110 Part II Psychodynamic Theories
During this period he wrote down his dreams, drew pictures of them, told
himself stories, and then followed these stories wherever they moved. Through
these procedures he became acquainted with his personal unconscious. (See Jung,
1979, and Dunne, 2000, for a collection of many of his paintings during this
period.) Prolonging the method and going more deeply, he came upon the contents
of the collective unconscious—the archetypes. He heard his anima speak to him
in a clear feminine voice; he discovered his shadow, the evil side of his personal-
ity; he spoke with the wise old man and the great mother archetypes; and finally,
near the end of his journey, he achieved a kind of psychological rebirth called
individuation (Jung, 1961).
Although Jung traveled widely in his study of personality, he remained a
citizen of Switzerland, residing in Küsnacht, near Zürich. He and his wife, who
was also an analyst, had five children, four girls and a boy. Jung was a Christian,
but did not attend church. His hobbies included wood carving, stone cutting, and
sailing his boat on Lake Constance. He also maintained an active interest in
alchemy, archeology, gnosticism, Eastern philosophies, history, religion, mythol-
ogy, and ethnology.
In 1944, he became professor of medical psychology at the University of
Basel, but poor health forced him to resign his position the following year. After
his wife died in 1955, he was mostly alone, the “wise old man of Küsnacht.” He
died June 6, 1961, in Zürich, a few weeks short of his 86th birthday. At the time
of his death, Jung’s reputation was worldwide, extending beyond psychology to
include philosophy, religion, and popular culture (Brome, 1978).Levels of the Psyche
Jung, like Freud, based his personality theory on the assumption that the mind, or
psyche, has both a conscious and an unconscious level. Unlike Freud, however,
Jung strongly asserted that the most important portion of the unconscious springs
not from personal experiences of the individual but from the distant past of human
existence, a concept Jung called the collective unconscious. Of lesser importance
to Jungian theory are the conscious and the personal unconscious.Conscious
According to Jung, conscious images are those that are sensed by the ego, whereas
unconscious elements have no relationship with the ego. Jung’s notion of the ego
is more restrictive than Freud’s. Jung saw the ego as the center of consciousness,
but not the core of personality. Ego is not the whole personality, but must be
completed by the more comprehensive self, the center of personality that is largely
unconscious. In a psychologically healthy person, the ego takes a secondary posi-
tion to the unconscious self (Jung, 1951/1959a). Thus, consciousness plays a rela-
tively minor role in analytical psychology, and an overemphasis on expanding
one’s conscious psyche can lead to psychological imbalance. Healthy individuals
are in contact with their conscious world, but they also allow themselves to expe-
rience their unconscious self and thus to achieve individuation, a concept we dis-
cuss in the section titled Self-Realization.