Carl Jung
From the UAP Encyclopedia, the open encyclopedia of UFO and UAP history · 👤 Person
Contents 4
| Type | Person |
|---|---|
| Also known as | Jung, C. G. Jung, Carl Gustav Jung |
Carl Gustav Jung (26 July 1875 – 6 June 1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist and the founder of analytical psychology. Late in life he wrote Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies, which treated the UFO wave of the 1940s and 1950s as a psychological and cultural event. He argued that the saucers had the symbolic meaning of mandalas, images of wholeness, whatever their physical reality.[1][2]
Career
Jung worked at the Burghölzli psychiatric hospital in Zurich under Eugen Bleuler and became a close collaborator of Sigmund Freud before the two parted ways. He then developed his own school of analytical psychology.[1] He introduced ideas such as the collective unconscious, archetypes, synchronicity, the psychological complex, and introversion and extraversion. He saw individuation, a person's lifelong process of becoming an integrated self, as the main task of human development.[1]
Flying Saucers
Flying Saucers was one of Jung's last books. The English translation by R. F. C. Hull appeared in 1959. Sources give dates from 1957 to 1959 for its first publication.[1][2] Jung examined dreams, old and new art, waking visions, science fiction, press reports and government statements about UFOs. He treated them all as places where symbols from the collective unconscious could appear.[2]
Jung linked the sudden surge of sightings to the strains of the Cold War: the division of the world into two nuclear-armed camps and the threat that mass movements posed to individuality. In his view the unconscious responded to this anxiety with a compensating symbol of wholeness, the mandala, projected into the sky as a round craft piloted by an intelligent being.[2] He did not set out to settle whether UFOs were physical objects. His main interest was their psychological meaning.[2] Some later writers note that he described imagined saucer occupants as "technological angels".[3]
Influence
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In 2020 psychologist Kelly Bulkeley called it an excellent model for the psychological interpretation of culture.[2]
References
- Carl Jung — Wikipedia · en.wikipedia.org · archived copy
- Kelly Bulkeley, "Jung, Flying Saucers, and the Anxieties of Our Time", Psychology Today (7 Dec 2020) · psychologytoday.com · archived copy
- Demonic UFO hypothesis — Wikipedia · en.wikipedia.org · archived copy
This page was last edited on 31 October 2026. Articles are written in our own words from the sources listed under References; disputed claims are attributed to the people who made them.
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