, he wanted to delve into his messages, images and symbols, perhaps that’s why he first thought about studying archaeology.
But for lack of money in his family, he ended up earning his medical degree in 1900 from the University of Basel.
Just as he was about to start working as a medical assistant, causality reappeared in his life, only this time it was not a dream that marked his destiny, but a book, a psychiatry manual, in this manual read the origin. psychosis and personality disorders.
Jung thought of his mother and also his own need to understand the psychological architecture of the human being, so he again felt a strong determination: to become an alienist?, remember that at that time psychologists who took care of mental problems were called that.
He set aside his future as a medical assistant and entered the world of an unrecognized, and therefore unknown, science that was psychiatry.
Between 1900 and 1906, Carl Jung worked with Eugen Bleuler, a pioneering psychologist in understanding mental illness.
It is at this point that he discovers how certain words provoke emotional reactions in patients, something that, in his opinion, represented nothing less than subconscious associations, clues about each other’s own complexes.
The break with Freud’s personal and theoretical universe had consequences for Carl Jung: the doors of the most relevant academic circles, such as those of the International Society of Psychoanalysis, were closed to him.
However, after suffering a nervous breakdown, he set himself a goal in life to develop his ideas, defend them and create his own personal approach: analytical psychology.
He argued that empirical evidence was not the only way to come up with psychological or scientific truths, for Jung the soul also played an essential role in the knowledge of the psyche, so the main contributions from this point of view were:
Gary Lachman stated in his biography of Carl Jung that much of the university community at the time considered him more of a mystic than a scientist; in fact, even today, some people say the same thing.
He spent much of his life navigating between the tangible and the spiritual, in search of cultures, rituals, cosmogonies and primitive mythologies from which it would be possible to immerse himself in the psychic night of humanity where, according to him, everything can be found. the answers.
Most of these revelations were immortalized in the Red Book, a strange but equally fascinating book that was not published until years after his death, at the age of 85.
Despite these gnostic and spiritual currents, Carl Jung became honorary vice president of the German Psychotherapy Association and is considered one of the most important psychologists of the twentieth century.
Although we have not founded any psychology schools, today we have the current Jungien, a therapeutic approach that applies these analytical concepts to further reveal the mysteries of the unconscious and the deep psyche inhabited by our archetypes.
Memories of external events in my life have already faded, if not largely disappeared. But my encounters with the other reality, my struggles with the unconscious, are they permanently stored in my memory? -C. G Jung, Memories, dreams and reflections, 1961-