Psychiatrist, Mystic, Visionary
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Article substantially revised on 1 August 2026.
Carl Jung transformed psychology by exploring symbols, myths, dreams, and the hidden depths of the unconscious. Breaking with Sigmund Freud, he developed some of the most influential—and controversial—ideas in modern psychology, including the collective unconscious, archetypes, the shadow, and individuation.
An Extraordinary Family
Carl Gustav Jung was born in 1875 to Paul Jung, a poor rural pastor in the Swiss Reformed Church, and Emilie Preiswerk, a melancholic who claimed to be visited by spirits.
His paternal grandfather, after whom he was named, was a physician who was rumoured to be the illegitimate son of Goethe, and rose to become Rector of Basel University and Grand Master of the Swiss Lodge of Free Masons.
His maternal grandfather, Samuel Preiswerk, was a theologian who had visions, conversed with the dead, and devoted his life to learning Hebrew in the belief that it was the language spoken in Heaven (actually, it’s Greek).
When Jung was just three years old, his mother had a nervous breakdown and spent several months in hospital. In his memoirs of 1961, he wrote: ‘From then on I always felt mistrustful when the word ‘love’ was spoken. The feeling I associated with ‘woman’ was for a long time that of innate unreliability.’
Jung’s father was kind but weak-willed, and, in Jung’s mind, too accepting of the religious dogma in which he had long lost all faith.
Childhood Years
Jung was a solitary child who imagined that he had two personas, that of a schoolboy of his time, and that of an authority from the past.
He once carved a tiny mannequin into the end of a wooden ruler, which he kept together with a painted stone in a pencil case in the attic. He periodically returned to the mannequin, bringing to it scrolls inscribed in a secret language of his own making.
Needless to say, he was bullied at school. At the age of 12, he received a blow to the head. He lay on the ground for much longer than necessary, and thought, ‘Now you won’t have to go to school anymore.’
For the next six months, he avoided going to school by fainting each time his parents tried to make him—an episode that gave him an early insight into hysteria.
Medicine, Psychiatry, and the Shadow
In 1895, inspired by a dream, Jung went to the University of Basel to study natural science and medicine. His father’s premature death one year later prompted his mother to comment, rather eerily, that ‘he died in time for you’.
During his studies, he had a dream in which he was battling against dense fog, with a tiny light in the cup of his hands and a giant black figure chasing after him. When he awoke, he realised that the black figure was his own shadow, brought into being by the light that he was carrying: ‘…this light was my consciousness, the only light that I have. My own understanding is the sole treasure I possess, and the greatest.’
This dream helped to inspire Jung’s concept of the ‘shadow’, which comprises those aspects of ourselves that we reject or repress. For Jung, the more we deny the shadow, the more power it gains over us. To become more fully ourselves, we must reckon with our shadow.
After presenting a paper on The Limits of the Exact Sciences, Jung spent two years recording the séances of a young medium, his cousin, Hélène Preiswerk. He submitted his observations in the form of a doctoral thesis entitled On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena.
As he neared the end of his studies, a reading of Krafft-Ebing’s textbook of psychiatry led him straight into psychiatry. The preface alone had such a profound impact on him that he had to stand up to catch his breath: ‘Here alone the two currents of my interest could flow together and in a united stream dig their own bed. Here was the empirical field common to biological and spiritual facts, which I had everywhere sought and nowhere found.’
He was taken on at the Burghölzli Psychiatric Hospital in Zürich as an assistant to Eugen Bleuler, the man who coined the term ‘schizophrenia’. Bleuler set him to work on Galton’s word-association test, and in 1906 he published Studies in Word Association, which, he claimed, provided hard evidence for the existence of unconscious complexes.
Freud and the Collective Unconscious
Jung sent a copy of Studies in Word Association to Sigmund Freud, and on their first meeting in Vienna, the pair exchanged for 13 hours straight—with or without toilet breaks, history does not record.
Jung needed a father as much as Freud needed a son, and Freud anointed Jung his ‘son and heir’. But Jung became increasingly dissatisfied with Freud’s assumptions that human motivation is entirely sexual and that the unconscious mind is exclusively personal.
For Jung, sexuality was but one aspect of a broader life force, and beneath the personal unconscious lay a deeper layer that contained the entire psychic heritage of humankind. This ‘collective unconscious’ had been pointed to by his childhood dreams and experiences and by the delusions and hallucinations of his patients, which contained symbols that recurred in myths and legends from all over the world.
Whereas the personal unconscious contains the repressed memories unique to each individual, the collective unconscious is common to all human beings. It is the deepest and oldest layer of the psyche, and the source of humanity’s common symbols and images.
In his book of 1912, Transformations and Symbols of the Libido, Jung replaced Freud’s concept of libido with a much broader concept of undifferentiated psychic energy, which could crystallize into universal symbols such as the hero’s slaying of the dragon, which represents the struggle of the ego for deliverance from parental dominance.
These universal symbols, or archetypes, include such recurring figures as the Hero, the Great Mother, the Wise Old Man, the Trickster, and the Shadow. Archetypes arise from the collective unconscious and recur in dreams, myths, and folk tales from all around the world.
For Jung, life’s purpose was individuation, which involves integrating the conscious and the unconscious by pursuing one’s personal vision of the truth, and, in so doing, realizing one’s fullest potential as a human being. For Jung, the aim of life was neither perfection nor happiness, but wholeness.
If this meant falling out with Freud, then so be it. In 1913, on the eve of the Great War, Jung and Freud broke off their relationship.
Confrontation with the Unconscious
Jung spent the next few years in a troubled state of mind that verged upon psychosis and led him to a ‘confrontation with the unconscious’.
By then, he had had five children with Emma Rauschenbach, the daughter of a rich industrialist. Despite being happily married, he felt that he needed a muse as well as a homemaker, observing that ‘the pre-requisite of a good marriage … is the license to be unfaithful’.
The marital strife that resulted from his affairs, notably with a former patient called Toni Wolff, contributed to his troubled state of mind, and Emma tolerated Toni as much from a concern for Jung’s sanity as from a desire to salvage the remnants of her marriage.
As Europe tore itself apart, Jung gained first-hand experience of psychotic material in which he found ‘a matrix of mythopoeic imagination which has vanished from our rational age’.
Like Gilgamesh, Odysseus, and Herakles before him, he journeyed to an underworld where he conversed with Salome, a mysterious young woman, and with Philemon, an old man with a white beard and the wings of a kingfisher. Although Philemon and Salome were products of his unconscious, they had lives of their own and said things that he had not previously thought. Jung later recorded many of these visions and conversations in what became known as The Red Book, which was not published until 2009.
In Philemon, Jung at long last found the father figure that both Freud and his own father had failed to be. More than that, Philemon was a guru, and prefigured what Jung himself was later to become: the ‘wise old man of Zürich’.
As the war burnt out, Jung re-emerged into sanity, and considered that he had found in his madness ‘the prima materia for a lifetime’s work’.
Continue Exploring
I revisit Jung in The Meaning of Madness and Hide and Seek: The Psychology of Self-Deception.
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