Carl Jung

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Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist and the founder of analytical psychology, the school that broke from Sigmund Freud over the nature and reach of the unconscious. His lasting terms — the collective unconscious, the archetypes, individuation — were offered as clinical and psychological concepts, but the material he read them through was largely religious and esoteric, and it is on that ground that he belongs here as a subject in his own right. He is the figure through whom Gnostic, Hermetic, alchemical, and astrological matter re-entered serious twentieth-century discourse under a new name — recoded, in the process, as the expression of universal structures of the mind rather than as the doctrine and rite it had once been.

Carl Gustav Jung photographed in 1912, the year of his break with Freud — unknown photographer, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Burghölzli, the word-association test, and the break with Freud

Jung’s career divides cleanly into three movements. From 1900 he was a clinical psychiatrist at the Burghölzli hospital in Zurich under Eugen Bleuler, where the word-association experiments — measuring the delay and disturbance with which a patient answers a prompted word — gave him the empirical footing for what he called the complex, an emotionally charged cluster of associations operating below awareness. His 1902 dissertation, on the psychology of so-called occult phenomena, was a study of a young medium’s trance productions; it already turned a clinical eye on the materials he would never afterward leave alone.

From 1907 to 1913 Jung was Freud’s chosen successor within the international psychoanalytic movement, the first president of its association and editor of its yearbook. The rupture was prefigured in the 1912 Fordham Lectures and consummated in Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (1912), where Jung treated libido not as narrowly sexual energy but as a general psychic current legible through myth. The English version, Psychology of the Unconscious, translated by Beatrice Hinkle in 1916, carried the quarrel to an Anglophone audience and is freely readable in full. Where Freud read the unconscious as a reservoir of repressed personal desire, Jung argued for a deeper, shared stratum: a layer of inherited dispositions whose contents surface as recurring images he named archetypes — the shadow, the anima, the wise old man, the figure of the self. Individuation, in his account, was the slow work by which a person comes to terms with these forces and grows into a more complete whole. How much of this is empirical psychology and how much a metaphysics in psychological dress has been argued since he proposed it; he insisted on the former, and his critics have pressed the latter. The doctrine itself is set out under the collective unconscious; it is enough to mark here that the archetype and the shared stratum are not established findings of the laboratory but a contested theoretical frame.

Clark University, September 1909: G. Stanley Hall, Sigmund Freud, and Carl Jung seated (front), with A. A. Brill, Ernest Jones, and Sándor Ferenczi standing — unknown photographer, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The confrontation with the unconscious

After the break with Freud came the period Jung called his confrontation with the unconscious, from roughly 1913 to 1917 — a sustained descent into induced visions that he transcribed, then illustrated, in a calligraphic illuminated manuscript he named the Liber Novus. He labored over the codex for some sixteen years, leaving it unfinished around 1930; it stayed in a family vault, unpublished, until it appeared in 2009 as the Red Book, with the editorial apparatus of Sonu Shamdasani restoring it to the record. The figures who spoke to him there — Philemon above all, an old man with a kingfisher’s wings whom Jung came to treat as an inner guide — supplied the imagery and several of the doctrines that would organize the rest of his life’s work. He treated these experiences as data of the same order as clinical observation, and the mature analytical psychology of the 1920s onward was built in part from material that originated in vision.

Out of that same period came the Septem Sermones ad Mortuos, a short Gnostic-styled cycle of seven sermons that Jung printed privately in Zurich in 1916. He ascribed it not to himself but to the second-century Alexandrian teacher Basilides, framing it as written in the city where East and West meet. Its cosmology turns on an undifferentiated pleroma from which the created world emerges by distinction, and on Abraxas, a deity posited beyond the opposition of good and evil — uniting light and shadow, god and devil, in a single figure. The speaker’s identity shifted across drafts: the voice that is Jung’s own in his private journals becomes Philemon in the Liber Novus and only in the printed pamphlet wears the mask of Basilides. He gave the booklet to a handful of confidants and published neither it nor the Red Book in his lifetime. How to read them — confession, experiment, or scripture — stays contested, and the strong claim advanced by Lance Owens, that the sermons are the experiential seed of all Jung’s mature work, runs ahead of what the dominant historiography (Shamdasani, Hanegraaff) will endorse.

