Carl Jung

Structure of Personality Dynamics of Personality

 Conscious Ego  Principle of Opposites
 Personal Unconscious  Principle of Equivalence
 Collective Unconscious  Principle of Entropy
 Archetypes
 Persona
 Shadow
 Anima/Animus
 Self
Stages of Development Psychological Types
 Childhood (Birth to Adolescence)  Introversion
 Young Adulthood (Adolescence to 40  Extraversion
years) Four functions of the psyche
 Middle Age  Sensing
 Old Age  Thinking
 Intuition
 Feeling
Assessment in Jung’s Theory
 Word Association Test
 Dream Analysis
 Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)
Comparison of Freud and Jung Theory
 Early colleague of Freud but later disagreed with him and pursued his own theoretical
formulations.
 Though his theory is derived from Freud’s psychoanalysis, it also differs from it on
several dimensions.
 Though Jung gave a prominent role to the unconscious, he added a new dimension to it –
the inherited experiences of human and pre-human species.
 He also did not agree with Freud on the role of sexuality and broadened the definition of
libido to a more generalized psychic energy.
 Another point of major difference concerns the forces that influence human personality.
Jung proposed that we are shaped not only by our past but also by our future. Human
beings are affected by what happened during their childhood and also by what they aspire
in the future.
Biographical Sketch
Admirer of Freud and met him in Vienna in 1907.
Freud saw Jung as the crown prince of psychoanalysis. Many contemporaries believed that Jung
would continue Freud’s psychoanalysis but this did not happen. Ideological and temperamental
differences made the two personalities split.
Jung claimed that Freud’s ideas were one-sided and too personalistic. Their relationship came to
an end forever when Jung published psychology of the Unconscious which argued against some
of the Freud’s ideas.
The end of his relationship with Freud has a profoundly disturbing effect on Jung. He withdrew
from psychoanalytic movement and suffered a six year log breakdown.
In 1912, Symbols and Transformations of the Libido was published.
Jung wanted to understand and analyze the symbolic meaning of the contents of the unconscious.
Hence, he name his discipline ‘Analytical Psychology.’
Structure of Personality
In Jungian psychology, the total personality is called the psyche. This Latin word originally
meant ‘spirit’ or ‘soul’ but in modern times it has come to mean ‘mind’.
The psyche embraces all the conscious and unconscious thoughts, feelings, and behavior of an
individual. It is composed of several distinct but interdependent and interacting systems. The
main ones are:
 Conscious ego
 Personal unconscious
 Collective unconscious
1. Conscious Ego
Like Freud, Jung also proposed ego as the conscious part of personality. It is concerned with
perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and memories.
It is the awareness that an individual has of himself and is responsible for the feeling of self-
identity.
It helps the individual to carry out normal activities of waking life and thus becomes the
individuals internal and external point of reference in the field of consciousness.
2. Personal Unconscious
Consists of those thoughts and feelings that are not currently in the individual’s field of
awareness. These might have been repressed, suppressed, forgotten, or ignored either because of
their ego threatening nature or simply because they were too unimportant.
However, like Freud preconscious, the contents of the personal unconscious are accessible to
consciousness,
Jung also proposed that the personal unconscious contains material both from the past and the
future.
 Complex
A major component of the personal unconscious
It is a pattern of thoughts, feelings, and memories about a particular theme.
Organized around a particular person or object.
Jung believed that complexes arise from childhood as well as adult experiences and also
from ancestral experiences.
Can be both conscious and unconscious.
Some complexes can be harmful and others can be useful.
E.g. Complex about power or status; achievement complex
3. Collective Unconscious
Deepest as well as the least accessible part of the psyche.
Basically the ‘psychic inheritance’ of the person’s evolutionary development and is a reservoir of
experience of the species as a consequence of repeated experiences over many generations; it is a
kind of knowledge that a person is born with, though the individual can never be directly
conscious of it.
It influences all experiences and behavior of the individual, especially the emotional one.
The collective unconscious is ‘Transpersonal’ in the sense that everyone’s collective
unconscious around the world is the same. Jung proposes that the collective unconscious is
universal because of the similarity of the brain structure in all human beings.
Individuals do not inherit racial memories or representations as such. What they inherit is the
possibility of reviving experience of past generations. These are predispositions that help the
individuals to react to the world in a particular manner. E.g. As human beings have always had
mothers, babies are born with a predisposition to perceive and react to a mother; the experience
of love at first site.
Thus, the collective unconscious becomes the inherited foundation of the whole personality.
 Archetypes
The ancient experiences contained in the collective unconscious are manifested by recurring
themes or patterns, which Jung called Archetypes.
Also referred to as primordial images.
Archetypes do not have content, only form.
They are not unconscious ideas, rather predispositions to perceive.
They are not memories of past experiences, but ‘forms without content’ representing the
possibility of a certain type of perception and action. They offer a certain kind of readiness to
produce the same or similar mythical ideas over and over again.
To Jung, they are ‘the ruling powers, the god, images of the dominant laws and principles, and
regularly occurring events in the soul’s cycle of experience.
Bases on years of psychiatric work and phenomenological research in religions and mythologies,
Jung identified several key motifs that the archetypes van take. The ones that he felt were
especially important include:
 Persona
 Shadow
  Anima/animus
 Self
1. Persona
The mask we wear to make a particular impression on others; it may reveal or conceal our real
nature.
As human beings cannot afford to confront the world with their true inner feelings, they must
fashion an outward appearance that will satisfy the demands of society. This protective shield or
artificial personality is called the ‘persona’
It is the compromise between a person’s real individuality and society’s expectations.
Generally, people with underdeveloped personas seem to be incompetent, dull, and blind to the
realities of the world; whereas an overdeveloped persona intrudes upon the ego.
2. Shadow
The negative or inferior side of the personality.
Made up of all the reprehensible characteristics that each of us wishes to deny, including animal
tendencies that Jung claimed we inherit from our infra-human ancestors.
Antithesis of the persona.
The power of shadow is seen when a person is overcome by violent and uncontrollable rage. The
shadow is projected onto other people.
The more unaware of the shadow we are, the blacker and denser it is.
The more dissociated it is from conscious life, the more it will display a compensatory demonic
dynamism.
3. Anima/Animus
Masculine and feminine archetypes that are usually present in varying degrees in all individuals.
An anima or animus is usually a persona that often takes on the characteristics of the opposite
sex.
 Anima: Personification of all feminine tendencies in a man’s psyche. It comes from three
sources:
 Individual man’s experience with women as companion
 Man’s own femininity – rooted presumably in the minority of female genes and
hormones present in man’s body.
  The inherited collective image that has been formed from man’s collective experience of
women throughout the centuries.
 Animus: personification of all masculine tendencies in a woman.
Said to be woman’s image of a man.

Jung believe that these archetypes comes from millennia of generations of Men and women
living together and slowly picking up parts of each other’s personalities. A well-adjusted
personality integrates the male and female attributes, allowing both to find satisfactory
expression.
4. Self
Midpoint of the personality, a centre between consciousness and unconsciousness.
Signifies the harmony and balance between the various opposing qualities that makeup the
psyche and represents the unity of the total personality system.
Regulating centre of personality and mediates between the conscious, unconscious, and the
collective unconscious.
The self does not really emerge until the other systems of the psyche have developed. This
occurs around middle age. Actualization of self not only involves goals and plans for the future
but also a correct perception of one’s abilities.