5 Carl G Jung's Analytical Psychology

Question 1

Dates of Jung’s life! Schnell!

Answer 1

1875-1961

Question 2

What was the name of Jung’s clinical approach?

Answer 2

Analytical psychology

Question 3

Which part of Freudian theory did Jung repudiate?

Answer 3

Sexual theory, which Freud claimed was the basis for psychoanalysis.

“I wish to leave that term entirely to the Freudians. What they understand by psychoanalysis is a method which is dogmatically bound up with, and based upon, Freud’s sexual theory. When Freud publicly declared that psychoanalysis and his sexual theory were indissolubly wedded, I was obliged to strike out on a different path.”

Question 4

What was the aim of Jung’s theory?

Answer 4

Purely therapeutic. It was an applied theory - read this and you get better.

Question 5

How does Jung’s theory of the unconscious differ from that of Freud?

Answer 5

Jung has the extra lower level of the collective unconscious

Question 6

How did Jung’s views on analysis of the unconscious depart from those of Freud?

Answer 6

Jung believed that conscious material can also be therapeutically useful. Analysis of the unconscious is not a panacea.

Question 7

What is the psyche?

Answer 7

“Psyche” is the Jungian term for personality

Question 8

What is the structure of the psyche, according to Jung?

Answer 8

1. Conscious ego
   Similar to that of Freud. Includes impressions, thoughts, feelings and bodily sensations – all internal and external events within our awareness
2. Personal unconscious
   Ideas withdrawn from consciousness by repression because threatening to the ego - corresponds to Freud’s dynamic unconscious
3. Collective unconscious
   Inherited, rather than learned, mode of functioning and the deepest level of our psyche.

Question 9

What are the functional units of the collective unconscious?

Answer 9

Archetypes. The collective unconscious consists of all an individual’s archetypes.

Question 10

What are archetypes?

Answer 10

Innate, neuropsychic centres that give rise to similar thoughts, images, feelings and ideas in people, irrespective of their background. For Jung, “the archetype is the introspectively recognizable form of a priori psychic orderedness”.

Question 11

How can archetypes be observed?

Answer 11

Only insofar as they are manifested and apprehended consciously. The archetypes which inform them are elementary structures which are unconscious and impossible to apprehend. Jung used the analogy of the structure of a crystal. The structure is the archetype - which has no material existence of its own.

Question 12

What are archetypes the psychical correlative of?

Answer 12

Instincts. And like instincts, their existence can not be observed unless they manifest themselves concretely.

Question 13

What’s the differences between the archetype-as-such and archetypal image?

Answer 13

Archetypes-as-such are the underlying psychical structure, which cannot be apprehended.

Archetypal images are concrete manifestations of archetypes-as-such

Question 14

What are some examples of archetypes?

Answer 14

Archetypal events: birth, death, separation from parents, initiation, marriage, the union of opposites.

Archetypal figures: great mother, father, child, devil, god, wise old man, anima, animus, wise old woman, the trickster, the hero.

Archetypal motifs: the apocalypse, the deluge, the creation.

Question 15

What is the animus/a?

Answer 15

The anima archetype appears in men and is his primordial image of woman. It represents the man’s biological expectation of women, but also is a symbol of a man’s feminine possibilities, his contrasexual tendencies.

The animus archetype is the analogous image of the masculine that occurs in women.

Question 16

What is the Self in Jungian psychology?

Answer 16

The Self is one of the Jungian archetypes, signifying the unification of consciousness and unconsciousness in a person, and representing the psyche as a whole. The Self, according to Jung, is realised as the product of individuation, which in his view is the process of integrating one’s personality.

Question 17

What does Jung mean when he posits two centres of the personality?

Answer 17

The ego is the centre of consciousness, whereas the Self is the centre of the total personality, which includes consciousness, the unconscious, and the ego. It’s like a dot (ego) within a circle (the self)

So the Self is both the whole and the center.

Question 18

How does the Self develop over a lifetime?

Answer 18

Jung considered that from birth every individual has an original sense of wholeness – of the Self – but that with development a separate ego-consciousness crystallizes out of the original feeling of unity. This process of ego-differentiation provides the task of the first half of one’s life-course.

Once ego-differentiation had been successfully achieved and the individual is securely anchored in the external world, Jung considered that a new task then arose for the second half of life - a return to, and conscious rediscovery of, the Self: individuation.

Question 19

What does the Self represent, according to Jung?

Answer 19

In Jung’s words, “the Self…embraces ego-consciousness, shadow, anima, and collective unconscious in indeterminable extension. As a totality, the self is a coincidentia oppositorum; it is therefore bright and dark and yet neither”. Alternatively, he stated that “the Self is the total, timeless man…who stands for the mutual integration of conscious and unconscious”.

Question 20

What dream images represent the Self?

Answer 20

Jung recognized many dream images as representing the self, including a stone, the world tree, an elephant, and the Christ.

Question 21

Name two influences of Jung’s theory of collective unconscious?

Answer 21

Claude Levi-Strauss in anthropology - universal infrastructures shared by all cultures

Noam Chomsky - universal linguistic structures

Question 22

Two reasons why Jung’s theory of archetypes, explained in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (1934), was not well received?

Answer 22

1. Bad timing - psychology was in the grip of behaviourism, which focussed on learnt behaviour
2. Theory not stated in a clear, testable form. And Jung focussed on phenomena that are inherently hard to test.

Question 23

What is individuation?

Answer 23

The process in which the individual self develops out of an undifferentiated unconscious. It is a developmental psychic process during which innate elements of personality, the components of the immature psyche, and the experiences of the person’s life become integrated over time into a well-functioning whole.

Individuation is a process of psychological integration. “In general, it is the process by which individual beings are formed and differentiated [from other human beings]; in particular, it is the development of the psychological individual as a being distinct from the general, collective psychology.”

Individuation is a process of transformation whereby the personal and collective unconscious are brought into consciousness (e.g., by means of dreams, active imagination, or free association) to be assimilated into the whole personality. It is a completely natural process necessary for the integration of the psyche. Individuation has a holistic healing effect on the person, both mentally and physically.

Question 24

What are the three determining factors in behaviour?

Answer 24

1. Determinism - causal factors influencing behaviour
2. Teleology - future goals set that influence behaviour
3. Synchronicity - “temporally coincident occurrences of acausal events.” These are indications of how we are connected by collective unconscious. The idea of synchronicity is that the conceptual relationship of minds, defined as the relationship between ideas, is intricately structured in its own logical way and gives rise to relationships that are not causal in nature. These relationships can manifest themselves as occurrences that are meaningfully related.

Synchronistic events reveal an underlying pattern, a conceptual framework that encompasses, but is larger than, any of the systems that display the synchronicity.

Question 25

What is the problem with the theory of synchronicity?

Answer 25

It’s nonsense. It’s all just confirmation bias.