In one line
Carl Jung was a Swiss doctor of the mind who believed the psyche is larger than the ego, that it pushes toward wholeness on its own, and that the second half of life has a purpose of its own.
The life
Jung was born on 26 July 1875 in Kesswil, a village on the Swiss shore of Lake Constance. His father, Paul Jung, was a pastor of the Swiss Reformed Church; his mother, Emilie Preiswerk, came from a Basel family with a long line of clergy and a strong interest in spirits and second sight. The family moved to Laufen by the Rhine Falls when he was a baby and then to Klein-Hüningen, just outside Basel. He was a lonely, inward child who spent long hours with his own fantasies and later described his home as full of religious doubt that no one talked about.
Basel. He studied medicine at the University of Basel from 1895 to 1900. His father died in 1896, leaving the family short of money. Jung read philosophy alongside medicine, Kant, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche above all, and he sat in on séances where a teenage cousin, Helene Preiswerk, went into trances. Those sessions became his doctoral thesis, On the Psychology and Pathology of So-called Occult Phenomena (1902). A textbook by Richard von Krafft-Ebing convinced him that psychiatry was the field where the body and the spirit met, and he chose it over a safer career in internal medicine.
Burghölzli. In December 1900 he joined the Burghölzli, the psychiatric hospital of the University of Zurich, under Eugen Bleuler, the man who later coined the word schizophrenia. Jung ran word-association experiments: a patient hears a word and answers with the first word that comes to mind, while the doctor times the reply. Long pauses and odd answers clustered around emotionally loaded themes. Jung called those clusters "feeling-toned complexes", and the word complex entered everyday speech. His book The Psychology of Dementia Praecox (1907) argued that even severe psychosis has meaning that can be followed. In 1903 he married Emma Rauschenbach; they had five children, and Emma later became an analyst and scholar in her own right.
Freud and the break. Jung's association studies seemed to confirm Sigmund Freud's theory of repression, and in 1906 he began writing to Freud. They met in Vienna on 3 March 1907 and talked for about thirteen hours. Freud came to see him as his heir. In 1909 the two sailed to the United States together to lecture at Clark University, and in 1910 Jung became the first president of the International Psychoanalytical Association. The partnership did not hold. Jung could not accept that every form of psychic energy was at bottom sexual. In Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (1911–12), translated in 1916 as Psychology of the Unconscious, he treated libido as general life energy and read myths of heroes, suns and sea monsters as pictures of that energy at work. Freud read it as a betrayal. In January 1913 Freud proposed that they end their personal relationship; Jung agreed. He resigned as editor of the movement's yearbook that year and as president of the association in 1914.
The confrontation with the unconscious. The break left Jung isolated and shaken. From late 1913 he went through several years of overwhelming visions and dreams. He did not run from them. He wrote them down in a set of notebooks, painted them, and held conversations with the figures that appeared, a method he later called active imagination. The material became The Red Book, which he kept private; it was published only in 2009. He later said that everything he did afterward grew out of these years. In 1918 and 1919, while commanding a camp for interned British soldiers at Château-d'Oex, he drew a small circular design almost every morning and noticed that the drawings tracked his inner state. He took the Sanskrit word mandala for them. Out of this period came the papers on the unconscious collected by Constance Long in 1916 and 1917 and, in 1921, Psychological Types.
Bollingen. In 1923, the year his mother died, Jung began building a round stone tower at Bollingen, on the upper shore of Lake Zurich. Over the next three decades he added to it in stages. There was no electricity and no telephone. He chopped wood, cooked, carved inscriptions in stone and wrote. In the same years he travelled to see how other cultures lived with the unconscious, from the Taos Pueblo in New Mexico to Mount Elgon in East Africa.
