Topic 3

Jungian Analytical Theory

Background
Carl Gustav Jung (26 July 1875 6 June 1961) Kesswil, a Swiss county.

The 4th & only surviving child of Paul Achilles & Emilie Preiswerk.
Father a poor rural pastor in a small Swiss Reformed Church. Mother came from a wealthy, established Swiss family. A solitary & introverted child.

 A number of childhood memories had made a life-long impression on him.

Mother was largely down with depression.

Early schooling years at the Humanistisches Gymnasium in Basel. Completed medical studies attached to Burghoslzli (Burgholzli) Hospital in Zurich, Switzerland. Worked as a psychiarist treating patients suffering from schizophrenia, while also conducting word association research.

 1904 Jung started his correspondence with Freud.

Started using Freuds psychoanalytic treatment with his patients. 1906 Upon Freud invitation, joined him at Vienna & they began to work closely together. Jung was Freuds the best known member of the group that formed the core of the early psychoanalytic movement.

 In the beginning, they held in common an understanding of the profound role of the unconscious, but later began to diverge. 1913, after Jungs publication of a major article on the psychology of the unconscious which emphasized the role symbolism (Jung, 1912); their relationship suffered and turned sour.
Jungs primary disagreement with Freud stemmed from their differing concepts of the conscious.

 He married Emma Ranschenbach in 1903. She died in 1955. They had 5 children. Jungs work convinced him that life has a spiritual purpose beyond material goals which helped him to form some of his later key concepts, including integrating spirituality into daily life & appreciation of the unconscious.

Major Concepts
Although some of Jung's structural terms were drawn from the Freudian psychoanalytic lexicon of the day, they are not necessarily used in the same way. In the Freudian conceptualization, ego refers to a psychic structure which mediates between society (superego) and instinctual drives (id). Jungs usage is in contrast to this.

Major Concepts
For Jung the ego is both conscious and unconscious aspects and is at the same time personal and collective. Simply put, too simply perhaps, the ego is how one sees oneself, along with the conscious and unconscious feelings that accompany that view (Hopcke, 1989, p. 77).
Psyche Your mind + your deepest feelings + attitudes.

Major Concepts
A major part of the ego's task -- and a major goal of psychotherapy -- is to develop an appropriate relationship with what Jung termed the Self, the archetype of wholeness. The Self can be understood as the central organizing principle of the psyche, that fundamental and essential aspect of human personality which gives cohesion, meaning, direction, and purpose to the whole psyche.

Major Concepts
Resting (for the most part) close to the surface of the unconscious are those personal attributes and elements of experience which have been excluded from the ego, usually because of parental and societal disapproval. These elements are known as the shadow, and they tend to be projected on less favored individuals and groups.

Major Concepts
While in general these qualities are negative ones, the shadow may also contain positive aspects which the individual has been unable to own. Some of these qualities may be disparaged by the individual's family and/or peers with labels such as unmanly (anima), unfeminine (animus), weak, or childish.

Major Concepts
Finally, the persona -- the Greek word for an actor's mask -- is the face shown to others. It reveals certain selected aspects of the individual and hides others. A well-developed individual may have several personae appropriate to business and social situations. The problem comes not in having a persona but in identifying with it.

Major Concepts
Jungs work with patients' dreams, the appearance of symbols which seemed to have little or no personal meaning for the dreamer and yet which often had great emotional charge. He observed that many of these symbols had appeared again and again throughout history in mythology, religion, fairy tales, alchemical texts, and other forms of creative expression.

Major Concepts
Jung became convinced that the source of this symbolic material was what he identified as the collective unconscious, a pool of experience accessible to all humans through history which lies below the personal unconscious. The archetypes were, for Jung, "typical modes of expression expressed, comprehended and relevance in the way personal experiences are organized.

Jungs Psychotherapy
A primary aim of Jungian psychotherapy/analysis is to establish an ongoing relationship between consciousness (ego) and the unconscious, between what is happening in the unconscious and what is taking place in day-to-day life.

Jungian theory understands the psyche as containing a drive toward balance and wholeness.

Jungs Psychotherapy
In psychotherapy, this unconscious material gradually manifests itself symbolically in dreams, in products of active imagination, and in the transference/counter-transference relationship between therapist and patient.

The process of individuation - the psyche, differentiating and incorporating the various elements of the personal unconscious and establishing access to the collective unconscious.

Jungs Psychotherapy
This transformation of the personality requires coming to terms with the unconscious, its specific structures and their dynamic relations to consciousness as these become available during the course of analysis. Given an adequate relationship, setting, and time, the client's psyche tends toward healing itself.

Your Task For This Topic :

Read more on Jungian Theory. Compare and contrast this theory with Freuds Psychoanalytic Theory and Adlerian Theory.