Last reviewed: 20 October 2026

Carl Jung

1875–1961

Swiss psychiatrist who founded analytical psychology.

What they got right

He argued that you can't see your own bias from inside it. You need an outside point of view, such as another culture or another person, to notice what you take for granted.

Skill it shows

Cognitive biases

Practise this skill

Also: Identifying assumptions

Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.

Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962), ch. 9 "Travels", section "America: The Pueblo Indians"; English translation by Richard and Clara Winston (1963)Translation from German Source

We always require an outside point to stand on, in order to apply the lever of criticism.

Memories, Dreams, Reflections, same passage

Worth knowing

Many of Jung's ideas, such as the collective unconscious and archetypes, are not supported by modern scientific evidence. A popular line, "Thinking is difficult, that's why most people judge", is not found in his works.

Try it yourself

Think of someone who annoyed you this week. What does your reaction say about what you expect or value? Is that expectation fair?

More about Carl Jung

Carl Gustav Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist, born in 1875, died in 1961, and the founder of analytical psychology. He trained in medicine, worked with patients, and broke with Freud over what the unconscious contains. He is not a philosopher by faculty, and this library does not pretend he was. He is here because the shadow, projection, and individuation became ordinary ways of talking about self-knowledge, often in sentences he did not write. The Collected Works, in R. F. C. Hull's English, are the place to check a paragraph. Memories, Dreams, Reflections is a memoir assembled with Aniela Jaffé, not a diary he issued line by line. Modern Man in Search of a Soul is an earlier book of essays. Short slogans such as 'what you resist persists' are later pop psychology. The nearest real remark, that what is suppressed comes up again elsewhere, is a different sentence and is filed separately.

The shadow
The dark and inferior side of the personality. Seeing it as real is, for him, the start of self-knowledge, and it takes moral effort.
Projection
What we will not own is experienced as a fact about the other person. Taking a projection back is a moral achievement, not a mood.
Individuation
Becoming the particular person one is, not inflating the ego. He says the process gathers a world; it does not shut the world out.

“The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort.”