Carl Jung1

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Describe and evaluate Carl Jung’s theory concerning personality types and show how they might usefully help a therapist to determine therapeutic goals.

Transcript of Carl Jung1

Page 1: Carl Jung1

Describe and evaluate Carl Jung’s theory concerning personality

types and show how they might usefully help a therapist to

determine therapeutic goals.

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Personality can be defined as a dynamic and organised set of characteristics

possessed by a person that uniquely influences his or her cognitions, motivations,

and behaviors in various situations (Ryckman 2004). The word "personality"

originates from the Latin persona, which means mask. Significantly, in the theatre of

the ancient Latin-speaking world, the mask was not used as a plot device to disguise

the identity of a character, but rather was a convention employed to represent or

typify that character.

Carl Jung was among many great personality theorists who drew inspiration and

guidance from the ancient models like astrology and the Four Temperaments. The

oldest being one devised by oriental astrologers. They classified personality

character in terms of the elements – fire water air and earth. Those under fire had a

fiery nature and corresponding temperament and fate, etc. The Four Temperaments

or Four Humours can be traced back reliably to Ancient Greek medicine and

philosophy ( 400BC), notably in the work of Hippocrates - the 'Father of Medicine')

and in Plato's ideas about character and personality. It was believed that in order to

maintain health, people needed an even balance of the four body fluids: blood,

phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. These four body fluids were linked to certain

organs and illnesses and also represented the Four Temperaments or Four Humours

of personality. The Greek physician Galen (AD 130-200) later introduced the aspect

of four basic temperaments reflecting the humors: the sanguine, bouyant type; the

phlegmatic, slugish type; the choleric, quick-tempered type; and the melancholic,

dejected type. Galen also classified drugs in terms of their supposed effects on the

four humors. He thus created a systematic guide or selecting drugs, which although

scientifically incorrect were the foundation stone of treating psychological and

psychiatric illnesses.

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Carl Jung approached personality and 'psychological types' (also referred to as

Jung's psychological types) from a perspective of clinical psychoanalysis. He was

one of the few psychologists n the twentieth century to maintain that development

extends beyond childhood and adolescence through mid-life and into old age. He

focused on establishing and developing a relationship between conscious and

unconscious processes. Jung believed that there was a dialogue between the

conscious and unconscious and without it the unconscious processes can weaken

and even jeopardise the personality and this is seen in one of his central concepts of

individuation. He believed that individuation is a life long process of personal

development that involves establishing a connection between the ego and the self

which could be brought to its highest fruition if worked with and the unconscious was

confronted. (Stevens 1999)

Jung, like Freud, referred to the ego when describing the more conscious aspect of

personality. Unlike Freud he did not seek to minimise the unconscious side of the

personality, but instead gave it equal status, complimentary to that of the conscious.

He referred to the integrated personality as Self; the centre of the total psyche,

including both the conscious and the unconscious. The Self includes all of a person’s

qualities and potentials whether or not they become apparent at a particular stage of

life. The goal of therapy is to guide the client to become a whole a human being as

personal circumstances will allow.

It was out of Jung’s confrontation with the unconscious, both in himself and in his

patients, that he slowly elaborated his psychology. His book Psychological Types

(1921) acted as the compass by which he tried to understand how he differed from

Freud and Adler, but more importantly, could begin to chart the internal world of

people. He had a deep appreciation of creative life and considered spirituality a

central part of the human journey. There is a whole literature relating Jungian

psychology and spirituality, primarily from a Christian perspective. This literature

includes writings by Kelsey(1974,1982) and by Sanford (1968, 1981). Caprio and

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Hedberg's (1986) Coming Home: A Handbook for Exploring the Sanctuary Within is a

practical guide for spiritual work in the Christian tradition. It contains striking personal

stories, excellent illustrations, and useful exercises. (Frager & Fadiman 2005)

Jung's description of personality states that in order to identify a psychological type it

is necessary to determine whether a person is oriented primarily toward his inner

world ( introversion) or toward external reality ( extraversion), known as the

fundamental attitude of the individual to emphasise its importance.