Küsnacht. His home and practice, from 1909 until his death, was the house he built at Küsnacht on the lake shore south of Zurich. Over the door he had carved a Latin saying he had found in Erasmus, the Delphic oracle's answer to the Spartans: Vocatus atque non vocatus deus aderit, "Called or not called, the god will be present." From the late 1920s his interests widened to Chinese philosophy, Gnosticism and above all alchemy, which he read as an early record of the same inner transformations he saw in his patients. In 1933 he became president of the International General Medical Society for Psychotherapy, a body then dominated by its German branch. Writings of his from those years that contrast "Jewish" and "Germanic" psychology have been rightly criticized; his defenders point to Jewish colleagues he helped. He took a chair of medical psychology at Basel in 1943 but gave it up after a heart attack in 1944. Emma died in 1955. Jung died at Küsnacht on 6 June 1961, aged 85. The Erasmus saying is carved on the family grave.
The big ideas
The unconscious has two layers. Below ordinary awareness lies the personal unconscious: forgotten memories, things we pushed away, things we half noticed. Below that, Jung said, lies a collective unconscious shared by all people, a stock of inherited patterns for imagining and reacting. That is why the same motifs, the hero swallowed by a monster, the sun dying in the sea, the wise old man, turn up in myths and dreams that never met.
Archetypes. These shared patterns he called primordial images and later archetypes. They are not inherited pictures but inherited tendencies to form certain kinds of picture, the way a bird inherits the urge to build a nest rather than a particular nest.
Persona. The persona is the mask we wear to deal with society: the role, the manners, the job title. It is useful and necessary. The danger is mistaking it for the whole person. "Fundamentally the persona is not real," he wrote in 1928.
Shadow. The shadow is the side of ourselves we do not want to see. What we refuse to own we tend to see in other people instead, which Jung called projection. Facing the shadow is the first, humbling step of any inner work, and it tends to make people more tolerant, not less.
Anima and animus. Jung held that each man carries an inner feminine figure, the anima, and each woman an inner masculine one, the animus. These figures show up in dreams and in the people we fall for. Many modern readers find the gender scheme dated; the core point, that we project unknown parts of ourselves onto partners, still holds up.
Libido as life energy. Where Freud saw sexual drive, Jung saw psychic energy in general, which can flow forward into life or back into memory and fantasy. Energy blocked from a fitting channel turns destructive. He liked to say that form gives energy its quality.
Opposites and enantiodromia. From Heraclitus he took the idea that anything pushed to an extreme turns into its opposite. Psychic life, for Jung, runs on the tension between opposites: thinking and feeling, inner and outer, conscious and unconscious. The answer is rarely for one side to win. Held long enough, the tension produces a third thing, often a symbol, that unites them.
Introversion and extraversion. In Psychological Types he described two basic attitudes. The introvert's energy turns inward toward the subject; the extravert's goes outward toward objects and people. He crossed these with four functions, thinking, feeling, sensation and intuition. Everyone has both attitudes; the type is only the one that leads.
Individuation and the self. The goal of the whole process is individuation: becoming a single, whole person rather than a collection of borrowed roles and unowned impulses. Its center is the self, the totality of conscious and unconscious, larger than the ego as the sun is larger than the earth. Individuation is not selfishness. Jung insisted that it leads to deeper solidarity with others.
The second half of life. Jung was one of the first to say that midlife is a turning point with a purpose of its own. The morning of life is for expansion: work, family, a place in the world. The afternoon is for culture, meaning and the inner life. Trying to live the afternoon by the morning's rules, he warned, makes people sick.
What his lines mean for you
Read together, the lines in our collection give a practical program. Do not confuse yourself with your job or your public face. When something in another person drives you up the wall, ask whether it lives in you too. Do not bury what you dislike in yourself; it will trip you at the worst moment. Give your energy a channel that fits, or it will turn on you. When you are stuck between two pulls, stay with the tension instead of forcing a quick answer. Expect the middle of life to change the rules, and treat the afternoon as a different kind of meaning rather than a slow decline. And keep playing: Jung was sure that nothing new is made by the intellect alone.
