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Early years

Carl Jung was born Karle Gustav II Jung in Kesswil, in the Swiss canton (or county) of Thurgau, as the fourth but only surviving child of Paul Achilles Jung and Emilie Preiswerk. His father was a poor rural pastor in the Swiss Reformed Church while his mother came from a wealthy and established Swiss family.

When Jung was six months old his father was appointed to a better parish in Laufen. Meanwhile, the tension between his parents was growing. An eccentric and depressed woman, Emilie Jung spent much of the time in her own separate bedroom, enthralled by the spirits that she said visited her at night. She left Laufen for several months of hospitalization near Basel for an unknown physical ailment. Young Carl Jung was taken by his father to live with Emilie Jung's unmarried sister in Basel, but was later brought back to the pastor's residence. Emilie's continuing bouts of absence and often depressed mood influenced her son's attitude towards women — one of "innate unreliability", a view that he later called the "handicap I started off with". After three years of living in Laufen, Paul Jung requested a transfer and was called to Kleinhüningen in 1879. The relocation brought Emilie Jung in closer contact to her family and lifted her melancholy and despondent mood.

A solitary and introverted child, Jung was convinced from childhood that he had two personalities — a modern Swiss citizen and a personality more at home in the eighteenth century. "Personality Number 1", as he termed it, was a typical schoolboy living in the era of the time, while "Personality Number 2" was a dignified, authoritative and influential man from the past. Although Jung was close to both parents he was rather disappointed in his father's academic approach to faith.

A number of childhood memories had made a life-long impression on him. As a boy he carved a tiny mannequin into the end of the wooden ruler from his pupil's pencil case and placed it inside the case. He then added a stone which he had painted into upper and lower halves and hid the case in the attic. Periodically he would come back to the mannequin, often bringing tiny sheets of paper with messages inscribed on them in his own secret language. This ceremonial act, he later reflected, brought him a feeling of inner peace and security. In later years he discovered that similarities existed in this memory and the totems of native peoples like the collection of soul-stones near Arlesheim, or the tjurungas of Australia. This, he concluded, was an unconscious ritual that he did not question or understand at the time, but which was practiced in a strikingly similar way in faraway locations that he as a young boy had no way of consciously knowing about. His findings on psychological archetypes and the collective unconscious were inspired in part by this experience.

Shortly before the end of his first year at the Humanistisches Gymnasium in Basel, at age 12, he was pushed to the ground by another boy so hard that he was for a moment unconscious. The thought then came to him that "now you won't have to go to school any more". From then on, whenever he started off to school or began homework, he fainted. He remained at home for the next six months until he overheard his father speaking worriedly to a visitor of his future ability to support himself, as they suspected he had epilepsy. With little money in the family, this brought the boy to reality and he realized the need for academic excellence. He immediately went into his father's study and began poring over Latin grammar. He fainted three times, but eventually he overcame the urge and did not faint again. This event, Jung later recalled, "was when I learned what a neurosis is".

Towards the end of his studies, a reading of Krafft-Ebing persuaded him to specialize in psychiatric medicine. He later worked in the Burghölzli, a psychiatric hospital in Zürich.

Jung in 1910.

In 1906, he published Studies in Word Association and later sent a copy of this book to Sigmund Freud, after which a close friendship between these two men followed for some six years (see section on Relationship with Freud). In 1912 Jung published Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (known in English as The Psychology of the Unconscious) resulting in a theoretical divergence between him and Freud and consequently a break in their friendship, both stating that the other was unable to admit he could possibly be wrong. After this falling-out, Jung went through a pivotal and difficult psychological transformation, which was exacerbated by news of the First World War. Henri Ellenberger called Jung's experience a "creative illness" and compared it to Freud's period of what he called neurasthenia and hysteria.

During World War I Jung was drafted as an army doctor and soon made commandant of an internment camp for British officers and soldiers. (Swiss neutrality obliged the Swiss to intern personnel from either side of the conflict who crossed their frontier to evade capture.) Jung worked to improve the conditions for these soldiers stranded in neutral territory; he encouraged them to attend university courses.