Introverts are people who prefer their internal world of thoughts, feelings, fantasies,

dreams, and so on, while extroverts prefer the external world of things and people

and activities.

Today the words have become confused with ideas like shyness and sociability,

partially because introverts tend to be shy and extroverts tend to be sociable. But

Jung intended for them to refer more to whether you ("ego") more often faced toward

the persona and outer reality, or toward the collective unconscious and its

archetypes. In that sense, the introvert is somewhat more mature than the extrovert.

Our culture, of course, values the extrovert much more. Jung warned that we all tend

to value our own type most, (Boeree 1996) This warning is applicable to therapists

today as it is important not to allow personal feelings to take place when working with

clients.

Both introvert and extravert overvalue their strengths and each tends to undervalue

the other. To the extravert, the introvert seems egotistical and dull, and to the

introvert, the extravert appears superficial and insincere (Fordham, 1966). Jung

believed that a person remained an extravert or introvert without change for the

whole of his life, and that heredity determines whether the libido is directed inward or

outward. Whether a person is an introvert or extrovert they need to deal with both

their inner and outer world. And each has their preferred way of dealing with it, ways

which they are comfortable with and good at. This hypothesised stability of the

introversion-extroversion trait is consistent with empircal research using Non-Jungian

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measures of introversion and extraversion. (Cloniger 2000) Jung suggested a link

between each of the attitudes and certain neurotic disorders which will be discussed

later.

We now find the introvert-extravert dimension in several theories, notably Hans

Eysenck's. In Eysenck’s (1982) view people are biosocial animals and that

psychology stands at the crossroads of biological sciences and social sciences. He

states that psychology must become more of a true science with methodology in all

that the therapist does in order to permit personality theorists to make predictions

that can be tested and therefore make possible the development of the causal theory

of personality, which he believes will inevitably help the therapist with clients

presenting problems.

Jung compared the conscious part of the psyche (ego) to an island that rises out of

the sea. We notice only the part above the water, even though there is a greater land

mass below the water – much like an iceberg, the unconscious lies below (Fordam

1953). The personal unconscious is a reservoir of experience unique to each

individual consisting of perceptions, thoughts, feelings and memories that have been

put to one side or repressed but not always covered by sea and therefore can be

reclaimed. Whereas the personal unconscious is unique to every individual, the

collective unconscious is shared or “transpersonal” and consists of certain

potentialities that we all share because of our human nature, because we all live in

groups and in some form of society or family life. He believed that the collective

unconscious did not develop individually but was inherited and consisted of pre-

existent forms, the archetypes. An archetype is a universal thought form or

predisposition to respond to the world in certain ways and is crucial to Jung’s concept

of the collective unconscious because it emphasises potentialities in which we may

express our humanness. He believed that they appeared to us in dreams, art, ritual,

myths and symptoms.

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Eysenck believed that from a point of view of

science, Jung’s contribution to the study of

personality types had been primarily negative as he

permitted mystical notions to override empirical data

and sought to go beyond descriptive analysis to the

causal analysis of personality. Eysenck went on to

review the theories and came to the conclusion that

most people fall somewhere between the middle of the two extremes of those whose

emotions are labile and easily aroused and those who are stable and less easily

aroused. He suggested that the basic dimensions of personality may be summarised

as show in the diagram above.( Diagram 1) .

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Further work by Eysenck tied personality differences to visceral brain activity and he

showed that because introverts have sensitive nervous systems they are more easily

conditioned and that also makes them more vulnerable to anxiety based neuroses if

the visceral brain activity is high, whereas the extravert has a less sensitive and more

inhibited cortical process and therefore are slow to develop conditioned response.

Because socialised behaviour depends on a well conditioned response in childhood

extraverts were more likely to develop psychopathic disorders if their visceral brain

activity is high. This theory is speculative and Eysenck acknowledged that his

hypothesis “must stand and fall by empirical confirmation” (1965) Despite his

scientific data Eysenck, like Jung,

advocated that human behaviour has

both biological and social causes but

that there is a strong genetic

component. Perhaps therapists could

look at the behaviour and traits of a

client’s close family when working with

them in order to better understand the “nature/nurture debate”

Jung suggested that people tend to develop two functions, usually one rational

function and one irrational function. There are four basic ways, or psychological

functions which are thinking, feeling, sensation or intuition; one of these becomes the

primary or dominant function and the other the auxiliary function. (See Figure 1).

