Man has developed consciousness
slowly and laboriously in a
process that took untold ages to
reach the civilized state. And
this evolution is far from
complete, for large areas of the
human mind are still shrouded in
darkness. These words were
written by Carl Jung, a Swiss
psychologist who lived from 1875
to 1961. In this video and a
subsequent one, we will examine
some of Jung's most important
ideas, including his ideas on
the conscious and unconscious
realms of the mind, his theory
of archetypes and what he called
the individuation process, which
he saw as a path to self
knowledge and wholeness. A key
to appreciating Jung's vast
contributions to the field of
psychology is knowledge of how
young conceived of the psyche.
The word psyche originally meant
soul or spirit, but by the turn
of the 20th century increasingly
came to refer to mind in Jungian
psychology one psyche can be
seen as their total personality
and encompasses all one's
thoughts, behaviors, feelings,
and emotions.  Knowledge of the
psyche, how it worked and how
one could influence its
functioning was of the utmost
concern for Jung. Broadly
speaking, Jung divided the
psyche into three main realms:
consciousness, the personal
unconscious, and the collective
unconscious. The different
realms of the psyche are not
completely separate from each
other, but instead continually
interact in a compensatory
manner. This dynamic interplay
between the conscious and
unconscious realms of the psyche
leads as we will see, to the
potential for personal growth
and change through what Jung
termed the individuation
process. Before examining in
more detail the unconscious
realms of the psyche, we will
first discuss consciousness,
that realm of the psyche most
familiar to us. The conscious
realm of the psyche can be
described as one's field of
awareness, and consists of those
psychic contents that one knows.
At the center of this field of
awareness was what Jung called
the ego. The ego is one's
personality, as they are aware
of it firsthand, or in the words
of Jung, the ego forms as it
were, the center of the field of
consciousness. And insofar as
this comprises the empirical
personality, the ego is the
subject of all personal acts of
consciousness. The ego plays a
crucial role in each person's
life as it acts as a gatekeeper
which influences what contents
of experience are reflected in
consciousness and which contents
are eliminated, repressed or
ignored. The ego in its role as
gatekeeper helps determine the
content of the next main area of
the psyche, we will look at, the
personal unconscious. As Jung
wrote, there are certain events
of which we have not consciously
taken note. They have remained
so to speak below the threshold
of consciousness. They have
happened, but they have been
absorbed subliminally. These
events that have been absorbed
subliminally occupied the
personal unconscious. The word
subliminal translates to below
the threshold. So what Jung
means is that there are many
events that the ego represses or
disregards, for various reasons,
be it that they are too
distressing or simply forgotten
or deemed insignificant. But
these events do not disappear
completely from the psyche, but
instead occupy the personal
unconscious and continue to have
the potential to influence one's
personality. It must be stressed
at the unconscious realm is not
merely a receptacle for
forgotten memories. Rather, as
we mentioned earlier, the
unconscious and conscious realms
of the psyche dynamically
interact, both playing an
integral role in the life of the
individual. One way that the
personal unconscious influences
one's behavior is through the
impact of what Jung called
complexes. Many people are
familiar with the term complex
in psychology. Sigmund Freud was
famous for his idea of the
Oedipus complex, while Alfred
Adler, a contemporary of Jung's
and Freud's stressed the
importance of the inferiority
complex. Jung conceived of
complexes as subpersonalities,
which have the potential to
exert powerful control over
one's thoughts, emotions and
behaviors, or as explained in
the classic introduction to
Jung, a primer of Jungian
psychology.
One interesting and important
feature of the personal
unconscious is that groups of
contents may come together to
form a cluster or constellation.
