I meant to reply to Devac's comment when I had time, but he has since deleted it, so I'm replying to you but really for his sake.

You really want to start with secondary sources to follow Jung. Behind the scenes he was very interested in mysticism, religion, and magic, but, good scientist that he was, he also didn't believe in the supernatural. His work on the collective unconscious and active imagination was inspired by a experiences he had during a nervous breakdown -- funny enough, hypnagogic visions, which was what I was thinking of when I suggest that to mike. He wrote an account of them in the Red Book, which was only published recently. The collective unconscious started as a theory of why his dreams resembled mythology and accounts of mystics' visionary experiences, and later his theories of archetypes evolved though his interest in alchemy, seeing the symbolic language of alchemy as describing psychological processes being projected on the external world. Because he was worried about his reputation as a scientist he didn't want to talk about that stuff, there really being no way you can talk about alchemy in a scientific context without sounding like a crackpot, so he danced around what motivated his theories until late in life and his writings are hard to follow without (more than) a little context.

Jung is in a funny place now. As a psychologist, he's regarded as a pseudoscientist, and rightly so because his theories aren't falsifiable. There are still clinical psychologist and counselors who use his theories, and reputable programs that will train them to, and they're justified because there's enough evidence that they help people even if their theoretical basis is shaky. He also inspired people interested in the esoteric to look at it in psychological terms, so they can play with their tarot cards or whatever if that works for them without feeling like moonbats or obliged to become a moonbat, which can be seen as good or bad depending on where you live and how many people have told you you're, like, such a Gemini lately, but has probably been a positive on the whole.