IB English Lit A HL - Ms Basel

Carl Gustav Jung

Aim:
Jung’s aim was to resolve the diverse states of personality which he believed divided not only into extrovert an introvert but also into feeling and thinking. Through understanding how the personal unconscious combine with the collective unconscious, a patient can therefore achieve a wholeness in ones self.


Intoversion and Extraversion:
•Introverts are people who prefer their internal world of thoughts, feelings, fantasies, dreams
•extroverts prefer the external world of things and people and activities

Introversion and extraversion refer more to whether your ("ego") more often faced toward the persona and outer reality, or toward the collective unconscious and its archetypes. In that sense, the introvert is somewhat more mature than the extrovert. Our culture, of course, values the extrovert much more.


Jung’s belief was similar to Freuds with the Collective unconscious and the Individual unconscious:
Individual Conscious:
•The repressed feelings and thoughts developed during an individuals life.

Collective unconscious:
•Inherited thoughts, feelings and memories shared by all humanity.
• The collective unconscious is made up of archetypes or primordial images which corresponds with:
confronting death

choosing a mate

surrounding ones self symbolically
in religions, myths, fairy tales etc.


Jung's theory divides the psyche into three parts:
(Difference from Freud)

The ego = conscious mind

The personal unconscious = anything which is not conscious. The personal unconscious includes both memories that are easily brought to mind and those that have been suppressed for some reason. But it does not include the instincts that Freud would have it include.

Collective unconscious = Knowledge and experiences we share as a species. And yet we are never directly conscious of it. It influences all of our experiences and behaviors, most especially the emotional ones.
Examples:
•love at first sight
•deja vu (the feeling that you've been here before)
•the immediate recognition of certain symbols
•the spiritual experiences of mystics of all religions
•the parallels in dreams, fantasies, mythologies, fairy tales, and literature
•Near death experiences


Archetypes:

•The contents of the collective unconscious.
•The archetype has no form of its own, but it acts as an "organizing principle" on the things we see or do.
•Unlike Freud’s theory phallic symbols do not usually refer to sex at all. They usually symbolize mana, or spiritual power.
Ie:These symbols would be displayed on occasions when the spirits are being called upon to increase the yield of corn, or fish, or to heal someone.

Example:
It works the way that instincts work in Freud's theory:
At first, the baby just wants something to eat, without knowing what it wants. Later, with experience, the child begins to yearn for something more specific when it is hungry -- a bottle, a cookie, a broiled lobster, a slice of New York style pizza.


Extra Info!
•Carl Jung was born on 26th July, 1875
• He died on 6th June, 1961
• Jung began his work on word association, in which a patient's responses to stimulus words revealed what Jung called “complexes”—a term that has since become universal.
• These studies brought him international renown and led him to a close collaboration with Freud.
• Jung continued to write voluminously through out his life, especially on analytical methods and the relationships between psychotherapy and religious belief.

THE END!
Thank you for reading.