Individual Psyche
Do you know what your life’s purpose is? Or how to achieve it? How about why you’re good at one thing but not great at another? Each person is unique in their own way, so how do you find out the answers to these questions?
Carl Gustav Jung, a Swiss psychologist and psychiatrist, who worked closely with Sigmund Freud, Carl founded the principal of analytic psychology. Jung created a process to help you develop answers to the questions above.
From the moment we’re born our life begins as part of a collective, but as we get older, we begin to form an understanding of the world around us and inside of us.
First is our acquired mind, called that simply due to the fact that part of our brain acquired through our environment. Family, friends, school, religion, and culture shape our personality.
Next, the conventional mind forms. This forms from the external world. The conventional world holds specific guidelines of what we SHOULD believe, what things mean and how we should behave.
Then the Unconscious mind, which is the world within us. Meaning everything outside our conscious awareness. As humans, we want to believe that we’re conscious of our thoughts, feelings, actions, and behaviors. Psychology says that’s not correct. There’s a lot we don’t know or are unable to observe about ourselves.
Society, all that surrounds us, conditions our consciousness which makes us unconscious of our true selves for the first part of our lives, or even more of our life.
Due to this, Jung developed the psychology of individual process. He believed every human being was unique along with having a distinct destiny in life. This idea and process would later be named Individual Process, which was his way if explaining the path to personal development for a person.
Individual Process, which may be simple or complex, is the process in which we become what we were destined for from the beginning. It also helps in increasing your personal consciousness. When we possess greater consciousness, it allows us to heal the splits in our conscious and unconscious, bringing together the wholeness of their psyche (the goal).
An example of this: Men seek autonomy. Females seek communion or relationships. If we can integrate both, without favoring one over the other, then we have successfully completed the goal of integrating two individual psyches.
If we try to repress an aspect of our psyche, it makes that aspect more destructive and detrimental to us. During self-actualization, we become more complete, thus revealing our own unique, special, individual structure. Universal human traits and possibilities are combined in each person, in a way that is not only original but unlike anyone else in the world.
According to Jung, he identified three archetypes of the Individual Process. Let’s dive into this as it will become incredibly important for this process.
The Three Types are:
The Shadow- The shadow archetype represents personality traits we’ve ignored, denied, or stopped acknowledging.
The Anima or Animus- Anima is the feminine component of a man, as animus is the masculine component of a woman. This Archetype connects us with the impersonal collective consciousness.
The Self- The self represents wholeness and self-transcendence.
Through Jung’s research, he observed some people favor thoughts to pass judgement while others follow feelings. Much like some people observe the world through senses, while others feel or sense intentions, potentials and hidden relationships.
He also observed that all humans fall within four types:
Thinking Types- People under the thinking type category approach life with little to no emotion, instead they use logic and order. Thinking types possess a very firm code of right and wrong.
Feeling types- People that are the feeling type understand something’s/someone’s worth. They are able to appreciate the infinite gradations of value and meaning.
Sensing types- People under this category most accurately interrupt information through the five senses. They are the ultimate realists, they accept the world as it is, they don’t try to fluff the bad to make it seem better, they accept what is exactly that, what is.
Intuiting types- This type of person is more interested in the future possibilities than the current status of things. These people tend to see similarities where most other people only see differences.
Jung’s research allowed him to see a very wide and intense perspective of different aspects of humans.
We all have things we’re good and bad at. So when we’re good at something, we like to do those things. But once we realize we’re bad at something, we avoid those things to avoid feeling inadequate. Though when we do this, we continue to develop certain skills while our underdeveloped talents remain in the unconscious mind. Imagine if you practiced both the good and bad, you wouldn’t be repressing, you’d be integrating.
Jungian psychology showed four functions within every person. He grouped those four into groups. Those groups being: thinking and feeling, and, sensing and intuition. Each person has one dominant/superior function (such as thinking) and also submissive/inferior function (such as feeling). The superior function is conscious, so the key to individualism lies within developing our inferior function.
Jung developed two related methods to help proceed towards our individuation. These two methods are dream work and active imagination.
Dream work- Jung believed dreams were the gateway through which the conscious and unconscious mind communicate. The self (often seen or viewed as an old wise man or wise woman) cannot communicate in language, simply through symbols and images.
Active imagination- Active imagination takes place while awake. We are able to go into our imagination and allow images and to arise from the unconscious and communicate within us.
Jung’s concept was that the aim of our life, psychologically speaking, is not suppressing or repression, but integration between the conscious and unconscious mind. Allow both parts of the mind to form one, allowing both parts to enjoy and control the while range of oneself.
To break that down in the simplest terms. Know who you are, the good and the bad. Accept both, strive for improvement by understanding the aspects that make up our mind.
The purpose of life is realize one’s potential and become a whole person in one’s own right. To realize this purpose, we must reconnect with the divine self within each of us. To achieve success we must peel away all the false identities our egos have created which triggers fear from our ego.
The psyche is a self-regulating system, much like our body craves homeostasis, our psyche seeks to maintain a balance between opposing qualities while striving for growth. But like our body, our minds can have splits that cause us trouble. Complexes are themed organizations in the unconscious mind centering on patterns of memories, emotions, perceptions, and wishes. Patterns that are formed by experience and the person’s reaction to that experience. When this happens, it can cause a person to feel that a behavior is an automatic and cannot be controlled. This can cause people to believe they are mentally ill or even possessed.
This is in no way saying mental illness isn’t real, actual mental illness is not what we are addressing in this week’s psych Sunday.
Through the Individuation process, not only do we achieve positive mental health but also become harmonious, mature, and responsible adults. Individuation can liberate us but we must remember it’s not a safe path. Once you leave the everyday world that you have lived for however many years and begin to explore your unconscious mind and connect that with your conscious mind, everything will change, there is no safety.
Lobeless note: As I typed this out, it all made sense to me, but I read numerous articles discussing this, so to me, it makes a lot of sense. Basically we have good and bad, right and wrong, conscious and unconscious, and so on. The plan is to integrate the good and the bad into one brain, not repress or ignore the things we don’t like. By combining the two, we become more highly evolved within our self and by using some of the examples above, we can see our short comings and where to change them.
For more information or details, simple google Carl Jung Individual Psyche and you can find more articles with more explanations.
Vibe Higher,
Lobeless