Biography
- Carl Jung was born in Thurgau Switzerland July 26 1875 and died June 6th 1961 at the age of 85.
- Carl Jung was born Karle Gustav II Jung in Kesswil, in the Swiss canton (or county) of Thurgau, as the fourth but only surviving child of
Paul Achilles Jung and Emilie Preiswerk. His father was a poor rural pastor in the Swiss Reformed Church while his mother came from a wealthy and established Swiss family. - Although his first career choice was archeology, he went on to study medicine at the University of Basel. While working under the famous neurologist Krafft-Ebing, he settled on psychiatry as his career.
- He later worked in the Burghölzli, a psychiatric hospital in Zürich.
- In 1906, he published Studies in Word Association and later sent a copy of this book to Sigmund Freud, after which a close friendship between these two men followed for some six years
Psychological approach: Carl Jung emphasized understanding the psyche through exploring the worlds of dreams, art, mythology, religion and philosophy. He considered the process of individuation necessary for a person to become whole. This is a psychological process of integrating the conscious with the unconscious while still maintaining conscious autonomy. Individuation was the central concept of Analytical Psychology.
Theory
Carl Jung theory starts with divided the psyche into three parts, similar to Freud. He believed that the psyche was divided into:
- Ego, similar to Freud, which is the conscious. Everything we are aware in the present moment.
- Personal Unconscious, this is the part of psyche that isn’t presently conscious, but can be. For example, memory, you are not consciously thinking about a memory but if you need to recall on it you can.
- Collective Unconscious, which is a more difficult concept and easily misinterpreted, it is the layer of the unconscious that contained patterns of psychic perception common to all humanity, the archetypes.
Archetypes
They are the contents of the collective unconscious. An archetype is the unlearned tendency to experience things in a certain way.
Some types of Archetypes
- Mother Archetype – finding a nurturing figure, normally associated with a female figure, Carl said that someone who fails to indentify a mother figure normally found escapes in other institutions like the church.
- The Shadow – sex and instinct part of our collective unconscious. It’s normally thought of as evil, but Carl thought it was more amoral, like animal instincts, they have the capabilities of nurturing, but they would kill brutally if needed.
- Anima and animus – this is the characterizing of man and women. Carl believed all humans possess both qualities.
- Other – father, family, child, hero, maiden, wise old man, animal, trickster, God, and Persona
Dynamics of the Psyche
Three Principles:
- Principle of Opposites – we understand thing in opposites, good vs. bad, black vs. white, we understand one because we know the opposite. Jung believed opposition created power.
- Principle of Equivalence – not suppressing the bad. This is understanding it exist but not using. If is suppressed a complex happens and we explode eventually.
- Principle of Entropy – this is the cool down or mixture of our opposites. When we are young we have extreme opposite, but when we get older we accept our opposite and have a good mixture this is called transcendence
