Carl Gustav Jung was born in Kesswil, Switzerland to a pastor rumored to be of the lineage of Goethe. Jung graduated from the University of Basel in 1900 with a medical degree and then began his professional career at the University of Zürich, where he worked at the Burghöltzi, the Zürich asylum and psychiatric clinic until 1909. Jung was an admirer of Freud until he met him in Vienna in 1907. Freud soon came to see Jung as a stalwart of psychoanalysis and as his successor. Jung, however, had never fully agreed with Freud's theory. Their relationship eventually dissolved as Jung decided to break away from Freudian theory since he did not support the notion of the unconscious mind as a reservoir of repressed sexuality, which  then causes all neuroses. He decided to found his own school of analytical psychology and he possibly inspired the New Age movement with his interest in occultism, Eastern religions and mythology.

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Jung was very interested in parapsychology. His life's work was the exploration of the "inner space" and the symbolism of complex mystical traditions such as Gnosticism, Alchemy, Kabala and Buddhism.  He had a capacity for very lucid dreaming and visions and with his cousin Helene Preiswerk, he conducted spiritual experiments geared at making sense of the unconscious and its habit of revealing itself only in symbolic form. Jung's most famous theory, the collective unconscious, has had a profound impact on psychology and also on philosophy and the arts.