Science
The Shadow: Mining for Black Gold
“Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!” Figure 1: The Shadow (Walter Gibson) In the early 1930s, the Shadow appeared in a detective magazine of the same name. The pulp [...]
Ego: The Nexus of Personal Identity
People often use the term ego. The word is often associated with selfishness or overconfidence. An egotistic person, for instance, is considered brash, pompous, and overly boastful. We have all heard the cliché: “Your ego is writing is writing checks that [...]
Persona: The Masks We Wear
Another key idea in Jung’s psychology is the persona. In Latin, the term refers to the mask of an actor. Jung viewed this word as a descriptor apropos of his concept. Social conventions and cultural demands require that we [...]
Anima/Animus: The Capacity to Relate
As discussed in a previous blog, an archetype is an organizer of experience, which gives rise to a basic pattern of psychic functioning. Jung’s concepts of anima and animus (i.e., syzygy) are two of the most important, and [...]
The Complex: Jung’s Royal Road to the Unconscious
As mentioned in previous blogs, there are a few “big” ideas in Jung’s psychology and without exception the complex is one of them. So two questions arise: 1) What is a complex? and 2) Why did Jung assign [...]
Typology 101
One of the most practical contributions of C. G. Jung’s psychology is his typological system. Jung introduced his theory of types in 1921 with his publication Psychological Types. Typology is a theory rooted in empirical observation, nonetheless, it is still merely [...]
Manage your mind, Manage your time
Most people fail to realize that time, for the most part, is a relational variable. In other words, time has little meaning beyond its relationship to objects, things, and people. By viewing time as a psychological construct, one ostensibly is [...]
Understanding the Ego
In a world with a 24-hour news cycle, the human mind is constantly inundated with “bad news” on top of “bad news.” As I begin to navigate my forties, it seems that more and more people that I befriended or befriended [...]
Honoring the Psyche
In 1937, C. G. Jung wrote that The psyche is the starting-point of all human experience, and all the knowledge we have gained eventually leads back to it. The psyche is the beginning and end of all cognition. It is not [...]
Jungian Psychology in Brief
“The integration of unconscious contents into consciousness, which is the main endeavour of analytical psychology, is just such an alteration of principle, in that it does away with the sovereignty of the subjective ego-consciousness and confronts it with unconscious collective contents.” [...]