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Jung’s Four Psychological FunctionsRational Functions

Irrational Functions

Thinking (process of cognitive thought) Feeling (function of subjective judgement or valuation) enabling decision making

Sensation (perception using the physical sense organs Intuition (receptivity to unconscious contents) providing the information on which to make judgements

Fig 1.

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Fig 2. (Stevens 1999c)

Therefore it is unusual to find thinking and feeling sensation and intuition, develop in

the same person. The dominant function is directed toward external reality if the

person is an extravert, or toward the inner world if the person in an introvert (O’Roark

1990). The rational functions of thinking and feeling can be conceived as a pair of

opposites as can the irrational functions of sensation and intuition. The extraverted

thinking sensation type would have an introverted feeling-intuitive shadow and vice-

versa. (See Figure 2 above)

The fundamental attitudes of extraversion or introversion can be combined with four

psychological functions in eight different ways to make up eight psychetypes. (See

Figure 3 below). These eight psychetypes are helpful in giving the therapist a more

complete picture of the client’s personality and help to identify the function that the

individual uses for dealing with the less preferred direction, known as the auxiliary

function. Jung cautioned that types rarely occur in a pure form and that there is a

wide range of variation within each type, that people of a specific type may change

as their personal collective unconscious changes in response to external or indeed

internal influences which will motivate the individual to seek change in their lives. The

therapist needs to be aware of that every client responds differently. Jung viewed

emotional disturbance as a person’s attempt to reconcile the contradictory aspects of

personality. One side of the psyche, such as the conscious, adaptive, social persona,

may be exaggerated at the expense of the darker, unconscious aspects, the shadow

side. For example the Extraverted sensation types who may appear to be superficial

and soulless and actively seek thrills and distractions but have a shadow side of

intuition which when activated by an inner event will gives rise to negative hunches

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that are way off beam and may manifest as paranoid or hostile behaviour for no

apparent reason. (Stevens 1994b)

The Extraverted Types The Introverted Types

Thinking: Tend to live according to fixed rules; try to be objective but may be dogmatic in thinking; repress feeling

Thinking: Have a strong need for privacy; interested in ideas rather than facts; may have problems with practical issues and relationships with people are not important; repress feeling

Feeling: Tend to be sociable: seek harmony: respect tradition and authority; tend to be emotional; repress thinking

Feeling: Superficially reserved but sympathetic and understanding of close others; may appear mysterious and indifferent; thoughtful and hypersensitive; repress thinking

Sensing: Emphasise the objects which trigger experience and enjoy new sensory experiences; strongly oriented toward reality; repress intuition

Sensing: Emphasise the experience which events trigger rather than the events themselves. Tend to be passive, calm and artistic; repress intuition

Intuition: In touch with the unconscious, very creative and adventurous; find new ideas appealing: tend to make decisions based on hunches rather than facts; in touch with their unconscious wisdom: repress sensing

Intuition: They are mystic dreamers, concerned with possibilities rather than what is currently present. Seldom understood by others. Repress sensing. Jung described himself as an introverted intuitor.

Fig 3. Adapted from Cloniger (2000b) and Engler (1999)

To usefully help a client and determine therapeutic goals it is necessary to determine

whether a person is primarily orientated toward their inner (introversion) or outer

world (extraversion) and next to assess which are the dominant and auxillary

psychological functions of the client.

Jung said that people connect ideas, feelings, experiences and information by way of

associations in the unconscious in such a way as to affect their behavior. These

groupings he named Complexes. They may be organised around a particular person

or object and the therapist may use this knowledge to bring to the forefront of the

client’s consciousness a situation which they may be finding difficult to disengage

from. Jung wrote of a man who knew that he was suffering from an imaginary growth

but could not stop himself from believing it. (Engler 1999 b) Today we have MRI and

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other techniques to help people see that their unconscious worries are unfounded,

but even with all this technology to hand counseling and cognitive therapy may be

appropriate.

