Carl Gustav Jung

Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking.

Summary

Carl Gustav Jung (1875 - 1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist and founder of a neopsychoanalytic school of psychology, which he named Analytical Psychology.

He emphasized understanding the psyche through exploring the worlds of dreams, art, mythology, world religion and philosophy.

He created the concept of the Collective Unconscious (see Vital Unconscious and Biocentric Principle).

Ideas

• Personality Types characterized by Extraversion and Introversion, and four personality functions Sensation, Thinking, Feeling, and Intuition.
• Unconcious - Jung took Sigmund Freud's Structural Model of the Psyche and extended it by dividing the Unconscious into two parts:
  • Personal Unconscious (Freud's Unconcious) which is composed of one's personal history.
  • Collective Unconscious which is composed of images or Archetypes common to all people - these images appear frequently in dreams, fairy tales, and myths.
• Each individual is so constituted that he or she has an innate drive to fulfillment, or to his or her own destiny.
• Individuation, or the attainment of personal integrity, occurs in the second half of life.
• Dreams arise from the 'all-uniting depths' and tend to compensate for deficits in the individual's waking life, facilitating the person's awareness of deficiencies in the personality and thus enabling their development.

Personality Types

Analytical psychology distinguishes several psychological types or temperaments:

• Extravert - interest in the Object:
  • Directed outward towards people and objects,
  • Desire breadth and are action-oriented.
• Introvert - interest in the Subject:
  • Directed inward toward concepts and ideas,
  • Seek depth and are self-oriented.

According to Jung, the conscious psyche is an apparatus for adaptation and orientation, and consists of a number of different psychic functions:

• Sensing - perception by means of the sense organs,
• Intuition - perceiving in unconscious way or perception of unconscious contents,
• Thinking - function of intellectual cognition - the forming of logical conclusions, and
• Feeling - function of subjective estimation.

Thinking and feeling functions are Rational, while sensing and intuition are Nonrational.

Personal Unconcious

The Personal Unconscious (Freud's Unconcious) is generated by our own personal history when our instincts encounter the Ecofactors that stimulate or inhibit our Human Potential.

It can be accessed by:

• Dream Interpretation,
• The technique of Free Association,
• Analysing the defence mechanisms of the Ego, and
• Anamnesis - medical history (particularly of the sexual history).

Collective Unconcious

The Collective Unconscious as proposed and described by Jung consists of our ancestral memories, in the form of Archetypes common to all of humanity.

It can be accessed by:

• Study of the symbols of transformation,
• The Archetypes which give corporeality to the self,
• Expression via paintings, poems and stories,
• Directed Lucid Dreaming with no interpretation, and
• Working with ceremonies and myths.