Swiss psychiatrist, Freud's heir apparent for several years, and — after their 1913 break — the founder of analytical psychology, a distinct depth-psychological tradition whose concerns overlap with Freud's but whose range is wider, its tone more religious, and its scientific respectability more contested.
Jung accepted Freud's basic picture of the unconscious but extended and recast it. Beyond the personal unconscious (the repressed contents of an individual life) he posited a collective unconscious shared across humanity — a structural layer populated by archetypes, patterned forms of psychic life (the Mother, the Shadow, the Wise Old Man, the Anima/Animus, the Self) that surface in dreams, myths, fairy tales, and religious symbolism across cultures. The evidence for this layer, for Jung, was the recurrence of similar symbolic figures in patients who could not plausibly have acquired them by ordinary cultural transmission, together with the cross-cultural convergence of mythic imagery.
His therapeutic goal was individuation — the gradual integration of the unconscious contents of the psyche into a more complete self. This is a lifelong process, rarely complete, whose second half is the characteristic task of mid-life and beyond. Jung took religious experience seriously in a way Freud did not — not as reducible to infantile wish but as a disclosure of real psychic (perhaps more than psychic) depths. This made him the depth psychologist of choice for generations of theologians, artists, and seekers, and marked him off from the more austerely scientific mainstream.
His personal trajectory (involvement with mandalas, alchemy, the I Ching, the Red Book) and his conduct in 1930s Germany remain controversial. His concepts — introvert/extravert, archetype, shadow, synchronicity, collective unconscious — have entered common speech even where his name has faded.