Feist−Feist: Theories of
Personality, Seventh
EditionII. Psychodynamic
Theories- Jung: Analytical
Psychology
(^112) © The McGraw−Hill
Companies, 2009
During his midlife encounter with his unconscious, Jung had many archetypal
dreams and fantasies. He frequently initiated fantasies by imagining that he was de-
scending into a deep cosmic abyss. He could make little sense of his visions and
dreams at that time, but later, when he began to understand that dream images and
fantasy figures were actually archetypes, these experiences took on a completely new
meaning (Jung, 1961).
Dreams are the main source of archetypal material, and certain dreams offer
what Jung considered proof for the existence of the archetype. These dreams produce
motifs that could not have been known to the dreamer through personal experience.
The motifs often coincide with those known to ancient people or to natives of con-
temporary aboriginal tribes.
Jung believed that hallucinations of psychotic patients also offered evidence
for universal archetypes (Bair, 2003). While working as a psychiatric assistant at
Burghöltzli, Jung observed a paranoid schizophrenic patient looking through a win-
dow at the sun. The patient begged the young psychiatrist to also observe.
He said I must look at the sun with eyes half shut, and then I could see the sun’s
phallus. If I moved my head from side to side the sun-phallus would move too,
and that was the origin of the wind. (Jung, 1931/1960b, p. 150)
Four years later Jung came across a book by the German philologist Albrecht Di-
eterich that had been published in 1903, several years after the patient was commit-
ted. The book, written in Greek, dealt with a liturgy derived from the so-called Paris
magic papyrus, which described an ancient rite of the worshippers of Mithras, the
Persian god of light. In this liturgy, the initiate was asked to look at the sun until he
could see a tube hanging from it. The tube, swinging toward the east and west, was
the origin of the wind. Dieterich’s account of the sun-phallus of the Mithraic cult was
nearly identical to the hallucination of the mental patient who, almost certainly, had
no personal knowledge of the ancient initiation rite. Jung (1931/1960b) offered many
similar examples as proof of the existence of archetypes and the collective uncon-
scious.
As noted in Chapter 2, Freud also believed that people collectively inherit pre-
dispositions to action. His concept of phylogenetic endowment,however, differs
somewhat from Jung’s formulation. One difference was that Freud looked first to the
personal unconscious and resorted to the phylogenetic endowment only when indi-
vidual explanations failed—as he sometimes did when explaining the Oedipus com-
plex (Freud, 1933/1964). In contrast, Jung placed primary emphasis on the collective
unconscious and used personal experiences to round out the total personality.
The major distinction between the two, however, was Jung’s differentiation of
the collective unconscious into autonomous forces called archetypes, each with a life
and a personality of its own. Although a great number of archetypes exist as vague
images, only a few have evolved to the point where they can be conceptualized. The
most notable of these include the persona, shadow, anima, animus, great mother,
wise old man, hero, and self.
Persona
The side of personality that people show to the world is designated as the persona.
The term is well chosen because it refers to the mask worn by actors in the early the-
ater. Jung’s concept of the persona may have originated from experiences with his
106 Part II Psychodynamic Theories