Carl Jung is probably the best-known psychologist after Sigmund Freud. Just like his older contemporary, Carl Jung made it his mission to dive into the hidden depths of the human psyche. However, he soon broke away from Freud’s ideas and started developing theories on what he called the collective unconscious. This expansion of the psyche from the individual to the collective represented an important shift in the history of psychology. While many of his ideas remain controversial, they continue to influence the world of art, science, philosophy, and spirituality.
The Early Life of Carl Jung
Carl Jung was born in Switzerland in 1875. He was the son of a pastor and a psychologically unstable mother who claimed that she was visited by various spirits. Given such a background, it is hardly surprising that the religious and the spiritual continued to be a great source of inspiration for Jung throughout his life. It is also not entirely surprising that Jung decided to study psychology and look for the interrelation between the unseen realms of the psyche and the unseen realms of existence.
Jung and Freud: An Intellectual Love Affair and a Fall-Out
At the time of Jung’s life, psychology was only just starting to be recognized as a science. Sigmund Freud was by far the most revolutionary thinker of the time, and his views on the human psyche, which traced the majority of human behavior back to sexual drives, were starting to gain a following across Europe. When Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud met for the first time, the latter was looking to secure support for his controversial theories. The two psychologists reportedly conversed for 13 hours during their first meeting, and it seemed that Freud had finally found his intellectual heir.
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Sign up to our Free Weekly NewsletterHowever, their intellectual love affair did not last long. While Jung was enticed by Freud’s theories at first, he soon started developing his own views on the makeup of the human psyche and the subconscious realms. For one thing, Jung discovered that many of his patients were having very similar dreams. He also came to realize that myths, religions, and cultures across the world had more in common than one would assume. All this led him to develop the theory of the collective unconscious.
Carl Jung and the Collective Unconscious
As part of his therapeutic work, the budding psychologist Carl Jung would often ask his patients to describe their dreams. While listening to hundreds of dream descriptions, Jung started to notice that the dreams of humans across the world share many of the same archetypal stories and symbolic images. This surprising realization led the psychologist to conclude that we are all born with certain collective imprints, which we have inherited from our ancestors. He soon started applying archetypal figures and stories as a tool when helping his patients. By associating a certain problem or pattern of behavior with an archetypal figure, patients could gain new perspectives on how to solve it.
Carl Jung and Archetypal Psychology
As part of his mission to understand the collective human psyche, Carl Jung traveled extensively and studied different cultures, mythologies, and religions. Having collected a vast number of stories from various cultures, places, and time periods, he started identifying certain universal patterns within human consciousness across space and time. By referring to archetypes like the artist, the jester, the magician, or the lover, Jung developed a universal framework that could help people gain a deeper insight into their own psychological patterns. Today, archetypal psychology is not only used in therapy but also in areas like coaching or corporate branding.
The Persona and the Shadow
When working with his patients and delving into human mythology, Carl Jung developed the idea that everybody (sub)consciously creates a so-called persona. The persona is the character and personality we show to the world. For example, this persona could be something like a successful businessman, loyal partner, or loving mother. However, there is a darker side to the face we show to the world. In creating the persona, we automatically also create a shadow. If we are to “hold up” the persona, we have to suppress all the qualities that are not in line with that persona.
If you have created the persona of a successful businessman, for example, you may have suppressed your feelings of inadequacy, laziness, or your childhood wish to be an artist into your own shadow. In most cases, the creation of the persona (and the resulting creation of one’s shadow), results in a harmful splitting of the psyche. Unfortunately, the shadow tends to cause a lot of mayhem in people’s lives. Having been suppressed into the unconscious, our shadow qualities often start driving our behavior without us even realizing it.
For example, our shadow may lead to all kinds of self-sabotaging behaviors like over-eating, or cause us to get triggered by seemingly minor things. By becoming conscious of one’s persona and the corresponding shadow, people can integrate all parts of their personality in a healthy way. This is not only because our shadow qualities lose their power over us once we are aware of them, but also because our shadow holds many of our talents and gifts. If we use the example of the successful businessman persona, the shadow may be holding that person’s artistic talents or psychic abilities.
Our Collective Shadow
Given that Carl Jung believed our psyche consisted of individual and collective parts, he also believed in the need to face and integrate our collective shadow. In the same way our individual shadow holds all the suppressed parts of our personality, the collective shadow holds everything a given society has deemed bad, evil, or unwanted. Many societies have suppressed violence, incest, pedophilia, or racism into their shadow.
The less aware a human collective is of its shadows, the more likely it is that these very shadows start to dominate individual and collective behavior. The idea of the collective shadow explains many historical moments, like the witch trials, religious wars, or genocides. All of the above have only been made possible because a given society sought to eliminate, rather than integrate, what was considered dangerous, foreign, or evil. The idea of the collective shadow can also be useful in analyzing and dealing with collective guilt or collective trauma. In Jung’s view, we can only avoid repeating the past, if we fully acknowledge and integrate the uncomfortable feelings that come along with truly facing it.
The Anima and the Animus
While Jung referred to specific archetypes like the hero or the jester, he also had a name for the feminine and masculine aspects of the human psyche: the (female) anima and the (masculine) animus. In Jung’s view, these two energies were essential parts of human beings of both genders. But while we all have both masculine and feminine inside us, men tend to suppress their feminine qualities and women tend to suppress their masculine qualities. However, Jung believed that one can only become truly whole if one integrates both sides of one’s psyche. This brings us to our next point.
The Goal of Jungian Therapy: Becoming Whole
Jungian therapy uses archetypes, dream analysis, free association, art therapy, and other methods to help people recognize and integrate their persona and shadow. For Jung, therapy wasn’t just about fixing psychological problems or neuroses. Instead, he developed his tools to help people from all walks of life know themselves on ever-deeper levels. Jung called this never-ending process of becoming conscious of all parts of one’s psyche individuation. For Carl Jung, therapy is not just about healing. It is about taking off all the false masks and letting go of the stories that are not our own. It is about finding out who we truly are.
Is Finding Oneself the Same as Finding God?
While Carl Jung was fully aware of the shadow side of religion and spirituality, he was one of the first psychologists to integrate both the scientific and the spiritual in his theories. As the son of a psychologically unstable mother who claimed to have been visited by various spirits, Carl Jung was exposed to supernatural phenomena at an early age. His research into various spiritual traditions only fortified his belief that there must be a higher meaning to life.
Given that we live in a world where most scientists don’t believe in God or a higher power, Jung’s spiritual inklings are unlikely to have gathered him many friends. This did not stop him from insisting that God (or whatever else you may choose to call it) is in everything, no matter whether you believe in it or not. But Jung did not stop there. He was also convinced that the Self is an expression of God, meaning that the process of individuation would eventually lead every human to recognize their own divine nature.
Carl Jung’s Death and Legacy
Carl Jung died in 1961 at the age of 85. His interdisciplinary approach to the human psyche continues to influence psychologists, therapists, and artists across the world. While not everyone goes along with his semi-mystical theories on the collective unconscious and spirituality, this has not stopped his work on archetypes from spreading around. Among other things, self-improvement coaches, marketing companies, and new-age spiritual leaders have found archetypal psychology to be incredibly useful in helping their clients build their identities. It remains to be seen in what new ways will Jung’s work be utilized in the future—the possibilities are truly endless.
