The Most Important Psychology You Will Ever Read - Jungian Psychology

"Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate." — Carl Jung

The word persona comes from the greek term for the masks worn by actors in ancient theatre. literal masks held up to the face that communicated to the audience who this character was. your persona is the psychological equivalent. it's the social face you construct and maintain to navigate the world.

beyond your personal unconscious, Jung proposed that there is a layer of the psyche that you did not acquire through experience. you were born with it. it is not personal but instead collective. it contains patterns, images, and symbols that belong to the entire human species. these are not cultural transmissions. not learned behaviours. not inherited memories in the biological sense. nothing ascertained from lived experience. instead they are structural features of the human psyche itself.

like the way your body came pre-equipped with an immune system that had never encountered a specific pathogen but already knew how to respond to pathogens in general. your psyche came pre-equipped with structures that have never encountered a specific story but already know how to respond to certain patterns of story.

the flood myth that appears in every culture. the great mother figure that appears in every religious tradition. the trickster. the wise old man. the hero. the monster. they're remembered. not by your personal memory. by something older.

the collective unconscious expresses itself as characters. jung called these archetypes. the hero. the shadow. the great mother. the wise old man. the trickster. the child. the lover. the warrior. people see these as metaphors or literary devices. Jung argued that they are functional structures of the psyche that shape how we experience and respond to the world. when you meet someone and feel immediately that they are wise without being able to explain why, the wise old man archetype is being activated. when you watch a film and feel a deep unreasonable resonance with the hero's journey, the hero archetype is being activated. when you fall into a destructive relationship that you intellectually know is wrong but emotionally cannot leave, the lover archetype, or possibly the shadow, is running things. the archetypes are the operating system.

Jung proposed that every man carries within his psyche a feminine aspect he called the anima. and every woman carries a masculine aspect called the animus. the anima in a man is the bridge to the unconscious. it represents receptivity, feeling, the capacity for connection, intuition, the ability to be moved by things. qualities that masculine socialization often systematically suppresses. the animus in a woman is the bridge to directed will. capacity for assertion, logical analysis, decisive action, confident stance in the world. qualities that feminine socialization often systematically suppresses.

"The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely." — Carl Jung

behind the persona and the ego and the shadow and the archetypes. there is the self. note the lowercase s in Jung's framework. the self is not the ego. the ego is the centre of conscious awareness. the self is the centre of the total psyche, conscious and unconscious together. the self is what you actually are when all of the partial, defended, performed, suppressed versions of yourself are finally integrated.

individuation is Jung's term for the process of becoming yourself.

neurologically, the process Jung described maps in interesting ways onto what we now know about neuroplasticity. the brain is not fixed. new neural pathways can form throughout a lifetime.

the work of individuation, of making the unconscious conscious and integrating what you find is at its core the work of building new neural architecture.