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.