Jungian psychology

From ArticleWorld

Jungian psychology is based on the theories of Carl Jung and, in turn, is central to analytical psychology. The majority of Jung’s career was devoted to individual psychodynamic psychotherapy in which he was concerned with the personal discovery of the motivations underlying human behaviour.

Jungian theory

His theory emphasized the importance of symbolism as well as the ego. A psychotic episode was the result of the conscious repressing the psyche as a whole which caused the psyche to rebel. The concept of the archetype was central to Jung’s theory of what comprised human personality and behaviour. An archetype, of which the ‘self’ was perhaps the most important, is to the mind what physical organs are to the body, and just as physical organs are the result of evolution, so are archetypes.

Complexes were seen by Jung to be autonomous and comprised a group of unconscious feelings and beliefs. When confronted with patients who exhibited otherwise unexplainable behaviour, Jung would try to get to the root of the problem by analyzing the complexes in the patients’ unconscious.

Post Jung

There are three schools which are influenced by Jungian psychology. The first is classical which is faithful to Jung and his theories; the second is developmental, which is a combination of Jungian and object-relations theory; and the third is the archetypal school, which concentrates of the psyche at the expense of the ego and examines the ‘archai’ in the deepest patterns of psychotic thought.