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Theories of Personality: Carl Jung

Biography

  • 1875 - 1961

  • Very metaphysical

  • At a young age, he turned from reason to his dreams, visions, and fantasies

  • At critical times, Jung resolved problems and made decisions based on what his unconscious told him through his dreams

  • Became interested in Freud’s work in 1900 when he read “The Interpretation of Dreams”

  • While a follower of Freud, he was never an uncritical one

  • Originally trained with Freud

  • Broke from Freudian analysis

  • EVENT: Freud and Jung analyzed each others’ dreams

    • Freud showed resistance to Jung’s analysis

    • Freud stopped, saying he would lose authority

  • Felt Freud overemphasized sexual aspects

  • Experience with developing sciences of Anthropology and Sociology

  • Spent time living in different cultures

Major Theories

  • Focused on the unconscious and conscious mind … he believed that the unconscious played more of a role in controlling our thought process (especially during dreaming)

  • The collective unconscious was also more dominant factor in the development of human personality

    • Behavior -> Ancestor

Introduction – Basic Principles

  • Psychic Energy

    • Libido

    • Contrary to Freud’s sexual energy

  • Principle of Opposites

    • Our personality consists of opposing/competing forces that we strive to balance

    • Ex. Conscious vs Unconscious

    • Ex. Introversion vs. Extraversion

    • Opposition (conflict) creates energy

      • Propels movement forward

    • One force comes with an opposing force

    • Libido drives but more holistic

    • Experience rather than biological

    • More spiritual ideas

    • Transcends biological needs

  • Principle of Equivalence

    • Energy created by opposites is given to both sides equally

    • Each pair in opposite has = amounts of energy

    • Increase in one area pulls energy from other area

    • Too much on one side:

      • May spur growth/create problems

      • Complex is said to develop

    • One are diminished -> will go to other areas

  • Principle of Entropy

    • Tendency for opposites to come together – be less extreme opposites

    • When younger, degree of opposites tends to be extreme

    • As one grows, able to tolerate differences/opposites (doesn’t have to be one or the other – can be both)

    • We strive toward balancing the opposites

      • Natural tendency for growth

      • Balance -> not free of conflict

      • Individuation: term used for goal of unity of our personality (unification of opposing forces into whole)

    • Extreme opposites -> tendency to find balance

Core Concepts

Ego

  • Conscious mind

  • Center of consciousness

  • Characterized by one dominant attitude (introversion/extraversion)

    • Determines perception of and reaction to environment

  • Characterized by 2 functions:

    • Thinking/Feeling: rational, logical

    • Sensing/Intuiting: based on experiences

Personal Unconscious

  • Similar to Freud’s conception of preconscious and unconscious

  • Contains memories that can be recalled as well as those that have been repressed

  • Complex: cluster of emotionally-charged memories that influence behavior

    • Arise from need to adapt and inability to meet that need/challenge

    • Develop over time

    • Identified through word association tests

      • Ex. Mother complex, guilt complex, hero complex

Collective Unconscious

  • Psychological residue of man’s ancestral past

    • Reservoir of mankind’s experiences as species

    • accumulated memories of mankind’s experiences

    • Seen in themes and symbols in cultures (why we respond to them):

      • Parallels in myths, fairy tales, literature, art, etc.

      • Dreams

      • Deja vu experiences

      • Near death experiences

    • Passed on unconsciously

    • Shared

Archetypes

  • Inherited predisposition to experience things in certain ways

  • “Symbols” for significant disposition

  • A way to understand a “role”

  • Transcends culture

  • More like an emotion

  • Jung described them as “thought-forms” -> implied as much feeling as thought

  • Experience archetypes as emotions associated with significant life events such as birth, adolescence, marriage, and death or with extreme reactions to danger

  • Jung found common archetypal symbols in cultures that were so widely separated in time and location that there was no possibility of direct influence

Additional Archetypes

  • Persona

    • Your public personality, aspects of yourself that you reveal to others

    • masks

  • Shadow

    • Prehistoric fear of wild animals, represents animal side of human nature

    • Dark; undesirable parts of ourselves

  • Anima

    • Feminine archetype in men

  • Animus

    • Masculine archetype in women

  • Anima/Animus: opposing forces in a person

  • Others

    • God, Hero, Nurturing Mother, Wise Old Man, Wicked Witch, Devil, Powerful Father