Where people get him wrong
Jung is one of the most misquoted writers on the internet. Some lines are invented outright: "I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become" has no source in his work, and "Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate" is a modern rewrite of a sentence in Aion (1951). Others are genuine but late and still in copyright: "Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves" comes from Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962), and "Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes" from a 1916 letter first printed in 1973. "The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are" belongs to Joseph Campbell, and "Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you" is hearsay first attached to Jung in the 1960s.
There are also wrong ideas. Jung did not invent personality tests; the Myers-Briggs indicator was built by others from his typology, which he meant as a map of tendencies, not a set of boxes. The collective unconscious is not a claim that we inherit memories. And the popular picture of Jung as a mystic who dismissed science leaves out his decades of clinical work and experiment.
On this site we print only what Jung published before 1931, either in English translations made at the time or in our own translations from his German first editions. Where a famous quote fails that test, we show the nearest genuine line that passes it.
Read him yourself
These editions were first published before 1931 and are in the public domain in the United States. Copyright law differs elsewhere; in Switzerland and the EU, Jung's own writings remain protected until the end of 2031.
- Psychology of the Unconscious, translated by Beatrice M. Hinkle (1916). The book that ended the friendship with Freud. Project Gutenberg
- Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (1912), the German original. Internet Archive
- Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology, edited by Constance E. Long (second edition 1917). Early papers, including the first versions of the essays on the unconscious and on types. Project Gutenberg
- Psychological Types, translated by H. Godwin Baynes (1923). Internet Archive
- Psychologische Typen (1921), the German original. Project Gutenberg
- Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, translated by H. G. and C. F. Baynes (1928). The clearest short statement of persona, shadow, self and individuation. Internet Archive
- Contributions to Analytical Psychology, translated by H. G. and C. F. Baynes (1928). Essays on psychic energy, marriage, the student, art and education. Internet Archive
Timeline
- 1875: Born 26 July in Kesswil, on Lake Constance, Switzerland.
- 1879: Family settles at Klein-Hüningen, near Basel.
- 1895: Begins medical studies at the University of Basel.
- 1896: His father, Paul Jung, dies.
- 1900: Joins the Burghölzli hospital in Zurich under Eugen Bleuler.
- 1902: Doctoral thesis on so-called occult phenomena.
- 1903: Marries Emma Rauschenbach.
- 1904–1909: Word-association studies; the idea of the complex.
- 1907: The Psychology of Dementia Praecox; first meeting with Freud in Vienna, 3 March.
- 1909: Lectures with Freud at Clark University, Massachusetts; moves into his house at Küsnacht and leaves the Burghölzli.
- 1910: First president of the International Psychoanalytical Association.
- 1911–1912: Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido.
- 1913: Break with Freud; beginning of the "confrontation with the unconscious".
- 1914: Resigns the presidency of the International Psychoanalytical Association.
- 1916: Hinkle's English Psychology of the Unconscious; Long's Collected Papers; the Psychological Club in Zurich is founded.
- 1918–1919: Commands an internment camp at Château-d'Oex; begins drawing mandalas.
- 1921: Psychologische Typen.
- 1923: Begins the tower at Bollingen; his mother dies; Baynes translates Psychological Types.
- 1924–1926: Visits the Taos Pueblo and Mount Elgon in East Africa.
- 1928: Die Beziehungen zwischen dem Ich und dem Unbewussten; Two Essays and Contributions in English.
- 1933: President of the International General Medical Society for Psychotherapy; first Eranos lectures at Ascona.
- 1937–1938: Travels in India.
- 1943: Chair of medical psychology at the University of Basel.
- 1944: Heart attack and near-death experience; Psychology and Alchemy.
- 1955: Emma Jung dies.
- 1961: Dies at Küsnacht, 6 June.
- 1962: Memories, Dreams, Reflections, recorded and edited by Aniela Jaffé, is published.
- 2009: The Red Book is published.