Cg jung institute zurich

The C.G. Jung Institute Zurich is the institutional vessel through which analytical psychology acquired its classical training form — the place where a circle of personal collaborators became a transmissible discipline. It was founded on 24 April 1948 in Küsnacht, and Jung himself described its purpose with characteristic directness in a letter to Father Victor White written just months before the founding:

As I am getting on in age and as I am going to be gathered to my ancestors and avatars within a measurable time, the Institute is meant to carry on the work. My former English Seminars are already substituted by a number of lectures and courses about dream psychology, ps. of fairy tales, selected topics from the Old Testament, ps. of the Gilgamesh Epos, ps. of the Renaissance (XV cent.) [These lectures] are to be consolidated in the form of an Institute.

The founding committee consisted of five people — C.A. Meier, Dr. K. Binswanger, Jolande Jacobi, Liliane Frey-Rohn, and Jung himself — all of them, as Jung noted, analysts and personal pupils. Jacobi, the Hungarian-born systematizer who had already written The Psychology of C.G. Jung at Jung's direct request, served as co-founder and organizational architect, giving the movement the institutional durability that a circle of personal relationships could never sustain on its own. Von Franz, who had been a student and then close collaborator of Jung's, became a training analyst and after Jung's death the principal continuator of the alchemical and symbolic work the Institute preserved.

The curriculum the Institute codified defines what is now called the Zurich school: immersion in the Collected Works, study of mythology, fairy tale, and the history of religions, training in dream analysis and typology, extended personal analysis, and supervised clinical work. Samuels notes that Jung had mixed feelings about formal training programmes, yet when the Institute was established he was active in devising the syllabus and insisted on examinations — a paradox worth sitting with, since the move from vocation-plus-personal-analysis to credentialed training inevitably changes what gets transmitted and what gets lost (Samuels, 1985).

The intellectual atmosphere of the Institute drew sustenance from the Eranos conferences at Ascona, which supplied the cross-disciplinary encounter with comparative religion, mythology, and symbolism that the Institute then structured into pedagogy. Hillman studied and later became the Institute's first Director of Studies before his increasingly sharp divergence from classical Zurich formation led him toward what would become archetypal psychology — a divergence that Samuels maps as the difference between the Classical School (where the integrating Self is primary), the Developmental School (focused on early object relations), and the Archetypal School (Hillman's counter-move against the centering impulse itself). The Institute remains the institutional home of the Classical School.

Stein, who trained at the Institute and has written what is arguably the most useful single introduction to Jung's psychology, describes the experience of first encountering Jung as something like plunging into a Mare Ignotum — and the Institute's purpose, from its founding, has been to provide enough structure that the plunge does not become a drowning (Stein, 1998). Whether that structure preserves or domesticates the original encounter is a question the tradition has never fully resolved.

  • Jolande Jacobi — portrait of the co-founder who systematized Jung's concepts into transmissible pedagogy
  • Marie-Louise von Franz — portrait of the analyst who carried the alchemical and fairy-tale work after Jung's death
  • James Hillman — portrait of the Institute's first Director of Studies and founder of archetypal psychology
  • Analytical psychology — the discipline the Institute was founded to transmit

Sources Cited

  • Jung, C.G., 1973, Letters Volume 1: 1906–1950
  • Samuels, Andrew, 1985, Jung and the Post-Jungians
  • Stein, Murray, 1998, Jung's Map of the Soul: An Introduction
  • von Franz, Marie-Louise, 1975, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time