Jung’s Dissertation on Occult Phenomena

Record summary

Carl Gustav Jung’s medical dissertation, published in 1902, analyzes the trance and séance productions of a young medium identified as his cousin, commonly associated with Emilie Preiswerk. Jung discusses somnambulism, secondary personalities, automatic speech, and the relation between mediumship and psychopathology. The dissertation matters for comparing early clinical accounts of altered identity with psychical-research descriptions. It is not a neutral case report: family relationships, retrospective interpretation, and period psychiatric categories shape the material, and later biographical summaries may simplify the original text.