Please enable JavaScript.
Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.
Theories of Personality (Jung: Analytical Psychology) - Coggle Diagram
Theories of Personality (Jung: Analytical Psychology)
Overview of Analytical Psychology
Carl Jung believed that people are extremely complex beings who possess a variety of opposing qualities, such as introversion and extraversion, masculinity and femininity, and rational and irrational drives
Biography of Carl Jung
Carl Jung was born in Switzerland in 1875, the oldest by about 9 years of two surviving children
Jung's father was an idealistic Protestant minister and his mother was a strict believer in mysticism and the occult
Jung's early experience with parents who were quite opposite of each other probably influenced his own theory of personality, including his fanciful No. 1 and Number 2 personalities
Soon after receiving his medical degree he became acquainted with Freud's writings and eventually with Freud himself
Not long after he traveled with Freud to the United States, Jung became disenchanted with Freud's pansexual theories, broke with Freud, and began his own approach to theory and therapy, which he called analytical psychology
From a critical midlife crisis during which he nearly lost contact with reality, Jung emerged to become one of the leading thinkers of the 20th century. He died in 1961 at age 85
Levels of Psyche
Jung saw the human psyche as being divided into a conscious and an unconscious level, with the latter further subdivided into a personal unconscious and a collective unconscious
Personal Unconscious
The unconscious refers to those psychic images not sensed by the ego
Some unconscious processes flow from our personal experiences, but others stem from our ancestors' experiences with universal themes
Jung divided the unconscious into the personal unconscious, which contains the complexes (emotionally toned groups of related ideas) and the collective unconscious, which includes various archetypes
Collective Unconscious
Collective unconscious images are those that are beyond our personal experiences and that originate from the repeated experiences of our ancestors
Collective unconscious images are not inherited ideas, but rather they refer to our innate tendency to react in a particular way whenever our personal experiences stimulate an inherited predisposition toward action
Conscious
Images sensed by the ego are said to be conscious
The ego thus represents the conscious side of personality, and in the psychologically mature individual, the ego is secondary to the self
Archetypes
Contents of the collective unconscious are called archetypes
Jung believed that archetypes originate through the repeated experiences of our ancestors and that they are expressed in certain types of dreams, fantasies, delusions, and hallucinations
Several archetypes acquire their own personality, and Jung identified these by name
One is the persona—the side of our personality that we show to others. Another is the shadow—the dark side of personality
In order for people to reach full psychological maturity, they must first realize or accept their shadow
A second hurdle in achieving maturity is for men to accept their anima—their feminine side—and for women to embrace their animu—their masculine side
Other archetypes include the great mother (the archetype of nourishment and destruction); the wise old man (the archetype of wisdom and meaning); and the hero, (the image we have of a conqueror who vanquishes evil but who has a single fatal flaw)
The most comprehensive archetype is the self; that is, the image we have of fulfillment, completion, or perfection
The ultimate in psychological maturity is self-realization, which is symbolized by the mandala, or perfect geometric figure
Persona
Shadow
Anima
Animus
Great Mother
Wise Old Man
Hero
Self
Dynamics of Personality
Jung believed that the dynamic principles that apply to physical energy also apply to psychic energy. These forces include causality and teleology as well as progression and regression
Causality and Teleology
Jung accepted a middle position between the philosophical issues of causality and teleology
In other words, humans are motivated both by their past experiences and by their expectations of the future
Progression and Regression
To achieve self-realization people must adapt to both their external and their internal worlds
Progression involves adaptation to the outside world and the forward flow of psychic energy
Whereas regression refers to adaptation to the inner world and the backward flow of psychic energy
Jung believed that the backward step is essential to a person's forward movement toward self-realization
Psychological Types
Eight basic psychological types emerge from the union of two attitudes and four functions
Attitudes
Attitudes are predispositions to act or react in a characteristic manner
The two basic attitudes are introversion—which refers to people's subjective perceptions—and extraversion—which indicates an orientation toward the objective world
Extraverts are influenced more by the real world than by their subjective perception, whereas introverts rely on their individualized view of things
Introverts and extraverts often mistrust and misunderstand one another, but neither attitude is superior to the other
Functions
These two attitudes can combine with four basic functions to form eight general personality types
The four functions are
thinking or recognizing the meaning of stimuli;
feeling, or placing a value on something
sensation, or taking in sensory stimuli
intuition, or perceiving elementary data that are beyond our awareness
Jung referred to thinking and feeling as rational functions and to sensation and intuition as irrational functions
Development of Personality
Nearly unique among personality theorists was Jung's emphasis on the second half of life
Jung saw middle and old age as times when people may acquire the ability to attain self-realization
Stages of Development
childhood, which lasts from birth until adolescence
youth, the period from puberty until middle life, which is a time for extraverted development and for being grounded to the real world of schooling, occupation, courtship, marriage, and family
middle life, from about 35 or 40 until old age and a time when people should be adopting an introverted, or subjective attitude
old age, which is a time for psychological rebirth, self-realization, and preparation for death
Self-Realization
Self-realization, or individuation, involves a psychological rebirth and an integration of various parts of the psyche into a unified or whole individual
Self-realization represents the highest level of human development
Jung’s Method of Investigation
Jung used the word association test, dreams, and active imagination during the process of psychotherapy, and all these methods contributed to his theory of personality
Word Association Test
Jung used the word association test early in his career to uncover complexes embedded in the personal unconscious
The technique requires a patient to utter the first word that comes to mind after the examiner reads a stimulus word
Unusual responses indicate a complex; that, an element from the personal unconscious
Dream Analysis
Jung believed that dreams may have both a cause and a purpose and thus can be useful in explaining past events and in making decisions about the future
"Big dreams" and "typical dreams," both of which come from the collective unconscious, have meanings that lie beyond the experiences of a single individual
Active Imagination
Jung also used active imagination to arrive at collective images
This technique requires the patient to concentrate on a single image until that image begins to appear in a different form
Eventually, the patient should see figures that represent archetypes and other collective unconscious images
Psychotherapy
The goal of Jungian therapy is help neurotic patients become healthy and to move healthy people in the direction of self-realization
Jung was eclectic in his choice of therapeutic techniques and treated old people differently than the young
Related Research
Although Jungian psychology has not generated large volumes of research, some investigators have used the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI; Myers, 1962) to examine the idea of psychological types
Some research suggests that engineering students who score high on both extraversion and feeling are likely to drop out of school or change their major (Thomas et al., 2000)
Other research has found that teachers-in-training are more likely than other people in general to score high in intuition and feeling (Willing, Guest, & Morford, 2001)
Filbeck, Hatfield, & Horvath (2005) studied how personality affects the ways people invest their money, specifically as related to levels of risk taking
The findings corresponded well with Jungian personality types. The researchers concluded that personality of investors is an important factor to consider
Critique of Jung
Although Jung considered himself a scientist, many of his writings have more of a philosophical than a psychological flavor
As a scientific theory, it rates below average on its ability to generate research, but very low on its ability to withstand falsification
It is about average on its ability to organize knowledge but low on each of the other criteria of a useful theory
Concept of Humanity
Jung saw people as extremely complex beings who are a product of both conscious and unconscious personal experiences
However, people are also motivated by inherited remnants that spring from the collective experiences of their early ancestors
Because Jungian theory is a psychology of opposites, it receives a moderate rating on the issues of free will versus determinism, optimism versus pessimism, and causality versus teleology
It rates very high on unconscious influences, low on uniqueness, and low on social influences