His later fundamental notion that there is in every individual a natural predisposition toward a “totality of the psyche” is first set forth here. In 1902 the degree of doctor of medicine was conferred upon him for his dissertation, “On the Psychology and Pathology of Socalled Occult Phenomena” (1902). Jung began as an assistant to Eugen Bleuler at Burghölzli, the psychiatric clinic of the University of Zurich.

As he saw it, this was the only way to do justice to the multilayered structure of the psyche. Thus, his lifework has that significant double aspect that ties it, on the one hand, to the natural sciences and, on the other, to the humanities. From as early as 1898 until the end of his life, occultism and mysticism interested him, as did the study of mythology. Thomas Aquinas, Meister Eckhart, Paracelsus, Bohme, Joachim of Floris, Goethe, Carus, Hölderlin, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Freud, to name but a few. At the same time, philosophy and the history of religion excited him, and the list of great men who had a decisive influence upon him is a long one it includes Heraclitus, Plato, Aristotle, St. His paternal grandfather, an aesthete and poet, was exiled from Germany for his revolutionary views he was called to the chair of surgery in the University of Basel in 1822 through the intercession of Alexander von Humboldt and later founded the first insane asylum there, as well as the Ansta’t zur Hoffnung, a home for mentally retarded children.Īs a young man, Jung was full of enthusiasm for biology, zoology, and paleontology it was only later that he shifted to medicine.

Despite an inclination toward the humanities, his ancestors on his father’s side also included physicians who exercised an enduring influence on Jung’s intellectual development. This heritage of concern with religious problems may have been the source of the questioning always characteristic of his work. His paternal great-grandfather, however, was a Roman Catholic Kirchenrat (member of a consistory) in Mainz, and his grandfather was in his eighteenth year when he was converted by Schleiermacher to Protestantism. Several of his ancestors on his mother’s side were also Protestant theologians, including his grandfather and greatgrandfather. At the age of four he went to Basel, which he regarded as his hometown: his mother was born there, and he went to school and received his doctorate in medicine there. Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961), founder of analytical psychology, was born the son of a clergyman in Kesswil (Thurgau canton, Switzerland) on Lake Constance.

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