Carl Jung

Carl Gustav Jung (1875 to 1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist, psychotherapist and psychologist who founded the school of analytical psychology. He worked as a research scientist at the Burghölzli psychiatric hospital in Zurich under Eugen Bleuler, and for several years collaborated closely with Sigmund Freud, who regarded him as heir to psychoanalysis. Differences over the nature of the psyche ended the friendship, and Jung went on to build analytical psychology as a separate system. Its central ideas include individuation, the collective unconscious, archetypes, the psychological complex, synchronicity, and the contrast between extraversion and introversion. His treatment of the American Rowland Hazard in 1926, and his view that alcoholics might recover through a spiritual experience, played a part in the events that led to Alcoholics Anonymous. He wrote more than twenty books, and his work influenced psychiatry, anthropology, literature, philosophy and religious studies. This entry records his clinical and theoretical standing as the sources describe it and offers no medical advice.