Carl Gustav Carus
Encyclopedia
Carl Gustav Carus was a German physiologist and painter, born at Leipzig
Leipzig
Leipzig Leipzig has always been a trade city, situated during the time of the Holy Roman Empire at the intersection of the Via Regia and Via Imperii, two important trade routes. At one time, Leipzig was one of the major European centres of learning and culture in fields such as music and publishing...

.
A friend of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was a German writer, pictorial artist, biologist, theoretical physicist, and polymath. He is considered the supreme genius of modern German literature. His works span the fields of poetry, drama, prose, philosophy, and science. His Faust has been called the greatest long...

, he was a many-sided man: a doctor, a naturalist, a scientist and a psychologist and an advocate of the theory that health of body and mind depends on the equipoise of antagonistic principles. A landscape painter, he had drawing lessons from Julius Diez
Julius Diez
Julius Diez was a German artist, active in etching, drawing, painting and graphic design....

 and subsequently studied under Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld
Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld
Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld was a German painter.-Biography:Schnorr was born at Leipzig, where he received his earliest instruction from his father Johann Veit Schnorr , a draughtsman, engraver and painter...

 at the Oeser
Oeser
Öser, Oeser may refer to:* Adam Friedrich Oeser* Christoph Oeser German blues pianist, jazz pianist; * Fritz Oeser* Jennifer Oeser , German female athlete;...

 drawing academy. From 1814 to 1817 he taught himself oil painting working under Caspar David Friedrich
Caspar David Friedrich
Caspar David Friedrich was a 19th-century German Romantic landscape painter, generally considered the most important German artist of his generation. He is best known for his mid-period allegorical landscapes which typically feature contemplative figures silhouetted against night skies, morning...

, a Dresden landscape painter.

In 1811 he graduated as a doctor of medicine and a doctor of philosophy. In 1814 he was appointed professor of obstetrics and director of the maternity clinic at the teaching institution for medicine and surgery in Dresden. He wrote on art theory.

He is best known to scientists for originating the concept of the vertebrate
Vertebrate
Vertebrates are animals that are members of the subphylum Vertebrata . Vertebrates are the largest group of chordates, with currently about 58,000 species described. Vertebrates include the jawless fishes, bony fishes, sharks and rays, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, and birds...

 archetype
Archetype
An archetype is a universally understood symbol or term or pattern of behavior, a prototype upon which others are copied, patterned, or emulated...

, a seminal idea in the development of Darwin's
Charles Darwin
Charles Robert Darwin FRS was an English naturalist. He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestry, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection.He published his theory...

 theory of evolution
Evolution
Evolution is any change across successive generations in the heritable characteristics of biological populations. Evolutionary processes give rise to diversity at every level of biological organisation, including species, individual organisms and molecules such as DNA and proteins.Life on Earth...

. In 1836, he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences or Kungliga Vetenskapsakademien is one of the Royal Academies of Sweden. The Academy is an independent, non-governmental scientific organization which acts to promote the sciences, primarily the natural sciences and mathematics.The Academy was founded on 2...

.

Carl Jung
Carl Jung
Carl Gustav Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist and the founder of Analytical Psychology. Jung is considered the first modern psychiatrist to view the human psyche as "by nature religious" and make it the focus of exploration. Jung is one of the best known researchers in the field of dream analysis and...

 credited Carus with pointing to the unconscious as the essential basis of the psyche
Psyche (psychology)
The word psyche has a long history of use in psychology and philosophy, dating back to ancient times, and has been one of the fundamental concepts for understanding human nature from a scientific point of view. The English word soul is sometimes used synonymously, especially in older...

.


Although various philosophers, among them Leibniz, Kant
KANT
KANT is a computer algebra system for mathematicians interested in algebraic number theory, performing sophisticated computations in algebraic number fields, in global function fields, and in local fields. KASH is the associated command line interface...

, and Schelling
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling , later von Schelling, was a German philosopher. Standard histories of philosophy make him the midpoint in the development of German idealism, situating him between Fichte, his mentor prior to 1800, and Hegel, his former university roommate and erstwhile friend...

, had already pointed very clearly to the problem of the dark side of the psyche, it was a physician who felt impelled, from his scientific and medical experience, to point to the unconscious as the essential basis of the psyche. This was C. G. Carus,3 the authority whom Eduard von Hartmann followed (Jung, [1959] 1969: par. 259). Footnote

3 Psyche (1846).

Works

Zoology, Entomology, Comparative anatomy, Evolution
  • Lehrbuch der Zootomie (1818, 1834).
  • Erläuterungstafeln zur vergleichenden Anatomie (1826–1855).
  • Von den äusseren Lebensbedingungen der weiss- und kaltblütigen Tiere (1824).
  • Über den Blutkreislauf der Insekten (1827).
  • Grundzüge der vergleichenden Anatomie und Physiologie (1828).
  • Lehrbuch der Physiologie für Naturforscher und Aerzte (1838)- also medical
  • Zwölf Briefe über das Erdleben (1841).
  • Natur und Idee oder das Werdende und sein Gesetz. 1861.


Medical
  • Lehrbuch der Gynekologie (1820, 1838).
  • Grundzüge einer neuen Kranioskopie (1841).
  • System der Physiologie (1847–1849).
  • Erfahrungsresultate aus ärztlichen Studien und ärztlichen Wirken (1859).
  • Neuer Atlas der Kranioskopie (1864).


Psychology, Metaphysics, Race, Physiognomy
  • Vorlesungen über Psychologie (1831).
  • Psyche; zur Entwicklungsgeschichte der Seele (1846, 1851).
  • Über Grund und Bedeutung der verschiedenen Formen der Hand in veschiedenen Personen (About the reason and significance of the various forms of hand in different persons)(1846).
  • Physis. Zur Geschichte des leiblichen Lebens (1851).

Denkschrift zum 100jährigen Geburtstagsfeste Goethes. Über ungleiche Befähigung der verschiedenen Symbolik der menschlichen Gestalt (1852, 1858).
  • Über Lebensmagnetismus und über die magischen Wirkungen überhaupt (1857).
  • Über die typisch gewordenen Abbildungen menschlicher Kopfformen (1863).
  • Goethe dessen seine Bedeutung für unsere und die kommende Zeit (1863).
  • Lebenserinnerungen und Denkwürdigkeiten – 4 volumes (1865-1866).
  • Vergleichende Psychologie oder Geschichte der Seele in der Reihenfolge der Tierwelt (1866).


Art
  • Briefe über Landschaftsmalerei. Zuvor ein Brief von Goethe als Einleitung (1819–1831).
  • Die Lebenskunst nach den Inschriften des Tempels zu Delphi ( 1863).
  • Betrachtungen und Gedanken vor auserwählten Bildern der Dresdener Galerie (1867).
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