Forever Jung: 2008 marks the 60th anniversary of Kusnacht's C.G. Jung Institute Zurich. Swiss News takes an up close and personal look at a father of psychology who was also a seminal thinker, philosopher and visionary.
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Carl Gustav lung was born on July 26, 1875 on the shores of Lake Constance in the village of Kesswil in Canton Thurgau.
When he was six months old, Jung's impecunious but scholarly father, Reverend Johannes Paul Achilles Jung, was transferred to Laufen, in Basel, and then relocated again to a parish in the city of Basel in 1879.
Jung's mother Emilie was depressive and frequently hospitalised. Her absences and mood swings left him with a deep mistrust of women that he could never shake. Jung remained an only child until age nine, when a sister, Gertrud, came along.
An introvert--a term with which he is credited (along with extrovert)--Jung also showed an early interest in philosophy, theology and the occult.
If he chose to study medicine at the University of Basel he may have been following in the footsteps of his paternal grandfather, a physician who had come from Germany to teach surgery there.
This grandfather had a certain mystique: not only did he resemble Goethe, for whose Faust Jung harboured great admiration, but he was also rumoured to be Goethe's illegitimate child.
After his graduation in 1900, Jung worked in Zurich's psychiatric facility, Burgholzli. Specialising in psychiatry was a way of tying medicine in with his metaphysical interests and may have also been a way of dealing with his mother's need of healing.
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His first published paper, and the basis for his doctoral thesis, was On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena.
In 1909, Jung entered private practice and moved to Kusnacht outside of Zurich. By now he had a wife--he had married heiress Emma Rauschenbach in 1903--and three of the five children they would have (four daughters, one son).
Enter Sigmund Freud
Jung became interested in the work of Freud around 1905, and the two men started corresponding. They first met in Vienna in 1907. Jung was drawn into Freud's inner circle and became active in the Meister's psychoanalytic movement in which he played a leading role.
Slowly, however, differences in thinking began to create a rift between them. By 1912 Jung was writing to his mentor, nearly 20 years his senior: "If ever you should rid yourself entirely of your complexes and stop playing the father to your sons and, instead of aiming continually at their weak spots, took a good look at your own for a change ..."
One particular episode soured the association. In 1908, five years after his marriage, Jung embarked on an affair with a woman patient, Sabina Spielrein.
The story is complicated and has since become the subject of books, plays and at least one movie. But the long and short of it is that, sometime around 1912, Spielrein, now a psychoanalyst herself, told Freud.
Freud's own professional behaviour with regard to Spielrein's work has been criticised as unethical, with many alleging that he appropriated...
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