Analytical psychology
Analytical psychology
Carl Gustav Jung who was an early colleague of Freud, broke from orthodox psychoanalysis and established a separate theory of personality called analytical psychology, which is constructed on the assumption that occult phenomena can and do influence the lives of everyone. Jung collected data for his theories from extensive reading in many disciplines, and from his use of techniques like the word association test, active imagination, dream analysis, and psychotherapy. The achieved information was then combined with readings on medieval alchemy, occult phenomena, or any other subject in an effort to confirm the hypotheses, and hence, analytical psychology was born.
Levels of the Psyche
Jung, basic understanding of human psyche was somewhat like Freud. He based his personality theory on the assumption that the mind, or psyche, has two layers, a conscious and an unconscious level. Contradicting with Freud, however, Jung strongly purports that the most important portion of the unconscious springs not from personal experiences or unconscious of the individual but from the distant past of human existence, which forms the most discussed concept proposed by Jung, the collective unconscious. In Jungian theory of personality, of lesser importance are the conscious and the personal unconscious. Jung believed every individual is motivated not only by repressed (or unconscious) experiences but also by certain emotionally toned experiences which are inherited from our ancestors. These inherited images are the components of the collective unconscious. The collective unconscious comprises those elements that an individual have never experienced individually but which have come down to them from their ancestors.
Archetypes:
There are certain elements which are highly developed in our collective unconscious, Jung called them the archetypes. The archetypes are somewhat similar among all individual, indicating that every individual is connected with one another by the collective unconscious. The following are the common archetype as described by Jung.
The persona:
The persona (or mask) is the outward face that one represent to the external world. It protects and insulates our real self and Jung describes it as the “conformity” archetype. It refers to the public face or the image that we hold before others, which is usually much different from the real self we posses.
The Anima and Animus:
According to Jung, there is are masculine components in all females (the animus archetype) and feminine components in all males (the anima archetype). Thus, “anima/animus” represents the mirror image of our biological sex, that is, the unconscious feminine side in males and the masculine tendencies in women. Each sex have come up to manifest attitudes and behavior of the other by virtue of centuries of living together.
The self:
The third most discussed archetype is the self which knits a sense of unity in experience. According to Jung, the ultimate aim of every individual is to achieve a state of selfhood (similar to self-actualisation), and very individual is striving to achieve it. With this aspect, Jung (like Erikson) is moving in the direction which is more humanistic in orientation.
Psychological Types
Apart from the levels of the psyche and the dynamics of personality, Jung also recognized various psychological types that emerges out of a union of two basic attitudes—introversion and extraversion—and four separate functions—thinking, feeling, sensing, and intuiting Jung’s theory is a discussion of opposites. People are both introverted and extraverted; rational and irrational; male and female; conscious and unconscious; and pushed by past events while being pulled by future expectations.
The Balance of Introversion and Extraversion
Jung is one the most celebrated psychologist and his theory is one of the most complete personality theory of his contemporary time, Hans Eysenck and R.B Cattell have extracted components from it and developed further.