Personality Chapter 4: Jung

Youth

Period from puberty until middle life. Youths strive to gain psychic and physical dependence from parents, find a mate, raise a family, and make a place in the world. Youth is a period of increased activity, maturing sexuality, growing consciousness and recognition that problem-free era of childhood is over. The major difficulty of youth is overcoming the natural tendency to cling to narrow consciousness of childhood to avoid problems in life. This desire to live in the past is called the conservative principle.

Jung's concept of humanity

Jung saw humans as complex beings with many opposing poles. 1. pessimism vs. optimism: his theory is neither pessimistic nor optimistic. 2. deterministic vs. purposive: neither To Jung, people are motivated partially by conscious thoughts, partially by images from their personal unconscious, and partially by latent memory traces inherited from ancestral past (collective unconscious). People's motivation comes from BOTH teleological and causal factors. No one is completely one-sided or simple. Each person is a composition of opposing forces: not totally introverted, not totally extraverted, thinking, feeling, sensing, intuiting, etc. The persona is only a fraction of an individual. Each person has a dark side, a shadow, and a feminine and masculine side. The various complexes and archetypes cast their spell over people and are responsible for many of their words and actions and most of their dreams and fantasies. People are not masters of their own houses, but are not completely dominated by forces out of their control either. They have some limited capacity to determine their own lives. Through courage and strong will, people can explore the hidden recesses of their psyche. Self-realization is not easy. Ordinarily, a person who has reached individuation has reached middle life and has lived successfully through the stages of childhood and youth. Even after attaining self-realization, people remain under the influence of impersonal collective unconscious that controls many of their prejudices, interests, fears, dreams, and creative activities. Jung's theory leans strongly toward the biology dimension rather than social aspects of personality. Except for the therapeutic potential of the doctor-patient relationship, Jung had little to say about the effects of social practices. He actually found cultural differences to be superficial and similarities to be profound. High on similarities and low on individual differences.

Word association test

Jung was not the first to use the word association test but he can be credited with helping to develop and refine it. He originally used it in 1903 when he was a psychiatric assistant. He seldom used it in his later career. He originally used the word association test to demonstrate the validity of Freud's hypothesis that the unconscious operates as an autonomous process. The basic purpose today in Jungian psychology is to uncover feeling-toned complexes. The word association test is based on the principle of complexes (emotionally toned conglomerations of images groups around a central core in the personal unconscious). These complexes create measurable emotional responses. Jung typically used list of 100 stimulus words arranged to elicit an emotional reaction. Respond to the stimulus word with the first word that comes to mind. Would record time to make response, rate of breathing, galvanic skin response and then re-test for consistency. Certain types of reactions indicate that the stimulus word has touched a complex. Critical responses include restricted breathing, changes in electrical conductivity of the skin, delayed reactions, multiple responses, etc. Any combination of these responses might indicate the complex has been reached.

Jung's psychotherapy

Jung was quite eclectic in his theory and practice of psychotherapy. His treatment varied according to age, stage of development, and particular problem of the patient. The ultimate purpose of Jungian therapy is to help neurotic patients become healthy and encourage healthy people to work independently toward self-realization. Jung sought this by using techniques such as dream analysis and active imagination to help patients discover personal and collective unconscious material and to balance these unconscious images with conscious attitude. Although he encouraged patients to become independent, he admitted the importance of transference, especially during the first three phases of therapy. He thought that both positive and negative transference were naturally associated with patient's revelation of highly personal information. Also recognized the importance of countertransference: therapist's feelings toward the patient. Depending on whether it leads to a better relationship between participants, the transference can be a help or a hindrance to therapy. Because Jungian psychotherapy has many minor goals and a variety of techniques, no universal description of a person who has successfully completed analytical treatment is possible.

Levels of the Psyche

Like Freud, Jung based his personality theory on the assumption that the mind has both an unconscious and conscious level. Unlike Freud, he belived that the most important part of the unconscious stemmed not from personal experiences, but from the distant past of human existence: the Collective Unconscious. 1. Conscious 2. Personal unconscious 3. Collective unconscious 4. Archetypes a) Persona b) Shadow c) Anima d) Animus e) Great mother f) Wise old man g) Hero h) Self

Thinking

One of the four functions. Thinking enables someone to recognize meaning. Logical intellectual activity produces a chain of ideas called thinking. The thinking type can be either extraverted or introverted depending on their basic attitude.

Persona

Is an archetype of the collective unconscious. It is the side of personality that people show to the world (word refers to mask worn by Roman actors in Greek plays). Jung believed that each of us should project a particular role, one that society dictates to each of us. This concept may have originated fromhis experiences with his No. 1 personality, which made accommodations to the outside world. Although persona is necessary side of our personality, we should not confuse it with our complete self. If we identify too closely with our persona, we remain unconscious o four individuality and are blocked from attaining self-realization. We should never identify with our persona because we will lose touch with our inner self and become dependent on society's expectations of us. To be psychologically healthy, we must strike a balance between the demands of society and who we truly are.

