Carl Gustav Jung was born on July 26, 1875 in Kesswil, on Lake Constance in Switzerland to Paul Achilles Jung (1842 – 1896), a theologian and Protestant pastor, and Emilie Preiswerk (1848-1923) in Kesswil, in the Swiss canton of Thurgau. Jung's family later moved to Schaffhausen and in 1879 to Klein Hüningen, where his father became rector of the parish, later also acting as chaplain in the city's mental asylum. Carl Gustav Jung remained an only child for nine years, until the birth of his sister, Johanna Gertrud, known as Trudi, in 1884. In 1895 Jung enrolled at the University of Basel where he graduated in Medicine in 1902, defending a thesis "On the psychopathology of so-called occult phenomena" in which he analyzed the case of a young medium, his cousin, and her experiences of spiritualism. In December 1900 he began working at the psychiatric institute in Zurich, the Burghölzli, directed by Eugen Bleuler. In the winter of 1902-1903 Carl Gustav Jung was in Paris to attend Janet's lectures. In 1903 he married Emma Rauschenbach, daughter of a wealthy industrialist, with whom he had four children and remained with him until the end of his days. In 1905 he became a private lecturer at the University of Zurich, where he remained until 1913. Between 1904 and 1907 he published various studies on the verbal association test and in 1907 the book Psychology of Dementia Praecox. At the same time, he began working at the psychiatric hospital in Zurich, becoming an expert in psychosis. In those years, Carl Gustav Jung became passionate about clinical observations on verbal associations and studied fixed ideas and complexes. In 1907, after having sent Freud his essay "Diagnostic Study of Associations", he went to Vienna to meet him. It was the starting point of a deep friendship, which lasted from 1907 to 1913, and of a long correspondence, they exchanged about 359 letters. For Freud, Jung was his possible heir and the one who could take psychoanalysis out of Vienna. Carl Gustav Jung, however, had already developed a conception of the unconscious and the psyche distant from the Freudian one, and he disagreed on the notions of infantile sexuality, the Oedipus complex and libido, despite being totally fascinated by Freud's personality and his work. Between 1907 and 1909, Jung founded the “Sigmund Freud Society” in Zurich and the magazine “Annals of Psychoanalytic and Psychopathological Research”, the first official magazine of the psychoanalytic movement. In 1907, he published “Psychology of Early Dementia” and two years later, accepting the invitation of Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, he went on a conference tour in the United States with Freud. However, despite continuing to engage in psychoanalysis, Carl Gustav Jung attested and deepened his theories and the publication “Metamorphosis and Symbols of the Libido” in 1912, which would become “Metamorphosis of the Heart and its Symbols” in 1953, defined the definitive break with Freud. #carljung #history #psychology #spirituality