Carl Gustav Jung: biography and work of a spiritual psychologist

Carl Gustav Jung He was born in July 1875 in Kesswil, Switzerland, into a very religious family. He was a withdrawn and lonely child, who went through much of his childhood without being able to relate to brothers or sisters. Partly because of this, he used to play with elements of nature and used his imagination to weave extravagant narrative lines about everything he experienced.

However, the unusual mental associations and symbolisms that populated the young Jung's mind did not limit his reign to the hours he spent awake. Jung began to have very vivid dreams with a strong symbolic charge very early on.. And, as you would expect from someone who dedicated much of his career to studying the dreamlike, at least one of these dreams marked him for life.

Biography of Carl Gustav Jung

When I was barely three or four years old, Jung dreamed that he was descending a dark rectangular hole that seemed to be dug in a meadow..

When he reached the bottom of the hole, he found an arch from which hung a green curtain that seemed to block his way. Jung, moved by curiosity, parted the curtain with one arm to find, on the other side, something similar to the royal chamber of a palace, with a high ceiling and a red carpet that described a path to an important place.

It all started with a dream

At the end of the carpet, presiding over the room, an impressive large royal throne, on which a creature rested strange: a monster shaped like a tree, the consistency of human skin and with no face but a single eye on the top of the trunk. The creature remained motionless and did not even show any signs of reacting to his presence, and yet Jung had the feeling that at any moment he could start crawling on the ground and catch up with him. quickly. At that moment, he heard his mother cry out from the entrance of the pit: "Look at him! It's the men's dining room! "

At that moment, Sheer terror made little Carl wake up. Many years later, he offered an interpretation of this dream based on the phallic symbolism of the underground god and that of the green veil, which covers the mystery. And although it may seem that experiencing this kind of nightmare is a very unpleasant experience, Jung came to consider that this dream was his beginning in the world of mysteries, the study of religion and symbols, and the operation of what would later be called the unconscious for the psychoanalysts.

Jung's predisposition towards spirituality

This dream, coupled with the great imagination and curiosity towards abstract subjects that Jung had from a very early age, made him he experimented more and more with the different ways of accessing the divine and the occult, usually through thoughts self-induced.

The fact that there were so many people strongly related to him in his family Lutheranism and that his mother had an erratic behavior that seemed not to respond at all to what was happening in the world of the observable (since it seemed to go through episodes of dissociation from reality), led to the birth in Jung of a double spirituality: one that was Lutheran and one that was based on ideas more related to paganism.

Jung began to develop an extraordinary sensitivity for relating feelings and ideas that apparently had little in common. This was one of the characteristic features that defined the way of thinking of Carl Gustav Jung as and as we know him today, and that would lead him to easily adopt the approaches of the psychoanalysis.

The university period

Upon reaching the second decade of his life, Jung became an avid reader. He was interested in many subjects and found reading an excellent hobby, so every time he he satiated a series of doubts on a subject assaulted him as many originated in his new base of knowledge. In addition, he was interested in developing as a person in two different senses: in everyday or social aspects and in issues related to the mysteries of life. Reading allowed him to have raw materials to work with to make progress in both flanks, but his aspirations were never satisfied, which moved him to continue doing research.

Once he had reached the age of going to college, Jung chose to study medicine at the University of Basel, and so he did from 1894 to 1900. When he finished, he began working as a hospital assistant, and shortly after he opted for the specialty of psychiatry.

Exercising in this area, Carl Gustav Jung saw how he was able to address the two through his own work aspects that he was passionate about: biological processes treated in medicine and psychic subjects and even spiritual. Thus, since 1900 he began to practice in a mental institution in Zurich.

The relationship between Carl Gustav Jung and Sigmund Freud

Although the psychiatry from which Jung started to work in the psychiatric clinic proposed a materialistic and reductionist vision of the Mental illness, he never gave up adopting elements and formulations from the thematic field of spiritualism, anthropology and even the study of art. Jung believed that the human mind could not be understood by giving up the study of symbols and their roots in the history of human culture, so he did not share the approach of what we understand today as psychiatry.

