An Brief Introduction to Jungian Analytical Psychology

The Unconscious

Jungian psychology is based upon the premise that the psyche—the sum total of human consciousness—is real. The psyche is composed of two main areas: consciousness and the unconscious. Consciousness is a relatively small part of the psyche ruled by the ego. The unconscious, by contrast, is a much larger area of psychic reality characterized by its mysterious quality which always remains, on one level, entirely unknowable. C. G. Jung explained that the unconscious surrounds consciousness on all sides while Jolande Jacobi likened its depth and breadth to an inner cosmos which is as infinite as the outer one. The unconscious is, furthermore, intrinsically creative—it spontaneously generates images. Jung called this imaginal capacity of the psyche its myth-making function, for the unconscious is a creative storyteller, a transpersonal (nonhuman) realm teeming with potential life, as opposed to being only a repository for forgotten and repressed contents, as Freud believed. It is a living field of reality complete with its own autonomy typically manifested in symbolic and metaphorical primordial images that are inherent to its structure.

Structural and Psychodynamic Aspects of the Psyche

The potential for life contained in the unconscious is actualized through certain structural and psychodynamic realities such as complexes and archetypes. Jung defined complexes as clusters of feeling-toned images that congregate around a central (archetypal) nucleus such as “Mother.” A complex is formed when a traumatic event tears asunder two parts of ourselves creating a fringe or splinter identity with its own energetic reality, its own autonomy, and an uncanny ability to absorb the ego into itself causing a state of possession experienced as a temporary alteration of personality. Complexes are therefore typically distinguished by the disturbances and symptoms they cause in the normal functioning of conscious processes. Jacobi connects complexes to the teleological thrust of the psyche by pointing out that complexes must be raised up into consciousness and assimilated so that a redistribution of psychic energy (libido) takes place. In this way, complexes exert a generative influence upon the psyche, using an autonomous existence manifested (through personified form) in dreams to drum up a relational field between ego and the unconscious. Complexes are thus the building blocks of consciousness, carriers of psychic energy, holders of images and their symbolic content.

Fundamentally, complexes are emotional psychic creatures distinguished by their high affectivity, for their meaning is contained in the feeling function which remains opaque in the face of intellectual regard. It is important to mention, however, that for Jung, complexes were not only manifestations of pathological states (as they were for Freud) but also intrinsic to the psychology of healthy individuals. The nodal point of the complex, arising as it does from the realm beyond, is never pathological, but primordial and universal, for complexes arise out of the archetypes of the collective unconscious. Archetypes belong to the collective unconscious while complexes belong to the personal unconscious, which is where an archetype puts on the clothing of a personal content with specific significance for the individual encountering it.

Jung insisted that archetypes “as such”—which he saw as a priori psychological instincts that condition conscious apprehension—cannot be exactly defined for their nature is utterly mysterious and unknowable. This is because they abide in the collective unconscious which is a suprapersonal realm that lies beyond conscious rational understanding. They can only be known through their effects which manifest in metaphorical and symbolic images observed in dreams, fantasies, visions, mythology, and fairy tales. Archetypes possess a numinous power which, when translated into an imaginal experience in the conscious psyche, exerts a tremendous influence that, in effect, causes certain specific behaviors to arise. Archetypes are structural conditioning factors, autonomous, unalterable, and fundamental to the psyche. They are dynamic, alive, numinous, fascinating, powerful, mysterious, and, above all, as Jung insists, ambivalent. Archetypes take recognizable form only when they come into contact with the personal unconscious and its contents at which point they manifest in symbols. Classic Jungian complexes and archetypes defined as structural elements of the psyche are called Ego, Persona, Shadow, Anima/Animus, and the Self.

