Carl Jung

Carl Gustav Jung was born on 26 July 1875 in Kesswil, a village on Lake Constance in the Swiss canton of Thurgau. His father, Paul Jung, was a Swiss Reformed pastor; the family moved twice in his early childhood, ending up in a parsonage at Kleinhüningen near Basel. His father struggled with a faith he could no longer feel. His mother, Emilie, he remembered as warm and companionable and also as something else: he wrote that he was sure she consisted of two personalities, one innocuous and human, the other uncanny. When he was around three she spent several months in a hospital in Basel and he was left with an aunt and the family maid, an absence he wrote about, decades later, as having troubled him deeply.

He was a solitary child who invented his own company. He carved a small manikin out of the end of a wooden ruler, hid it in the attic in a pencil case with a painted stone, and brought it scrolls in a language he made up. Decades later he found the same gesture in other cultures and understood he had performed a ritual nobody had taught him.

He also recounted the earliest dream he could remember, from around the age of three or four: a stone stairway leading underground into a chamber where something enormous stood on a throne, which he recognised only much later as a ritual phallus, and which his mother's voice in the dream called the man-eater. He kept it secret for most of his life. Whatever else it was, it was the first time he found that the psyche produces images it never learned.

He entered the University of Basel in 1895 to study natural sciences and medicine. His father died the following year, leaving the family short of money, and relatives helped him finish. By his own account he chose psychiatry near the end of his studies after reading a textbook preface that showed him a field where natural science and the questions he actually cared about could occupy the same room.

He finished his medical studies and passed the state examination in 1900, and in December went to the Burghölzli, the cantonal psychiatric hospital and university clinic in Zurich, then directed by Eugen Bleuler. The doctorate itself came from Zurich in 1902, for a dissertation on the psychology of so-called occult phenomena built partly from séances he had attended with a young cousin. In 1903 he married Emma Rauschenbach; they had five children, and she became a serious analyst in her own right.

The work that made his name was mundane in method and startling in result. With his colleague Franz Riklin he ran word association experiments: read a word, record the response, time it to a fraction of a second. The hesitations and stumbles clustered, and the clusters had themes. Something organised and emotionally charged was operating below the person's awareness and interfering with their speech, on a stopwatch, measurably. He did not coin the word complex, but he made it central to psychology and supplied the experimental evidence for it.

Jung and Freud began corresponding in 1906, after Jung sent him the association studies. They met in Vienna on 3 March 1907, and Jung recalled that they talked for something like thirteen hours almost without pause. For a few years the relationship was extraordinarily close. Freud saw in Jung the man who would carry psychoanalysis beyond its Viennese circle, and in 1910 Jung became the first president of the International Psychoanalytical Association.

In August 1909 the two sailed for the United States together with Sándor Ferenczi, for Clark University's twentieth anniversary that September, where Freud gave the five lectures that marked the formal introduction of his theories in America, Jung lectured on the association method, and both received honorary degrees. It was the only time Freud crossed the Atlantic. Jung came back repeatedly, and what he saw on those later trips changed him.

The disagreement underneath was a genuine theoretical one, though personal strain ran alongside it throughout. Freud held that libido was fundamentally sexual; Jung came to treat it as general psychic energy, the life force that could take many forms. He also held that the unconscious was not only a basement for what a particular person had repressed, but included a layer shared by everyone. The 1911 and 1912 instalments of the book that eventually became Symbols of Transformation set that idea going, and he later said it was that book which cost him the friendship. Scholars tend to read it as crystallising a rift already forming.

In January 1913 Freud wrote proposing they end their personal relationship. They saw each other for the last time at the Munich congress that September, and Jung resigned the presidency in 1914. He was thirty-eight, he had lost his closest intellectual ally and his standing in the movement, and what came next was the strangest and most productive period of his life.

He called it his confrontation with the unconscious. Beginning in the winter of 1913 he deliberately induced waking fantasies and then entered them, as one enters a play, and wrote down what happened. He recorded it first in a series of small notebooks now called the Black Books, and later transcribed and illuminated the material into a large red leather folio. That folio is Liber Novus, the Red Book.

The practice he built to do this became active imagination, and it is still the most distinctive technique in Jungian work. One of the figures, an old man with the horns of a bull and the wings of a kingfisher, first came to him in a dream; he called him Philemon. In his memoir Jung is recorded as saying that Philemon taught him psychic objectivity, the reality of the psyche, and said things he had not consciously thought.

