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Carl Gustav Jung, 1875-1961
The Swiss psychiatrist, Carl Jung leaves a legacy of wide-ranging investigations into the nature and dynamics of the human psyche in both its conscious and unconscious aspects that has left its mark on our culture beyond the field of psychiatry.
Jung's influential ideas include:
A theory of psychological types that is still widely accepted and used. In his work on psychological types, Jung introduced the terms introvert/introversion and extravert/extraversion which are now widely used.
A theory of positive development that emphasizes our innate urge to grow toward wholeness and meaning, a process Jung termed “individuation.”
The recognition of archetypes and the collective unconscious: Just as the human body has a physiology and anatomy common to all of our species, Jung demonstrated that the psyche has a similar set of universal features that can be tracked in the spontaneous images of the unconscious such as dreams. Moreover, such archetypal images are at the core of our experience of meaning in life.
An approach to therapy that emphasizes the individual's uniqueness as well as the depth of meaning that comes from the individual's relation to the symbols in dreams and culture.
“…I had accustomed myself to living on two planes simultaneously,
one conscious, which attempted to understand and could not,
and one unconscious, which wanted to express something
and could not formulate it any better than by a dream.”
"There is no light without shadow and
no psychic wholeness without imperfection.
To round itself out life . . . calls not for perfection but for completeness;
and for this the 'thorn in the flesh' is needed,
the suffering of defects without which there is no progress
and no ascent."
“If the individual is not
renewed in his spirit,
society cannot renew itself.”
~ C. G. Jung