Phenomenal and Experiential Aspects of the Psyche

Jung has said that archetypes are akin to actionable psychic organizations which means that they have a role to play in the creation of consciousness. This has to do with what Jung has called the teleological aspect of the psyche—its inherent need to move toward a goal, which is the synthesis of conscious and unconscious realms into a state of equilibrium where the centering unit of consciousness, the ego, is grounded in and informed by the more profound centering unit of the total psyche—the archetype of the Self. To achieve this wholesome state of consciousness, which is what Jung called individuation, the objective psyche spontaneously generates symbolic images in order to communicate its intentions and needs to the conscious sphere. For life to be complete, external life must correspond with the imaginal and metaphorical version of it taking place on a symbolic level in the psyche. A sort of dialectic process therefore unfolds between conscious and unconscious spheres of psychic reality with symbols acting as the connecting bridge. Symbols shuttle the unknowns of the deep objective psyche into the realm of consciousness using images. Jungian images are not restricted to visual styles but encompass any spontaneous emanation from the deep psyche which can take the form of thoughts, ideas, emotions and affects, visions, sudden insights and inspirations, creative output of any kind, dreams, and rituals, to name a few. By interacting with these symbolic images through methods (reintroduced by Jung) such as active imagination, dreamwork, and ritual, the conscious ego is opened up to a broader level of consciousness as more and more unconscious knowledge comes up into the light of day, as it were, and becomes integrated into conscious awareness. This is what is meant by the idea of wholeness.

These dynamic psychological phenomena are experienced in personal life through the advent of our creative and emotional lives. It is as if we become aware of other persons, emotional beings, exerting an autonomous influence over us in the form of strange, inexplicable moods, sudden flashes of rage or sadness, melancholic ideas about the past or future, and creative abilities such as fluency with writing or painting or dance. But perhaps the most ubiquitous experience of the symbolic output of the psyche takes place each night when we enter the world of dreams. Dreams and their counterparts, myths, fairy tales, and poetry are essentially the symbolic language of the psyche writ large. It is through meaningful dialogue with this language and its speakers that we enlarge and expand the otherwise limited realm of consciousness. The images enrich our lives with meaning, endowing us with secret knowledge from beyond the limited human realm, which brings with it the numinous power of renewal, regeneration, and the fecundity inherent in transpersonal nature.

The Relationship Between Instinct and Spirit

In his investigations into the nature of archetypal phenomena, Jung needed to distinguish between instinctual behavioral patterns such as those we share with animals, and psychological patterns that appear to be only psychic. To this end he devised a model that put the total psyche, conscious and unconscious, on a scale with two opposite poles—on one end there is the purely physiological realm of instinct, on the other, the purely psychic, or spiritual, realm of archetypes. Consciousness can slide between these two extremes, taking on the qualities of one or the other. When consciousness has merged with the purely instinctual pole—the pole which Jung designates with the color infrared—an individual can be overcome by passions of the body such as overeating or pathological sexual drives. In the other extreme, when consciousness has merged with the purely spiritual (archetypal) pole—designated by the color ultraviolet—an individual may be persuaded that they are the lord savior or remain possessed by some other fanatical form of spiritual conviction. Jung believed that while spirit and instinct are polar opposites, they nevertheless exist together in a symbiotic and fruitful form of correspondence which, through tension producing dynamics in the psyche, generate the psychic energy needed for life, a dynamic Jung identified as the transcendent function. Spirit and instinct are thus contaminated with one another and are correlates that, in a sense, connect psyche with matter. Jacobi helpfully compares an archetype to the psychic aspect of brain structure and explains that instinct determines and regulates biological functioning while archetype determines and regulates psychological functioning. At either extreme end of the spectrum, there is the psychoid realm, which is a transpersonal dimension beyond the matter/psyche duality where archetypes as spiritual, nonorganic entities connect with physiological instincts and essentially become the same thing, thereby enacting the well-known alchemical image of an uroboros.

Divine Intervention

The psyche is the world’s pivot: not only is it the one great condition for the existence of the world at all, it is also an intervention in the existing natural order, and no one can say with certainty where this intervention will finally end. CW8, para. 423

Our course, C. G. Jung in Context begins with this evocative and far-reaching quote from the man himself. Here, Jung is saying that without the psyche existence would be moot and that manifestations of movement, change, evolution, would likewise be absent. The psyche is the pivot, the axis, and the driving force which generates the ongoing project of life. Accordingly, the psyche and its numinous inhabitants—the archetypes—draw consciousness into being making life itself a reality. However, it is the “intervention” of the psyche into “the existing natural order" of life that fascinates me the most about this quote. It reminds me of Jung’s definition of God from an interview he gave to Good Housekeeping Magazine in December 1961, just before his death:

To this day God is the name by which I designate all things which cross my willful path violently and recklessly, all things which upset my subjective views, plans and intentions and change the course of my life for better or worse. (n.p.)

