As discussed in a previous blog, the ego consists of the personal center of the psyche, however, C.G. Jung (Figure 1) conjectured the existence of another psychic center, a transpersonal one, which extends far beyond the ego’s sphere of influence. Jung called this transpersonal center the self, which not only…
“Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!” In the early 1930s, the fictional character The Shadow appeared in a detective magazine of the same name. The pulp magazine revolved around a mysterious nocturnal crime-fighter. The character evolved into a vigilante figure with anti-hero qualities….
People throw around the term ego all the time. The word is often associated with selfishness or overconfidence. An egotistic person, for instance, is considered brash, pompous, and overly boastful. We have all heard the cliché: “Your ego is writing is writing checks that your body cannot cash”. So the term,…
Another key idea in Jung’s psychology is the persona. In Latin, the term refers to the mask of an actor, and Jung viewed this word as a descriptor apropos of his concept. After all, social conventions and cultural demands require that we all don a mask from time to time…
As discussed in a previous blog, an archetype is an organizer of the psychic experience and what it yields is a pattern of psychic functioning. Jung’s concepts of anima and animus (i.e., syzygy) are two of the most important and too often misunderstood archetypes in the Jungian lexicon. Thus, further…
In 1937, C.G. Jung wrote that The psyche is the starting-point of all human experience, and all the knowledge we have gained eventually leads back to it. The psyche is the beginning and end of all cognition. It is not only the object of its science, but the subject…
What is the unconscious? What did Jung mean by the term and how does the idea fit into Analytical Psychology? The unconscious is another big idea in the Jungian lexicon, one of which literally and figuratively underpins the very foundation of not only Jung’s psychology, but arguably depth psychology as…
C.G. Jung placed such value on the complex that his psychology was originally termed “complex psychology.” In fact, Jung preferred this name over the more frequently used analytical psychology. As mentioned in previous blogs, there are a few “big” ideas in Jung’s psychology and without exception the complex is one…
Archetypes are one of the key ideas in the Jungian lexicon. In fact, they are integral to most of the other big ideas (e.g., complexes, collective unconscious, dreams, etc.) in his psychology. However, they remain a concept that is ambiguous and ill-defined. When people ask me what archetypes are, I…
