Analytical Psychology and Humanistic Theories

Chapter 4: Analytical Psychology

Biographical Highlights of Carl Jung

  • Born on July 26, 1875.
  • Came from a family with a strong religious background; both his father and maternal grandfather were ministers in the Swiss Reformed Church.
  • His paternal grandfather was a prominent physician, also named Carl Gustav Jung.
  • Had several pastors as relatives.
  • His mother's family had a tradition of spiritualism and mysticism; his maternal grandfather was believed to have occult practices, including communicating with the dead.
  • Experienced being an only child.
  • Father associated with reliability but had strong doubts about religious faith and was described as a sentimental idealist.
  • Mother associated with unreliability and was described as having two dispositions.
  • The mother had two dispositions:
    • Realistic, practical, and warmhearted.
    • Unstable, mystical, clairvoyant, archaic, and ruthless (Jung referred to this as the No. 2 or night personality of the mom).
  • Moved to Basel at age four.
  • Early dreams influenced his concept of the collective unconscious.
  • During school, Jung became aware of two separate aspects of himself:
    • No. 1 personality: extraverted and in tune with the objective world.
    • No. 2 personality: introverted and directed inward toward his subjective world.

Levels of the Psyche

  • Conscious Level: Images that are sensed by the ego.
    • Ego: The center of consciousness.
    • Self: The center of personality, largely unconscious, and more comprehensive than the ego.
  • Unconscious Level: Contains elements with no relationship to the ego.
    • Personal Unconscious: Includes repressed, forgotten, or subliminally perceived experiences.
      • Contains repressed infantile memories and impulses, forgotten events, and experiences perceived below the threshold of consciousness.
      • Formed by individual experiences and is unique to each person.
      • Complexes: Emotionally toned conglomerations of associated ideas within the personal unconscious.
    • Collective Unconscious: Has roots in the ancestral past of the entire species.
      • Contents are inherited and passed down through generations as psychic potential.
      • Archetypes: Forms without specific content that develop and emerge through repetition; innate potential or blueprint activated by experience.
      • The elements of the collective unconscious are active and influence thoughts, emotions, and actions.
      • Instinct: An unconscious physical impulse toward action.
      • Archetype: Its psychic counterpart.
      • Both are unconsciously determined and help shape personality.

Archetypes

  • Archetypes are ancient or archaic images derived from the collective unconscious.
  • Emotionally toned collections of associated images with a biological basis, expressed through dreams, fantasies, and delusions.
    • Persona: The personality shown to the world.
    • Shadow: Darkness and repression of objectionable qualities.
    • Anima: Feminine side of men, leading to irrational moods and feelings.
    • Animus: Masculine side of women, influencing thinking and reasoning.
    • Great Mother: Represents nourishment and fertility.
    • Wise Old Man: Embodies wisdom and meaning, representing pre-existing knowledge of life’s mysteries.
    • Hero: Represented by a powerful person, symbolizing an ideal personality.
    • Self: Innate disposition towards growth, perfection, and completion, symbolized by the mandala (represented by the Yin and Yang).

Dynamics of Personality

  • Causality (previous experience) and Teleology (goals) shape human behavior.
  • Progression (forward flow of psychic energy) and Regression (backward flow of psychic energy) can activate the process of healthy personality development when working together.

Psychological Types

  • Attitudes: Reactions
    • Introversion: Psychic energy orientation towards the subjective, away from the objective.
    • Extraversion: Psychic energy orientation towards the objective, away from the subjective.
  • Functions: Orientations or types
    • Thinking: Enables people to recognize meaning, producing a chain of ideas.
    • Feeling: Informs people about value or worth, describing the evaluation process.
    • Sensing: Tells people that something exists, receiving sensations and transmitting them to perceptual consciousness.
    • Intuition: Works beyond consciousness, allowing people to know about something without knowing how they know.

Psychological Types (Combination)

  • Extraverted-Thinking: Relies heavily on concrete/objective thoughts, basing actions on intellectual analysis of objective data. Lives by a general intellectual formula or universal moral code, expecting others to obey it. Represses the feeling function and may neglect personal interests. If extreme, may become petty, bigoted, tyrannical, or hostile.
  • Introverted-Thinking: Reacts to external stimuli, but interpretation is colored more by personal meaning than by objective facts. Tends to be impractical and indifferent to objective concerns, avoiding notice and seeming cold or arrogant. Appears caught up in their own ideas. If extreme, can become rigid, withdrawn, or impolite, confusing subjective truth with their own personality.
  • Extraverted-Feeling: Uses objective data to make evaluations, following fashion and harmonizing personal feelings with social values. Thinking is subordinate to feeling. When extreme, feeling may become extravagant and dependent on momentary enthusiasms. Repressed thinking may erupt in infantile ways, leading to attribution of dreaded characteristics to loved ones.
  • Introverted-Feeling: Bases judgment on subjective perceptions rather than objective facts, appearing brooding and inaccessible. Aims to be subtle, making little attempt to impress, and generally fails to respond to the feelings of others. Inwardly, feelings are deep and intense, with secret religious or poetic tendencies. When extreme, may become domineering and vain. Negative repressed thinking may be projected, leading to paranoia and secret rivalries.
  • Extraverted-Sensing: Perceives stimuli objectively as it exists in reality, seeking many concrete sensations, preferably pleasurable ones. If normal, such persons are sensualists attracted by physical characteristics. Not reflective or introspective, with no ideals except sensory enjoyment. If extreme, they are often crudely sensual and exploit situations for personal pleasure. When neurotic, repressed intuition may be projected, leading to suspicion or jealousy.
  • Introverted-Sensing: Largely influenced by subjective sensations, reacting subjectively to events in a way unrelated to objective criteria. May seem neutral or indifferent to objective reality. Alternatively, the world may be perceived as illusory or amusing. In extreme cases, this may result in an inability to distinguish illusion from reality. The subjective world of archaic images may dominate consciousness completely. Repressed intuition may be expressed in vaguely imagined threats.
  • Extraverted-Intuition: Oriented towards facts in the external world. Excellent diagnostician and exploiter of situations, seeing exciting possibilities in every venture. Inspires others with conviction, doing well in initiating new projects. However, easily bored and stifled by unchanging conditions, which often result in a waste of life and talents. Extremely, may cause compulsively tied to people/ objects that stir in them primitive sensations such as pleasure, pain or fear leading to phobias, and compulsions.
  • Introverted-Intuition: Guided by unconscious perception of facts that are basically subjective. Can be either an artist, seer, or crank, having a visionary ideal that reveals strange, mysterious things; enigmatic, 'unearthly' people who stand aloof from ordinary society. They have little interest in explaining or rationalizing their personal vision, but are content merely to proclaim it, partly making them often misunderstood. The person's life then becomes symbolic, taking on the nature of a Great Work, mission or spiritual-moral quest. If neurotic, repressed sensation may express itself in primitive, instinctual ways and, often suffer from compulsions.