He also reported, in his memoir, a waking vision in October 1913 of a monstrous flood covering the lands between the North Sea and the Alps, the water turning to blood, which returned two weeks later more vividly still. The following summer Europe went to war, and he came to read the vision as a premonition.

Whether this period was a breakdown is genuinely contested. Some readers have called it a psychotic episode; Sonu Shamdasani, who edited the Red Book, argues that reading cannot be sustained on the documents, and points out that Jung kept a full analytic practice throughout. Jung himself, describing those 1913 visions, wrote that he first concluded he was menaced by a psychosis, a reading he abandoned once the war broke out. The honest version is that a man deliberately went as far down as he could and came back with a method, and that he was frightened while doing it.

He worked on the Red Book for about sixteen years and never finished it, filling roughly 205 of its six hundred pages and breaking off around 1930 in the middle of a sentence. His family kept it private for decades. It was finally published in 2009, edited by Shamdasani, and it turned out to contain the seed of nearly everything he wrote afterward.

In 1922 he bought land at Bollingen on the upper basin of Lake Zurich, and in 1923 he built a round stone tower there. He extended it in stages over the following twelve years, and once more twenty years after that, each stage answering something in himself: a central structure with an annex in 1927, an extension in 1931 giving him a retiring room he kept the key to and that nobody entered without his permission, a walled courtyard and a loggia on the lake in 1935, and an upper storey after Emma died in 1955.

He worked on it physically, alongside the hired workmen, and cut and chiselled stone himself. The popular line that he built it with his own hands overstates it; that he laid stone with his own hands does not. He kept the place without electricity or running water, and wrote that he tended the fire, pumped the water, chopped the wood and cooked the food himself. In 1950 he carved a cube of stone that had turned up at the site by mistake, and cut into its faces an alchemical verse, a small hooded figure, and a line from Heraclitus about time as a child at play.

It is worth knowing about the tower because it is the clearest physical evidence of what he actually believed. He thought the psyche needed to be lived and not only theorised, so he built a place with his hands where he could live it. Of the storey he added after Emma died he wrote that he felt an inner obligation to become what he himself was, and could no longer hide behind the other towers.

Early in 1944, at sixty-eight, he broke his foot and then had a heart attack. In his memoir he wrote that while unconscious he experienced visions of such magnitude that he concluded he was close to death: seeing the earth from perhaps a thousand miles up, Ceylon far below his feet and India ahead of him, bathed in what he called a gloriously blue light, the most glorious thing he had ever seen.

He wrote that he came back reluctantly, and that a fruitful period followed in which a good many of his principal works were written. This is his account of an inner experience, not a report of an event, and he was careful about that distinction himself. What is not in question is that everything most people mean by late Jung comes after 1944.

The last stretch is the strangest and, for many readers, the best. Aion (1951) traced the fish symbol through two thousand years of Christian imagery as one strand of a wider inquiry into the Self. Answer to Job (1952) read the Book of Job as a drama in which God is confronted by his own unconsciousness, and it provoked the controversy he later said he had expected. That same year he published his essay on synchronicity in a joint volume with the physicist Wolfgang Pauli. Mysterium Coniunctionis, finished in his eighty-first year, read the alchemical literature as a symbolic record of the union of opposites, and he wrote of it that his task was finished, his work done, and now it can stand.

Emma Jung died in November 1955, after more than fifty years of marriage and her own work as an analyst and writer, including her essays on the animus and anima and the Grail research that Marie-Louise von Franz completed after her death.

In March 1959 the BBC filmed him at his house in Küsnacht for the interview series Face to Face. John Freeman asked whether he had believed in God as a child, and Jung said yes. Then Freeman asked whether he believed now. The transcript records a pause, and then:

Now? Difficult to answer. I know. I don't need to believe. I know.

It is usually quoted as “I don't believe, I know”, which drops his “need to”. He said he knew first, and then that knowing made believing unnecessary. The interview closes with another line worth keeping: man cannot stand a meaningless life.

The broadcast had one more consequence. A publisher saw it, and asked Freeman to persuade Jung to write something for ordinary readers. Jung refused. By Freeman's account he then reconsidered, moved by the flood of letters the broadcast brought from ordinary viewers and by a dream in which he stood addressing a crowd who listened and understood, and he agreed on two conditions: that he choose his own collaborators, and that Freeman coordinate the book. The result is Man and His Symbols, conceived from the start for readers who were not specialists. Jung planned it, chose the contributors, and wrote its opening chapter, finishing about ten days before his final illness. It was published in 1964.

He died at home in Küsnacht on 6 June 1961, aged eighty-five.