Stages of personality development

1. childhood 2. youth 3. middle life 4. old age Jung grouped the stages of life into four general periods. Jung compared the trip through life to the journey of the sun across the sky. Childhood is the early morning sun. It is full of potential but lacks consciousness. Youth is the morning sun which is unaware of the impending decline. Middle age is the early afternoon sun which is obviously declining but brilliant, and old age is the evening sun where consciousness is dimmed. To Jung, values, ideals, and modes of behaviour suitable for early life are inappropriate for the second half of life and people must learn to find new meaning in their declining years.

Related research

1. personality type and investing money 2. personality type and leadership Jung's approach to personality was influential in early development of personality psychology. His influence has waned recently: today most research related to Jung focuses on descriptions of personality types: for example, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is the most used measure of Jung's personality types. The instrument is often used in schools to direct students toward rewarding avenues of study or jobs. Researchers recently have extended work on the usefulness of Jungian personality types by exploring role of types in how people manage their personal finances and leadership style.

Psychotherapy 4 Basic approaches

Jung identified 4 basic approaches to therapy, representing four developmental stages in the history of psychotherapy. 1. confession of a pathogenic secret: this is a cathartic method practiced for patients who merely need to share their secrets. 2. interpretation, explanation, elucidation: second stage gives patients insight into the causes of their neuroses but may still leave them incapable of solving social problems (used by Freud) 3. The third stage was used by Adler; it is the education of patients as social beings 4. Jung suggested a fourth stage because he believed that the third stage left the patient's merely social well adjusted. The fourth stage is transformation. For this phase, the therapist first must be transformed into a healthy human being, preferably by undergoing psychotherapy. Only after this transformation and an established philosophy of life is the therapist able to help patients move toward individuation, wholeness, or self-realization. This fourth stage is used especially with patients who are in the second half of life and who are concerned with realization of the inner self.

Development of personality

According to Jung, personality develops through a series of stages that culminate in individuation or self-realization. The second half of life (35-40) is when a person has the opportunity to bring together the various aspects of personality to achieve self-realization. At this time however, there is also the opportunity for degeneration or rigid reactions to develop. The psychological health of middle-aged people is related to their ability to achieve balance between the poles of the various opposing processes. This ability is proportional to the success achieved in journeying through the previous stages of life.

Conceptualized archetypes

Although a large number of archetypes exist as vague images, a few have been conceptualized. 1. persona 2. shadow 3. anima 4. animus 5. great mother 6. wise old man 7. hero 8. self

Active imagination

Jung used this technique during his own self-analysis and with others. It requires a person to begin with any impression- a dream image, vision, picture, fantasy- and concentrate until the impression begins to move. The person must follow the images to wherever they lead and then courageously face the autonomous images and communicate with them. The purpose of active imagination is to reveal archetypal images emerging from the unconscious. It is useful for people who want to be acquainted with their collective and personal unconscious and who are willing to overcome resistance that ordinarily blocks communication with the unconscious. Jung thought that active imagination has an advantage over dream analysis because its images are produced during a conscious state making them more clear and reproducible. As an alternative to active imagination, Jung has patient's draw, paint, or express in some nonverbal manner the progression of their fantasies.

Overview of Analytical Psychology

Jung was an early colleague of Freud, but broke with psychoanalysis to establish a separate theory of personality called analytical psychology. Analytical psychology holds that occult phenomena can and do influence the lives of everyone. Everyone is motivated not only by repressed experiences, but also certain emotionally toned experiences inherited from our ancestors, called the collective unconscious. Some elements of the collective unconscious become highly developed (archetypes). The most inclusive archetype is the notion of self-realization, which is achieved only by attaining a balance between various opposing forces of personality.

Attitudes

An attitude is a predisposition to act or react in a characteristic direction. Jung said that every person has both an introverted and an extroverted attitude, but only one may be conscious while the other is unconscious. Introversion and extroversion can be symbolized by the yin yang symbol just as other opposing forces in Jung's analytical psychology. People are neither completely introverted or completely extroverted; they are just unbalanced in one direction to varying extents. Psychologically healthy people attain a balance of the two attitudes, feeling equally comfortable with their internal and their external worlds.

Instinct

An unconscious physical impulse toward action. Archetypes are the psychical counterpart to instincts.