An ancient Abraxas gem, the deity Jung set beyond good and evil in the Septem Sermones — engraving from Charles W. King, The Gnostics and Their Remains (1887), via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Alchemy as a record of the inner work

In 1928 Richard Wilhelm sent Jung the manuscript of his German translation of a Chinese Taoist text, the Secret of the Golden Flower. Jung’s commentary on it opened a turn that lasted the rest of his life: from that point his historical research bent steadily toward European alchemy. The turn was less a discovery than a systematic deepening — alchemical motifs from Zosimos of Panopolis already surface in the 1912 Wandlungen, and the imagery saturates the Red Book — but from 1929 onward Jung assembled one of the major private alchemical libraries of the century and read it as a single sustained argument about the soul.

His interpretive thesis is that the adepts were not primarily failed chemists. In laboring to transform base matter into gold they projected the unworked contents of their own psyches onto the vessel and the fire, so that the opus became an unwitting record of inner transformation. The blackening, whitening, and reddening of the work answer, on his reading, to the confrontation with the shadow, the integration of the contrasexual image, and the emergence of the self; the philosophers’ stone figures wholeness achieved; and the coniunctio, the chemical wedding of Sol and Luna, King and Queen, sulfur and mercury, images the marriage of conscious and unconscious mind. He drew his material from the great compendia — the Theatrum Chemicum, the Musaeum Hermeticum (the English window onto which is A. E. Waite’s Hermetic Museum), Manget’s Bibliotheca Chemica Curiosa — and from individual treatises by Paracelsus, Gerhard Dorn, Michael Maier, and others. The two mature volumes are Psychology and Alchemy (1944), which correlates a patient’s dream series with images from the Rosarium Philosophorum and the Splendor Solis, and the late Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955–1956), his longest and final major book, built around Dorn’s treatises and the Aurora Consurgens. As historians of early chemistry such as Lawrence Principe and William Newman have shown, the reading is anachronistic as a history of pre-modern science, which pursued real laboratory ends in its own terms. It is nonetheless the single most influential modern interpretation of the alchemical corpus, and it shaped later scholarship even where that scholarship rejects it.

Plate from the Splendor Solis attributed to Salomon Trismosin, one of the illuminated alchemical sources Jung read in Psychology and Alchemy — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Gnosis, the demiurge, and synchronicity

Jung’s gnosis reached back to his Burghölzli years and to the Theosophical scholar G. R. S. Mead, whose translations gave him his first wide window onto the Gnostic archive before the Nag Hammadi codices were unearthed in 1945. Mead’s Pistis Sophia and Fragments of a Faith Forgotten — the former and the latter both hosted in the library — and his three-volume Thrice-Greatest Hermes furnished Jung the vocabulary of pleroma, Abraxas, and Sophia, and a route into the Hermetic and Neoplatonic materials that fed his late work. In the Gnostic myth Jung found a pattern he held to recur across cultures: a divine spark fallen into matter and a lower world-fashioner, the demiurge, who governs a botched creation in ignorance of the fullness above it. He read the figure not as cosmic fact but as a psychic image — the partial, self-blind ego mistaking itself for the whole — and carried the line into theodicy in Answer to Job (1952), where he treats the God of the Book of Job as a union of opposites lacking moral self-consciousness. Martin Buber charged the book with a smuggled Gnostic dualism, a reading Jung disavowed in print but never fully put to rest.

For the kind of meaningful coincidence that seemed to him to escape ordinary cause — an inner state and an outer event aligning without one producing the other — Jung coined the term synchronicity, arguing that mind and matter might be dual aspects of a single underlying order that he and the physicist Wolfgang Pauli, drawing on Dorn’s unus mundus, set out in their joint 1952 volume. He had pursued the same intuition through astrology for decades — a 1911 letter to Freud reports evenings given over to horoscopic calculation in search of a clue to psychological truth — and a marriage-horoscope experiment reported alongside the synchronicity essay sought statistical confirmation that the data did not sustain; Jung conceded the failure and folded the result back into his account of meaningful, rather than statistical, correspondence. Synchronicity has gained no foothold in physics or in academic psychology, where it persists chiefly within Jungian practice; it endures as a contribution to the philosophy of mind and as the most fully argued modern attempt to make room for meaning in coincidence.

