Campbell, Joseph (ed.) - Portable Jung (Penguin, 1976)

Carl Gustav Jung was born July 26, 1875, in Kesswil,

Switzerland, on Lake Constance. His paternal grandfather,

after whom he was named, had moved from Germany in

1822, when Alexander von Humboldt obtained an appointment

for him as professor of surgery at the University of

Basel. His father, Johann Paul Achilles Jung ( 1 842-

1896), was a· clergyman, and his mother, Emilie Preiswerk

Jung ( 1848- 1923), was the daughter of a long-established

Basel family. When the boy was four, his parents moved

to Klein-Hiiningen, near Basel, and it was there his education

began. His father taught him Latin, and his mother,

as he tells in a volume of old-age reminiscences, Memories,

Dreams, Re{fect.ions, read to him of exotic religions from

a n illustrated children's book, to which he constantly returned

to view with fascination its pictures of Hindu gods.

During early youth, Jung thought of archaeology as

a career. Theology, too, interested him, though not in his

father's sense; for the concept of Christ's life as the sole

decisive feature in the drama of God and man he regarded

as belying Christ's own teaching that the Holy Ghost

would take his place among men after his death. He

regarded Jesus as a man; hence, either fallible or a mere

mouthpiece of the Holy Ghost, who, in turn·, was "a manifestation

of the inconceivable God."