The therapeutic goal of Jungian therapy is to help the client reconcile unbalanced

aspects of their personality which present in a number of differing ways of

psychological disturbance. Examples include: extreme negativity, addictions, degrees

of paranoia, sudden religious conversion, inappropriate attachments to unsuitable

partners, hysteria, mania, depression, hypochondrias or schizoid personality traits as

Jung himself had as a boy. By understanding his theory and how each type may

present the therapist can help them unlock the shadow sides of their personality. It is

a process in which the client is helped to come to terms with the place of self within

their own world and also to help them see that they are part of a greater collective

unconscious. Much of Jung’s work was about the interconnectedness of all people

and cultures. Today more than ever as we seek to become “one world” Jung’s work

with eastern as well as western religions and cultures seems more and more

appropriate. The work of Hans Eysenck through empirical studies across the world

has shown that personality types exist in all cultures and therefore concludes that

there is a genetic component to personality types. “Such cross cultural unanimity

would be unlikely if biological factors did not play a predominant part” (Eysenck,

1990) But like Jung he believed that environmental factors probably determine how

much an individual will develop to their full potential. The use of appropriate

assessment techniques can be invaluable in helping a therapist to develop the

untapped potential within the individual and is so doing contribute to the collective

unconsciousness and synchronicity of the planet as a whole.

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References Boeree G. (2006) Carl Jung 1875 - 1961 http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/jung.html Accessed 28/08/10

Cloniger S. C. ( 2000) Theories of personality: understanding Persons (3rd Ed) New Jersey: Prentice Hall

Cloniger, S. C. ( 2000b) Theories of personality: understanding Persons (3rd Ed) New Jersey: Prentice Hall p 91)

Engler, B. (1999) Personality theories, an introduction. (5th Ed) p82 Boston: Houghton Migglin Company

Engler, B. (1999) Personality theories, an introduction. (5th Ed) p75 Boston: Houghton Migglin Company

Eysenck , H.J. (1982) Personality, genetics and behaviour: Selected papers. New York Praeger in Engler, B. (1999) Personality theories, an introduction. (5th Ed) p 310-111 Boston: Houghton Migglin Company

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Eysenck, H. J. (1990). Biological dimensions of personality. In L. A. Pervin (Ed.), Handbook of personality: Theory and research (pp. 244-276). New York: Guilford. In Engler, B. (1999) Personality theories, an introduction. (5th Ed) p315 Boston: Houghton Migglin Company

Frager, R., & Fadiman, J. (2005). Excerpt from Personality and Personal Growth (6th ed.)New York: Pearson Prentice Hall pg. 56: http://www.itp.edu/about/carl_jung.php

Fordam, F (1953) An introduction to Jung’s psychology. Baltimore. Penguin. In Engler, B. (1999) Personality theories, an introduction. (5th Ed) p74 Boston: Houghton Migglin Company

Furnam, A (1990) Can people accurately estimate their own personality test scores? European Journal of Personality, 4(4), 319-327 in Engler, B. (1999) Personality theories, an introduction.p87 (5th Ed) Boston: Houghton Migglin Company

Jung C, (1933) Jung 'Psychological Theory of Types'. Modern Man in Search of a Soul, p. 98 (cf. C.W., 6). http://www.cgjungpage.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=852&Itemid=41#Contents2 Accessed 30/08/2010

O’Roark, A.M. (1990). Comment on Cowan’s interpretation of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and Jung’s psychological functions. Journal of Personality Assessment, 58, 277-299 in Cloniger S. C. ( 2000) Theories of personality: understanding Persons (3rd

Ed) New Jersey: Prentice Hall p 90

Stevens, A. (1994a) Jung A Very Short Introduction. p38. New York: Oxford University Press Inc

Stevens, A. (1994b) Jung A Very Short Introduction. p91. New York: Oxford University Press Inc

Stevens, A. (1994b) Jung A Very Short Introduction. p90. New York: Oxford University Press Inc

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