The Life and Work of C.G. Jung Reconsidered

The Life and Work of C.G. Jung Reconsidered

In my original paper on Carl Gustav Jung, I took a rather skeptical view of the doctor and his work, for several reasons that I will reiterate. However, after studying further into his work, I realized that these objections only related to his early psychiatric cases, and I found myself to be far more intrigued and impressed by his later work and theories. While I had stated in my first consideration of Jung that, “there is a frustratingly limited, almost biased quality to much of… his work”, I was pleasantly surprised later on to find that many of his later theories and assumptions were anything but limited. I still believe that in his early case work he took tremendous risks, both clinically and professionally, yet it is that risk-taking aspect of his personality that ultimately allowed, or rather, propelled him to boldly go forward with some of his most groundbreaking and controversial contributions to the fields of psychology, and philosophy as well. It can even be said, and has been, that Dr. Jung is the father of modern “new-age” thinking. He also laid the groundwork for those who were inspired by his thoughts, perhaps much in the way that he himself was originally inspired by Freud. Once again, while my original opinion of Dr. Jung caused me to “wonder how much of Jung’s work was truly visionary, and how much of it benefits from a positive hindsight bias because of the successes he was able to achieve” in his early casework, I must say that my current opinion, early casework aside, is that Jung was in fact truly visionary, and was the originator of some of the most revolutionary conceptual thinking that the human experience has to offer.

I will begin by giving a short background on Dr. Jung’s life, revisiting some of my objections to his early case work, and then move on to the ideas and concepts that caused me to reconsider his work as a whole.

Carl Gustav Jung was born on July 26th, 1875 in Kesswil, Switzerland, the only son of Johannes Paul Achilles Jung, a Swiss Reformed Church Evangelical minister. He was a strange, melancholic child with no brothers or sisters until he was nine years old. The family was steeped in religion, as he had eight uncles in the clergy as well as his maternal grandfather, Samuel Preiswerk, a respected pastor in Basel.

In school Jung gravitated...

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...’s experience from the practical to the mystical

These theoretical concepts developed by Dr. Jung are what caused the hypothesis and negativity of my original consideration of him to be replaced by a deep respect and, in fact, an almost gleeful fascination with his work. I am discovering that quite a few people find that Jung has a great deal to say to them. This tends to include writers, artists, musicians, film makers, theologians, clergy of all denominations, students of mythology, and of course, and many psychologists

In conclusion, my opinion on Carl Gustav Jung has come full circle. In a sense, the very qualities about him that I found troubling initially are the same qualities that allowed him to be brave enough to defy and question, at first, Freud, and later perhaps the entire psychiatric establishment base, and come up with theories and concepts that are still being built upon. There are elements of his work in the Humanistic approach, Existentialism, and obviously the various Jungians, and neo-Jungians that continue to explore the meaning he was able to give to what previously held little meaning. Dr. Jung’s work was visionary, to say the least, visionary indeed.