Jung’s Analytical Psychotherapy

Jung’s main principle is that personality is the consequence of both conscious and unconscious influences and that behavior is determined not only by past events but also by future goals and aspirations.

Jung believed that the “conscious” is oriented toward the external world, is governed by the ego, and represents the individual’s thoughts, feelings, ideas, memories, and sensory perceptions. The unconscious is made up of two parts: the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious. Personal unconscious contains experiences that were once conscious but are now repressed, forgotten, or unconsciously perceived. Collective Unconscious is the repository of latent memory traces that have been handed down from one generation to the next, that is, the thoughts, values, morals, and code for living handed down through family teaching and social mores that influence the way we behave.

Included in the collective unconscious are Archetypes, which are primordial images that cause people to experience and understand certain phenomena in a universal way and include the Self, which strives for unity of the different parts of the personality, the Persona, or public mask, the Shadow, the dark side of the personality, and the Anima and Animus. The Anima is the female side of the man and Animus is the masculine side of the woman.

Jung also described the personality as consisting of two attitudes, extroversion and introversion, and four basic psychological function: thinking, feeling, sensing, and intuiting. Although all four functions operate in the unconscious of all people, one function ordinarily predominates in consciousness.

Goals

The primary goal of the Jungian therapist is to bridge the gap between the conscious and the personal and collective unconscious. The key component of Jungian analytical psychotherapy is the analysis and interpretation of dreams, and working with clients’ transferences as projections of the personal and collective unconscious. Unlike Freud, Jung believed therapists’ counter-transferences to be a useful therapeutic tool that can provide the therapist with information about what is actually occurring during the course of therapy.