Here and in his other writings, Jung essentially equates the psyche (conscious and unconscious, personal and collective) with God—God, the creator, and God, the destroyer. Jung warns that God is not our stooge to be used by us for wish fulfillment, revenge, or derivation of power. Rather, it is a word representing an awesome, autonomous, and not always friendly power under whose ambivalent, unknowable influence we find ourselves, again and again. This knowledge is significant for me personally since I am living the life of a spiritual seeker. Looking for, and ultimately finding God is my job, my vocation. What is unique in Jung’s view is the admission that God is not necessarily our friend. God is not here to save us or rescue us or satisfy our wishes or make us shine. God has a dark side, a vengeful side. Furthermore, this God is none other than our own psychospiritual level of existence. We contain, no, we—are—God.

This course also taught me an important lesson about the dangers of hero worship. By examining the psychic effects of a constellated child archetype in relation with the puella aeternis, and by studying the various attributes of Jung’s personal life and times, I was able to see how I was worshipping him a bit, in the way a young girl might blindly worship her father. During this course, I was able to significantly shift my inner perceptions about the father archetype which led to a graduation from the grips of the wounded inner child, who is, after all, the shadow side of the hero archetype, my unconscious default position.

Jung has said that archetypes evolve, myths evolve, and, through the long step by step process of individuation, ideally, the whole person also evolves. There is an image of growth one can hold onto along the way. This course taught us to examine the idea of a personal myth and self-presentation, not just in how Jung presents himself in his writings, but also how we present ourselves in the many areas of life (including the dreamworld) in which we gambol about. The boundaries between self and other, personal and collective, dream and reality, are much more permeable than we’ve been led to believe. Permeability thus connects personal with archetypal using threads of psychic intelligence—they inform one another and grow together. One’s life and one’s myth are archetypal images which grow and evolve, just as ideas about Jung as a womanizing antisemitic racist permeate and grow with ideas of him as a genius explorer of parts unknown. Learning to put Jung in context helps bring a sense of objectivity to one’s own life as well. The psyche is a divine intervention, and this lessens the potential for boredom in objectivity. After all, what can be more exciting than watching God at work?

Unfolding A Life In Work

DJA700, “Introduction to Depth Psychology,” provided me with a historic foundation upon which to build my future academic work in Jungian and Archetypal Psychology. While I did not find all of the material equally inspiring, I was nevertheless deeply engaged. The first two modules gave me a look at the ancient shamanic roots of depth psychology and the origin of the word mesmerize. I also learned how the scientific and industrial revolutions led to a preponderance of psychological disorders which gave birth to depth psychology.

We moved on to study the three great founders of depth psychology—Freud, Adler, and Jung. We learned about Freud’s insistence that sexual energy lies at the center of all psychic activity and that it alone is responsible for the creation of the unconscious, since that is where the psyche must deposit all its sexually charged shame and other repressed materials. Adler taught that the well being of the human psyche is tied to a holistic approach to an individual as situated within society and within social equity. Adler felt that inferiority/superiority complexes were instrumental in causing psychic malaise. Then, of course, there is Jung. He is my hero and no matter how often people go on about his romantic misadventures, I still find his work to be supremely illuminating and of extreme relevance to our current world troubles. Jung espoused a vision of the psyche that includes the personal unconscious, the broader collective unconscious, and a number of inhabitants, features, and psychic proclivities which populate and animate psychic existence, all of which exert a formative influence upon our daily lives.

Later, we learned about the social implications of rapidly spreading psychological practices and saw some of the corrosive, diabolical methods for inequitable social engineering that psychology was used for, especially in the post modern world. In the last two weeks we studied Ken Wilbur and his Integral Psychology, which, for me at least, requires a great deal more than one week of study to be understood. Finally, we did our best to decipher Susan Rowland’s views on Jungian psychology by studying Jung’s prose with its invisible peaks and valleys—the expressions of the unconscious embedded in his words and sentences. “Jung believed and wrote as though he believed that the thinking and discriminating mind—conventionally used to produce non-fictional argument—was situated within a sea of unconscious creativity” (Rowland, 2005, p. 1). In other words, the unconscious was also doing the writing, and Jung let it do so.

My favorite part of the class happened when I discovered Gustav Fechner’s The Little Book of Life After Death, in which, among many other moments of beauty, he postulates the development of human consciousness and its evolution into an angelic eventuality. This further cemented my personal attachment to the Romantic ground of depth and archetypal psychology, with Keats’s profound notion of life as “the vale of soul-making.”

