Carl G. Jung is currently considered the father of Transpersonal Psychology. His ideas and concepts renewed and shed light not only on Psychology but also on many other sciences.


Carl Gustav Jung was a Swiss physician, psychiatrist, and psychologist born on July 26, 1875. From a young age, Jung had an interest in sciences, philosophy, and religion. In fact, his father was a Protestant pastor with conflicts of faith, something that was initially a source of anguish but later a subject of reflection for young Jung. In his youth, Jung decided to pursue medicine and later psychiatry. As he narrates in interviews and his autobiography, psychiatry was still a poorly developed discipline at the time. Jung wrote a book on dementia praecox, which he sent to Freud (whom he had not yet met). After extensive correspondence, Jung visited Freud, and their first meeting was so intense that they spent more than 10 hours straight discussing psychiatry and the human soul. Jung collaborated with Freud for a few years but was not his disciple, as some incorrectly claim. Differences in approaches were present from the beginning. Jung had a strong interest in philosophical thinking and belonged to a different generation (with almost a 30-year age difference). Combined with his great genius, this led him to incorporate notions from anthropology, alchemy, dreams, art, mythology, religion, and philosophy into his methodology.

From the beginning, Jung opposed the idea that the cause of repression lay in sexual trauma. He could constantly confirm in his own practice that many cases did not align with sexuality as the basis of every neurotic conflict. Freud never questioned why he had to constantly talk about sex, why this thought possessed him. He never became aware that in the "monotony of meaning," he expressed a fleeing from himself or from that other part of him that might be defined as "mystical." Without recognizing this part, he could not feel in harmony with himself. He was blind to the paradox and ambiguity of the meanings of the unconscious and did not know that everything that emerges from the unconscious has something higher and lower, something internal and external. When talking about the external—and Freud did this—the unconscious considers only half of it, and consequently, an antagonistic force arises in the unconscious.

Carl Gustav Jung. Memories, Dreams, Reflections.

Jung would later say of Freud that he was a prisoner of a point of view, although he never denied Freud's significant contribution to the early days of Psychology. His research often ventured into seemingly distant areas, such as religion (Psychology and Religion, 1937) or alchemy (Psychology and Alchemy, 1944), delving into the study of concepts such as the collective unconscious, archetype (as the basis for the existence of universally repeated myths), or self (distinct from the "I-ego-impermanent," which refers to the REAL SELF or the spiritual being within us). He also defined the basic types of introverted and extraverted.

A key concept in his work is the collective unconscious, which Jung explains is constituted by archetypes. Examples of these archetypes are the Persona, the Shadow, the Saint, the Genius and the Hero, the Self, the Animus, and the Anima. He also identified certain images as archetypal, such as representations of the mandala. To develop his concept of the archetype, Jung drew inspiration from the repetition of motifs or themes in various mythologies of the most remote cultures: he found common unconscious themes that humanity repeated with slight variations, depending on the circumstances. Even though we are individuals with our own personal lives, we are also, on the other hand, representatives of our humanity, of the human condition. These are the archetypes, the universal and timeless primordial models or images, and therefore, they are patterns that repeat in different cultures and times, guiding us from our unconscious.


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