Therefore, Jung always moved in the tension between the material and the spiritual, something that won him not a few enemies in the academic world. However, there was a researcher with a materialistic philosophical base who interested him greatly, and his name was Sigmund Freud.

The importance of the unconscious and symbols

This was not surprising, given the central role that the concept of "the unconscious" has in Freud's psychoanalytic theory. Jung agreed with the neurologist that deep down in the human psyche there is an area inaccessible to consciousness that ultimately directs actions and thoughts of people and whose strength is expressed through primary drives.

Jung and Freud began to send letters to each other in 1906, and a year later they met in Vienna. In their first meeting, according to Jung himself, they spoke for about 13 hours.

More or less from their first meeting, in Vienna, Sigmund Freud became a kind of mentor to the young psychiatrist, who had already been interested in psychoanalysis for a few years. However, although the writings on the unconscious and impulses fascinated Jung, he did not agree with approach the entire spectrum of mental processes and psychopathology as if it were all function-based biological.

Jung's discrepancy with Freudian thought

This also led him to reject the idea that the cause of mental pathology lies in blocked processes related to human sexuality (the call Freud's "Sex Theory"). Therefore, in a similar way to how the psychoanalyst did Erik erikson, Jung took a large part of the proposals of Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis and added the cultural factor into the equation, displacing the prominence of sexual impulses.

Jung, however, went far beyond materialistic explanations, since his writings delve headlong into explanations with a obscurantist tone, aimed at explaining phenomena of a spiritual nature that are usually approached from parapsychology and certain approaches of the philosophy.

The unconscious, according to Jung

Jung believed that Freud's portrait of the nature of the unconscious was incomplete without adding an important cultural factor. He argued that in the psyche of each individual person lives, indeed, a very important part which may be called "the unconscious", but for Jung a part of this unconscious is, in fact, u a kind of "collective unconscious" or collective memory, something that does not belong only to the individual.

The concept of unconscious collective

Is collective memory it is full of all those symbols and recurring elements of significance that the culture in which we live has been weaving throughout the generations. The collective memory that Jung describes, therefore, is an element that explains the similarities between the myths and symbols of all the cultures he studied, however different from each other they seem to be.

These recurring elements did not exist only as a phenomenon to be studied from anthropology, but they had to be approached by the psychology of the time, since individual minds also operate on the basis of these schemas cultural

In this way, the culture and the cultural legacy that is transmitted from generation to generation remains more or less the same over the centuries, creating a foundation on which the human psyche can take root and add on it learnings based on the individual experiences of each one. These learnings and the way in which they are carried out, however, will be conditioned by the cultural substrate of this unconscious part of the psyche.

Jung and the archetypes

So for Jung a part of the unconscious is made up of inherited memories, the raw material of culture. These memories are expressed through what Jung called "archetypes".

The archetypes are the elements that make up the collective memory, the result of the hereditary transmission of culture. These archetypes exist as embodiments in all human-made cultural products (theater, painting, stories, etc.) but they also belong to the invisible world of each person's unconscious, as if it were something latent. As they are elements that are characterized by being of hereditary transmission, they are basically universal, and can be found in different forms in practically all cultures.

Cultural production as a key element to understand the human psyche

That is why Jung drew attention to the fact that in order to understand the human mind it was also necessary to study its products, that is, its cultural productions. In this way, Jung justified the need to relate psychology and anthropology, in addition to the study of symbols used in obscurantist fields such as tarot.

Through the archetypes, whose etymology comes from what in ancient Greek is translated as "original model", we would be able to see a a glimpse of how our common ancestors, the fathers and mothers of other cultures, perceived reality. But, in addition, by studying it we can know the unconscious mechanisms through which we understand and organize our reality today. The archetypes serve, according to Jung, to describe the orography of a cultural nature on which our individual experiences are based.

A very varied legacy

Jung proposed a way of understanding psychology that did not seem very conventional in his day, and which today would be even less so.

He was a person with multiple concerns, and the nature of these sources of interest was not usually easy to describe in words. His legacy lives on especially in psychoanalysis, but also in the analysis of art and even in studies of the obscurantist type.