Who Was Carl Jung?
You may have heard of his theories and notions, but who was Carl Jung? Not only did this man change the way that we currently view psychology, he directly impacted mental health as it is today.
Born on July 26, 1875, Karl Gustav II Jung was the only child (surviving) of Paul Achilles Jung and Emilie Preiswerk. Some say that Jung’s childhood directly impacted his adult life, and Jung himself called his mother’s constant bouts with depression (and time spent inside of mental hospitals) “innate unreliability.” As a child, Jung spent many days living with his aunt and father while his mother sought a cure for her depression, and during this time he began to formulate some ideas regarding the human psyche. In order to fully answer the original question (who was Carl Jung ?), we must first understand who he wasn’t.
Though his mother came from a wealthy family, his father was a simple clergy man that often struggled to pay the bills. Being an introverted child, young Carl would often play by himself and ignore his classmates – unfortunately for him, this didn’t exactly work out. One day, a particularly large bully knocked him onto the ground with one punch. Carl was instantly unconscious, and before he decided to get up her realized that he could get away with not going to school if he could manage to faint every time he started out for the school yard. Well, this plan worked quite well ... until his father began to have financial troubles and Carl felt just a tad guilty.
Even though he fainted every time he opened a book for the first two years back at school, he persisted and learned that higher education was the only way to go. By the time Jung graduated from high school, he loved to learn and yearned to study archaeology. However, his parents could not afford to send him to a far away archaeology school, so he settled for the local university’s (University of Basel) medical program instead. When he began reading Krafft-Ebing towards the end of his university stint, he decided to study psychiatry. Still, who was Carl Jung? Well, by this time he was no longer the introverted child that he once was, and his life began to change for the better.
Jung wrote and published his first book “Studies in Word Association” in 1906. He decided to send a copy of his book to the famous psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, and from that point on he and Freud were close friends. Eventually, Jung and Freud would have a disagreement over a certain concept, and neither could see the other’s point of view. Freud and Jung split at this time, and Jung went on to develop his own theories.
The amazing thing about Jung and his theories is that we still use them within the field of psychology today. Now that you know the answer to the question: who was Carl Jung, you can begin to appreciate all that this man did for mental health, and for those that are suffering from mental illness.