Home » Mind & Soul » Dream Interpretation » Who is Carl Gustav Jung?

Who is Carl Gustav Jung?

© Lauri Jean Crowe

Born in Switzerland in 1875, Jung came from a family whose father and maternal grandfather were both Protestant ministers with a strong interest in the Hebrew language. His paternal grandfather has the distinction of having been a Grand Master of the Swiss Freemasons, a rector at the University of Basel and allegedly was Goethe's illegitimate son. Jung's mother and maternal grandmother have both been depicted as possessing strong psychic abilities. It is perhaps these family influences which were a catalyst for shaping Jung's professional development in psychology.

His training began at the Burgholzli Psychiatric Hospital in Zurich in 1900, working with psychotic patients. Jung then spent a year under the tutelage of Pierrer Janet in Paris and then returned to Burgholzli to become its clinical director. Jung taught courses on psychotherapy, hysteria, and in 1903 began to carry out studies on word association. The results of his work became a standard of care in Swiss mental hospitals and were influential in the inspiration for creating other studies and tests such as the Rorschach Inkblot Test.

Jung became interested in the work of Sigmund Freud, particularly The Interpretation of Dreams. Jung found himself regularly encountering repression in the form of delayed responses to stimulus words of emotional significance. Freud's concept of applying repression to the field of dreams, caused Jung to meet with Freud in 1907 were they talked for long hours on the items being repressed. Freud found them to be mostly sexual in nature, while Jung found the areas of repression to be much more varied. After his talk with Freud, Jung became heavily involved in the psychoanalytic movement and became the first president of the International Psychoanalytic Association in 1910. He served as such for four years.

Freud and Jung continued to have many theoretical disagreements, leading to ever-increasing tension between the two men. Eventually Jung realized that their ideas on dreams and their value to psychoanalysis differed so vastly that they could never work amenably together as colleagues. The process that led to this dissolution of the relationship between Freud and Jung cannot be overlooked in researching Jung's contribution to dreams and I will discuss it in next month's article.

There is no doubt that Carl Gustav Jung, who traveled widely in Europe, safaried in North and east Africa as well as traveling in New Mexico and India, also journeyed extensively into the land of dreams and has impacted modern day thought tremendously. In October we'll pick up a peek into this Swiss psychologist's life and perhaps find inspiration within it to forge ahead with our

The copyright of the article Who is Carl Gustav Jung? in Dream Interpretation is owned by . Permission to republish Who is Carl Gustav Jung? in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.