Early years

Childhood family

Carl Gustav Jung was born in Kesswil, in the Swiss canton of Thurgau, on 26 July 1875 as the second and first surviving son of Paul Achilles Jung (1842–1896) and Emilie Preiswerk (1848–1923). Their first child, born in 1873, was a boy named Paul who survived only a few days. Being the youngest son of a noted Basel physician of German descent, also called Karl Gustav Jung (de) (1794–1864), whose hopes of achieving a fortune never materialised, Paul Jung did not progress beyond the status of an impoverished rural pastor in the Swiss Reformed Church; his wife had also grown up in a large family, whose Swiss roots went back five centuries. Emilie was the youngest child of a distinguished Basel churchman and academic, Samuel Preiswerk (de) (1799–1871), and his second wife. Preiswerk was antistes, the title given to the head of the Reformed clergy in the city, as well as a Hebraist, author and editor, who taught Paul Jung as his professor of Hebrew at Basel University.

When Jung was six months old, his father was appointed to a more prosperous parish in Laufen, but the tension between his parents was growing. Emilie Jung was an eccentric and depressed woman; she spent considerable time in her bedroom where she said that spirits visited her at night. Although she was normal during the day, Jung recalled that at night his mother became strange and mysterious. He reported that one night he saw a faintly luminous and indefinite figure coming from her room with a head detached from the neck and floating in the air in front of the body. Jung had a better relationship with his father.

Jung's mother left Laufen for several months of hospitalization near Basel for an unknown physical ailment. His father took the boy to be cared for by Emilie Jung's unmarried sister in Basel, but he was later brought back to his father's residence. Emilie Jung's continuing bouts of absence and depression deeply troubled her son and caused him to associate women with "innate unreliability", whereas "father" meant for him reliability but also powerlessness. In his memoir, Jung would remark that this parental influence was the "handicap I started off with. Later, these early impressions were revised: I have trusted men friends and been disappointed by them, and I have mistrusted women and was not disappointed." After three years of living in Laufen, Paul Jung requested a transfer; he was called to Kleinhüningen, next to Basel in 1879. The relocation brought Emilie Jung closer into contact with her family and lifted her melancholy. When he was nine years old, Jung's sister Johanna Gertrud (1884–1935) was born. Known in the family as "Trudi", she later became a secretary to her brother.

Childhood memories

Jung was a solitary and introverted child. From childhood, he believed that, like his mother, he had two personalities—a modern Swiss citizen and a personality more suited to the 18th 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. Although Jung was close to both parents, he was disappointed by his father's academic approach to faith.

A number of childhood memories made lifelong impressions on him. As a boy, he carved a tiny mannequin into the end of the wooden ruler from his pencil case and placed it inside the case. He added a stone, which he had painted into upper and lower halves, and hid the case in the attic. Periodically, he would return to the mannequin, often bringing tiny sheets of paper with messages inscribed on them in his own secret language. He later reflected that this ceremonial act brought him a feeling of inner peace and security. Years later, he discovered similarities between his personal experience and the practices associated with totems in indigenous cultures, such as the collection of soul-stones near Arlesheim or the tjurungas of Australia. He concluded that his intuitive ceremonial act was an unconscious ritual, which he had practiced in a way that was strikingly similar to those in distant locations which he, as a young boy, knew nothing about. His observations about symbols, archetypes, and the collective unconscious were inspired, in part, by these early experiences combined with his later research.

At the age of 12, shortly before the end of his first year at the Humanistisches Gymnasium in Basel, Jung was pushed to the ground by another boy so hard that he momentarily lost consciousness. (Jung later recognized that the incident was his fault, indirectly.) A thought then came to him—"now you won't have to go to school anymore." From then on, whenever he walked to school or began homework, he fainted. He remained at home for the next six months until he overheard his father speaking hurriedly to a visitor about the boy's future ability to support himself. They suspected he had epilepsy. Confronted with the reality of his family's poverty, he realized the need for academic excellence. He went into his father's study and began poring over Latin grammar. He fainted three more times but eventually overcame the urge and did not faint again. This event, Jung later recalled, "was when I learned what a neurosis is."

