Episode 58. Carl Jung: Psychotherapist, Pioneer, Healer

SYNOPSIS

The son of a Swiss Reformed pastor, Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) experienced an isolated childhood, marked by an unusually acute awareness of the otherworldly and numinous. Breaking with family tradition, after studying at the universities of Basel and Zurich, he became a psychiatrist, joining the staff of the Burghölzli Asylum in Zurich in 1900.

The episode charts the course of Jung’s career, commencing with his close association with Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, before the profound break between them during the First World War after the publication of Jung’s Psychology of the Unconscious in 1916. The materialist and rationalist Freud took exception to Jung’s interest in mysticism or ‘oceanic feeling’.

Moving beyond the Freudian preoccupation with childhood trauma occasioned by the impact of the birth parents, Jung posited a deeper layer of feeling beyond sexual neurosis, intuiting archetypal masculine and feminine energies and access to a collective unconscious. Jung’s analytic pyschology emphasized the process of individuation, through which the shadow, the repressed side of each individual’s personality, becomes healthily integrated.

GUESTS

Earl Collins, a native of Belfast, studied philosophy and Byzantine Studies in Belfast and Athens, completing a PhD in Byzantine mystical theology. He also studied at the Zurich Jung Institute. He is a vicar and Officer for Continuing Ministerial Development in the Diocese of Chichester, running seminars in theology, psychology, and spirituality. He has worked with the Guild of Pastoral Psychology, which was formed in the 1930s to disseminate the insights of analytic psychology in the UK. Jung was a Founding Patron.

Simon’s interview with Earl Collins was recorded at Earl’s Brighton home on 2 December 2024.