About

Carl Gustav Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist.

July 26th, 1875 – June, 6th 1961

Jung’s Life Facts:

-Born in Switzerland in 1875 – father a preacher
-Weak, tormented youth
-Studied under Freud and was great friends
-Well versed in mythology, religion, and world cultures
-‘Lucid Dreamer’ who saw visions and images while awake – at points though he was going insane.
-Later worked to catalog, interpret, and actualize them as works of visual art.

 

Jung’s Theory of the Psyche Three Part Psyche The Ego, The Personal Unconscious, and the Collective Unconscious

The Ego
Jung’s theory divides the psyche into three parts. The first is the ego, which Jung identifies with the conscious mind.

The Personal Unconscious
The personal unconscious is like most people’s understanding of the unconscious in that it includes both memories that are easily brought to mind and those that have been suppressed for some reason.

The Collective Unconscious
You could call collective unconscious your “psychic inheritance.” It is the reservoir of our experiences as a species, a kind of knowledge we are all born with. And yet we can never be directly conscious of it. It influences all of our experiences and behaviors, most especially the emotional ones, but we only know about it indirectly, by looking at those influences.

The contents of the collective unconscious are called archetypes. An archetype is an unlearned tendency to experience things in a certain way.

 

Archetypes – The Self
The Self is the archetype of wholeness. The Self can be understood as the central organizing principle of the psyche, that fundamental and essential aspect of human personality which gives cohesion, meaning, direction, and purpose to the whole psyche. It is who you believe you are.

Archetypes – The Shadow
Sex and the life instincts in general are, of course, represented somewhere in Jung’s system. They are a part of an archetype called the shadow. It derives from our pre-human, animal past, when our concerns were limited to survival and reproduction, and when we weren’t self-conscious.

Archetypes – The Persona
The persona represents your public image. The word is, obviously, related to the word person and personality, and comes from a Latin word for mask. So the persona is the mask you put on before you show yourself to the outside world. Although it begins as an archetype, by the time we are finished realizing it, it is the part of us most distant from the collective unconscious.

The Complex
What happens when your entire self differs from your persona? If you deny and suppress it, the energy will go towards the development of a complex. A complex is a pattern of suppressed thoughts.

Here’s where the problem comes: If you pretend all your life that you are only good, that you don’t even have the capacity to lie and cheat and steal and kill, then all the times when you do good, that other side of you goes into a complex around the shadow. That complex will begin to develop a life of its own, and it will haunt you.
If it goes on long enough, the complex may take over, may “possess” you, and you might wind up with a multiple personality.

In ordinary human experience, the experience of being taken over by a complex is what we point to with language such as “I was beside myself” or “I don’t know what got into me.” Jung wrote vividly of the autonomous quality of the complexes.

 

Author: jungflor on May 2, 2011
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