Carl Jung is known for his philosophical as well as his psychiatric impact on contemporary society. Even at a young age, Jung showed signs of being inordinately philosophical; he spent countless hours on a rock at his home, debating with himself as to whether he was the rock, or vice versa. Jung was always fascinated with symbolic dreams and their connection to reality. He would record, analyze and theorize about their meanings. Most of this was done during the day, when he was missing school under the pretense of sickness. The truth of the matter was, Jung was isolated from his peers because of his impressive early knowledge, which included Latin and ancient literature. This isolation drove Jung to embarrassing fainting episodes, which helped Jung to avoid confrontations with his schoolmates. In fact, Jung was introspective to the point of being antisocial.
Thus began Carl Jung's early passion for the human psyche.
However, before Jung could contribute to the world of psychology, he went from his hometown of Kessewil into medicine at the University of Basel. His first career choice was in fact archeology, but Jung decided to work under the infamous neurologist Krafft-Ebing who introduced him to psychiatry. What attracted Jung most to this field was that it seemed to combine what were his two greatest interests, science and spirituality:
- What appealed to me in science were the concrete facts and their historical background,
and in comparative religion the spiritual problems, into which philosophy also entered. In
science I missed the factor of meaning, and in religion, that of empiricism. . . . Torn
between these two poles, I was for a long time unable to settle on anything.11
Psychology not only answered both these desires, but also had the allure of being quite new and unexplored. Before him, Freud was only beginning to scratch the surface of the unconscious which played a key role in the treatment of psychiatric disorders. In comparison to Freud, Jung became the more extensive psychiatrist. While Freud treated neurological patients of the middle class, Jung treated the psychotics of the lower class. Jung's first position after graduation was at the Burghoeltzli Mental Hospital in Zurich under Eugene Bleuler, an expert on schizophrenia. His influence directed Jung into concentrating on schizophrenia.
Schizophrenia played an important role in a more personal manner. Following his break with Freud, Jung went through a mental breakdown. He began to question his own mental health when he started envisioning a “monstrous flood” overtaking Europe and his home country of Switzerland. Psychiatrists can lose themselves in their patients' realities, and as he felt this happening to him, he came near to labeling himself as psychotic. The facts point towards the likelihood that he was becoming schizophrenic, however, a few months later, Wold War I broke out, and this convinced Jung that his psychotic episode was a premonition linking him with the fate of humanity. Then, by attempting to control his illness through understanding it, Jung was able to develop his concept of archetypes, and theorize on its influence on people's psyche.
Whether Jung will admit it or not, his well-educated family did have a profound influence on him, namely his parents. His father, Paul Jung, was a clergyman who had experienced a loss of faith, and his mother, Emilie Preiswerk Jung, was a distant figure to the child Carl Jung. A fantasy that constantly recurred in Jung's mind bothered him a great deal in his youth:
- I saw before me the cathedral, the blue sky. God sits on His golden throne, high above the
world--and from under the throne an enormous turd falls upon the sparkling new roof,
shatters it, and breaks the walls of the cathedral asunder.12
However, Jung disregarded the fact that his father's loss in faith probably had a great impact onJung's perception, and believed this fantasy to represent a universal archetypal image.
His mother also influenced Jung's idea of archetypes, more precisely the mother, goddess, and anima archetype. Jung's mother was very different from Freud's, who was kind and attentive to her son. Jung concluded from his childhood experience that the goddess figure could have two faces: the caring angel, and the manipulative witch. To Jung, the mother archetype expressed itself in nature in symbols such as mother earth, or in comforting religious icons like the strong bulwark of a cathedral. For him, these replaced his mother's role within his life.
Another relationship that shaped Jung's ideas was with Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. As a student and young man, Jung had studied the older man's work, and was greatly impressed. When the two psychologists finally met in 1907, both took an instant liking to each other. Freud cancelled all his appointments for the rest of the day and the pair spoke “virtually without pause for thirteen hours.” Jung later said that “Freud was the first man of real importance I had encountered; in my experience up to that time, no one else could compare with him. There was nothing in the least trivial in his attitude. I found him extremely intelligent, shrewd, and altogether remarkable”13. However, there were dangerous difficulties between them from the start. Freud believed in his sexuality-based personality theory with an almost religious fervour, and asked Jung to help him to defend it from “the black tide of mud of occultism.” By “occultism,” Jung felt Freud meant “everything that philosophy and religion, including the rising science of parapsychology, had learned about the psyche”14. Jung, however, was deeply in awe of Jung, to the point of hero-worship, and kept silent in his objections for many years. Finally, though, Jung felt obliged to break with Freud and publish the theories he had developed on the collective unconscious while studying schizophrenic patients. Freud, who had hitherto regarded Jung as the successor to his crown, in effect, disowned him. It was then that Jung entered his mental breakdown that he was to later describe as a “creative illness,” from which he emerged an independent and powerful voice among twentieth century psychologists.
