Carl Jung

Definition

Carl Jung (1875–1961) was the Swiss psychiatrist who founded analytical psychology, the school that reads dreams, myths and religious symbols as expressions of a psychic layer shared by all people, which he called the collective unconscious. He also read Gnostic and alchemical texts as records of inner experience, which is why his name runs through this lexicon.

Primary source

Notwithstanding the fact that I have often been called a philosopher, I am an empiricist and adhere to the phenomenological standpoint.

— Psychology and Religion, ch. I (The Autonomy of the Unconscious Mind), p. 1. The Terry Lectures, delivered at Yale in 1937 and written in English (Yale University Press, 1938). Scan at archive.org

Deep Understanding

Jung was born in Kesswil, Switzerland, in 1875 and trained as a psychiatrist. From 1907 he worked closely with Sigmund Freud. The two broke in 1913, largely over what the unconscious holds: for Freud it was personal and mostly repressed material, while Jung found a deeper layer common to everyone. The years after the break were a long confrontation with his own inner images, recorded in the Red Book. The figure of Philemon and the Seven Sermons to the Dead (1916) both come from that period.

In the 1937 Terry Lectures at Yale, Jung described himself as an empiricist working from the phenomenological standpoint rather than as a philosopher. It was a statement of method. He would report what the psyche produces, such as images, dreams and the conviction of a presence, and he said he refrained from metaphysical or philosophical judgements about what stands behind them. The same lectures define religion as the careful observation of the numinosum, an experience that seizes the subject instead of being willed. Readers who take Jung for a metaphysician, whether to praise him or to dismiss him, usually skip this opening.

This entry is about the man and his method. The ideas he named each have their own entry: the unconscious with its personal and collective layers, the shadow, the archetype, the process of individuation and the technique of active imagination. Read the concepts there; here they are his vocabulary.

His link to the Gnostics is explicit. Aion (1951; Collected Works 9ii) has a chapter titled Gnostic Symbols of the Self, and his last major book, Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955–56), reads the alchemical union of opposites as an inner process. His is a psychological reading. The Gnostic authors wrote about the cosmos and the soul's way back to its source; Jung read their myths as a map of the psyche. Both readings can be held side by side, as long as one is not mistaken for the other.

Often confused with

Philemon: the winged inner figure Jung met in active imagination and described as independent of his own ego, not a pen name for Jung himself. Seven Sermons to the Dead: a text Jung wrote but signed with the name of the Gnostic teacher Basilides, so its voice is an adopted one rather than Jung speaking as a psychologist.

Stefan's Alkimia. (2026, October 1). Carl Jung. Pleroma Guide. https://pleroma.guide/en/lexicon/carl-jung

Stefan's Alkimia. “Carl Jung.” Pleroma Guide, 1 Oct. 2026, pleroma.guide/en/lexicon/carl-jung.

Stefan's Alkimia. “Carl Jung.” Pleroma Guide. October 1, 2026. https://pleroma.guide/en/lexicon/carl-jung.

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  author = {{Stefan's Alkimia}},
  title = {{Carl Jung}},
  organization = {{Pleroma Guide}},
  date = {2026-10-01},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://pleroma.guide/en/lexicon/carl-jung},
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