My Best Friend Essay Essay, Research Paper

Carl G. Jung

Carl Gustav Jung

Carl Gustav Jung was born in Kesswil, Switzerland in the year 1875 and died

86 years later in 1961. He studied at Basel from 1895-1900 and then at Z?rich

where he received his M.D. in 1902. He worked at the University Psychiatric

Clinic there in Z?rich and afterwards worked for Eugen Bleuler at the Burgholzli

Clinic where he wrote his book on the psychology of dementia praecox in

1906. In 1907 he met Sigmund Freud and they discovered together that their

theoretical beliefs had a lot in common. At the age of 36 he became the

president of the International Psychoanalytical Society. Before World War II

Carl became president of the German Association for Psychotherapy, a

Nazi-influenced organization but resigned after the Nazis began forcing their

ideology on the members of the association.

One of the biggest influences on the hypothesis’s he made throughout his career

was his childhood. In his book Psychological Types published in 1921 he was

the first to bring up the now popular types of personality, extrovert and

introvert. Each representing a parent, his mother an extrovert was the polar

opposite of his introvert father. Throughout his childhood his love for his parents

was torn between the two each always pulling him in their direction. He

developed the concepts of extroversion and introversion for his studies of

personality types as well as the theory of synchronicity, the coincidence of

causally unrelated events having identical or similar meaning.

Jung was the first to introduce extrovert and introvert personalities to the world

of psychology. Most people are a combination of the two with one seemingly to

be somewhat more visible to observers than the other. An extroverted

personality centers most of their energies upon the surrounding world and

generally enjoys being immersed in social situations. An introverted person

directs much of their energy into themselves and ordinarily prefers solitude.

“This general activity or drive of the individual was called the libido by Jung.”5

In years to come psychologists were influenced by this theory, such as Hans

Eysenck who did research on many samples of individuals that produced more

classifications.

Jung’s work has become widely influential in a variety of fields, such as religious

studies and literary criticism. Jungian psychology is based of psychic totality and

psychic energism. He concluded that there were two different dimensions in the

unconscious: the personal and the ideals of a collective unconscious. “To Jung,

the most important and lifelong task imposed upon any person is fulfillment

through the process of individuation, achievement of harmony of conscious and

unconscious, which makes a person one and whole.”3

Bibliography

1 http://www.cgjung.com/fordhamintro.html An introduction to Jung’s

Psychology. Frieda Fordham.

2 http://encarta.msn.com/find/Concise.asp?z=1&pg=2&ti=06aff000 Jung, Carl

Gustav. Encarta Online Concise.

3 http://www.encyclopedia.com/ Extroversion and Introversion. Encyclopedia.

Electric Library.

4 http://www.infoplease.com/ce5/CE027475.html Jung, Carl Gustav.

Encyclopedia Entry. Netscape.

5 http://www.infoplease.com/ce5/CE017717.html Extroversion and

Introversion. Encyclopedia Entry. Netscape.