Carl Gustav Jung was born in July 1875 in Kesswil, Switzerland, into a very religious family. He was a withdrawn and lonely child, who spent a large part of his childhood without being able to relate to brothers or sisters. Partly because of this, he used to play with elements of nature and used his imagination to weave extravagant narrative lines about everything he experienced.

However, the unusual mental associations and symbolisms that populated the mind of the young Jung did not limit his reign to the hours he spent awake.
Jung began very early to have very vivid dreams with a strong symbolic charge . And, as was to be expected from someone who dedicated a large part of his career to studying the dream, at least one of these dreams marked him for life.

Biography of Carl Gustav Jung

When I was barely three or four years old,
Jung dreamt that he was descending through a dark rectangular hole that seemed to be dug in a meadow .

When he reached the bottom of the hole, he found an arch from which hung a green curtain that seemed to block his way. Jung, moved by curiosity, pulled the curtain aside with one arm to find, on the other side, something similar to the royal chamber of a palace, with a high ceiling and a red carpet that described a path to an important place.

It all started with a dream

At the end of the carpet, presiding over the room, an impressive large royal throne, on which rested a strange creature: a tree-shaped monster, consisting of human skin and with no more face than a single eye on the top of the trunk. The creature remained motionless and did not even show signs of reacting to its presence, yet Jung had the feeling that he could crawl across the ground and reach it quickly at any moment. At that moment, he heard his mother shouting from the entrance to the pit: “Look at him! It’s the men’s room!”

At that time,
pure terror made little Carl wake up . Many years later, he offered an interpretation of this dream based on the phallic symbolism of the underground god and that of the green veil, which covers the mystery. And although it may seem that experiencing this kind of nightmare is a very unpleasant experience, Jung came to consider this dream as his beginning in the world of mysteries, the study of religion and symbols, and the functioning of what would later be called the unconscious by psychoanalysts.

The predisposition towards Jungian spirituality

This dream, together with the great imagination and curiosity towards abstract subjects that Jung had from a very early age, made him experiment more and more with the different ways to access the divine and the hidden, usually through self-induced thoughts.

The fact that in his family there were so many people strongly related to
The fact that his mother had an erratic behavior that seemed not to respond completely to what was happening in the world of the observable (since she seemed to go through episodes of dissociation from reality), caused the birth in Jung of a double spirituality : one that was Lutheran and another that was based on ideas more related to paganism .

Jung began to develop an extraordinary sensitivity to relate sensations and ideas to each other that apparently had little in common. This was one of the characteristic features that defined Carl Gustav Jung’s way of thinking as we know it today, and which would lead him to easily adopt the approaches of psychoanalysis.

The university period

As he enters his second decade of life,
Jung became an avid reader . He was interested in many subjects and found reading to be an excellent pastime, so that every time he would satisfy a series of doubts about a subject he would be assailed by as many others originating from his new knowledge base. In addition, he was interested in developing as a person in two different ways: in everyday or social aspects and in topics related to the mysteries of life. Reading allowed him to have raw material with which to work to make progress on both sides, but his aspirations were never satisfied, which moved him to continue his research.

Once he had reached the age of going to college,
Jung chose to study medicine at the University of Basel , and did so from 1894 to 1900. When he finished, he started to work as an assistant in a hospital, and soon after that he decided to specialize in psychiatry.

Practicing in this field, Carl Gustav Jung saw how he was able to address through his own work the two aspects that fascinated him: the biological processes dealt with in medicine and the psychic and even spiritual issues. Thus, since 1900 he began to practice in a mental institution in Zurich.

The relationship between Carl Gustav Jung and Sigmund Freud

Although the psychiatry that Jung left to work in the psychiatric clinic proposed a materialistic and reductionist vision of the
mental illness, he never gave up adopting elements and formulations coming from the thematic field of Spiritism, anthropology and even the study of art. Jung believed that the human mind could not be understood by renouncing to the study of symbols and their roots in the history of human culture , so he did not share the approach of what we understand today as psychiatry.

