Karl Gustav Jung was the son of a prosperous medical practitioner from Mainz, involved in the campaign against Napoleon, Franz Ignaz and his wife Sophie Maria Josepha née Ziegler.

Following medical studies, he gained his Science and MD doctorate summa cum laude at Ruprecht-Karls-Universitaet Heidelberg in 1816, with a dissertation, entitled, De evolutione corporis humani.

[2][1] In 1815, inspired by liberal and nationalistic ideas, he had converted from his family's Catholicism to Protestantism and had joined the ancient Heidelberg Burschenschaft student fraternity, Teutonia.

[1] As a brilliant young practitioner, he subsequently specialised further in surgery and in ophthalmology as an assistant under Johann Nepomuk Rust at the Charité in Berlin, where he was helped by the publisher, Georg Reimer and befriended by Alexander von Humboldt who later wrote letters recommending him for a professorship in Basel.

[1] In 1819 after Karl Ludwig Sand, a friend of Jung's, killed the poet August Kotzebue, all student fraternities were banned and teaching staff with liberal sympathies, arrested.