The 1930s and the General Medical Society for Psychotherapy

The most disputed chapter of his record is the 1930s. In 1933 Jung accepted the presidency of the international General Medical Society for Psychotherapy through the years its German section was being coordinated into the Nazi state under Matthias Heinrich Göring, a cousin of the Reich Marshal. In the society’s journal he published “The State of Psychotherapy Today” (1934), an essay distinguishing a “Jewish” psychology, which he characterized as reductive after the manner of Freud, from a “Germanic” or “Aryan” one with, in his telling, a deeper creative reserve. The passage has been read both as a damning accommodation and as a clumsy extension of his long quarrel with Freud’s universalizing of Jewish clinical material; it is, on any reading, the use of a racial typology in a year when such language carried lethal political weight.

His defenders point to the constitution he reworked so that the international society admitted members individually, allowing Jewish doctors barred from the German section to retain standing in the parent body, and to his work on behalf of particular émigré colleagues. They note too his postwar admission that he had, in his own word, slipped up. His detractors weigh the prominence the presidency lent the coordinated German section and the plain content of the 1934 essay. The biographical record (Deirdre Bair) and the intellectual history (Shamdasani) supply the documents on both sides; the proportion of opportunism, vanity, naivety, and conviction in his conduct is genuinely in dispute, and that dispute turns on weighing the constitutional rescue against the essay rather than on any missing fact.

Eranos and the scholarly afterlife

From 1933 Jung lectured almost yearly at Eranos, the conference at Ascona on Lake Maggiore founded by Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, where many of his late papers — on the archetypes, on alchemical redemption, on synchronicity — were first rehearsed before an audience that included Mircea Eliade, Henry Corbin, Karl Kerényi, Heinrich Zimmer, and Gershom Scholem. Through the Bollingen Series, Eranos and Jung together became the spine of mid-century Anglophone interest in myth, archetype, and mysticism. Current scholarship treats that legacy with care. Sonu Shamdasani has reconstructed Jung as a participant in the scientific psychology of his time, not an aberration from it, and has shown — against Richard Noll’s reading of Jung as the founder of a sun-worshipping cult — that the visionary and the empirical strands are a single project rather than two incompatible men. Wouter Hanegraaff places Jung at the hinge where rejected esoteric knowledge re-entered the academy under psychological cover, at the cost of a flight from history: the late-antique and medieval materials were recoded as timeless structures of the psyche, severed from the rite and community in which they had once lived. The standing caution from both is the same — that Jung reshaped these traditions in the very act of describing them, so that the alchemy and gnosis we inherit through him are, in part, his.

That double action is the measure of the man. Within scientific psychology he is one source among several, his typology and his complex absorbed and his metaphysics largely set aside. Within the modern study and practice of esotericism his hand lies on nearly everything: the twentieth-century reading of alchemy as inner work, of myth and astrology as symbol, of the Gnostic spark and the demiurge as states of the soul, all pass through the vocabulary he forged from the matter Mead and the old compendia put in front of him. He called the whole undertaking empirical and meant it as a science of the psyche; it was at the same time the largest single conduit by which the rejected learning of the West reached a secular century in a form it could read, and the shape of the man it passed through is on every page of what arrived.

→ In the library: Mead — Fragments of a Faith Forgotten (1906) · Waite — The Hermetic Museum (1893) · Mead — Pistis Sophia (1921) · Mead — Thrice-Greatest Hermes, Vol. I (1906)

→ Related: Gnosis · Gnosticism · Neoplatonism · Theosophy · Hermes Trismegistus · Alchemy · Astrology · Synchronicity · Corpus Hermeticum · Demiurge · Basilides · Collective Unconscious · Helena Blavatsky · Paracelsus · Rosicrucianism · Comparative Religion Eranos