Carl Gustav Jung: A BRIEF PERSONAL INTRODUCTION

Carl Gustav Jung (German: [ karl staf j ]; 26 July 1875 6 June 1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist, an influential thinker and the founder of Analytical Psychology. Jung is considered the first modern psychiatrist to view the human psyche as "by nature religious" and make it the focus of exploration. Jung considered the process of individuation necessary for a person to become whole. This is a psychological process of integrating the opposites including the conscious with the unconscious while still maintaining their relative autonomy. Individuation was the central concept of analytical psychology Jung emphasizes the racial origins of personality. Humans are born with many predispositions that have been bequeathed to them by their ancestors; theses predispositions guide their conduct and determine in part what they will become conscious of and respond to in their world of experience. In other words, there is a racially performed and collective personality that reaches out selectivity into the world of experience and is modified and elaborated by the experiences that that it receives. An individuals personality is a resultant of any inner forces acting upon and being acted upon by outer forces.

Jung on Personality Assessment techniques: Word Association Test and Painting Therapy What is Personality Assessment? Personality Assessment is a process in which a psychologist uses systematic procedures to gather and organize information about a person to aid understanding, prediction or the making decisions about that person. It is considered a process because it is characterized by a sequence of identifiable stages. Sundberg (1977) has identified such five stages: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Establishing the reason for assessment Selecting the assessment techniques Gathering the information Organizing and interpreting the information Communicating conclusions and making decisions

Since the final goal of personality assessment is to contribute valid conclusions and decisions about an individual, it is logical for the psychologist to begin by asking some relevant questions: Why is this assessment being undertaken? What exactly needs to be understood or decided in relation to the person being assessed? Knowing the specific purpose of the assessment, including a clear comprehension of the referral question, enables the psychologist to proceed more realistically and efficiently, with a minimum of error in direction and interpretation.

Assessment techniques come in a variety of forms. Each has special strengths and limitations regarding the kinds of responses obtained, scoring, interpretation, reliability, validity. However, there are three major types of psychological techniques used to assess individual personality: projective, objective, and behavioral. Measures of each type often are part of an assessment battery. It is not possible to indicate which specific technique is best because many considerations need to be taken into account. These considerations need historical developments in the study of individual differences, technical standards of reliability and validity, relatively changes in the popularity of specific techniques over time, factors related to a professionals training and theoretical framework, personal preferences of psychologists, applications to adult or children, and the kinds of questions that need to be answered. Despite evidence of recent decline in traditional uses of psychological tests, assessment remains an important aspect of personality study.

Personality Assessment Techniques To talk of unconscious aspects of personality is one thing; to observe or measure such phenomena is quite another. How can psychologists possibly get at something by definition is not directly available to consciousness? Freud and Jung suggested a number of avenues: free association, word association, slips of the tongue, certain events occurring during psychoanalytic therapy, waking fantasy, and interpretation of dreams. Here we consider some of these revolutionary techniques for exploring the unconscious.

WORD ASSOCIATION TEST In the same vein, Carl Jung (1910) sought to get at the unconscious by developing the Word Association Test (WAT). One of the first personality tests used in clinical settings. Jung instructed persons to say the first word that come to mind after hearing each of 100 words from a standardized list. He then analyzed the associations according to content, commonality, or uniqueness, reaction time later recall, and accompanying behavior (facial expressions, postural shifts, voice changes, laughing, and crying.) he paid particular attention to responses given to emotionally arousing words. Jung found it helpful to interpret results in the context of emotional complexes, in which ideas that seem illogical on the surface can be understood by their links to similar feelings, conflicts, or experiences likely to be present in deeper unconscious. In addition, areas of conflict were assumed to be present if the patient: (1) repeated the stimulus word several times as though it had been not heard; (2) misheard the word as some the other; (3) gave a response of more than one word; (4) gave a meaningless reaction (a made-up word); or (5) failed to respond at all. Jung also required his patients to recall all their responses to the word stimuli following a rest interval.

PAINTING THERAPY Another technique used by Jung in conjunction with dream analysis was painting therapy. He relied heavily on paintings by his patients as a means of further encouraging them to express their unconscious feelings or thoughts. Pointing out that these paintings had little artistic merit. He helped patients to see that they must be expressions of their innermost selves. The painting exercises were conducted to help patients clarify the symbols seen in their dreams and to force patients to cope actively with their problems. In Jungs view, painting had real therapeutic effects. It moved patients off dead center and started them on the road to self realization. Art Jung proposed that Art can be used to alleviate or contain feelings of trauma, fear, or anxiety and also to repair, restore and heal. In his work with patients and in his own personal explorations, Jung wrote that art expression and images found in dreams could be helpful in recovering from trauma and emotional distress. Jung often drew, painted, or made objects and constructions at times of emotional distress, which he recognized as recreational Jung had a much more optimistic view of mankind than Freud, and of art in particular. Not all was rooted in sexuality, or in personal experience and psychological difficulties. One type, psychological art, certainly drew on the assimilated experience of the psyche, creating work generally intelligible to the community. But there was also another type, visionary, which drew on the archetypes of the collective unconscious, creating work of a deeper and less individual nature. Appearing in dreams, mythology and art, these patterns took the form of images selforiginating, inventive, spontaneous and fulfilling images. In some respects archetypes could be viewed as metaphors which held worlds together and could not be adequately circumscribed. But they were also emotionally possessive, organizing whole clusters of events in different areas of life, ascribing to us our place in society, controlling everything we see, do and say. Because their work drains energy from the conscious control of personality, artists may be more susceptible than others to psychological illnesses, but their creations should not be written off as individual or infantile aberrations. Art is crucial to society, giving life and cohesion to its fundamental beliefs.


