Carl Jung

Biography

In 1913 Jung began writing down his visions in small notebooks, which he himself called the Black Books. Then he started copying the entries into a large folio bound in red leather, decorating the pages with paintings. The work went on, with interruptions, for about sixteen years.

He was born on 26 July 1875 in Kesswil, in the canton of Thurgau, the son of Paul Jung, a pastor of the Swiss Reformed Church. His mother, Emilie, née Preiswerk, came from a large Basel family; her father was the head of the city’s Reformed clergy. His paternal grandfather, also named Carl Gustav Jung, taught medicine at Basel, and a family legend made him a natural son of Goethe, a story Jung himself later described as mere rumour. When the boy was six months old the family moved to Laufen, and in 1879 to Klein-Hüningen near Basel. As a child he carved a little man from the end of a school ruler, put it in a pencil case together with a painted stone and hid it in the attic; later he would secretly bring it notes written in an invented language. As an adult he saw a resemblance to the rituals of the Australian tjurungas.

At about twelve he was knocked to the ground by another boy and briefly lost consciousness. After that he fainted every time he sat down to his lessons, and he stayed at home for six months. What helped him recover was a conversation between his father and a visitor that Carl overheard by chance: they were discussing whether he would ever be able to support himself. He took up Latin grammar and got the better of the fainting fits. Later Jung said that this was when he learned what a neurosis is.

In 1895 he entered the medical faculty of the University of Basel. His father died in January 1896, the family was left almost without means, and relatives helped to pay for his studies. What persuaded him to choose psychiatry was Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s textbook, which describes psychoses as diseases of the personality: there the biology and the spirit he was looking for came together. His dissertation, “On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena” (1903), is built on séances with his cousin Hélène Preiswerk.

From December 1900 Jung worked at the Burghölzli clinic in Zurich under Eugen Bleuler. In the winter of 1902–1903 he studied in Paris with Pierre Janet. Together with Franz Riklin he devised the word association experiment: by timing reactions to words, they identified emotionally charged groups of ideas, which they called complexes. The work was published as “Diagnostic Association Studies”. In 1905 Jung became senior physician at the clinic and a lecturer (Privatdozent) at the University of Zurich. In February 1903 he had married Emma Rauschenbach, the daughter of an industrialist from Schaffhausen; the couple had five children. In 1909 he left the clinic and opened a private practice in a new house at Küsnacht on Lake Zurich.

He had known Freud’s “The Interpretation of Dreams” since 1900. In 1906 the two men exchanged their writings, and on 3 March 1907 in Vienna they talked for thirteen hours without a break. From 1908 Jung edited the “Yearbook for Psychoanalytical and Psychopathological Research”. In September 1909 he sailed with Freud and Sándor Ferenczi to the United States for the anniversary celebrations of Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he received an honorary degree. From 1910 to 1914 he was president of the International Psychoanalytical Association: Freud saw in him a “crown prince” and successor, but his Viennese colleagues would agree only to a two-year term.

The break was prepared by the book “Psychology of the Unconscious” (1912), in which Jung refused to reduce libido to sexual drive. In addition, besides the personal unconscious he allowed for a collective one. In early January 1913 Freud proposed in writing that they end their personal relationship. Jung ended the professional collaboration in October 1913 and resigned as president of the association in April 1914. He also gave up university teaching, but he kept his practice at Küsnacht to the end of his life.

It was then that the visions, the voices and the method of “active imagination” began, which he applied to himself. Jung feared that he was threatened by psychosis. In the First World War he was called up as an army doctor and made commandant of a camp for interned British soldiers and officers; there he drew his first mandalas and encouraged the internees to attend university courses.

In 1921 “Psychological Types” appeared, with its concepts of extraversion and introversion. In 1922 he bought land at Bollingen on Lake Zurich and built a tower there, which he went on extending for years. He travelled to the Pueblo Indians in New Mexico (1924–1925), to East Africa, to the slopes of Mount Elgon (1925–1926), and to India (1937–1938); in 1938 he received an honorary degree from Oxford. In 1939 he laid down the presidency of the International General Medical Society for Psychotherapy, which he had headed since 1933: his position in the years of Nazi rule was criticised, and the arguments about it have not died down.

Later he turned to alchemy, seeing in its imagery a forerunner of the psychology of the unconscious. The results were “Psychology and Alchemy” (1944) and “Mysterium Coniunctionis” (1955–1956). In 1943 Jung was given the chair of medical psychology at Basel, but he resigned after a heart attack in 1944. “Answer to Job” appeared in 1952, and “Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies” in 1959, in which he analysed the archetypal meaning of UFO sightings. His last work was the first part of the collection “Man and His Symbols”, published in 1964. I would add that it is hard to find a common thread in this list, and I think the author did not look for one.

He died on 6 June 1961 in Küsnacht. The Red Book was left without instructions for publication; in 1984 the family placed it in a bank vault, and in 2009 it was published in German, the same year that the original was exhibited at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York.