Forever Mysterious, Forever Jung

 

Biography: Carl Jung

Carl Gustav Jung is best known as one of the fathers of modern psychotherapy alongside his erstwhile associates Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler. He introduced such terms as introversion and extraversion, the collective unconscious, archetypes and synchronicity into the popular vocabulary. But beyond that, most people today probably know little about the man. Understanding something of his profound influence, however, is critical for anyone who wants to better understand the current state of Western culture.

After his departure from Freud’s Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1910, Jung founded an approach he named Analytical Psychology, many tenets of which have not only led some to refer to him as a “founding father of the New Age” but also prevented much of the scientific community from taking him seriously.

Who was Jung, the man? Most biographies focus on the relational history of their subjects—the families into which they are born and the later encounters that influenced their development, but a sketch of Carl Gustav Jung’s life, by necessity, is bound to have a slightly different focus. The experiences that had the most profound effect on him were, by his own account, those that occurred within himself; people and the physical trappings of everyday life were relatively uninteresting to him.
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A Plea for Social Conscience: A Biography of Alfred Adler

Though considered one of the three “great fathers” of modern psychotherapy, Alfred Adler is less familiar to most people today than Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. His psychology—and indeed his life—was all about cultivating consciousness, whether of meaning in life, of choices, of the welfare of others, or of the need to overcome the limitations of birth or environment in order to reach the full human potential.
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The Earliest Cognitive Therapy? Adler's Psychology of Change

Three psychiatrists joined forces soon after the turn of the 20th century in Vienna, Austria. Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler and Carl Jung were brought together by a deeply held common interest, only to be divided after less than a decade by just as deeply held theoretical differences. Both Jung and Adler chafed at Freud’s insistence on seeing sexual motivations behind every human behavior. And while Jung’s differences with Freud were many, Adler’s reached more fundamental levels on a wider variety of fronts.
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