Jung's Infancy and Childhood and its Influence upon the Development of Analytical Psychology

At the age of 83 Jung made the following observation:

I have never fully unwound the tangle of my earliest memories. They are like individual shoots of a single underground rhizome, like stations on a road of unconscious development. (Jung 1961, p. 27)

Little has been written concerning Jung's childhood and infancy and its relationship to the development of his thought, although some work was done by a close associate of Jung's, Marie-Louise von Franz. Von Franz adopts an archetypal approach to Jung's childhood and tends to avoid a personal exploration of Jung's early life. She relates that ‘from early childhood his own dreams had contained the most impressive mythological images which could not possibly have been explained through his own personal memories and for which he found explanatory parallels in religious history only many years later’ (von Franz 1975, p. 124). Von Franz defines Jung's mythologem as the creative and sees his childhood dreams, fantasies, and ritual behaviours as expressions of archetypal patterns which prefigured his later realization of the Self. When the origins of the Jungian approach are investigated, invariably Jung's relationship with Freud, their meeting, their collaboration, and their eventual painful break become the point of focus. Analytical psychology is often seen as an outgrowth of Freud's creative energies which gave shape to psychoanalysis.

To date, Jung's infancy and childhood have been little dealt with from a developmental perspective. Winnicott (1964) reviewed Jung's autobiography and came to the conclusion that Jung suffered from