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Carl Gustav Jung



Carl Gustav Jung was born in Kesswil, Switzerland in the year 1875 and died 86 years later in 1961. He studied at Basel from 1895-1900 and then at Zürich where he received his M.D. in 1902. He worked at the University Psychiatric Clinic there in Zürich and afterwards worked for Eugen Bleuler at the Burgholzli Clinic where he wrote his book on the psychology of dementia praecox in 1906. In 1907 he met Sigmund Freud and they discovered together that their theoretical beliefs had a lot in common. At the age of 36 he became the president of the International Psychoanalytical Society. Before World War II Carl became president of the German Association for Psychotherapy, a Nazi-influenced organization but resigned after the Nazis began forcing their ideology on the members of the association.

One of the biggest influences on the hypothesis's he made throughout his career was his childhood. In his book Psychological Types published in 1921 he was the first to bring up the now popular types of personality, extrovert and introvert. Each representing a parent, his mother an extrovert was the polar opposite of his introvert father. Throughout his childhood his love for his parents was torn between the two each always pulling him in their direction. He developed the concepts of extroversion and introversion for his studies of personality types as well as the theory of synchronicity, the coincidence of causally unrelated events having identical or similar meaning.

Jung was the first to introduce extrovert and introvert personalities to the world of psychology. Most people are a combination of the two with one seemingly to be somewhat more visible to observers than the other. An extroverted personality centers most of their energies upon the surrounding world and generally enjoys being immersed in social situations. An introverted person directs much of their energy into themselves...