Jung called them complexes. When
we say a person has a complex,
we mean he is strongly
preoccupied by something that he
can hardly think about anything
else. In modern parlance, he has
a hang up. A strong complex is
easily noticed by others,
although the person himself may
not be aware of it. Freud, who
was Jung's mentor, for a period
of time, believed that a complex
largely arose due to traumatic
childhood experiences. However,
Jung was not satisfied with this
explanation. His dissatisfaction
with Freud's explanation led him
on a search for what it was in
the psychic realm that gave rise
to complexes. And what he was to
discover was that the roots of
complexes resided in a layer of
the unconscious that was deeper
and more fundamental than the
personal unconscious, which he
called the collective
unconscious. This discovery was
spurred by extensive analysis of
the unconscious material of his
patients such as their dreams
and fantasies, as well as his
study of comparative religion
and mythology. What Jung noticed
was that not only were there
uncanny similarities between
unconscious material of
different patients, but more
interestingly, there was also
uncanny similarities in the
major mythological motifs and
religious symbols of different
civilizations. This led Jung to
propose that in addition to the
conscious and personal
unconscious realms of the
psyche, there also existed
another realm as he wrote.  From
the unconscious there emanate
determining influences, which
independently of tradition,
guarantee in every single
individual a similarity and even
a sameness of experience, and
also of the way it is
represented imaginatively. One
of the main proofs of this is
the almost universal
parallelism between mythological
motifs. Jung's idea of the
collective unconscious was one
of his most important
contributions to the field of
psychology. What Jung was
proposing was that in addition
to the personal unconscious,
which is mainly composed of
elements drawn from the
individuals life experiences,
the collective unconscious
contains universal elements
which are inherited. We can also
find in the unconscious,
qualities that are not
individually acquired, but are
inherited, instincts as impulses
to carry out actions from
necessity without conscious
motivation. In this deeper
stratum, we find archetypes the
instincts and archetypes
together form the collective
unconscious. I call them
collective because unlike the
personal unconscious, it is not
made up of individual and more
or less unique contents, but of
those which are universal and of
regular occurrence.
According to young archetypes
are psychic structures which are
common to all humans, and
constitute the archaic Heritage
of Humanity. Archetypes can be
described as cognitive
categories or predispositions
that humans are born with to
think, feel, perceive and act in
specific ways. It is important
to note that Jung did not
believe that one could directly
perceive an archetype rather,
one can note their existence
only by observing the images or
symbols which are manifested as
a result of their existence in
the unconscious. Archetypes
shouldn't be equated with
symbols or images instead,
archetypes manifest images and
symbols along with various other
phenomena. In the words of
Anthony Stevens, archetypes
possess the capacity to initiate
control and mediate the common
behavioral characteristics and
typical experiences of all human
beings. Thus on appropriate
occasions, archetypes give rise
to similar thoughts, images,
mythologies, feelings and ideas
in people, irrespective of their
class creed, race, geographical
location, or historical epic.
Some of the archetypes that Jung
examined included those of the
mother, birth, death, rebirth,
power, the hero, and the child,
to name but a few. However, as
Jung stated, there are as many
archetypes as there are typical
situations in life. Endless
repetition has engraved these
experiences into our psychic
constitution, not only in the
forms of images filled with
content, but at first only as
forms without content,
representing merely the
possibility of a certain type of
perception and action. The
archetypes of the collective
unconscious have a deep
evolutionary basis, and Jung
considered them to be inherited
parts of the psyche. Jung
thought it obvious that, just as
the body has evolved over long
periods of time, so to must the
psyche have evolved certain
predispositions and inherent
tendencies as well, throughout
our vast evolutionary lineage.
Just as the human body
represents a whole museum of
organs, each with a long
evolutionary history behind it.
So we should expect to find that
the mind is organized in a
similar way. It can know more be
a product without history, then
is the body in which it exists.
By history, I do not mean the
fact that the mind builds itself
up by conscious reference to the
past through language and other
cultural traditions. I am
referring to the biological,
prehistoric, and unconscious
development of the mind in
archaic man, who say he was
still close to that of the
animal. While archetypes are
formed over extremely long
periods of time in an
evolutionary manner, and are
common to all humans, they
express themselves differently
in each person. In other words,
the archetypes interact in a
dynamic manner with the
individual experience of each
person. And this leads to the
formation of a unique
personality. Jung believed it
was of paramount importance for
each individual to confront and
integrate the contents of their
unconscious and thought the
failure to do so would result in
a fragmented individual. For the
sake of mental stability and
even physiological health, the
unconscious and the conscious
must be integrally connected
and thus move on parallel lines
 if they are split apart or di
sociated psychological di
turbance follows. This
rocess of confronting the uncon
cious was according to Jung,
path to self knowledge which 
e called the individuation pr
cess. As Jung commented, I used 
he term individuation to de
ote the process by which 
 person becomes a psych
logical individual that is, a
separate indivisible unity or w
ole. The individuation proces
 will be examined in more deta
l in the next video, along with
a number of other importan
Jungian concepts such as the
persona, and various archetypes
hich are encountered d
ring the individuation process
such as the shadow, the Anima
 and the Animus, and the arc
etype of wholeness, which Jung 
alle
