Feist−Feist: Theories of
Personality, Seventh
EditionII. Psychodynamic
Theories- Jung: Analytical
Psychology
© The McGraw−Hill^129
Companies, 2009neys or changes in location. Jung used these and other symbols to determine pa-
tients’ unconscious attitudes toward death and to help them discover a meaningful
philosophy of life (Jung, 1934/1960).
Self-Realization
Psychological rebirth, also called self-realizationor individuation,is the process of
becoming an individual or whole person (Jung, 1939/1959, 1945/1953). Analytical
psychology is essentially a psychology of opposites, and self-realization is the
process of integrating the opposite poles into a single homogeneous individual. This
process of “coming to selfhood” means that a person has all psychological compo-
nents functioning in unity, with no psychic process atrophying. People who have
gone through this process have achieved realization of the self, minimized their per-
sona, recognized their anima or animus, and acquired a workable balance between
introversion and extraversion. In addition, these self-realized individuals have ele-
vated all four of the functions to a superior position, an extremely difficult accom-
plishment.
Self-realization is extremely rare and is achieved only by people who are able
to assimilate their unconscious into their total personality. To come to terms with the
unconscious is a difficult process that demands courage to face the evil nature of
one’s shadow and even greater fortitude to accept one’s feminine or masculine side.
This process is almost never achieved before middle life and then only by men and
women who are able to remove the ego as the dominant concern of personality and
replace it with the self. The self-realized person must allow the unconscious self to
become the core of personality. To merely expand consciousness is to inflate the ego
and to produce a one-sided person who lacks the soul spark of personality. The self-
realized person is dominated neither by unconscious processes nor by the conscious
ego but achieves a balance between all aspects of personality.
Self-realized people are able to contend with both their external and their in-
ternal worlds. Unlike psychologically disturbed individuals, they live in the real
world and make necessary concessions to it. However, unlike average people, they
are aware of the regressive process that leads to self-discovery. Seeing unconscious
images as potential material for new psychic life, self-realized people welcome these
images as they appear in dreams and introspective reflections (Jung, 1939/1959;
1945/1953).
Jung’s Methods of Investigation
Jung looked beyond psychology in his search for data to build his conception of hu-
manity. He made no apologies for his ventures into the fields of sociology, history,
anthropology, biology, physics, philology, religion, mythology, and philosophy. He
strongly believed that the study of personality was not the prerogative of any single
discipline and that the whole person could be understood only by pursuing knowl-
edge wherever it existed. Like Freud, Jung persistently defended himself as a scien-
tific investigator, eschewing the labels of mystic and philosopher. In a letter to Calvin
Hall, dated October 6, 1954, Jung argued: “If you call me an occultist because I am
seriously investigating religious, mythological, folkloristic and philosophical
Chapter 4 Jung: Analytical Psychology 123