Freud said that the goal of therapy was make the unconscious conscious. Indeed, he made this postulate the core of his work as a theorist. And furthermore, he defined the unconscious as something very unpleasant. To illustrate this, consider the following: it is a cauldron of established desires; a bottomless pit of incestuous and perverse longings; a bed of terrifying experiences that can still rise to consciousness. Frankly, this doesn’t sound like something I want to enter my consciousness!
Shortly after, a new thinker appeared who represented a great advance in the Personality Theories in Psychology: Carl Gustav Jung. Keep reading this Psychology-Online article if you want to know more about this well-known psychologist and psychiatrist.
Jung’s summary theory
Carl Jung, Freud’s young colleague, dedicated himself to the exploration of “inner space” through all his work. He set out to the task equipped with a background in Freudian theory, of course, and with a seemingly inexhaustible knowledge of mythology, religion and philosophy. But he was especially skilled in the symbolism of complex mystical traditions such as Gnosticism, alchemy, Kabbalah, and similar traditions in Hinduism and Buddhism. If there is a person who has a sense of the unconscious and the habits of it as capable of expressing itself only symbolically, it is Carl Jung.
Additionally, he had the capacity for very lucid dreaming and occasional illusions. In the autumn of 1913 he had a vision of a “monstrous flood” that sank almost all of Europe, its waters reaching the foothills of the mountains of his native Switzerland. He saw thousands of people drowning and the city shaking. Then the waters turned to blood. In the weeks following the vision, dreams of eternal winters and rivers of blood arose. He was scared that he was becoming psychotic.
But on August 1 of that year, the First World War began. Jung believed that there was somehow a connection between him as an individual and humanity in general that could not be explained. From this time until 1928, he engaged in a painful process of self-exploration that would form the basis of his future theory.
He carefully began to write down his dreams, fantasies and visions, and he drew, painted and sculpted them. He found that his experiences tended to take human forms, beginning with a wise old man and his companion, a little girl. The wise old man evolved, through several dreams, into a kind of spiritual guru. The little girl became “anima”, the female soul, which served as a means of communication (medium) between man and the deepest aspects of his unconscious.
A leather-brown goblin appeared as guard at the entrance to the unconscious. He was “the shadow,” a primitive companion of Jung’s Self. Jung dreamed that both he and the goblin had murdered the beautiful blonde girl, whom he called Siegfred. For him, this scene represented a caution regarding the dangers of work aimed solely at obtaining glory and heroism that would soon cause great pain throughout Europe (as well as a warning about the dangers of some of his own tendencies). regarding the heroic enterprise of Sigmund Freud!).
Jung also dreamed a lot about issues related to death; with the territory of the dead and their rebirth. For him, this represented the unconscious itself; not that “small” unconscious that Freud made so big, but a new collective unconscious of humanity. An unconscious that could contain all deaths, not just our personal ghosts. Jung began to consider that the mentally ill were possessed by these ghosts, at a time when no one was supposed to believe in them. By simply “recapturing” our mythologies, we would understand these ghosts, we would feel comfortable with death and thus overcome our mental pathologies.
Critics have suggested that Jung was simply ill when all this occurred. But Jung believed that if we want to understand the jungle, we cannot be content with just moving around its surroundings. We must enter it, no matter how strange or terrifying it may look.
Biography
Carl Gustav Jung was born on July 26, 1875 in a small town in Switzerland called Kessewil. His father, Paul Jung, was a rural clergyman and his mother was Emilie Preiswerk Jung. The boy Carl grew up surrounded by a very educated and extended family that included a few clergymen and some eccentrics as well.
Carl’s father introduced him to Latin at the age of 6, which he accepted from the beginning with great interest, especially in ancient language and literature. In addition to reading most of the modern languages of Western Europe, Jung also alternately read several other ancient languages such as Sanskrit (the original language of the Hindu sacred books).
Carl was more of a lonely boy in his adolescence, he didn’t care much about school and couldn’t stand competition. He attended a boarding school in Basel, Switzerland, where he encountered jealousy from his classmates. He began to use illness as an excuse, developing an embarrassing tendency to faint when he was under great pressure.
