Carl Gustav Jung Essay Example for Free

Carl Gustav Jung Essay Carl Gustav Jung, (26 July 1875 – 6 June 1961), was a Swiss psychologist and psychiatrist, and the founder of analytical psychology. His work and influence extends way beyond understanding personality, and he is considered to be one of the greatest thinkers to have theorised about life and how people relate to it. However, for the purpose of this assignment I will concentrate on Jung’s theory of Psychological Types. In this essay I aim to demonstrate an understanding of Jung’s personality types by describing and evaluating his theory and to show how they might useful in helping a therapist to determine therapeutic goals. Jung (1990, p.531) states that’ from earliest times, attempts have been made to classify individuals according to types, and so bring order to the chaos. The oldest attempts known to us were made by oriental astrologers who devised the so-called trigons of the four elements air, water, earth, and fire. The air trigon in the horoscope consists of the three aerial signs of the zodiac, Aquarius, Gemini, Libra; the fire trigon is made up of Aries, Leo, Sagittarius. According to this age old view, whoever is born in these trigons shares in their aerial or fiery nature and will have a corresponding temperament and fate.‘ In the same paragraph, Jung states that ‘the astrological type theory, to the astonishment of the enlightened, still remains intact today,’ which is true. Closely connected with the astrological type theory is the division into the four temperaments which corresponds to the four humors (Jung, 1990, p.531). A Greek physician, Claudius Galen (AD130 200), distinguished four basic temperaments: the sanguine, the phlegmatic, the choleric, and the melancholic. Galen’s theory goes back to the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates’ (460 370BC), who described physical illness as being caused by the balance of bodily fluids, or humors as he labelled them’ (Maltby, et al, 2007, p.159). These bodily fluids are blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm. Galen expanded on Hippocrates’ theory and applied it to describe human personality, stating that when the humors were in balance, an equitable temperament was the result, however, if the humors were out of balance, then physical illness and mental disturbance occurred (Maltby et al, 2007, p.160). However, ‘by the time of the Middle Ages, scholars dismissed the idea that bodily fluids were directly implicated in personality traits. But the behavioural descriptions associated with the four humours lived on’ (McAdams, 2000, p.256). Galen’s four temperaments provided much inspiration and historical reference for Carl Jung’s theory of psychological types. According to Jung’s theory we are all different in fundamental ways and each psychological type has a different idea of what it means to achieve personal success. However, www.personalitypage.com states that, ‘so many people are hung up on somebody else’s idea of what it means to be successful, that they are unaware of what is truly important to them‘. I agree, because for many years, I wanted to be somebody else as that person’s life seemed so much better than mine, or so I thought at the time. Jung was one of the few psychologists in the twentieth century to maintain that development extends beyond childhood and adolescence through mid-life and into old age (Stevens, 2001, p.38). Jung insisted that ‘we never finish the process of self-examination and growth that charts our journey towards individuation.’ (Snowdon, 2010, p.86). In my case, I believe I am on that journey of accepting myself as I truly am, becoming my true ‘self‘. Stevens (2001, p.38) claims that ‘it could be brought to the highest fruition if one worked with and confronted the unconscious,’ and for me, it is and has been important to face the ‘monsters that lurk’ (Snowdon, 2010, p.86) in my unconscious, even when it has been uncomfortable to do so. According to Jung, like Freud, there are three levels of consciousness in the psyche (mind);- conscious, personal unconscious and collective unconscious. Snowdon (2010, p.56) states that ‘the individual psyche is always changing as it seeks growth and wholeness.’ Jung referred to the ego when describing the more conscious aspect of the personality, the part of the psyche that selects perceptions, thoughts, feelings and memories that may enter our conscious awareness. Stevens (2002, p. 62) states that ‘the ego is then centre of consciousness and is responsible for our continuing sense of identity.’ The personal unconscious comprises of ‘all the acquisitions of personal life, everything forgotten, repressed, subliminally perceived, thought, felt’ (Jung, 1990, p.485). This is an aspect of the unconscious that Freud also emphasized and these forgotten experiences are accessible to consciousness, and for both Freud and Jung, ‘the exploration of the unconscious is the key to personal insight’ (McAdams, 2000, p. 135). Conscious attitudes within the psyche should always be balanced by unconscious attitudes, and Snowdon (2010, p.56) claims that ‘if a conscious attitude grows too strong then the unconscious will always seek to restore equilibrium,’ by means of dreams, fantasies, slips of the tongue and so on. However, if the unconscious message is ignored, then ‘neurosis or even disease may result’ (Stevens, 2010, p.57). Where the personal unconscious is unique for each individual the collective unconscious is not an ‘individual acquisition but rather the functioning of the inherited brain structure, which in its broad outlines is the same in all human beings (Jung, 1954, p.117). Therefore, the collective unconscious represents the shared experiences, emotions and memories we have inherited from previous generations. Jung believed that we were born with a built-in human developmental programme, which is buried deep within the collective unconscious (Snowdon, 2010, p. 80). According to Jung, the personal unconscious contains various complexes, while the collective unconscious contains archetypes (see Fig 1) ‘Complexes are related groups of emotionally charged ideas, thoughts and images’ (Snowdon, 2010, p.61), and can exert a strong influence on the thoughts and behaviour of a person. Some complexes may be beneficial and others may be potentially harmful, and Jung (1990, p.529) states that ‘complexes do not necessarily indicate inferiority. It only means that something discordant, unassimilated, antagonistic exists, perhaps as an obstacle, but also as an incentive to greater effort, and so, perhaps to new possibilities of achievement.’ Therefore, a therapist may use this knowledge to bring to the forefront of the client’s consciousness, a situation which they may be finding difficult to overcome. Complexes can be related to a particular archetype, Stevens (2001, p.48) states that ‘complexes are personifications of archetypes; they are the means through which archetypes manifest themselves in the personal psyche.’ An archetype is a universal thought form or predisposition to respond to the world in certain ways (Jung, 1936), and Jung believed they appeared to us in dreams, myths, religions, art and symptoms. Engler (1991, p.86) claimed that ‘it is helpful for us to get in touch with them because they represent the latent potentially of the psyche.’ The widely recognised archetypes are the persona, the shadow, the anima and the animus, and the self. The persona archetype is the mask that a person wears to hide their true nature from society. The shadow is an unconscious part of the personality that contains weaknesses and other aspects of personality that a person cannot admit to having’ (Snowdon, 2010, p.68). The anima is the unconscious feminine aspect of a man’s personality, and the animus is the masculine aspect of a woman’s personality. The self is the central archetype and true midpoint of the personality (Engler, 1991, p.89). A criticism of Jung’s theory was his lack of empirical research, in which his theory has been attacked as being non-falsifiable and unscientific (Hergenhahn, 1994, p.93). Jung based his psychology on explorations of his own inner world, as well as his work with people ranging from ‘normal’ to those with neurotic problems and even those suffering from psychosis (Snowdon, 2010, p.XXVI). Eysenck (Engler, 2009, p.316) believed that from the point of view of science, Jung’s contribution to the study of personality types was primarily negative as he permitted mystical notions to override empirical data. However, Jung was unconcerned claiming that he ‘cannot experience himself as a scientific problem. Myth is more individual and expresses life more precisely that does science (Stevens, 2001, p.156).’ Jung’s description of personality states that in order to identify a psychological type, it is necessary to determine whether a person’s psychic energy (libido) is turned inwards towards the subject (introversion), or outwards towards the object (extroversion). Introverts are people who prefer their own inner world of thoughts and feelings, whilst extroverts prefer the external world towards external relationships and objects. According to Jung (1990, p.415) ‘the presence of two attitudes is extremely frequent,’ although one is generally dominant and conscious and the other is subordinate and unconscious. However, McAdams (2000, p.310) claims that ‘Eysenck, a British psychologist of German origin, rejected the idea that conscious extroversion is connected to unconscious introversion, and vice versa.’ Unlike Jung, Eysenck linked extroversion and introversion to differences in brain activity, however this theory is speculative and Eysenck acknowledged that his hypotheses ‘must stand and fall by empirical confirmation’ (Eysenck, 1965). Introvert and extrovert dimensions are now found in several theories, one of those being Hans Eysenck’s theory of personality. Although Eysenck expressed considerable disdain for Jung’s approach to psychological types, some of his ideas were rather similar, for example, ’both defined the concepts by making reference to the direction of a person’s approach to life’ (McAdams, 2000, p.309). However, in other ways Eysenck’s concepts were quite difference, for example, whilst Jung believed that a person can be classified as either extroverted or introverted, he believed that most people fall somewhere between the two attitudes, ‘combining qualities of both the extroverted and introverted poles’ (McAdams, p. 310). Like Jung, Eysenck examined historical approaches to personality as well as conducting various methods of research, to uncover the underlying structure of personality. Eysenck suggested that the basic dimensions of personality may be summarised in the diagram below (see Fig 2), which show the two main dimensions of extroversion-introversion and stable-unstable, with the traits associated with each personality type. The diagram also shows how the four temperaments are related to these types.