Archetypes

Are similar to complexes in that they are emotionally toned conglomerations of associated images, but complexes are based on individual experience and are from the personal unconscious. Archetypes are generalized and derive from the contents of the collective unconscious. Archetypes are NOT instincts. Instincts are physical impulses toward an action while archetypes are PSYCHICAL IMPULSES. Both archetypes and instincts are unconsciously determined and both shape personality. Archetypes have a biological basis but originate through the repeated experiences of human's early ancestors. There are countless number of archetypes that exist as potentials in each person, and when a person's personal experience corresponds with an archetype, it becomes activated. When activated, it expresses itself through several modes: primarily dreams, fantasies, and delusions. Archetypes all contain both conscious personal and unconscious personal components but are mostly formed by collective unconscious images.

Complexes

Are the contents of the personal unconscious. A complex is group of associated ideas that carry an emotional tone. Complexes are largely personal, but may be partly derived from humanity's collective experience. Complexes may be partially conscious and stem from both personal and collective unconscious.

Middle life

Begins at age 35-40. The sun is beginning its downward descent. Although middle life can present with anxieties, it is also a period of tremendous potential. If middle-aged people retain their moral and social values of early life, they become rigid in trying to hold on to their physical attractiveness and agility. People who lived youth by neither childish nor middle-aged values are prepared to advance into middle life and to live fully during that stage. They are capable of giving up extraverted goals of youth and moving in the introverted direction of expanded consciousness. They must look forward to the future with hope and anticipation, surrender the lifestyle of youth, and discover new meaning in middle life. Their psychological health is NOT enhanced by success in business, prestige in society, or family life satisfaction. The step of moving into middle life involves mature religious orientation, especially belief in life after death.

Psychological types

Besides levels of the psyche and dynamics of personality, Jung recognized various psychological types that grow out of a union of two basic attitudes: 1. introversion 2. extroversion and four separate functions: 1. thinking 2. feeling 3. sensing 4. intuiting.

Jun's Childhood

Born in 1875 in Switzerland. His paternal grandfather was prominent physician/one of the best known men of the city. Jung sometimes believed he was the great grand son of the German poet Goethe. Both of Jung's parents were the youngest of 13 siblings, which may have contributed to some difficulties in their marriage. His father was minister of Swiss Reformed church and mother was daughter of a theologian. Both religion and medicine were prominent professions in his family and extended family. His mother's family had a tradition of mysticism and spiritualism, and his mother's mother believed in the occult and often talked to the dead. Jung's early life was as an only child. He had an older brother who only lived for 3 days and a younger sister 9 years younger than himself. Jung was an emotional and sensitive child and identified with the unstable and mystical side of his mother. At age 3 he was separated from his mother who was hospitalized for several months, and this separation was deeply troubling for him. Years later he still felt distrustful about the word "love" and still associated "woman" with unreliability and "man" with reliability, but powerlessness. Before his 4th birthday, family moved to Basel, and from this period, his earliest dream stems (which had a profound effect on his later life and his concept of collective unconscious). During school years, Jung became aware of two separate aspects of himself: which he called his no. 1 and no. 2 personalities. At first he thought that both personalities were part of his own personal world, but in adolescence, came to see No. 2 personality as a reflection of something other than himself: an old man long dead. In later years, he recognized that No. 2 personality had been in touch with feelings and intuitions that No. 1 did not perceive. Between 16-18 his No. 1 personality emerged as more dominant and gradually repressed the world of intuitive premonitions that his No. 2 personality was in touch with. He described his No. 1 personality as extroverted and in tune with the objective world. His No. 2 personality was introverted and directed toward his subjective world. During his school years, he was largely introverted, but he became extroverted when he needed to prepare for a profession and meet responsibilities. This No. 1 personality prevailed until his midlife crisis, after which point he became extremely introverted.

Functions

Both introversion and extraversion can combine with any one or more of four functions, forming 8 possible orientations or types. The 4 functions are: 1. sensing 2. thinking 3. feeling 4. intuiting The four functions usually appear in hierarchy, with one occupying a superior position and another in a secondary position, the other two take inferior positions. Most people only cultivate one function so they characteristically approach a situation relying on one dominant/superior function. A person who has theoretically achieved self-realization or individuation would have all four functions highly developed.

Childhood

Childhood is divided into 3 substages: 1. anarchic phase: characterized by chaotic and sporadic consciousness. Islands of consciousness exist but with little or no connection between these islands. 2. monarchic phase: characterized by the development of the ego and the beginning of logical and verbal thinking. Children come to see themselves objectively and refer to themselves in third person. Islands of consciousness become larger and more numerous and inhabited by a primitive ego. Although the ego is perceived as an object it is not yet ware of itself as perceiver. 3. dualistic phase: in this phase, the ego as perceiver arises when the ego is divided into the objective and the subjective. Children refer to themselves in first person and aware of their existence as separate individuals. Islands of consciousness become connected and inhabited by an ego complex that recognizes itself as both object and subject.

