Once upon a time, great psychological thinkers bestrode the earth. William James, Sigmund Freud, Jean Piaget, Fred Skinner, Carl Jung and a few other heavyweights left deep footprints in the cultural landscape. The ground trembled when they fought.

Just as dinosaurs evolved into birds, grand theorists have been replaced by flocks of empiricists. As the science of the mind splinters into a hundred specialist fields, academic psychology no longer pays much heed to old theoretical systems. But the ideas of these early 20th century theorists continue to reverberate. Among the most interesting are Jung’s.

Jung’s thought has been doubly overlooked, obscured by the general eclipse of grand theories and the shadow of Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis.

As an early figure in the psychoanalytic movement who left it on bad terms, Jung tends to be written out and written off. His ideas of the collective unconscious and his emphasis on archetype and myth are often treated as obscure and mystical today, but they are worth a closer look.

Other ideas, such as his concept of individuation, challenged the dominant psychoanalytic view that our personalities are forged and fixed in our early years, anticipating the large body of recent research establishing that personality change continues throughout adulthood. And his discovery of introversion and extraversion deserves recognition.

Jung made several claims that ran against the theoretical tide of his time but chime with recent trends in psychology. His keen interest in non-Western cultures and traditions aligns with our modern desire to make psychology more global.

Why then does he not receive the level of acknowledgement a pioneer might expect?

Carl Gustav Jung was born in Switzerland in 1875, the son of a Protestant pastor and his wife. A shy, anxious youth with an interest in philosophy, he trained as a doctor in Basel, wrote a thesis on the psychology of occult phenomena and moved to Zurich in 1900 to work in the famous Burghölzli psychiatric hospital.

There he took a special interest in schizophrenia (then called dementia praecox) and carried out experiments on word associations.

Around this time, Jung was introduced to psychoanalytic ideas about the unconscious determinants of behaviour, the everlasting conflict between instinct and civilisation and the “talking cure”.

He began to apply them in his clinical work – including the fateful treatment of a young woman, Sabina Spielrein, portrayed in the 2011 film A Dangerous Method, which led to an intense romantic relationship.

He also began a lively correspondence with Freud. By 1910, Freud had anointed Jung as his successor and installed him as president of the International Psychoanalytic Association. This move was driven partly by fatherly enthusiasm and partly, perhaps, to combat the perception that psychoanalysis was a Jewish enterprise.

The intense bond between Jung and Freud was short-lived. Differences in their views of human motivation and the unconscious led to a bitter break in 1913.

Jung subsequently developed a theoretical system he pointedly called “analytical psychology”. He published extensively, kept voluminous diaries, travelled, lectured and saw patients until his death in 1961. His life is chronicled in the autobiographical Memories, Dreams, Reflections.

Jung’s fundamental concepts depart from psychoanalytic theory while sharing its commitment to “depth psychology”, the view that unconscious influences on mind and behaviour are powerful.

Jung developed a distinctive understanding of the unconscious, its contents, the process of psychological development and personality.

The collective unconscious

Jung is best known for proposing a new, deeper layer of the unconscious. Whereas the Freudian unconscious was personal, containing what had been repressed during the individual’s life, Jung’s collective unconscious was shared among all people, the legacy of our ancestral history.

He recounted a dream in which this deepest level of the mind was symbolised. Descending the........

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