Therefore, Jung always moved in the tension between the material and the spiritual, something that earned him not a few enemies in the academic world. However, there was one researcher with a materialistic philosophical background who interested him greatly, and his name was
Sigmund Freud.

The importance of the unconscious and symbols

Not surprisingly, given the central role that the concept of “the unconscious” plays in Freud’s psychoanalytic theory. Jung agreed with the neurologist that
in the depths of the human psyche inhabits a realm inaccessible to the consciousness that ultimately directs the acts and thoughts of people and whose strength is expressed through primary impulses.

Jung and Freud began sending each other letters in 1906, and a year later they met in Vienna. At their first meeting, according to Jung himself, they talked for about 13 hours.

From his first meeting in Vienna, Sigmund Freud
became a kind of mentor for the young psychiatrist , who had already been interested in psychoanalysis for some years. However, although Jung was fascinated by the writings on the unconscious and impulses, he did not agree with addressing the whole spectrum of mental processes and psychopathology as if everything was based on biological functions.

Jung’s discrepancy with Freudian thought

This also led him to reject the idea that the cause of mental pathology is found in blocked processes related to
human sexuality (Freud’s so-called “Sexual Theory”). Therefore, in a similar way to the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, Jung took a large part of the proposals of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis and added the cultural factor into the equation , displacing the protagonism of sexual impulses.

Jung, however, went far beyond materialistic explanations, since his writings go deep into explanations with an obscurantist tone, aimed at explaining phenomena of a spiritual nature that are usually approached from parapsychology and certain approaches to
philosophy.

The unconscious, according to Jung

Jung believed that Freud’s portrayal of the nature of the unconscious was incomplete without an important cultural factor. He held that in the psyche of each individual person dwells, indeed, a very important part that can be called “the unconscious,” but for Jung a part of this unconscious is, in fact, a
in a kind of “collective unconscious” or collective memory , something that does not belong only to the individual.

The concept of unconscious collective

This
collective memory is full of all those symbols and elements of recurrent meaning that the culture we live in has been weaving over generations. The collective memory that Jung describes, therefore, is an element that explains the similarities between the myths and symbols of all the cultures he studied , no matter how different they might seem to be.

These recurrent elements did not exist only as a phenomenon to be studied from the anthropology, but had to be addressed by the psychology of the time, since individual minds also operate based on these cultural schemes.

In this way, the culture and cultural legacy that is passed on from generation to generation
remains more or less the same over the centuries, creating a base on which the human psyche can take root and add to it lessons based on one’s individual experiences. These learnings and the way in which they are carried out, however, will be conditioned by the cultural substratum of this unconscious part of the psyche.

Jung and the archetypes

So, for Jung
a part of the unconscious is composed of inherited memories , the raw material of culture. These memories are expressed through what Jung called “archetypes”.

Archetypes are the elements that make up the collective memory, the fruit of the hereditary transmission of culture. These archetypes exist as an expression of all cultural products made by human beings (theatre, painting, stories, etc.) but they also belong to the invisible world of each person’s unconscious, as if it were something latent. As they are elements that are characterized as being of hereditary transmission,
are basically universal, and can be found in different forms in practically all cultures .

Cultural production as a key element in understanding the human psyche

That is why Jung drew attention to the fact that in order to understand the human mind, one had to study the products of the human mind, i.e. its
cultural productions . In this way, Jung justified the need to link psychology and anthropology, in addition to the study of symbols used in obscurantist fields such as the tarot.

Through the
archetypes , whose etymology comes from what in ancient Greek is translated as “original model”, we would be able to see a glimpse of how our common ancestors, the fathers and mothers of the rest of the cultures, perceived reality. But, in addition, through their study we can know the unconscious mechanisms through which we understand and organize our reality today. Archetypes serve, according to Jung, to describe the orography of cultural nature on which our individual experiences are based.

A varied legacy

Jung proposed a way of understanding psychology that once seemed unconventional, and which today would be even less so.

He was a person with multiple concerns, and the nature of these sources of interest was not usually easy to describe in words.
His legacy is still especially alive in psychoanalysis , but also in the analysis of art and even in obscurantist-type studies.