Examples of Archetypes

  • Family Archetypes

    • Father: stern, powerful, controlling

    • Mother: feeding, nurturing, soothing

    • Child: birth, beginnings, salvation

  • Animal Archetypes

    • Faithful Dog: unquestioning loyalty

    • Enduring Horse: never giving up

  • Story Archetypes

    • Hero: rescuer, champion

    • Maiden: purity, desire

    • Wise Old Man: knowledge, guidance

    • Magician: mysterious, powerful

    • Witch/Sorceress: dangerous

    • Trickster: deceiving, hidden

Archetypes of Collective Unconscious

  • Self

    • Center of psyche

    • Represents our striving for unity of opposing forces

    • Individuation

      • Process by which individual integrates opposing tendencies

      • Indivisible

      • Contradictions do not overwhelm

    • Personified by Jesus Christ and Buddha

    • Perfection only completed at death

    • Symbolized in mandala

    • Drive => to become better

Theory of Psychological Type

  • Attempt to explain individual differences

  • Began with concepts of introversion and extraversion

  • Added functions (thinking-feeling, sensing-intuiting) later

  • Represents preferences rather than exclusive talents

  • Myers-Briggs Type Indicator

  • Explains why one person is different to the other

  • Attitudes

    • Orientations

    • Our tendency to act in certain ways; how we orient to the world

    • Introversion

      • Oriented toward inner world (object -> ego)

      • Prefer inner world of thoughts, feelings, dreams, etc.

      • Focus on concepts, ideas, internal expressions

      • More oriented to collective unconscious and archetypes

    • Extraversion

      • Oriented to outside world (ego -> object)

      • Prefer world of things and people

      • Focus on others and thinks aloud

      • More oriented toward persona and outer reality

  • Functions: rational functions

    • Judging: how we come to conclusions about what we perceive

      • Thinking

        • Decide impersonally on basis of logical conclusions

        • Tell what it is

        • Naming and interpreting experience

      • Feeling

        • Decisions based on personal and social values

        • Tell what it is worth

        • Evaluating an experience for its emotional worth to us

  • Functions: nonrational functions

    • Perceiving: how we gather/take in information

      • Sensing

        • Pay attention to observable facts/events through 5 senses (seeing, hearing, touching, etc.)

        • Good at looking and listening

      • Intuiting

        • Focus on meanings, relationships, possibilities

        • Unconscious sensing – knowing without sensing

        • Unconscious processing

  • Types

    • Each type represents preferences for one over the other

    • Dominant function => function used most enthusiastically

    • Development and type

      • Youth and Adolescence

        • Develop dominant function

        • Most natural - feels most comfortable

      • Midlife

        • People tend to be motivated toward completion of personality

        • Begin to add neglected functions

Theories of Personality: Carl Jung

Biography

  • 1875 - 1961

  • Very metaphysical

  • At a young age, he turned from reason to his dreams, visions, and fantasies

  • At critical times, Jung resolved problems and made decisions based on what his unconscious told him through his dreams

  • Became interested in Freud’s work in 1900 when he read “The Interpretation of Dreams”

  • While a follower of Freud, he was never an uncritical one

  • Originally trained with Freud

  • Broke from Freudian analysis

  • EVENT: Freud and Jung analyzed each others’ dreams

    • Freud showed resistance to Jung’s analysis

    • Freud stopped, saying he would lose authority

  • Felt Freud overemphasized sexual aspects

  • Experience with developing sciences of Anthropology and Sociology

  • Spent time living in different cultures

Major Theories

  • Focused on the unconscious and conscious mind … he believed that the unconscious played more of a role in controlling our thought process (especially during dreaming)

  • The collective unconscious was also more dominant factor in the development of human personality

    • Behavior -> Ancestor

Introduction – Basic Principles

  • Psychic Energy

    • Libido

    • Contrary to Freud’s sexual energy

  • Principle of Opposites

    • Our personality consists of opposing/competing forces that we strive to balance

    • Ex. Conscious vs Unconscious

    • Ex. Introversion vs. Extraversion

    • Opposition (conflict) creates energy

      • Propels movement forward

    • One force comes with an opposing force

    • Libido drives but more holistic

    • Experience rather than biological

    • More spiritual ideas

    • Transcends biological needs

  • Principle of Equivalence

    • Energy created by opposites is given to both sides equally

    • Each pair in opposite has = amounts of energy

    • Increase in one area pulls energy from other area

    • Too much on one side:

      • May spur growth/create problems

      • Complex is said to develop

    • One are diminished -> will go to other areas

  • Principle of Entropy

    • Tendency for opposites to come together – be less extreme opposites

    • When younger, degree of opposites tends to be extreme

    • As one grows, able to tolerate differences/opposites (doesn’t have to be one or the other – can be both)

    • We strive toward balancing the opposites

      • Natural tendency for growth

      • Balance -> not free of conflict

      • Individuation: term used for goal of unity of our personality (unification of opposing forces into whole)

    • Extreme opposites -> tendency to find balance

Core Concepts

Ego

  • Conscious mind

  • Center of consciousness

  • Characterized by one dominant attitude (introversion/extraversion)

