Analytical Psychology (Jungian)

Jung’s structural model adds a layer beneath the personal unconscious: a collective unconscious containing archetypes — inherited predispositions to organise experience in certain forms. Archetypes are not images but form-giving tendencies; the images that fill them are cultural and personal.

Persona

The adapted face presented to the world. Necessary; pathological when identified with entirely.

Shadow

The disowned aspects of the self, typically encountered first through projection onto others. Integration of the shadow is the first substantial task of analysis.

Anima / animus

The contrasexual inner figure. The most dated part of the theory, resting on assumptions about gender that contemporary analysts have largely reworked or abandoned.

Self

The organising centre and totality of the psyche, distinguished from the ego. The goal of individuation is a relationship between ego and Self, not their merger.

Complex

An emotionally charged cluster of associations around an archetypal core. Jung demonstrated complexes empirically with the word association test — his most testable contribution.

Psychological types

Jung’s typology — attitudes of introversion and extraversion, and the functions of thinking, feeling, sensation and intuition — was the origin of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. The MBTI has poor psychometric properties: low test–retest reliability, dichotomised scores where the data are continuous, and weak predictive validity. Jung’s original conception is more nuanced than the instrument built on it, and neither is a sound basis for clinical decisions.

Symptoms are compensations. If consciousness has become one-sided — over-identified with the persona, or with rationality, or with a role — the unconscious presses in the opposite direction, and it does so through symptoms, dreams and errors. The neurosis is the psyche’s attempt at self-correction, badly executed.

Jung’s distinctive contribution to clinical thinking was to take the second half of life seriously as a developmental period with its own tasks: meaning, mortality, and the integration of what was set aside in order to build a career and a family. Much of what presents in midlife as depression he read as individuation pressing for attention.

Individuation — becoming the person one potentially is — proceeds through encounter with unconscious material rather than through its elimination.

1. 1Confession — the cathartic disclosure of what has been withheld.
2. 2Elucidation — interpretation, including of the transference.
3. 3Education — adaptation to social reality, drawing explicitly on Adler.
4. 4Transformation — individuation proper, and the mutual transformation of analyst and patient.