Conscious

Conscious images are those that are sensed by the ego, whereas unconscious images have no relationship with the ego. The ego is the center of consciousness, but not the core of personality. Thus, ego is not the whole personality, but must be completed by the SELF: the center of personality that is largely unconscious. The ego of a psychologically healthy person will take secondary position to the unconscious SELF. Thus, consciousness plays a minor role in analytical psychology. Healthy individuals are in contact with conscious world, but also allow themselves to experience their unconscious self and achieve individuation. Too much emphasis on expanding one's conscious psyche can lead to psychological imbalance.

Dreams, hallucinations & Archetypes

Dreams are the main source of archetypal material. Certain dreams offer proof of existence of the archetype: dreams that produce motifs that could not be known to the dreamer through personal experience. These motifs coincide with those known to ancient people. Jung believed that hallucinations of psychotic patients offered evidence for universal archetypes (ex: sun phallus account)

Personal unconscious

Encompasses all repressed, forgotten or subliminally perceived experiences of an individual; thus it is unique to each person. Some images in the personal unconscious can be remembered easily, some with difficulty, and some not at all (Kind of like Freud's unconscious and the pre-conscious combined). Contents of personal unconscious are called complexes.

Extraverted feeling

Extraverted feeling people use objective data to make evaluations. They are not guided by their subjective opinion, but external values and widely accepted standards of judgement. Likely to be at ease in social situations and usually are well liked because of ability to know on the spur of the moment how to act and what to say. However, in their quest to conform to social standards, they may appear artificial, shallow, and unreliable. Their value judgements will have an easily detectable false ring. They often become business people or politicians because these professions demand and reward the making of value judgements based on objective information.

Extraverted intuiting

Extraverted intuitive people are oriented toward facts in the external world. Rather than fully sensing facts, they merely perceive them subliminally. Strong sensory stimuli interfere with intuition and intuitive people suppress many of their sensations and are guided by hunches and guesses contrary to sensory data. ex: inventors who must inhibit distracting sensory data and concentrate on unconscious solutions to objective problems

Extraverted sensing

Extraverted sensing people perceive external stimuli objectively in much the same way that these stimuli exist in realist. Their sensations are not greatly influenced by their subjective attitudes. This function is essential in jobs such as painter, wine taster, proof reader, or any job requiring sensory discriminations congruent with those of most people.

Extraverted thinking

Extraverted thinking people rely heavily on concrete thoughts but may also use abstract ideas if these ideas have been transmitted to them from someone without. The thinking is objective, not subjective (ex: accountants, mathematicians, engineers, etc.) Not all objective thinking is productive. Without at least some individual interpretation, ideas are merely previously known facts with no originality or creativity.

Extroversion

Extroversion is the attitude distinguished by the turning outward of psychic energy so that a person is oriented toward the object and away from the subjective. Extraverts are more influenced by their surroundings than by their inner world and they tend to focus on the objective attitude and suppress the subjective attitude. They are pragmatic and well rooted in the realities of everyday life and are suspicious of the subjective attitude in others and themselves.

Feelings

Feelings describes the process of evaluating an idea or event. A more appropriate term may be VALUING. The feeling function is distinguished from emotion: feeling is the evaluation of every conscious activity whether they are valued as indifferent or valuable. Most of the evaluations have no emotional content but are capable of becoming emotions if their intensity increases to the point of stimulating physiological changes.

Personality type and investing money

Filbeck et al. (2005) wanted to better understand the level of risk individuals are willing to tolerate when it comes to investing money based on personality type. Some people can tolerate more wide fluctuations in their investments. They found that the Myers-Briggs personality type is a good predictor of who is willing to tolerate risk and who is not. Found that those who are of the thinking type have a high tolerance for risk whereas those of the feeling type have a low tolerance for the same level of risk. It was found that the introversion-extraversion dimension was not a good predictor of risk tolerance, so it is difficult to predict what specific type of thinkers and feelers are most tolerant/intolerant of risk. Though not all of the Jungian personality types were related to risk tolerance in the study, the researchers concluded that personality of investors is an important factor for financial advisors to consider when creating an investment portfolio that meets the needs of investors.

Collective unconscious vs. phylogenetic endowment

Freud looked first to the personal unconscious and resorted to the phylogenetic endowment only when personal explanations failed. Jung placed primary emphasis on the collective unconscious and used personal experiences to round out the total personality. Major distinction between thetwo was Jung's differentiation of the collective unconscious into autonomous forces called archetypes, each with a life and personality of its.

