DE GUZMAN, Jolenne Marie SC.

Assignment in Psychology
SY1412 July 21, 2014
1









Jung's theory, like Freud's, is a depth psychology. It assumes the most important
factors influencing your personality are deep in the unconscious. However, Jung did
not use Freud's concepts of id and super-ego.

What was the psyche? What was Jung's special interest?
The mind as a whole was called the psyche (PSY-kee) by both men. The psyche is the
whole psychic universe of the individual, including both conscious and unconscious
processes. Jung was fascinated with unconscious processes in the psyche. If the sexual
theory was Freud's special interest, unconscious mental contents were Jung's special
interest. Jung was interested in any sort of myth, art, dream, legend, or religious belief,
because he regarded these as conscious expressions of deep, largely unconscious
psychological forces.

Jung distinguished between two types of unconscious mind: the personal
unconscious and collective unconscious. The personal unconscious was the
accumulation of experiences from a person's lifetime that could not be consciously
recalled. The collective unconscious, on the other hand, was a sort of universal
inheritance of human beings, a "species memory" passed on to each of us, not unlike
the motor programs and instincts of other animals.

What were two types of unconscious mind, to Jung? What were complexes?
Jung believed the personal unconscious was dominated by complexes. Complexes, in
Jung's system, are emotion-laden themes from a person's life. For example, if you had
a leg amputated when you were a child, this would influence your life in profound
ways, even if you were wonderfully successful in overcoming the handicap. You might
have many thoughts, emotions, memories, feelings of inferiority, triumphs, bitterness,
determination...centering on that one aspect of your life. If these thoughts troubled
you, Jung would say you had a complex about the leg.





DE GUZMAN, Jolenne Marie SC. Assignment in Psychology
SY1412 July 21, 2014
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A complex is literally a grouping of parts around some central emotional theme.
In Jung's terminology, it is a system of related thoughts and emotions tied together by
a psychologically powerful event. Complexes were due to a person's life experiences,
so they were individual and unique, part of the personal unconscious according to
Jung. A complex might manifest itself by turning up in dreams or fantasies, or by
provoking an unusual reaction to events in the outside world that relate to the
complex.

Why was Jung interested in alchemy?
Jung was struck by the similarity between images from dreams, reported to him
by patients, and images in the journals of medieval alchemistsmagicians who
demonstrated impressive chemical reactions, sometimes sold potions or told the future,
and (according to legend) were always seeking a way to turn lead into gold. Some
alchemists also kept dream diaries, illustrating their journals with flamboyant, mysterious
drawings of supernatural creatures and mystical symbols. Jung received his first
alchemist's journal on loan from a library the same week he had a vivid dream about
a book full of obscure symbols. The book arrived on loan, Jung opened it, and there
before him were pages filled with fantastical symbols, just as in his dream. From that
point on he was hooked on alchemy, so to speak. He frequently explored ancient
alchemist's books for clues to obscure symbolism and occult practices.

What was the symbolic meaning of alchemy, to Jung?
Jung did not believe gold could be created from lead...at least, not literally.
Jung saw the whole enterprise of alchemy as symbolic, a spiritual exercise. Alchemy
was a symbol of the potential for human transformation from base, lower existence
(lead) to higher spiritual awareness (gold). Jung could see similarities in the symbolism
occurring in the journals of alchemists, the dreams of schizophrenics, and the myths of
ancient cultures. All (Jung believed) were manifestations of the same human effort to
struggle toward spiritual wholeness, to find the "gold" in existence.











DE GUZMAN, Jolenne Marie SC. Assignment in Psychology
SY1412 July 21, 2014
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Concept of Collective Unconscious at Jung


Jung concept of collective unconscious is based on his experiences with
schizophrenic persons since he worked in the Burgholzli psychiatric hospital.

Though initially Jung followed the Freudian theory of unconscious as the psychic
strata formed by repressed wishes, he later developed his own theory on the
unconscious to include some new concepts. The most important of them is the
archetype.

Archetypes constitute the structure of the collective unconscious - they are
psychic innate dispositions to experience and represent basic human behavior and
situations. Thus mother-child relationship is governed by the mother archetype. Father-
child - by the father archetype. Birth, death, power and failure are controlled by
archetypes. The religious and mystique experiences are also governed by archetypes.

The most important of all is the Self, which is the archetype of the Center of the
psychic person, his/her totality or wholeness. The Center is made of the unity of
conscious and unconscious reached through the individuation process.

Archetypes manifest themselves through archetypal images (in all the cultures
and religious doctrines), in dreams and visions. Therefore a great deal of Jungian
interest in psyche focuses on dreams and symbols interpretation in order to discover
the compensation induced by archetypes as marks of psyche transformation.

The collective unconscious is an universal datum, that is, every human being is
endowed with this psychic archetype-layer since his/her birth. One can not acquire
this strata by education or other conscious effort because it is innate.

We may also describe it as a universal library of human knowledge, or the sage
in man, the very transcendental wisdom that guides mankind.

Jung stated that the religious experience must be linked with the experience of
the archetypes of the collective unconscious. Thus, God himself is lived like a psychic
experience of the path that leads one to the realization of his/her psychic wholeness.


