Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) is most famous as one of the first psychoanalysts to break with Freud's vision of human instincts as either sexual or self-preservative in nature and to develop a less mechanistic psychoanalytic theory of his own. In addition to reworking Freud's concept of the conscious, the preconscious and the unconscious Jung developed the idea of a collective unconscious in which, he claimed, all human beings shared a link with their primeval past. Jung subsequently developed his own theory of personality in which the idea of the collective unconscious led him to the conclusion that regression, rather than being maladaptive, was a helpful psychological strategy. Jung's ideas were developed in the context of his broad interests in the literatures, religions and mythologies of the world. This produced an attempt to gain a universal perspective which would account for all aspects of the human psyche, from religious belief to the problems of pathology.
Jung was born in Kesswil, Switzerland, the son of a country pastor from a family of clergymen and physicians. He received an excellent education, beginning Latin at the age of six, but was a lonely and solitary boy who did not like school. He was sent to a boarding school at Basel but harassment by other students and Jung's dislike of competition made him extremely unhappy. At the time Jung developed the habit of using dreams and fantasies as a form of consolation that "in many ways replaced the companionship of other children" (Segaller and Berger 3). This was to have an influence on Jung's later thought since it led to his interest in the meaningful content of dreams, the reality of the psyche and to a sense of his relationship to the world as different from that of most people. As he put it, "today as then I am solitary, because I know things and must hint at things which other people do not know, and usually do not want to know" (quoted in Segaller and Berg...