The Normal Times

Born July 1875, died June 1961.

Carl Jung was a Swiss shrink who founded the proverbial school of analytical psychology.

He was born in the canton of Thurgau, the progeny of a forever broke rural pastor and a chronically depressed mother who believed she was being harassed by ghosts every night.

Carl came out an odd kid, mostly because of his odd mother. The interesting bit is that his particular brand of weird seems to have inspired the first whiffs of what would become his famed theory of archetypes. His mother, when she wasn’t “abroad for a rest”, was said to be very normal during the daylight hours, with the wilder behavior only coming out at night. At least sub-consciously influenced by this eccentricity, young Carl came to believe he too had two personalities. The first was that of a typical 18th century school boy, which he was. The second was that of a dignified, authoritative, and influential grown man from some bygone era.

Another one of his main theories was rooted in his childhood. This was the idea that there are universal symbols that are known to all through the collective conscious of dreams. He had carved a little figure into his ruler and hid it in the attic. Periodically he would visit with the figure and deliver it little messages written in a secret language he’d made up. As an adult he said this ritual, though he didn’t understand why he did it, gave him a sense of inner peace and security. He believed that this ritual was similar to what people in remoter lands practiced with totems, and there was something about the practice that was intrinsic to humanity.

As a young man, Jung famously became friends with the older Sigmund Freud. Freud had a large influence on his formative years, but the two had a falling out while on a visit to the United States. The source of this conflict was a spat over the meaning of dreams, and each man thinking that the other was incapable of admitting when they were wrong about something. While he was still in the U.S. he met William James, who came to eclipse Freud’s influence on Jung, who had been intrigued by James’s interests in mysticism and psychical phenomena.

Jung’s model of personality archetypes was used to develop the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, aka astrology shit for nerds. He is also considered the “godfather” of the mutual self-help movement, Alcoholics Anonymous.