Adultlife

His first profession choice was archaeology. He had limited financial resources. Forced by this limitation to choose school close to home, he didn't have the option of archaeology, so he chose natural sciences, then narrowed to medicine, then narrowed to psychiatry when he learned it deals with subjective phenomena. In his first year of medical school, his father died, leaving him to care for mother and sister. He also attended seances at this time with relatives. He later claimed that these seances were controlled experiments for him. Completed medical degree in 1900, became a psychiatric assistant to Bleuler at mental hospital in Zurich: most prestigious psychiatric teaching hospital in the world at that time. He married a woman from a wealthy Swiss family in 1903. Read Freud's interpretation of dreams when it came out and later began interpreting his own dreams. In 1906, Jung and Freud began a steady correspondence, and one year later, Freud invited Jung and his wife to Vienna. Freud and Jung developed a mutual respect and affection for each other right away. Freud believed Jung would be the ideal person to be his successor: he was neither Jewish nor Viennese, and Freud had warm feelings for Jung and regarded his as a man of great intellect. Freud selected Jung to be the first president of the International Psychoanalytic Association. Freud's and Jung's relationship began to fizzle: Jung did not believe that Freud was interpreting his dreams correctly. After Freud and Jung returned from their trip to USA, their personal and theoretical differences cooled the friendship and a year later Jung resigned presidency and withdrew membership in Int. Psychoanalytic assoc. Jung's erotic feelings toward Freud, coupled with his experience of sexual assault by an older man he once worshiped, may have been one of the major reasons why Jung broke it off with Freud. Jung's rejection of Freud's sexual theories may have stemmed from his ambivalent sexual feelings toward Freud. Two women who shared Jung's life for 40 years were his wife Emma (who related better to Jung's No.1 personality) and a former patient named Antonia (who related better to his no. 2 personality). Jung and Antonia made no effort to hide their relationship, but his children probably had a lifelong resentment toward her. Jung seemed to need women other than his wife. He remained a Swiss citizen, had four girls and a boy, was Christian but didn't attend church, had hobbies such as wood carving, stone cutting, sailing. 1944 became professor of medical psychology at U of Basel. He resigned a year later due to poor health, and after his wife died in 1955, he was mostly alone. He died in 1961.

Old age

In old age people experience a diminution of consciousness. If people fear life during the early phases of life, they will most definitely fear death during the later ones. Fear of death is taken as normal but Jung believed that death is the goal of life and can be fulfilling. Most of Jung's patients were middle age or older and suffered from a backward orientation, desperately clinging to goals and lifestyles of the past and going through the motions of life aimlessly. Jung treated these people by helping them to establish new goals and find meaning in living by first finding meaning in death. He treated through dream interpretation because old age dreams often contain symbols of rebirth. Jung used these and other symbols to determine patient's unconscious attitudes toward death and to help them discover meaning in life.

Introversion

Introversion is the turning inward of psychic energy with an orientation toward the subjective. Introverts are tuned in to their inner world. They perceive the outside world of course, but do so selectively, and with their own subjective view. Becoming totally introverted risks becoming possessed completely by the inner world=psychosis.

Introverted feeling

Introverted feeling people base their value judgements primarily on subjective perceptions rather than objective facts (ex: art critics). These introverted feeling people have individualized consciences, taciturn demeanours, and an unfathomable psyche. They ignore traditional opinions and beliefs and nearly completely indifferent to the objective world. This often causes people around them to feel uncomfortable and to cool their attitude toward them.

Introverted intuiting

Introverted intuitive people are guided by unconscious perception of facts that are basically subjective and have little resemblance to external reality. Their subjective intuitive perceptions are often remarkably strong and capable of motivating decisions of great magnitude. Ex: mystics, profits, surrealist artists, etc. These people often appear peculiar to others. They may not even understand their own motivations but are deeply moved by them.

Intuiting

Intuition is the function that involves perception beyond consciousness. Like sensing, it is based on the perception of absolute facts, ones that provide the raw material for thinking and feeling. Intuiting differs from sensing in that it is more creative and often adds or subtracts elements from conscious sensation.

Dream analysis

Jung agreed with Freud that dreams have meaning and should be taken seriously and that they spring from the depths of the unconscious and their latent meaning is expressed in symbolic form. He objected to Freud's idea that all dreams are wish fulfillments and most dream symbols represent sexual urges. Instead, Jung believed that people use symbols to represent a variety of concepts to try to comprehend the unknowable; a reality that can only be expressed symbolically. The purpose of Jungian dream interpretation is to uncover elements from the personal and collective unconscious and to integrate them into consciousness in order to facilitate the process of self-realization. If a person's conscious life is incomplete in a certain area, then that person's unconscious self will strive to complete that condition through the dream process. Ie: archetypes that are ignored in conscious life may appear a lot in dreams as symbols.

