Carl Jung

More of modern spirituality runs through him than through anyone else in this section — which is exactly why his weakest claims and his worst conduct both need stating plainly.

Who they were

Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist, the founder of analytical psychology, and the single largest channel through which esoteric and mystical material entered modern Western culture.

If you have encountered the shadow, the collective unconscious, archetypes, introversion and extraversion, synchronicity, or the idea that a myth might be describing something in you rather than something that happened — that is Jung. Much of the vocabulary the rest of this site will need was either coined by him or reached general use through him, which is why he appears here in the groundwork rather than later among the esotericists.

Where they came from

He was the son of a Swiss Reformed pastor whose loss of faith he watched at close range, and he described a childhood full of vivid visionary experience. He trained in psychiatry at the Burghölzli hospital in Zurich under Eugen Bleuler, doing genuinely respected early empirical work on word association.

His collaboration with Freud began in 1906 and broke in 1913, over Freud's insistence on the sexual origin of neurosis and over Jung's unwillingness to treat religion as pathology.

The break precipitated a period from 1913 to about 1930 in which Jung deliberately induced and recorded visionary states, writing and painting the results in what became The Red Book, unpublished until 2009. He described everything he did afterwards as an elaboration of that material. It is a remarkable document and it is not a scientific one — a distinction he was clearer about than many of his followers.

From the 1920s he read deeply in alchemy, Gnosticism, astrology, the I Ching and Eastern texts, treating them as records of psychological process rather than as claims about the world.

What they taught

The collective unconscious — a layer of the psyche below the personal unconscious, common to humanity, containing inherited structures rather than inherited contents.

Archetypes — those structures: the shadow, the anima and animus, the self, the wise old man, the mother. Jung's careful statement is that archetypes are not images but predispositions to produce images, which is why similar figures appear in unconnected mythologies.

Individuation — the lifelong work of integrating what has been split off, particularly the shadow, into a more complete self. Not self-improvement; more like a reckoning.

Synchronicity — meaningful coincidence, proposed as an acausal connecting principle. His most metaphysically ambitious idea and his least defensible.

Psychological types — introversion, extraversion and the four functions, which reached the wider world in a distorted form through the Myers-Briggs indicator, an instrument Jung had no part in and which psychometricians regard poorly.

What we can and cannot say

We can say his cultural influence is enormous and largely unacknowledged. A great deal of what presents itself as timeless spiritual wisdom in the modern West is Jung at one or two removes.

We can say the core theoretical claims lack empirical support. The collective unconscious is not a construct contemporary psychology uses. Inherited archetypal structures have no established mechanism and no clear evidential base — cross-cultural similarity in myth has explanations that do not require them. His method was interpretive rather than experimental, and its findings are not the kind that can be checked. Synchronicity, as a claim about acausal order in the world rather than about how minds seek pattern, has essentially no support.

We can also say something in his favour that his critics often skip: his insistence that religious material is doing real psychological work, and cannot be dissolved by declaring it false, has aged better than Freud's opposite position.

And two things have to be said directly.

His conduct in the 1930s is genuinely contested and not exonerated. He accepted the presidency of a reorganised international psychotherapy body under Nazi influence and edited its journal, and in that period published writing distinguishing "Aryan" from "Jewish" psychology in terms that were at best inexcusably careless. Defenders argue he took the role to protect Jewish colleagues' professional standing and that he later worked against the regime; critics read the writing as reflecting attitudes present in his work before and after. He acknowledged after the war that he had "slipped up". Scholars have not reached agreement, and this article will not pretend to settle it. It should be neither omitted nor treated as the whole of him.

His conduct with patients also matters here, because this site has a section on how spiritual and therapeutic authority gets misused. His relationships with Sabina Spielrein, a former patient, and with Toni Wolff, who became both his patient and long-term partner within his household, involved boundary violations that would end a career now and were questionable by the standards of his own time. Anyone reading him as a guide to evaluating a teacher should hold those facts alongside the theory.

What we cannot do is take him as either a scientist or a sage. He is best read as an unusually perceptive interpreter of what human beings do with symbols — which is a real achievement, and a smaller claim than the one usually made for him.

Who they were

Where they came from

What they taught

What we can and cannot say

Further reading