C.G. Jung Biography

Carl Gustav Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology. His work has been influential not only in psychiatry but also in philosophy, anthropology, archaeology, literature, religious studies, quantum mechanics and psychobiology as well as neuroscience. As a notable research scientist based at the famous Burghölzli hospital, under Eugen Bleuler, he came to the attention of a Viennese neurologist, Sigmund Freud. The two men conducted a lengthy correspondence and collaborated on an initially joint vision of human psychology.

Among the central concepts of analytical psychology is individuation—the lifelong psychological process of differentiation of the self out of each individual's conscious and unconscious elements. Jung considered it to be the main task of human development. He created some of the best known psychological concepts, including synchronicity, archetypal phenomena, the collective unconscious, the psychological complex, and extraversion and introversion.