Development of Personality

  • Stages of Development:
    • Childhood
      • Anarchic
      • Monarchic
      • Dualistic phase
    • Youth
    • Middle Life
    • Old Age
  • Self-Realization = psychological rebirth

Jung’s Methods of Investigation

  • Word Association Test: To uncover feeling-toned complexes.
  • Dream Analysis: To uncover elements from the personal and collective unconscious and integrate them into consciousness to facilitate self-realization.
  • Active Imagination: To reveal archetypal images emerging from the unconscious.
  • Psychotherapy: To make neurotic patients become healthy and encourage healthy people to work independently towards self-realization.

Part 4: Humanistic Theories

Humanism

  • An approach that focuses on human experience, problems, potentials, and ideals.
  • Human Nature: Traits, qualities, potentials, and behavior patterns most characteristic of humans.
  • Free Choice: The ability to choose that is NOT controlled by genetics, learning, or unconscious forces.
  • Subjective Experience: Private perceptions of reality.

Maslow’s Theory

  • Abraham Maslow is considered the father of the humanistic movement.
  • Observed the lives of healthy and creative people to develop his theory.
  • Hierarchy of Needs: The motivational component of Maslow’s theory, in which our innate needs, which motivate our actions, are hierarchically arranged.
  • Self-Actualization: The fullest realization of a person’s potential.

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

  • Self-actualization
    • Self-actualization as expressed through meta-needs: wholeness, perfection, completion, justice, richness, simplicity, aliveness, beauty, goodness, uniqueness, playfulness, truth, autonomy, meaningfulness
  • Esteem and self-esteem
  • Love and belonging
  • Safety and security
  • Physiological needs: air, food, water, sleep, sex, etc.

Characteristics of Self-Actualized People

  • Efficient perceptions of reality
  • Comfortable acceptance of self, others, and nature
  • Spontaneity
  • Task Centering
  • Autonomy
  • Continued freshness of appreciation
  • Fellowship with humanity
  • Profound interpersonal relationships
  • Comfort with solitude
  • Non-hostile sense of humor
  • Peak experiences

Some Self-Actualized People

  • Albert Einstein
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • William James
  • Thomas Jefferson
  • Abraham Lincoln
  • Eleanor Roosevelt
  • Albert Schweitzer
  • Mahatma Gandhi

Carl Roger’s Self Theory

  • Carl Rogers: American psychologist; believed that personality formed as a result of our strivings to reach our full human potential.
  • Fully Functioning Person: Lives in harmony with his/her deepest feelings and impulses.
  • Self-Image: Total subjective perception of your body and personality.
  • Conditions of Worth: Behaviors and attitudes for which other people, starting with our parents, will give us positive regard.
  • Unconditional Positive Regard: Unshakable love and approval.
  • Positive Self-Regard: Thinking of oneself as a good, lovable, worthwhile person.

Evaluation of Humanistic Theories

  • Many of the Humanists’ claims are untestable.
  • Humanists may have an overly-positive, rosy view of humankind. They do not look at the “dark side.”
  • For the Humanists, the cause of all our problems lies not in ourselves, but in others.
  • Maslow’s characterization of self-actualized individuals is very biased toward a certain philosophical position.
  • Most of the people Maslow identified as self-actualized had rather serious psychological problems.

Interpreting the Briggs-Myer

  • Extraversion: sociability, energized by people, lonely when alone (75%)
  • Intraversion: territorial, enjoys being alone, private, drained by people (25%)
  • Sensation: practical, trusts facts; learns through experience; wants to deal with what’s real
  • Intuition: innovative, fantasizes; future more attractive than the present
  • Thinking: prefers the objective, logical, analytical
  • Feeling: prefers the subjective, personal, values
  • Judging: prefers closure, wants deadlines, feels more comfortable once a decision has been made.
  • Perceiving: resists closure, wants more & more data; values the open-ended; pressure to decide stressful.