The Self in Jungian psychology is a dynamic concept which has undergone numerous modifications since it was first conceptualised as one of the Jungian archetypes . [1]
Historically, the Self, according to Carl Jung, signifies the unification of consciousness and unconsciousness in a person, and representing the psyche as a whole. [2] It is realized as the product of individuation, which in his view is the process of integrating various aspects of one's personality. For Jung, the Self is an encompassing whole which acts as a container. It could be symbolized by a circle, a square, or a mandala. [3] [4]
The idea that there are two centers of the personality distinguished Jungian psychology at one time. The ego has been seen as the center of consciousness, whereas the Self is defined as the center of the total personality, which includes consciousness, the unconscious, and the ego; the Self is both the whole and the center. While the ego is a self-contained center of the circle contained within the whole, the Self can be understood as the greater circle. [4] [5]
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. [6] This process of ego-differentiation provides the task of the first half of one's life-course, though Jungians also saw psychic health as depending on a periodic return to the sense of Self, something facilitated by the use of myths, initiation ceremonies, and rites of passage. [6]
Once ego-differentiation had been more or less successfully achieved and the individual is somewhat 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. Marie-Louise von Franz states that "The actual processes of individuation - the conscious coming-to-terms with one's own inner center (psychic nucleus) or Self - generally begins with a wounding of the personality". [7] The ego reaches an impasse of one sort or another; and has to turn for help to what she termed "a sort of hidden regulating or directing tendency...[an] organizing center" in the personality: "Jung called this center the 'Self' and described it as the totality of the whole psyche, in order to distinguish it from the 'ego', which constitutes only a small part of the psyche". [8]
Under the Self's guidance, a succession of archetypal images emerges, gradually bringing their fragmentary aspects of the Self increasingly closer to its totality. [9] The first to appear, and the closest to the ego, would be the shadow or personal unconscious - something which is at the same time the first representation of the total personality, and which may indeed be at times conflated with the Self. [10] [11] Next to appear would be the Anima and Animus, the soul-image, which may be taken as symbolising the whole Self. [12] Ideally however, the animus or anima comes into play in a mediating role between the ego and the Self. [13] The third main archetype to emerge is the Mana figure of the wise old man/woman [14] - a representative of the collective unconscious akin to the Self. [15]
Thereafter comes the archetype of the Self itself - the last point on the route to self-realization of individuation. [16] 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". [17] Alternatively, he stated that "the Self is the total, timeless man...who stands for the mutual integration of conscious and unconscious". [18] Jung recognized many dream images as representing the self, including a stone, the world tree, an elephant, and the Christ. [19]
Von Franz considered that "the dark side of the Self is the most dangerous thing of all, precisely because the Self is the greatest power in the psyche. It can cause people to 'spin' megalomanic or fall into other delusionary fantasies that catch them up", so that the subject "thinks with mounting excitement" that he has grasped the great cosmic riddles. He therefore risks losing all touch with human reality. [20]
In everyday life, aspects of the Self may be projected onto outside figures or concepts such as the state, God, the universe or fate. [21] [22] When such projections are withdrawn, there can be a destructive inflation of the personality - one potential counterbalance to this being however the social or collective aspects of the Self. [23]
Young-Eisendrath and Hall write that 'in Jung's work, self can refer to the notion of inherent subjective individuality, the idea of an abstract center or central ordering principle, and the account of a process developing over time'.[ citation needed ]
In 1947 Michael Fordham proposed a distinct theory of the primary self to describe the state of the psyche of neonates, characterised by homeostasis, or 'steady state' in his words, where self and other (usually the mother) are undifferentiated. It predicates that there is no distinction between the internal and external world, and there are as yet no different components in the internal world. Fordham derived his hypothesis partly from the Jungian concept of the archetype of the self, and the psychoanalytic idea of internal 'objects'. The primary self, taken as the original totality of each person, with its 'archetypal' tendencies to develop aspects, such as language, complexes etc., enters into relation with the external world through a continuous dual process of de-integration and re-integration, a process said to be characteristic of the first half of life. [24] [25]
Redfearn, for instance, who has also synthesised the classical archetypal theory with a developmental view based on years of clinical observation, sees the self as probably consisting of a range of subpersonalities over a lifetime. [26] [1]
According to Peter Fonagy the connections between "post-Freudians" and "post-Jungians" have been further strengthened after the advent of contemporary neuroscience in this connection, as outlined in his foreword to Jean Knox's update on the "formation of internal working models", which he describes as a milestone. [27] [28]
Fritz Perls objected that 'many psychologists like to write the self with a capital S, as if the self would be something precious, something extraordinarily valuable. They go at the discovery of the self like a treasure-digging. The self means nothing but this thing as it is defined by otherness'. [29]
Carl Gustav Jung ( YUUNG; German: [kaʁl ˈjʊŋ]; was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology. Jung's work has been influential in the fields of psychiatry, anthropology, archaeology, literature, philosophy, psychology, and religious studies. Jung worked as a research scientist at the famous Burghölzli hospital, under Eugen Bleuler. During this time, he came to the attention of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. The two men conducted a lengthy correspondence and collaborated, for a while, on a joint vision of human psychology.