Anima

Jung believed that all humans are sexually bisexual and possess both masculine and feminine sides. The feminine side of men originates in the collective unconscious as an archetype that is very resistant to consciousness. Few men become acquainted with their anima because it requires courage. In order to master the projections of the anima, a man must delve into unconsciousness and realize the feminine side of their personality. The anima originates from early men's experiences with women that are combined to form a generalized picture of women that has become embedded in the collective unconscious of all men as the anima archetype. Every man comes into the world with predetermined concept of women that shapes his relationships with individual women because he projects the anima onto them. The anima can be the source of misunderstandings in female-male relationships and also may be responsible for the alluring mystique the woman has. The anima can appear in dreams as a woman with no particular identity but enters his dream from the depths of the collective unconscious. The anima can also be represented by feelings or moods: the anima influences the feeling side of a man and is the explanation for certain irrational moods and feelings. When this occurs, the man almost never admits that it is his feminine side casting a spell. The anima also has deceptive qualities.

Jung's method of investigation

Jung believed that the study of personality was not the prerogative of any single discipline and that the whole person could be understood only by pursuing knowledge wherever it existed. He persistently defended himself (like Freud) as a scientific investigator however, maintained that the psyche cannot be understood by intellect alone but must be grasped by the total person. He said that not everything he wrote came out of his head, but also his heart. He gathered data for his theories from extensive reading in many disciplines but also gathered data from his use of the 1. word association test 2. dream analysis 3. active imagination 4. psychotherapy This information was then combined with readings on medieval alchemy, occult phenomena, and any other subjects in an effort to confirm the hypotheses of analytical psychology.

Big dreams

Jung felt that certain dreams offer proof of the collective unconscious: these dreams are "big dreams" that have spiritual meaning for all people. Big dreams are a type of collective dream

Causality and teleology

Jung insisted that motivation springs from past causes and from teleological goals. Jung criticized Freud for being one-sided on his emphasis on causality and insisted that a causal view cannot explain all motivation. Human behaviour is shaped by both causal and teleological forces and the explanations must be balanced. Jung claimed that some dreams spring from past events but also some dreams can help a person make decisions about the future.

Critique of Jung

Jung regarded himself as a scientist and insisted that his scientific study of religion, mythology, folklore, and philosophical fantasies did not make him a mystic any more than Freud's study of sex made Freud a sexual pervert. Analytical theory must be evaluated against the six criteria of a useful theory. Jung's theory is almost impossible to either verify or falsify. The collective unconscious, which is the core of Jung's theory, is nearly impossible concept to test empirically. Much of the evidence for archetypes and the collective unconscious has come from Jung's own inner experiences, so there is really no empirical evidence. Jung's theory gets a moderate rating on ability to generate research because of the part of the theory concerned with the classification and typology, functions and attitudes, that can be studied and tested, and have generated a moderate amount of research. Jung is the only modern personality theorist to attempt to include such a broad scope of human activity within a single theoretical framework (those aspects of human personality dealing with the occult, mysterious, etc.) Thus, Jung gets a moderate rating on ability to organize knowledge into a meaningful framework. Jung's theory gets a low rating on practicality because the theory doesn't really aid teachers, clinicians, etc. in solving everyday problems, but is limited to those therapists who subscribe to basic Jungian tenets. The collective unconscious doesn't lend itself to empirical research but may have some usefulness in helping people understand cultural myths and adjust to life's traumas Low on internal consistency. He generally used the same terms consistently, but often employed several terms to describe the same concept. Many of his terms are not adequately defined. He did not define terms operationally. Low on parsimony.

Self

The self is the inherited tendency to move toward growth, perfection, and completion. The self is the most comprehensive archetype because it pulls together all of the other archetypes and unites them in the process of self-realization. Like all archetypes, the self has both conscious and unconscious personal components but is mostly formed by the collective unconscious images. The self archetype is symbolized by a person's ideas of perfection, completion or wholeness but its ultimate symbol is the mandala. It represents the striving of the collective unconscious for unity, balance, and wholeness. The self (which is both conscious and unconscious) should not be confused with the ego (which is only consciousness). The ego is only a small part of the total personality. The totality of the ego (personal conscious), the personal unconscious, and the collective unconscious is the self. The balance between all of the components of the total self is probably never going to be ideal. Many people have an overabundance of consciousness and thus lack the soul spark of personality. Other people who are overpowered by their unconscious are often pathological. So, although the self is almost never perfectly balanced, each person has the collective unconscious concept of the perfect, unified self and the mandala represents this. The self can appear as Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, or other deities. The self includes both the conscious and unconscious mind and unites the opposing elements of the psyche: male and female, good and evil, light and dark. These opposing elements are often symbolized by the yin and yang symbol. Complete self-realization is seldom every achieved but it is an ideas that exists within the collective unconscious of everyone. To actualize or fully experience the self, people must overcome their fear of the unconscious and prevent their persona from dominating their personality, recognize the dark side of themselves (shadow) and face their anima or animus.

