Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961) is the most famous follower of Sigmund Freud. Jung used Freud's psychoanalytic techniques in his medical practice, and both men agreed on the significant role played by the unconscious. Freud was fond of Jung and began to see him as his heir apparent, the successor who would carry on the Freudian school of thought.

A Parting of Ways

Eventually, Jung and Freud had an acrimonious split about the nature of the unconscious. Jung veered away from the emphasis of sexual forces being the driving factors that could explain every action and motivation. Not thinking and acting as objective men of science, each felt betrayed, and the split led not only to the end of a friendship and professional rapport, but it was instrumental in bringing about Jung's being shunned as a pariah by his fellows.

Jung took a radical sabbatical wherein he indulged in the unheard of practice of self-analysis. He chronicled this in his memoir Memories, Dreams, Reflections and called it a “confrontation with the unconscious.”Jungian theories and the Jungian school of thought were the result of this inward journey, and his ideas are a major contribution to psychology, transcending it to embrace the worlds of mythology, folklore, astrology, Eastern spirituality, and alchemy. It is no surprise that Jung is quite fashionable in New Age circles, given the mystical nature of his later writings. He is also deeply criticized in other circles for his failure to denounce the rise of Hitler and the Nazis in Germany in the 1930s. He ultimately did so, but many feel it was too little and too late.

The Collective Unconscious

While Freud was fond of the iceberg analogy to explain the unconscious (the unconscious part of our mind and personality being the 90 percent of the glacier that is below the surface), Jung made the comparison of a cork gently bobbing on a vast ocean. The cork is our conscious mind, and the ocean is the unconscious. The cork is tossed about at the whim of the cruel sea unless we get a handle of the nature of the true Self (of which we are only dimly aware, if at all) via the psychotherapeutic process he called analytical psychology.

Jung's most famous theory is that of the collective unconscious, a shared memory of symbols, imagery, and memories that he called archetypes. These harken back to the dawn of human consciousness and are common in all cultures and civilizations. The famous mythographer Joseph Campbell supports this theory in his work The Hero with a Thousand Faces. By cataloguing and cross-referencing myths from a broad spectrum of cultures and time frames, he came up with the notion of the monomyth. There is basically one story with the same cast of archetypes that Campbell called “The Hero's Journey.”

Jung encountered a wide array of archetypes in his journey within. For many of his contemporaries, this bordered on fantasy. Men of science found the idea of mythical energies springing forth from a primordial reservoir and dwelling within every human a little too poetic a principle.

Gender Bending

Jung also proposed that within every man there is an inner woman, and within every woman there is an inner man — a feminine and masculine energy, actually, which he labeled the anima (inner woman) and animus (inner man). He felt that you had to embrace that side of your self and own it in order to have optimum mental health. If the anima or animus was too powerful or too passive, you were prone to psychological problems. This is similar to Plato's notion on love that proposes that humans were once a large androgynous bloblike creature embodying both genders. These creatures were split by the gods into men and women. And that is why each seeks out their counterpart to find balance and the other half of them that was long lost. Jung believed that this struggle goes on within each person whether we know it or not.

This theory is often criticized these days, and Jung is accused of some politically incorrect gender stereotyping. He suggested a man with a dominant anima was an overemotional whiner, and the woman with a powerful animus was overbearingly bossy and obnoxious. And the cliché of a man trying to embrace his feminine side has become fodder for standup comics and sitcom writers.

The Shadow

Jung has his own variation on Freud's theory of the Ego, Superego, and Id. Like Freud, Jung's definition of ego is the conscious part of the mind. The ego is that cork bobbing on the ocean, and its goal is to seek what Jung called individuation, bringing together all the myriad elements of the human psyche into one Self. Fully individuated individuals were the model of sound psychological wholeness.

Jung called his equivalent of the Id and Superego combined the Shadow. The Shadow is, in simple terms, a person's dark side, the impulses and desires and traits that remain beneath the surface after years of parental and societal pressure. Jung felt people have a tendency to project those negative shadow elements on people that we dislike.

Think about it: Have you ever had an immediate dislike for someone for no apparent reason? And after time, if you are honest with yourself, you realize that you saw aspects of yourself in that person. Just as you can see your own soul reflected back at you through your beloved's eyes, you can see your shadow in the obnoxious neighbor or coworker.

Jung felt that the objective was to own your shadow and not try to bury it. Burying it never works. The shadow will be heard, usually when you least expect it. Everyone has aspects of himself or herself that they're not proud of. Jung believed we must own it and integrate it on the path to Wholeness.