My work is still amorphous and unknowable, like the archetypes. I am in the middle of a creative journey and cannot know yet what the outcome will be. The history of depth psychology and its many permutations is a snapshot of academic work as creative work. I’m able to see the knowledge which developed out of the discovery of the unconscious, and I’m able to take inspiration from its serpentine progression. All our forebears in this work, people like Jung, Freud, Fechner, Adler, Whitmont, von Franz, Mesmer, Edinger, Hillman, Rowland, Mayes and countless others have each expressed a life in work, exhibiting the way a vocation unfolds into a realized vision. For me, this means that I must simply continue putting one academic foot in front of the other, paying careful attention to every step, and taking special notice of the numinous moments along the way when a certain idea takes hold of me and doesn’t let go. In this way, I hope to unfold a life in work as a writer, an artist, and a scholar.

Hubris, Sacrifice, and Living the Religious Life

The never-ending school shootings are the unconscious sacrifice and American Exceptionalism as embodied in the Second Amendment, the so-called infallibility of the Founding Fathers, and the Constitution—is the hubris.

I’m more excited about the second part of the lecture--that subtler level of sacrifice and its practical application in everyday life. This is where we can develop “. . . that stability which human existence acquires when the claims of the spirit become as imperative as the necessities of social life” (Jung, CW 10, para. 190) [Italics mine].

The correct relationship of hubris to sacrifice is exactly that of the ego to the Self. There is a healthy way and a destructive way, and the healthy way unequivocally requires sacrificing the ego to the Self, again, and again, and again.

Strange moods, dark forebodings, irrational sorrows, sudden, unmistakeable intuitions, creative outpourings, the immensity of our dreams—these are the “significant” parts of “psychic life” that “always” lie “below the horizon of consciousness,” for “when we speak of the spiritual problem of modern man, we are speaking of things that are barely visible—of the most intimate and fragile things, of flowers that open only in the night” (Jung, CW 10, para. 194).

Sacralizing average moments in the day by surrendering egoic inclinations in favor of nurturing “the restorative possibilities in embracing the dark, underworld of shadow and dream” (Slater, nd, p. 114)—this is what it means to live a religious life.

Each morning, I write down my dreams. Each day, I honor the shadow (sad songs, angry, passionate drawings), 10, 20, 30 times a day I check in with myself: Where is my attention going? Who is in charge right now?

I finally know what Krishnamurti meant when he said you must die to your Self.

Divine Progression

The essence of psychic conflict seems to reside within the confrontation between two warring factions. On one side sits the hardened one-sidedness of ego consciousness with its abysmal feeling of inadequacy, on the other a numinous intuition, an image of wholeness and freedom emanating from the unconscious. This confrontation between pairs of opposites yields an intolerable tension which creates a third thing. The transcendent function, as it is called, is a new and elegant solution “. . . which manifests itself as a quality of conjoined opposites” (Jung, 1969, p. 90).

Why is this psychic tension necessary for the individuation process? It seems that without it, there would be no forward movement. Coppin and Nelson (2017) write that the psyche is dialectical, invoking Hegel and his view that “all human thought and nature itself is composed of paradox and contradiction . . . the source of the natural and necessary movements towards the ‘Absolute’. . . ”(Nelson, 2017, p. 157). Accordingly, the psyche is inherently teleological, and the transcendent function is a kind of engine that feeds on tension, driving the conscious ego into the arms of the Self. “Conflict, to paradox, to revelation;” says Robert Johnson, “that is divine progression” (Johnson, 1971, p. 91). We must suffer--allow and bear--the tension, so we may “. . . earn the right to unity” (Johnson, 1971, p. 88).

Allowing and bearing the tension can sometimes become unendurable. After weeks of weathering an emotional cacophony, I was finally led to reading about the shadow. I discovered why things have been so painful—I have not been honoring mine. I have brutally rejected my artist self. I began drawing images that symbolize and express different parts of my shadows. I enacted a ritual of acknowledgment. I did active imagination.

While this process is urgent and ongoing, relief has been instantaneous.

Jung, C. G. (1969). The transcendent function (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). In H. Read et al. (Eds.), The collected works of C. G. Jung (Vol. 8, 2nd ed., pp. 67-91). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1958)

Coppin, J & Nelson, E. (2017). The art of inquiry. A depth-psychological perspective. Spring Publications. Thompson: Conn.

Jonson, R. (1971). Owning your own shadow. Understanding the dark side of the psyche. Harper One. New York: NY.