Collective unconscious refers to the unconscious mind and shared mental concepts. It is generally associated with idealism and was coined by Carl Jung. According to Jung, the human collective unconscious is populated by instincts, as well as by archetypes: ancient primal symbols such as The Great Mother, the Wise Old Man, the Shadow, the Tower, Water, and the Tree of Life. Jung considered the collective unconscious to underpin and surround the unconscious mind, distinguishing it from the personal unconscious of Freudian psychoanalysis. He believed that the concept of the collective unconscious helps to explain why similar themes occur in mythologies around the world. He argued that the collective unconscious had a profound influence on the lives of individuals, who lived out its symbols and clothed them in meaning through their experiences. The psychotherapeutic practice of analytical psychology revolves around examining the patient's relationship to the collective unconscious.
The principle of individuation, or principium individuationis, describes the manner in which a thing is identified as distinguished from other things.
Analytical psychology is a term coined by Carl Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist, to describe research into his new "empirical science" of the psyche. It was designed to distinguish it from Freud's psychoanalytic theories as their seven-year collaboration on psychoanalysis was drawing to an end between 1912 and 1913. The evolution of his science is contained in his monumental opus, the Collected Works, written over sixty years of his lifetime.
In analytical psychology, the shadow is either an unconscious aspect of the personality that the conscious ego does not identify in itself, or the entirety of the unconscious; that is, everything of which a person is not fully conscious. In short, the shadow is the unknown side.
Marie-Louise von Franz was a Swiss Jungian psychologist and scholar, known for her psychological interpretations of fairy tales and of alchemical manuscripts.
A complex is a core pattern of emotions, memories, perceptions, and wishes in the personal unconscious organized around a common theme, such as power or status. Primarily a psychoanalytic term, it is found extensively in the works of Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud.
The anima and animus are described in Carl Jung's school of analytical psychology as part of his theory of the collective unconscious. Jung described the animus as the unconscious masculine side of a woman, and the anima as the unconscious feminine side of a man, each transcending the personal psyche. Jung's theory states that the anima and animus are the two primary anthropomorphic archetypes of the unconscious mind, as opposed to the theriomorphic and inferior function of the shadow archetypes. He believed they are the abstract symbol sets that formulate the archetype of the Self.
John Beebe is an American psychiatrist and Jungian analyst in practice in San Francisco.
In psychology, the psyche is the totality of the human mind, conscious and unconscious. Many thinkers, including Carl Jung, also include in this definition the overlap and tension between the personal and the collective elements in man.
The Jungian interpretation of religion, pioneered by Carl Jung and advanced by his followers, is an attempt to interpret religion in the light of Jungian psychology. Unlike Sigmund Freud and his followers, Jungians tend to treat religious beliefs and behaviors in a positive light, while offering psychological referents to traditional religious terms such as "soul", "evil", "transcendence", "the sacred", and "God". Because beliefs do not have to be facts in order for people to hold them, the Jungian interpretation of religion has been, and continues to be, of interest to psychologists and theists.
Rubedo is a Latin word meaning "redness" that was adopted by alchemists to define the fourth and final major stage in their magnum opus. Both gold and the philosopher's stone were associated with the color red, as rubedo signaled alchemical success, and the end of the great work. Rubedo is also known by the Greek word iosis.
In Jungian theory, the Cosmic Man is an archetypal figure that appears in creation myths of a wide variety of mythology. Generally, he is described as helpful or positive, and serves as a seed for the creation of the world, such that after death parts of his body became physical parts of the universe. He also represents the oneness of human existence, or the universe.
Two Essays on Analytical Psychology is volume 7 of The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, presenting the core of Carl Jung's views about psychology. Known as one of the best introductions to Jung's work, the volumes includes the essays "The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious" and "On the Psychology of the Unconscious" (1943).
Jungian archetypes are defined as universal, primal symbols and images that derive from the collective unconscious, as proposed by Carl Jung. They are the psychic counterpart of instinct. It is described as a kind of innate unspecific knowledge, derived from the sum total of human history, which prefigures and directs conscious behavior. They are underlying base forms, or the archetypes-as-such, from which emerge images and motifs such as the mother, the child, the trickster, and the flood among others. History, culture, and personal context shape these manifest representations thereby giving them their specific content. These images and motifs are more precisely called archetypal images. However, it is common for the term archetype to be used interchangeably to refer to both the base archetypes-as-such and the culturally specific archetypal images.
Michael Scott Montague Fordham was an English child psychiatrist and Jungian analyst. He was a co-editor of the English translation of C.G. Jung's Collected Works. His clinical and theoretical collaboration with psychoanalysts of the object relations school led him to make significant theoretical contributions to what has become known as 'The London School' of analytical psychology in marked contrast to the approach of the C. G. Jung Institute, Zürich. His pioneering research into infancy and childhood led to a new understanding of the self and its relations with the ego. Part of Fordham's legacy is to have shown that the self in its unifying characteristics can transcend the apparently opposing forces that congregate in it and that while engaged in the struggle, it can be exceedingly disruptive both destructively and creatively.
Archetypal pedagogy is a theory of education developed by Clifford Mayes that aims at enhancing psycho-spiritual growth in both the teacher and student. The idea of archetypal pedagogy stems from the Jungian tradition and is directly related to analytical psychology.
Jolande Jacobi was a Swiss psychologist, best remembered for her work with Carl Jung, and for her writings on Jungian psychology.
In Jungian psychology, the Wise Old Woman and the Wise Old Man are archetypes of the collective unconscious.
The persona, for Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, was the social face the individual presented to the world—"a kind of mask, designed on the one hand to make a definite impression upon others, and on the other to conceal the true nature of the individual."
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