University studies and early career

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, exactly what he was searching for. In 1895 Jung began to study medicine at the University of Basel. Barely a year later in 1896, his father Paul died and left the family near destitute. They were helped out by relatives who also contributed to Jung's studies. During his student days, he entertained his contemporaries with the family legend, that his paternal grandfather was the illegitimate son of Wolfgang Goethe and his German great-grandmother, Sophie Ziegler. In later life, he pulled back from this tale, saying only that Sophie was a friend of Goethe's niece.

In 1900 Jung began working at the Burghölzli psychiatric hospital in Zürich with Eugen Bleuler. Bleuler was already in communication with the Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud. Jung's dissertation, published in 1903, was titled On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena. In 1906 he published Diagnostic Association Studies, and later sent a copy of this book to Freud. It turned out that Freud had already bought a copy.

Eventually a close friendship and a strong professional association developed between the elder Freud and Jung, which left a sizeable correspondence. For six years they cooperated in their work. In 1912, however, Jung published Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (known in English as Psychology of the Unconscious), which made manifest the developing theoretical divergence between the two. Consequently, their personal and professional relationship fractured—each stating that the other was unable to admit he could possibly be wrong. After the culminating break in 1913, Jung went through a difficult and pivotal psychological transformation, exacerbated by the outbreak of the First World War. Henri Ellenberger called Jung's intense experience a "creative illness" and compared it favorably to Freud's own period of what he called neurasthenia and hysteria.^:173

Wartime army service

During World War I Jung was drafted as an army doctor and soon made commandant of an internment camp for British officers and soldiers (The Swiss were neutral, and obliged to intern personnel from either side of the conflict who crossed their frontier to evade capture). Jung worked to improve the conditions of soldiers stranded in neutral territory and encouraged them to attend university courses.

Marriage

In 1903, Jung married Emma Rauschenbach, seven years his junior and the elder daughter of a wealthy industrialist in eastern Switzerland, Johannes Rauschenbach-Schenck, and his wife. Rauschenbach was the owner, among other concerns, of IWC Schaffhausen – the International Watch Company, manufacturers of luxury time-pieces. Upon his death in 1905, his two daughters and their husbands became owners of the business. Jung's brother-in-law—Ernst Homberger—became the principal proprietor, but the Jungs remained shareholders in a thriving business that ensured the family's financial security for decades. Emma Jung, whose education had been limited, evinced considerable ability and interest in her husband's research and threw herself into studies and acted as his assistant at Burghölzli. She eventually became a noted psychoanalyst in her own right. They had five children: Agathe, Gret, Franz, Marianne, and Helene. The marriage lasted until Emma's death in 1955.

During his marriage, Jung engaged in extramarital relationships. His alleged affairs with Sabina Spielrein^{:84–5, 92, 98–9, 102–7, 121, 123, 111, 134–7, 138–9, 145, 147, 152, 176, 177, 184, 185, 186, 189, 194, 213–4} and Toni Wolff^{:184–8, 189, 244, 261, 262} were the most widely discussed. Though it was mostly taken for granted that Jung's relationship with Spielrein included a sexual relationship, this assumption has been disputed, in particular by Henry Zvi Lothane.

Meeting and collaboration

Jung was thirty when he sent his Studies in Word Association to Sigmund Freud in Vienna in 1906. The two men met for the first time the following year and Jung recalled the discussion between himself and Freud as interminable. He recalled that they talked almost unceasingly for thirteen hours. Six months later, the then 50-year-old Freud sent a collection of his latest published essays to Jung in Zurich. This marked the beginning of an intense correspondence and collaboration that lasted six years and ended in May 1913.