Анна ШиманDraft translation. This text was translated automatically and has not been proofread yet — if something reads oddly, it does.
Analytical psychology.
It is one of the schools of psychoanalysis, founded by the Swiss psychologist and practitioner of depth psychology Carl Gustav Jung. It is a holistic approach to depth work and self-discovery, built on exploring unconscious complexes and archetypes.
Analytical psychology rests on the idea that the personality has an unconscious sphere, a source of healing forces and of the growth of individuality. At the heart of this teaching lies the concept of the collective unconscious, which draws on anthropology, ethnography, cultural history and religion.
Jung distinguished between the individual (personal) and the collective unconscious. The individual unconscious is a powerful part of the human soul. A steady contact between the conscious and the unconscious within the individual psyche is essential to its wholeness.
The collective unconscious is shared by a group of people and does not depend on a person’s individual experience and feelings. The collective unconscious is made up of archetypes (human primordial images) and ideas. Archetypes are seen most clearly and fully in the figures of heroes from fairy tales, myths and legends. Besides, anyone may meet archetypes in their own experience, in the images of their dreams. The number of archetypes is limited, and yet each archetype shows itself, to a greater or lesser degree, in every culture and in every historical era.
Jung believed that personality develops most intensively in adulthood. Accordingly, his scheme puts in the foreground the many-layered system of an adult’s social relationships in all its variety. Jung saw the aim of full development as attaining wholeness of the personality in the process of individuation: overcoming the split between the conscious and the unconscious which, in Jung’s view, inevitably arises in childhood.
A split, or splitting, of this kind is largely shaped by the social environment. For instance, on reaching school age and trying to win the most comfortable position among their peers, a child consciously chooses the personal qualities and ways of behaving that bring the reaction they want from the people around them. This is how the Persona is formed: the part of the personality that is fully conscious, subjectively accepted and deliberately presented to the world. Meanwhile, the sides of the personality that do not meet the standard of social desirability are not simply hidden but actively rejected within the person and, in the end, repressed into the unconscious. This is exactly how the Shadow is formed: a structure incompatible with the ego’s self-acceptance and self-esteem.
The Shadow is an unconscious complex holding all the repressed or estranged parts of the conscious personality. In dreams, the Shadow may appear as a dark figure of the same sex as the dreamer. A person who is unaware of their Shadow and rejects it usually behaves in extremely rigid ways, struggles to fit into teamwork, and is unable to engage fully in creative work or to take in new ideas and other points of view.
This school has not lost its relevance for many decades. What is more, Jung’s analytical psychology gave rise to such branches of practical psychology as:
- Jungian symboldrama (catathymic imaginative experience),
- Jungian art practice,
- Jungian psychodrama,
- Process-oriented psychology,
- Jungian sand tray (sandplay),
- Neo-Ericksonian hypnosis,
- Socionics.