Mandala

is the symbol for the self. It represents the perfect self, the archetype of order, unity and totality. Because self-realization involves completeness and wholeness, it is represented by this symbol of perfection. Jung found evidence for the self archetype in the mandala symbols that appear in dreams and fantasies of contemporary people who have never been conscious of their meaning.

Collective dreams

1. big dreams 2. typical dreams 3. earliest dreams

Dynamics of personality

1. causality and teleology 2. progression and regression

Introverted sensing

Introverted sensing people are largely influenced by their subjective sensations of sight, sound, taste, touch and so forth. They are guided by their interpretation of stimuli rather than the stimuli themselves and give subjective interpretation to objective phenomena but are still able to communicate meaning to others. Ex: portrait artists.

Introverted thinking

Introverted thinking people react to external stimuli, but their interpretation of an event is coloured more by the internal meaning they bring with them than by the objective facts. They react to the world in highly subjective and creative manner, interpreting old data in new ways (ex: philosophers, inventors). When carried to the extreme, introverted thinking results in unproductive mystical thoughts that are useless to other people.

Ego

Jung's definition of the ego is more restrictive than Freud's. The ego is the center of consciousness, but not the core of personality. Thus, ego is not the whole personality, but must be completed by the SELF: the center of personality that is largely unconscious.

Self-realization /individuation /psychological rebirth

Psychological rebirth/self-realization/individuation is the process of becoming an individual or whole person. Analytical psychology is essentially a psychology of opposites and self-realization is the process of integrating the opposite poles into a single homogenous individual. Self-realization requires that all psychological components function in unity and balance, with no psychic processes atrophying. It means realizing of the self, minimizing the persona, recognizing their animus or anima, and their shadow, and finding a workable balance between introversion and extraversion. As well, this person has elevated all 4 functions to a superior position. This is extremely difficult! Almost never achieved before middle-life. Self-realization is extremely rare and only achieved by people who are able to assimilate their unconscious into their total personality. To come to terms with unconsciousness is a difficult process that demands courage to face the evil nature of ones shadow and even greater courage to face one's feminine or masculine side (anima or animus). Only achieved by people who can remove the ego as the dominant concern of personality and replace it with the self. The unconscious self must become the core of personality. To merely expand consciousness is to inflate the ego and produce a one-sided person. A self-realized person achieves a balance between all aspects of personality; they are able to contend with both their external and internal worlds. They live in the real world and make necessary concessions to it, but they are also aware of the regressive processes that lead to self discovery. Self-realized people welcome unconscious images as they appear in dreams and introspective reflections, as they are potential material for new psychic life.

Typical dreams

Second kind of collective dream; those that are common to most people. These dreams include archetypal figures (wise old man, great mother, etc.), archetypal events (birth, marriage, etc.), and archetypal objects (sun, water, fish, etc.).

Sensing

Sensing function is the function that receives physical stimuli and transmits them to perceptual consciousness. The sensation is not identical to the physical stimulus but is the individual's perception of the sensory impulse. These perceptions are not dependent on logical thinking or feelings but exist as absolute facts within each person.

Personality type and leadership

The MBTI has been used in research related to leadership and managerial behaviours, extensively. Some of the work suggests that a preference for thinking over feeling and for judging over perceiving is characteristic of effective managers because they can focus on achieving results through a quick analysis of problems and confident implementation of decisions. Jarlstrom and Valkealahti (2010) used the MBTI to examine "person-job fit" which is the match between a person's knowledge, skills, and abilities and job demands. Feeling types were found to be over-represented among business students compared to managers. The authors argue that their results suggest a new type profile that is emerging in today's business workd, one characterized by qualities associated with Jung's feeling function: encouragement of participation and consensus building and compassionate placement of oneself in other's people's shoes during decision-making.

Progression and regression

The achieve self-realization, people must adapt not only to their outside environment but toward their inner world as well. Progression is adaptation to the outside world involving the forward flow of psychic energy. Progression inclines a person to react consistently to a given set of environmental condition. Regression is adaptation to the inner world that relies on a backward flow of psychic energy. Regression is a necessary backward step in the process of attaining a goal, and it activates the unconscious psyche which is essential to the solution of most problems. Jung believed that both progression and regression are essential for people to achieve self-realization or individual growth. Alone, neither can lead to development because there will be too much one-sidedness. The two, working together, can activate the process of healthy personality development.

Animus

The animus is the female equivalent of the male's anima. It is the masculine archetype in women. It represents and is symbolic of thinking and reasoning. It is capable of influencing the thinking of a woman, but does not actually belong to her because it belongs to the collective unconscious that originates from the encounters of prehistoric women with men. A woman can project the anima onto individual men in her life. The animus is responsible for thinking and opinion in women and explains the irrational thinking and illogical opinions often attributed to women. Objectively valid opinions held by women are not actually thought out but are ready-made and come from the animus. If the woman is dominated by her animus, no logical or emotional appeal can shake her prefabricated beliefs. The animus appears in dreams, etc. in personified form.