Jung was not the first to turn to art in the name of psychological explorations of the unconscious, nor would he be the last. Charcot, Prinzhorn, the unfortunate Dr. Ferdire all looked to drawing and painting as an important clue to understanding and potentially treating madness. And not a few were tempted to cross the boundary of insanity themselves in the process. But the power of images went far beyond scientific interest or therapeutic effects for Jung. In his eyes, creativity and the symbols it produced took charge as autonomous forces over and above (or below) the individual artist, who was reduced to a vessel or medium, much like a shaman in magic rituals. Here Jung was treading ground eagerly explored by the radical avant-garde in the age of high modernism. Artauds visit to the shamans and his incantations at Rodez, the mediumistic trances of the Surrealists, Max Ernsts alchemical novel, Une semaine de

bont, Hans Arps mandalassuch experiments paralleled Jungs own investigations step by step in the 1920s and 1930s, and they reflect similar ideas about the source and power of art.

Jung Art Therapy Theory Carl Jung, famous for the Jung art therapy concept, was one of the associates of the famous Austrian psychiatrist, Sigmund Freud, the founding father of the psychoanalytic varsity of psychology. Freud became internationally recognized with his groundbreaking theories about the conscious vs. Comatose parts of the mind. At the same time beginning his Jung art therapy hypotheses, Jung felt that although Freud made the target of his care the comatose conscious, he felt that it was made to sound as though it were an unpalatable cauldron of seething desires. But according to the north american Art Treatment organisation, Inc, Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud together, with plenty of other psychiatric folk at the time, had a big hand in the development of art treatment. It was accepted that these historic practitioners had the same discernment that entered into the development of art care, with its application of conflict resolution. The healing and learning that sprung from the talk therapy these men ultimately became renowned for, was thought to have created a base for making clear the comatose levels of the mind. But many feel that it was essentially the Jung art therapy that appeared to be the strategy on which todays art treatment received its roots. One of the tools Carl Jung used for his patients to express their comatose feelings was art, bringing forth the Jung art therapy method. Influenced by both psychology and therapy, Jungs influence was based on his attention to the psychological advocating that was within each art piece. Freud himself never had his patients do their own design, but Carl Jung impressed it. To paint what we see before us, Jung wrote, is a different art from painting what we see within. absolutely rejecting Freuds ideas, Jung expanded the province of treatment on a personal level. The Jung art therapy included design of all levels, the interaction of mythology and its influence on the present time, and the thoughts of local folks including the round non secular mandala and the Sanskrit. Many felt he had commoner sense than Freud, as the he felt the persons psyche had more than one interacting systems. One of these was the ego, as he discharged Freuds superego and id, feeling the ego alone was thought of as a private comatose state of the mind but as a basic collective comatose one. With much more of a upbeat view of art than did Freud, with his Jung art therapy viewpoints Carl Jung felt that psychological art came from the psyche and was thought to be intelligible to the general mass. But even more, he found out that another style called idealist art, dew on the collective comatose and was far deeper and with less individual nature. This kind of art were of images appearing in dreams and in the art formand were more spontaneoius and were considered to be more gratifying photos. He considered them as metaphors that held the unsettled individuals separate worlds together in a whole world of stress and chaos. REFERENCE

5 Hall and Lindsay, Theories of Personality 2nd Ed. John Wiley and Sons Inc., New York, 1973 (Page 117) 5 Potkay and Allen, Personality: Theory, Researsh and Application, Brooks /Cole Publishing Company, A Division of Wadsworth, Monterey, California, 1986 (Pages 36, 96, 106) 5 Ryckman and Wadsworth, Theories of Personality 9th Ed. USA, 2008 5 Don H. and Sandra E. Hockenbury, Worth Publishers, USA, 1997 (Pages 101-102) 3http:///Art/Therapy/Jung/and/the/Modernist/Aesthetic/Psyche&Muse/Creative/Entangle ments/with/the/Science/of/the/Soul.htm

PSYCHOLOGY 224
(THEORIES ON PERSONALITY)

Submitted By:

MARITER D. SAJISE
BS PSYCH-2

Nov. 28, 2011