In a masterful telling of Carl Jung's childhood, from his ancestry and birth until 1900 when Jung finished medical school in Basel and was heading to Zurich to become a psychiatrist, Brockway uncovers the impact Jung's experiences played in forming his later theories. Jung himself attributed his discovery of the collective unconscious to early childhood experiences beginning with a particularly vivid dream. The dream of the underground phallus king, which haunted him throughout life, seems to have played an important role in his discovery of the collective unconscious.