Although his first career choice was archaeology, he decided on medicine at the University of Basel. There he met the famous neurologist Kraft-Ebing, and came to work for him. Under his influence, he studied psychiatry.
Shortly after his bachelor’s degree, he settled in the Burghoeltzli Mental Hospital in Zurich under the tutelage of Eugene Bleuler, father and most important expert on schizophrenia. In 1903, he married Emma Rauschenbach. At that time, he also dedicated part of his time to teaching at the University of Zurich and maintaining a private practice. It was here that he invented word association.
Being a great admirer of Freud, he finally met him in Vienna in 1907. The story goes that after meeting him, Freud canceled all his appointments for the day, to continue a conversation that would last 13 continuous hours. Such was the impact of this meeting between these two privileged minds! Eventually, Freud regarded Jung as the crown prince of psychoanalysis and his right-hand man.
But Jung Freudian theory was never fully supported. Their relationship began to cool in 1909, during a trip to America. On this trip, they were both amusing themselves by analyzing each other’s dreams (apparently more casually than seriously), when at a certain point Freud demonstrated excessive resistance to Jung’s analytical efforts. Finally, Freud told him that they should stop, since he was afraid of losing his authority. Jung evidently felt insulted.
The First World War It was an especially painful period of self-examination for Jung. However, it was just the beginning of one of the most interesting theories of personality the world has ever seen.
After the war, Jung traveled widely; from tribes in Africa to populations in America and India. He retired in 1946, withdrawing from public life from this time until the death of his wife in 1955. He died on June 6, 1961 in Zurich.
Jung’s theory of personality
Jung’s theory divides the psyche into three parts. The first is the Self, which is identified with the conscious mind. Closely related is the personal unconscious, which includes anything that is not present in consciousness, but is not exempt from being present. The personal unconscious would be like what people understand by the unconscious in that it includes both memories, those that we can quickly attract to our consciousness and those memories that have been repressed for whatever reason. The difference is that it does not contain the instincts, as Freud included.
After describing the personal unconscious, Jung adds a part to the psyche that will make his theory stand out from the others: the collective unconscious. We could simply call it our “psychic inheritance.” It is the reservoir of our experience as a species; a type of knowledge that we are all born with and share. Even so, we are never fully aware of it. From it, an influence is established on all our experiences and behaviors, especially emotional ones; but we only know him indirectly, seeing these influences.
There are certain experiences that demonstrate the effects of the collective unconscious more clearly than others. The experience of love at first sight deja vu (the feeling of having previously been in the same situation) and the immediate recognition of certain symbols and meanings of some myths, can be considered as a sudden conjunction of the external and internal reality of the collective unconscious. Other examples that further illustrate the influence of the collective unconscious are the creative experiences shared by the artists and musicians of the world at all times, or the spiritual experiences of the mysticism of all religions, or the parallels of dreams, fantasies, mythologies, fairy tales and literature.
An interesting example currently being discussed is near death experience. It seems that many people from different parts of the world and with different cultural backgrounds experience very similar situations when they have been “rescued” from clinical death. They talk about feeling like they are leaving their body, seeing their bodies and the events around them clearly; that they feel like a “force” draws them towards a long tunnel that ends in a bright light; of seeing deceased relatives or religious figures waiting for them and a certain frustration at having to leave this happy scene and return to their bodies. Perhaps we are all “programmed” to experience death this way.
The theory of archetypes
The contents of the collective unconscious are the so-called archetypes. Jung also called them dominants, imagos, primordial or mythological images and other names, but the term archetype is the best known. It would be an innate (unlearned) tendency to experience things in a certain way.
The archetype has no form in itself, but acts as an “organizing principle” over the things we see or do. It works in the same way as instincts in Freudian theory. At first, the baby just wants something to eat, not knowing what she wants. That is to say, she presents an indefinite longing that, however, can be satisfied by some things and not by others. Later, with experience, the baby begins to crave more concrete things when she is hungry (a bottle, a cookie, a grilled lobster, a slice of New York-style pizza).
The archetype is like a black hole in space. We only know it’s there because of how it draws matter and light to itself.
The maternal archetype
This archetype is particularly useful as an example. All our ancestors had mothers. We have evolved in an environment that has included a mother or a…