    • Determines perception of and reaction to environment

  • Characterized by 2 functions:

    • Thinking/Feeling: rational, logical

    • Sensing/Intuiting: based on experiences

Personal Unconscious

  • Similar to Freud’s conception of preconscious and unconscious

  • Contains memories that can be recalled as well as those that have been repressed

  • Complex: cluster of emotionally-charged memories that influence behavior

    • Arise from need to adapt and inability to meet that need/challenge

    • Develop over time

    • Identified through word association tests

      • Ex. Mother complex, guilt complex, hero complex

Collective Unconscious

  • Psychological residue of man’s ancestral past

    • Reservoir of mankind’s experiences as species

    • accumulated memories of mankind’s experiences

    • Seen in themes and symbols in cultures (why we respond to them):

      • Parallels in myths, fairy tales, literature, art, etc.

      • Dreams

      • Deja vu experiences

      • Near death experiences

    • Passed on unconsciously

    • Shared

Archetypes

  • Inherited predisposition to experience things in certain ways

  • “Symbols” for significant disposition

  • A way to understand a “role”

  • Transcends culture

  • More like an emotion

  • Jung described them as “thought-forms” -> implied as much feeling as thought

  • Experience archetypes as emotions associated with significant life events such as birth, adolescence, marriage, and death or with extreme reactions to danger

  • Jung found common archetypal symbols in cultures that were so widely separated in time and location that there was no possibility of direct influence

Additional Archetypes

  • Persona

    • Your public personality, aspects of yourself that you reveal to others

    • masks

  • Shadow

    • Prehistoric fear of wild animals, represents animal side of human nature

    • Dark; undesirable parts of ourselves

  • Anima

    • Feminine archetype in men

  • Animus

    • Masculine archetype in women

  • Anima/Animus: opposing forces in a person

  • Others

    • God, Hero, Nurturing Mother, Wise Old Man, Wicked Witch, Devil, Powerful Father

Examples of Archetypes

  • Family Archetypes

    • Father: stern, powerful, controlling

    • Mother: feeding, nurturing, soothing

    • Child: birth, beginnings, salvation

  • Animal Archetypes

    • Faithful Dog: unquestioning loyalty

    • Enduring Horse: never giving up

  • Story Archetypes

    • Hero: rescuer, champion

    • Maiden: purity, desire

    • Wise Old Man: knowledge, guidance

    • Magician: mysterious, powerful

    • Witch/Sorceress: dangerous

    • Trickster: deceiving, hidden

Archetypes of Collective Unconscious

  • Self

    • Center of psyche

    • Represents our striving for unity of opposing forces

    • Individuation

      • Process by which individual integrates opposing tendencies

      • Indivisible

      • Contradictions do not overwhelm

    • Personified by Jesus Christ and Buddha

    • Perfection only completed at death

    • Symbolized in mandala

    • Drive => to become better

Theory of Psychological Type

  • Attempt to explain individual differences

  • Began with concepts of introversion and extraversion

  • Added functions (thinking-feeling, sensing-intuiting) later

  • Represents preferences rather than exclusive talents

  • Myers-Briggs Type Indicator

  • Explains why one person is different to the other

  • Attitudes

    • Orientations

    • Our tendency to act in certain ways; how we orient to the world

    • Introversion

      • Oriented toward inner world (object -> ego)

      • Prefer inner world of thoughts, feelings, dreams, etc.

      • Focus on concepts, ideas, internal expressions

      • More oriented to collective unconscious and archetypes

    • Extraversion

      • Oriented to outside world (ego -> object)

      • Prefer world of things and people

      • Focus on others and thinks aloud

      • More oriented toward persona and outer reality

  • Functions: rational functions

    • Judging: how we come to conclusions about what we perceive

      • Thinking

        • Decide impersonally on basis of logical conclusions

        • Tell what it is

        • Naming and interpreting experience

      • Feeling

        • Decisions based on personal and social values

        • Tell what it is worth

        • Evaluating an experience for its emotional worth to us

  • Functions: nonrational functions

    • Perceiving: how we gather/take in information

      • Sensing

        • Pay attention to observable facts/events through 5 senses (seeing, hearing, touching, etc.)

        • Good at looking and listening

      • Intuiting

        • Focus on meanings, relationships, possibilities

        • Unconscious sensing – knowing without sensing

        • Unconscious processing

  • Types

    • Each type represents preferences for one over the other

    • Dominant function => function used most enthusiastically

    • Development and type

      • Youth and Adolescence

        • Develop dominant function

        • Most natural - feels most comfortable

      • Midlife

        • People tend to be motivated toward completion of personality

        • Begin to add neglected functions

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