Carl Jung

Carl Jung
Born	26 July 1875 Kesswil, Thurgau, Switzerland
Died	6 June 1961 (aged 85) Küsnacht, Zurich, Switzerland
Known for	Analytical psychology Archetypes

Carl Gustav Jung (26 July 1875 – 6 June 1961) was a Swiss-German psychiatrist and psychologist born in Kesswil, Switzerland. He was the son of a rural Christian pastor and had a solitary childhood; so, he spent much of his time observing nature and his own mind, which might have sparked his interest in psychology. He entered the University of Basel, chose psychiatry, and ended up taking his medical doctor's exam in 1900. He became a lecturer for the University of Zurich in 1905; after this, he went to work under the psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler, who coined "schizophrenia," at Burghölzli Psychiatry Hospital in Zurich.

He is best known for coining the concepts of introversion and extroversion and the archetypes.

Carl Jung's stance that we all share an inherited and universal consciousness treats the consequences of our social formations and our material conditions as unrelated to our social ills or our consciousness, but rather as stemming from an inherited consciousness shared by all humanity.

‘’While man, to maintain his existence, acts on the external world, he changes his own nature’’ - Karl Marx, Capital, Vol.1.

Philosophy

Carl Jung's school of thought is commonly called "analytical psychology," as he diverged from Sigmund Freud's fixation on childhood sexuality and trauma while keeping and expanding on Freud's psychoanalysis. Jung emphasized the concept of a universal human mind that we all share, in the sense that we share memories.

Just as a preface, Jung's ideas of collective souls and consciousness divert attention away from our class interests and our political struggle by turning our social and class difficulties into private spiritual deficiencies that we must solve individually.

Jung divided the human mind into three parts: consciousness, the personal consciousness, and the collective consciousness. Consciousness is described as the ego, which entails the center of your awareness and encompasses your sense of identity and all your thoughts.

Personal consciousness was described as the part that holds your personal memories, suppressed memories, and forgotten ones; this part also contains your personal complexes, e.g., the perfectionism complex or the inferiority complex.

Collective consciousness is his idea of an inherited consciousness shared by all humans, which contains your ancestors' memories, symbols, and psychology.

Carl Jung developed the ideas of extraversion and introversion, which became the foundation for the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) tests. He claimed that one is not purely introverted or extraverted; rather, we exist on a spectrum of introversion and extraversion, and one or the other becomes dominant depending on the situation.

Introversion is the idea that libido flows inward, or, in other words, that those who are introverted direct their psychological energy inward toward their thoughts, ideas, and reflections.

Whereas extraversion is the idea that one's libido flows outward, which entails the directing of psychological energy toward people, activities, and the environment.

He further elaborated that there are eight functional types: extraverted thinking, extraverted feeling, extraverted sensing, extraverted intuition, and introverted thinking, introverted feeling, introverted sensing, and introverted intuition.

Jung's archetypes, alongside the concepts of extraversion and introversion, are his two most popular theories. Specifically, the archetypes have been popularized by the reactionary grifter Jordan Peterson, who applies them to Disney movies and Biblical stories in order to peddle far-right ideology to young people.

Jung's archetypes are universal characters that appear across cultures through dreams, art, fairy tales, and religion. These archetypes are:

• The Persona: is the mask or facade that you present to the world in order to socialize and meet societal expectations.
• The Shadow: is the repressed, hidden desires and instincts that you deny in yourself and project onto others.
• Anima and Animus: The Anima is the unconscious femininity within a man's psyche, and the Animus is the unconscious masculinity within a woman's psyche.
• The Self: is the unifying consciousness and unconsciousness that represents harmony and balance, basically, your psyche.

The ultimate goal of analytical psychology is Individuation, which is the lifelong journey of uniting the conscious and unconscious, embracing your repressed, hidden desires (the Shadow), which makes you become your authentic self.

The idea of Individuation becomes a vehicle to drive the worker into bourgeois therapy culture, to adapt and depoliticize workers to capitalism, rather than challenging the real structural causes of our suffering.

Jung's major works include: "The Psychology of the Unconscious," "Psychological Types," "The Theory and Practice of Analytical Psychology," and "Memory, Dreams, and Thinking."