Carl Jung

The vocabulary that shows up in so much modern self-help — archetypes, the idea that recurring figures and patterns shape how people understand themselves — traces back to the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung. He founded analytical psychology, and it is that framework, rather than any single book or lecture, that keeps his name circulating far outside clinical settings.

He was born in Kesswil, Switzerland, in 1875. The working method he developed early on paired conceptual rigour with an unusual care for how ideas were expressed; he wanted arguments to be exact and also readable. As his career progressed, the scope widened, and his writing took on historical, social and technical problems that his earliest work had not attempted.

Disagreement played a part in this. Jung's critics pushed him to state his principles more precisely, and the resulting formulations were sharper for it. By the later part of his life — he died in 1961 — he had become a fixed point of reference, someone whose work held together the new and the inherited. What survives is less a closed archive than a set of tools for asking questions, which is why people still reach for it.