Collective unconscious

The collective unconscious results from the experiences of the ancestral past as a species. The contents of collective unconscious are inherited and passed down from one generation to the next as psychic potential. These contents are more or less the same for people of all cultures. The contents of the collective unconscious are not dormant. They are active and influence a person's thoughts, emotions, and actions. Collective unconscious is responsible for many myths, legends, and religious beliefs. The collective unconscious does not refer to inherited ideas, but to human's innate tendency to react in a particular way whenever experiences stimulate a biologically inherited response tendency. This innate potential requires individual experience before it can be activated. (ie: mother reacts with care and love to newborn infant because of innate inherited blueprint). People have as many inherited tendencies as they have typical situations in life.

Great Mother

The great mother is a derivative of animus and anima. Everyone male and female possesses a great mother archetype because it is a preexisting concept of mother that is always associated with both positive and negative feelings. The great mother represents two opposing forces: fertility and nourishment and power and destruction. She is capable of producing and sustaining life but also may devour or neglect life (her offspring). Our personal view of mother is overrated and the influences we feel really come from the archetype we project upon our mothers. The fertility and nourishment dimension of the great mother archetype is symbolized by a tree, garden, field, sea, heaven, home, country, church, or hollow objects. The destructive dimension is symbolized by a god mother, Mother Nature, Mother Earth, a stepmother, or a witch. Fertility and power can combine to form rebirth which is represented by processes like reincarnation, resurrection, baptism, individuation or self-realization.

Hero

The hero archetype is represented by a powerful person who fights against great odds to conquer or vanquish evil. In the end, the hero often is undone by some seemingly insignificant person or event. Heroic deeds can only be performed by someone who is vulnerable. The image of the hero touches an archetype within us: we are fascinated with heroes. When the hero conquers the villain, they free us from feelings of impotence and misery and at the same time, serves as our model for the ideal personality. The hero motif goes back all the way to earliest human history to the dawn of consciousness. In conquering the villain, the hero is symbolically over-coming the darkness of prehuman consciousness: the achievement of consciousness was one of our ancestor's greatest accomplishments and the archetype of the hero represents victory over darkness.

Conservative principle

The major difficulty of youth is overcoming the tendency to cling to narrow consciousness of childhood in order to avoid problems at the present point of life. This desire to live in the past is the conservative principle. A middle-aged person who attempts to hold on to youthful values faces a crippled second half of life and is handicapped in ability to achieve self-realization.

Yin yang symbol

The opposing elements of the psyche are represented by the yin yang symbol. Good-evil, dark-light, male-female, etc.

Shadow

The shadow is the archetype of darkness and repression, and represents those qualities that we do not wish to acknowledge but attempt to hide from ourselves and others. The shadow consists of morally objectionable tendencies but also a number of constructive

Midlife crisis/journey into the unconscious

The years after the break with Freud were filled with loneliness and self-analysis for Jung. From 1913-1917 he underwent trip through his own unconscious psyche-searched for himself. (like Freud, who endured a midlife crises sparked by his father's death). Jung's midlife crisis was sparked by split with his spiritual father, Freud. Both men underwent period of loneliness and isolation and both were deeply changed by the experience. Jung's journey into his unconscious was painful but also necessary and fruitful. Through dream analysis and active imagination, he created his unique theory of personality. During this period he wrote down his dreams, drew pics of them, told himself stories, and followed these stories wherever they moved: through these processes he became acquainted with his PERSONAL UNCONSCIOUS. As he prolonged this process and went deeper, he came to discover the COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS. Near the end of his psychological journey he achieved a psychological rebirth called INDIVIDUATION.

Earliest dreams

Third type of collective dream. These are the earliest dreams remembered. These dreams can be traced back to about age 3-4 and contain mythological and symbolic images that could not have been reasonably experienced by the individual child. These earliest dreams often contain archetypal motifs such as the hero, wise old man, mandala, etc. These dreams stem from the collective unconscious rather than the personal conscious or unconscious.

Wise Old Man

Wise old man is the archetype of wisdom and meaning and symbolized human's preexisting knowledge about the mysteries of life. The archetypal meaning is unconscious and cannot actually be reached by any individual. Many people speak authoritatively (like politicians) and may sound sensible and wise to others who are misled by their own wise old man archetypes. People who appeal to reason as well as emotion are guided by this unconscious archetype but this is not real wisdom. Wise old man archetype is personified in dreams as father, grandfather, teacher, guru, doctor, or priest. Can be symbolized as life itself.