ABOUT c.g. JUNG
Carl Gustav Jung was a Swiss psychologist and psychiatrist working in the early-mid twentieth century, and is recognized as a major figure in modern Western thought and philosophy. He was foundational in the formation of modern psychology, psychotherapy, and psychiatry, and continues to influence a large international body of analytical psychologists. His writings have also had a vast impact outside professional circles, and the ideas of pioneering psychoanalysts Jung and Freud have been widely disseminated in the arts, the humanities, film, and popular culture. Jung’s immense body of work continues to spark research and to inspire many new paths of exploration, for those who are interested in excavating and understanding the deepest layers of the human soul.
Ideas that are central to Jung’s approach include the Self, which he defined as both a facet of the psyche and as an inner quality that promotes psychological health and spiritual development, and the unconscious aspect of the mind, which contains unknown psychic material and can therefore ameliorate fixed conscious attitudes. While one’s personal unconscious pertains to personal experiences such as the forgotten, the repressed, or the subliminal, the collective unconscious is broader, relating to humankind’s shared experiences and to timeless, universal matters. The collective unconscious gives rise to archetypes, our instinctual patterns of thought and of symbolic form. According to Jung, one of the main goals of life is to individuate, that is, to overcome the one-sidedness of the conscious attitude and to become more aware of our multifaceted human nature. Jung defined individuation as the coming-to-be of the Self— becoming whole via integrating all aspects of the human experience.
