Professional Documents
Culture Documents
By:
Christine Kasprzak
Approaches to Personality
Fall 2002
Carl Jung made it his life’s work to explore the “inner space” previously
known as the unconscious conscious. A younger colleague of Sigmund
Freud’s with a background in his theory as well as inexhaustible
knowledge of mythology, religion, and philosophy he made it his habit
to make sense of the unconscious. Also equipped with a knowledge in
the symbolism of complex mystical traditions such as Gnosticism,
Alchemy, Kabala, and similar traditions in Hinduism and Buddism, if
anyone could sense of the unconscious often revealing itself only in
symbolic form Jung could. After graduating and settling on psychiatry
as a career Jung took a position at the Burghoeltzli Mental Hospital
under Eugene Bleuler, an expert on (and the namer of) schizophrenia.
It was only a few years after that that Jung met Freud. It had been said
that the day that they met Freud cancelled all of his appointments for
the day and they talked for 13 hours straight. Freud later came to see
Jung as the “crown prince of psychoanalysis” and his heir apparent.
Jung was never completely sold on Freud’s theories, however, and their
relationship began to end when during a trip to America they were
analyzing each other’s dreams and Freud seemed to show a lot of
resistance to Jung’s efforts at analysis. Freud finally told Jung that they
would have to stop because he was afraid that he would lose his
authority. From there, Carl Jung developed on of the most interesting
theories of personality the world has ever seen.