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.

Jung trained in Zurich and worked first on the word-association test before his collaboration with Freud, which lasted until their break around 1913. Where Freud read the unconscious as a reservoir of repressed personal desire, Jung came to argue for a deeper, shared stratum he called the collective unconscious: 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 debated since he proposed it; he insisted on the former, and his critics have pressed the latter.

What is not in question is the range of his reading. Jung studied the alchemical corpus closely for decades, treating its imagery of dissolution and conjunction as a symbolic record of inner transformation rather than failed chemistry; the results fill Psychology and Alchemy and the late Mysterium Coniunctionis. He read the Gnostics with equal attention, drawing on the translations of his day, and he took the figure of the divine spark and the lower creator-god as evidence of psychic patterns he believed recurred across cultures. He coined the term synchronicity for what he held to be meaningful coincidence not bound by cause.

Two private works stand apart. In the years after the break with Freud Jung recorded an extended sequence of induced visions, then spent into the late 1920s transcribing and illustrating them in a calligraphic manuscript he called the Liber Novus, abandoned around 1930 and published only in 2009 as the Red Book; out of that same period came the Septem Sermones ad Mortuos, a short Gnostic-styled text he printed privately under the name of the second-century teacher Basilides. He did not publish either in his lifetime, and how to read them — confession, experiment, or scripture — remains contested.

The most disputed chapter of his record is the 1930s, when he presided over the international General Medical Society for Psychotherapy through the years its German section aligned itself with the Nazi state, and published in its journal “The State of Psychotherapy Today” (1934), an essay contrasting “Jewish” with “Germanic” psychology. His defenders point to the society’s constitution, which he reworked so that Jewish doctors excluded from the German section could keep individual membership of the international body, and to his reported admission after the war that he had “slipped up”; his motives and the degree of his culpability remain genuinely debated.

His influence runs in two directions at once. Within psychology he is one source among several; within the modern study and practice of esotericism his reach is larger, since much of the twentieth century’s revival of alchemy, astrology, and myth as inner symbolism passed through his vocabulary. Scholarship now treats Jung less as a neutral observer of these traditions than as a participant who reshaped them in the act of describing them. He spoke of his work as empirical to the last. Whether it was that, or a religious project carried on by other means, is the question his readers have not stopped asking.

→ In the library: Mead — Fragments of a Faith Forgotten (1906) · Waite — The Hermetic Museum (1893)

→ Related: Gnosis · Neoplatonism · Theosophy · Hermes Trismegistus