Carl Jung
Carl Gustav Jung, born July 26, 1875, was a Swiss psychiatrist, a colleague of Sigmund Freud, and founder of analytical psychology. His broad and unique approach to psychology included the application of rigorous scientific method but also emphasized understanding the mind through exploring the worlds of religion, philosophy, mythology and symbolism. Jung’s work focused heavily on the “unconscious,” which would include the subconscious as Freud defined it, plus something that Jung called “the collective unconscious” – a storehouse of latent memory traces inherited from man’s ancestral past, a past that includes not only the history of man as a separate species but our pre-human ancestry as well, the whole history of human evolution. Jung discovered that this collective unconscious is shared by all people and is therefore universal, and he understood it to be the foundation upon which the individual subconscious mind and ego are built. According to Jung, included in the collective unconscious are “archetypes” or basic human personality patterns that we live out from deep inside ourselves and the collective culture.