DE GUZMAN, Jolenne Marie SC. Assignment in Psychology
SY1412 July 21, 2014
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Jung about the Collective Unconscious

The collective unconscious - so far as we can say anything about it at all -
appears to consist of mythological motifs or primordial images, for which reason the
myths of all nations are its real exponents. In fact, the whole of mythology could be
taken as a sort of projection of the collective unconscious... We can therefore study
the collective unconscious in two ways, either in mythology or in the analysis of the
individual. (From The Structure of the Psyche, CW 8, par. 325.)

Jung's Methods in Psychotherapy

Jung's method in psychotherapy follows the Freud's one, as he often admitted.
In rare cases, when Freudian approach of the psyche is not sufficient, Jung would
apply also a complementary method that should guide the patient to a personal
confrontation with the collective unconscious and its archetypes.

This confrontation aims at the assimilation of archetypal images, in short, the
individuation - an extensive process that leads to the realization of the psychic
wholeness made of the conjunction of the conscious and the unconscious. In
common terms, it is all about an extension of the conscious mind to include the
archetypal materials pointing to the basics of the completeness.


The entire process is achieved through the following methods of exploration:

Free Associations Test
Test used in psychotherapeutic treatment that consists of recording the average
response time to certain stimulus-words. The patient is asked to answer to the
inducted words pronounced by the analyst with any word that comes to his mind. The
response time can be an indicator of the activated unconscious complexes.

Note: There is a free associations test that automatically computes the problem-words
here...

Dream Analysis
Up to a point, Jung's dream interpretation method follows the Freud's one, including
the free associations, subject level, retrospective approach. But he later added several
new concepts, such as the amplification of dream content, the idea that the dream
brings a compensation to the one-sided individual ego, and its finality that aims at the
the psychic wholeness. Learn more...
DE GUZMAN, Jolenne Marie SC. Assignment in Psychology
SY1412 July 21, 2014
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Active Imagination
Jung invited his patients to let all the things flow in their mind. That is, the inner
fantasies must flow freely while the patient must proceed not as a detached and
contemplative viewer, nor as a psychotherapist, but as an actor that takes part in his
fantasies, that plays a role in them. The fantasies are products of the unconscious and
must be fully integrated in his conscious mind. Learn more.

Symbol Analysis
A large part of dream interpretation technique at Jung consists in symbol analysis. It
aims at the integration of the unconscious contents and the extension of conscious
mind. Learn more.

Playing, painting, building and other such activities may lead one to explore and
manifest his own unconscious contents. In painting one may express a visual
representation of the wholeness. Also in building, one may relieve his inner creative
forces blocked or inhibited by his one-sided moral or ethical values.



Jung's Definitions

For Jung, My thesis then, is as follows: in addition to our immediate
consciousness, which is of a thoroughly personal nature and which we believe to be
the only empirical psyche (even if we tack on the personal unconscious as an
appendix), there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and
impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does
not develop individually but is inherited. It consists of pre-existent forms, the
archetypes, which can only become conscious secondarily and which give definite
form to certain psychic contents.

Jung linked the collective unconscious to 'what Freud called "archaic
remnants" - mental forms whose presence cannot be explained by anything in the
individual's own life and which seem to be aboriginal, innate, and inherited shapes of
the human mind'.






DE GUZMAN, Jolenne Marie SC. Assignment in Psychology
SY1412 July 21, 2014
6


Minimal/maximal interpretations
In a minimalist interpretation of what would then appear as 'Jung's much
misunderstood idea of the collective unconscious', his idea was 'simply that certain
structures and predispositions of the unconscious are common to all of us...[on] an
inherited, species-specific, genetic basis'. Thus 'one could as easily speak of the
"collective arm" - meaning the basic pattern of bones and muscles which all human
arms share in common'.

Others point out however that 'there does seem to be a basic ambiguity in
Jung's various descriptions of the Collective Unconscious. Sometimes he seems to
regard the predisposition to experience certain images as understandable in terms of
some genetic model' - as with the collective arm. However, Jung was 'also at pains to
stress the numinous quality of these experiences, and there can be no doubt that he
was attracted to the idea that the archetypes afford evidence of some communion
with some divine or world mind', and perhaps 'his popularity as a thinker derives
precisely from this'[8] - the maximal interpretation.

Marie-Louise von Franz accepted that 'it is naturally very tempting to identify
the hypothesis of the collective unconscious historically and regressively with the
ancient idea of an all-extensive world-soul'. New Age writer Healy goes further,
claiming that Jung himself 'dared to suggest that the human mind could link to ideas
and motivations called the collective unconscious...a body of unconscious energy that
lives forever'. This is the idea of monopsychism.

Collective unconscious

Collective unconscious is a term of analytical psychology, coined by Carl Jung.
It is proposed to be a part of the unconscious mind, expressed in humanity and all life
forms with nervous systems, and describes how the structure of the psyche
autonomously organizes experience. Jung distinguished the collective unconscious
from the personal unconscious, in that the personal unconscious is a personal reservoir
of experience unique to each individual, while the collective unconscious collects and
organizes those personal experiences in a similar way with each member of a
particular species. (Source: Wikipedia, the free online Encyclopedia)