Jung’s Theory of Personality #AtoZChallenge

Hi everyone and welcome to my letter J post in the #AtoZChallenge. On Monday, I discussed Freud, so it follows almost naturally that I’d be talking about Jung as well.

Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), like Freud, postulated that the human psyche consists of both an unconscious and a conscious part. He, however, believed that the unconscious consists of two parts: the personal unconscious (which is similar to Freud’s unconscious) and the collective unconscious, which includes archetypes universal to all humans.

The personal unconscious includes all of an individual’s acquired information that influences a person’s behavior but that has been forgotten or repressed. For clarity’s sake, it is not always negative. I think of this as the fact that positive triggers (also known as glimmers) are a thing too.

Jung says that the personal unconscious includes “complexes”, that is, associated collections of information that influence a person’s behavior.

The collective unconscious is mainly expressed in art, religion and other symbolic representations. It also shows up in dreams. The collective unconscious is universal. This is apparent from the fact that, as Jung observed in his interactions with psychotic patients in a mental hospital, there are certain underlying themes common to their dreams. According to Jung, the archetypes present in the collective unconscious, are the same for everyone across cultures and time periods. These archetypes, for example, include the Mother, the Hero, the Child, the Trickster, etc. I can’t help but notice how some of these are traditionally gendered.

Jung also believed people have a dominant attitude towards life: introversion or extraversion. They also have a dominant function, be it feeling, thinking, intuition or sensing. As such, Jung believed there are eight different personality types. As I’ve shared a few times, current thinking says that most people are not one type, but exist somewhere along a continuum.