Carl Gustav Jung

Carl Gustav Jung was born in Kesswil, Switzerland in the year 1875 and died 86 years later in 1961. He studied at Basel from 1895-1900 and then at Zürich where he received his M.D. in 1902. He worked at the University Psychiatric Clinic there in Zürich and afterwards worked for Eugen Bleuler at the Burgholzli Clinic where he wrote his book on the psychology of dementia praecox in 1906. In 1907 he met Sigmund Freud and they discovered together that their theoretical beliefs had a lot in common. At the age of 36 he became the president of the International Psychoanalytical Society. Before World War II Carl became president of the German Association for Psychotherapy, a Nazi-influenced organization but resigned after the Nazis began forcing their ideology on the members of the association.

One of the biggest influences on the hypothesis's he made throughout his career was his childhood. In his book Psychological Types published in 1921 he was the first to bring up the now popular types of personality, extrovert and introvert. Each representing a parent, his mother an extrovert was the polar opposite of his introvert father. Throughout his childhood his love for his parents was torn between the two each always pulling him in their direction. He developed the concepts of extroversion and introversion for his studies of personality types as well as the theory of synchronicity, the coincidence of causally unrelated events having identical or similar meaning.

Jung was the first to introduce extrovert and introvert personalities to the world of psychology. Most people are a combination of the two with one seemingly to be somewhat more visible to observers than the other. An extroverted personality centers most of their energies upon the surrounding world and generally enjoys being immersed in social situations. An introverted person directs much of their energy into themselves and ordinarily prefers solitude. "This general activity or drive of the individual was called the libido by Jung."5 In years to come psychologists were influenced by this theory, such as Hans Eysenck who did research on many samples of individuals that produced more classifications.

Jung's work has become widely influential in a variety of fields, such as religious studies and literary criticism. Jungian psychology is based of psychic totality and psychic energism. He concluded that there were two different dimensions in the unconscious: the personal and the ideals of a collective unconscious. "To Jung, the most important and lifelong task imposed upon any person is fulfillment through the process of individuation, achievement of harmony of conscious and unconscious, which makes a person one and whole."3

Bibliography

1 http://www.cgjung.com/fordhamintro.html An introduction to Jung's Psychology. Frieda Fordham.

2 http://encarta.msn.com/find/Concise.asp?z=1&pg=2&ti=06aff000 Jung, Carl Gustav. Encarta Online Concise.

3 http://www.encyclopedia.com/ Extroversion and Introversion. Encyclopedia. Electric Library.

4 http://www.infoplease.com/ce5/CE027475.html Jung, Carl Gustav. Encyclopedia Entry. Netscape.

5 http://www.infoplease.com/ce5/CE017717.html Extroversion and Introversion. Encyclopedia Entry. Netscape.