Theorist Carl Jung

Carl Jung

Carl Jung was a Swiss-German psychoanalyst. Serving with S. Freud was instrumental in bringing psychology into the twentieth century by developing several theories of the unconscious. Born Carl Gustav Jung on July 26, 1875 in a small village of Kessewil. A well-educated family surrounded Jung, including clergymen and some eccentrics. Jung began Latin at the age of six with an interest of ancient literature. Jung could read several languages including Sanskrit; which is the original language of the Hindu holy books.

Carl was a solitary adolesant who attended boarding school in Basel, Switzerland. Although his first career was first to be in archeology, he went on to study medicine at the University of Basil. Towards the end of his studies, his readings and working under the famous Krafft-Ebing persuaded him to specialize in psychiatric medicine. Jung developed his own approach to the study of the human mind. When working in a Swiss hospital with schizophrenic patients and working with Sigmund Freud, he took a closer look at the depths of the human unconscious.

Fascinated with what he saw along with his own past visions from the unconscious nearly leading him to psychosis. It awoke a revolutionary appreciation of how close his own dreams were to the myths and rituals. Forcing Jung to acknowledge forces within the human psyche witch the Freudian view had no explanation. Jung began his career as an admirer and an associate of Freud but later became a dissenter and developed his own psychoanalysis and his own method of psychotherapy, which later his approach became known as analytical psychology.

The part of the psyche that makes Jung’s theory standout from all others is the collective unconscious or your psychic inheritance. The collective conscious can be thought of as the DNA of your human psyche. As all humans share a common physical heritage and predisposition towards specific physical forms, all humans also have a common psychological predisposition. This is the kind of knowledge that you are born with. It influences all of our experiences and behaviors and especially the emotional ones.

There are experiences that show the effects of the collective unconscious clearer than others. For example: love at first sight, or dйjа vu, and the immediate recognition of certain symbols and the meanings of certain myths. Examples would be the creative experiences shared by artists, and musicians, or the spiritual experiences of mystics of all regions. The parallels in dreams, fantasies, mythologies, fairy tales, and literature would also be examples.

The contents of the collective unconscious are called the archetypes, which could also be called dominants, imagoes, and mythological images, or primordial images. Archetypes are an unclear tendency to experience things in a certain way but acts as an organizing principle on things we see or do. Contents that were once conscious but have been forgotten or repressed is that of the personal unconscious, where contents of the collective unconscious have never been in consciousness. So the contents of the collective unconscious are not acquired but due to heredity.

An archetype called the shadow is somewhat like the dark side of our ego’s. It is the prehuman, and animal past, which gives us our sex and the life instincts in general. When our concerns are limited to survival and reproduction, and when we weren’t self-conscious. The shadow does what it wants and becomes a trashcan for the parts of ourselves that we can’t admit to. Symbols of the shadow would be the snake, the dragon, monsters, demons, and other dark figures of the same gender as the dreamer.

There are constructive and deconstructive types of shadow. On the destructive side a person might see them selves as ugly but in reality is beautiful, also if someone sees them self as kind will have a shadow that is unkind. On the constructive side, a shadow will represent hidden positive influences. Denial, projection, integration, and transmutation are the four ways humans’ deal with reality threw shadows.

A part of our persona or the way we represent our public image is the anima and animus. Jung and others felt that there is a bisexual side to all of us. As we are a fetus and begin our lives we have undifferentiated sex organs that gradually becomes male or female due to the influence of hormones, also when we become infants we come under the influence of society thus gradually molding us into men and women. The animus includes a masculine, assertive element, the male aspect present in the collective unconscious of women, and the anima includes a female, passive element, and the female aspect present in the unconscious of men.