Saturday 26 July 2014

He was convinced having two personalities in childhood; learnt psychiatry from own life & childhood events & praised by Freud!!!


Carl Gustav Jung (26 July 1875 – 6 June 1961), often referred to as C. G. Jung, was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology. Jung proposed and developed the concepts of extraversion and introversionarchetypes, and the collective unconscious. His work has been influential in psychiatry and in the study of religion, philosophy, archeology, anthropology, literature, and related fields. He was a prolific writer, many of whose works were not published until after his death.


Born in Kesswil, in the Swiss canton of Thurgau, on 26 July 1875 as the fourth but only surviving child of Paul Achilles Jung and Emilie Preiswerk. Jung's father was a poor rural pastor in the Swiss Reformed Church while his mother came from a wealthy Swiss family. Emilie Jung was an eccentric and depressed woman who spent much of her time in her own separate bedroom enthralled by the spirits that she said visited her at night.


Jung was a solitary and introverted child and was convinced from childhood that, like his mother, he had two personalities—a modern Swiss citizen and a personality more suited to the nineteenth century. "Personality Number 1," as he termed it, was a typical schoolboy living in the era of the time. "Personality Number 2" was a dignified, authoritative and influential man from the past.


Jung did not plan to study psychiatry since it was not considered prestigious at the time. But, studying a psychiatric textbook, he became very excited when he discovered that psychoses are personality diseases. His interest was immediately captured—it combined the biological and the spiritual and was exactly what he was searching for.


In 1895 Jung studied medicine at the University of Basel. In 1900 he began working in the Zurich psychiatric hospital Burghölzli with Eugen Bleuler. His dissertation, published in 1903, was titled "On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena." In 1906 he published Studies in Word Association and later sent a copy of this book to Sigmund Freud which led to a close six year friendship between them. Jung and Freud influenced each other during the intellectually formative years of Jung's life. Freud called Jung "his adopted eldest son, his crown prince and successor". 


The central concept of analytical psychology is individuation—the psychological process of integrating the opposites, including the conscious with the unconscious, while still maintaining their relative autonomy. Jung considered individuation to be the central process of human development. Jung created some of the best known psychological concepts, including the archetype, the collective unconscious, the complex, and synchronicity

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), a popular psychometric instrument, has been developed from Jung's theory of psychological types. Jung saw the human psyche as "by nature religious" and made this religiousness the focus of his explorations. Jung is one of the best known contemporary contributors to dream analysis and symbolization.


Though he was a practising clinician and considered himself to be a scientist, much of his life's work was spent exploring tangential areas such as Eastern and Western philosophyalchemyastrology, and sociology, as well as literature and the arts. Jung's interest in philosophy and the occult led many to view him as a mystic, although his ambition was to be seen as a man of science. His influence on popular psychology, the "psychologization of religion", spirituality and the New Age movement has been immense.


Jung founded a new school of psychotherapy, called analytical psychology or Jungian psychology. His theories include:
His also focused on other areas like Individuation, Persona, Spirituality, Alchemy, Alcoholics Anonymous and Art therapy.