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After reading this article you will learn about Carl Jung’s approach to unconscious processes in human behaviour.
Jung, a distinguished psychologist, emphasised the importance of unconscious processes in human behaviour like Freud. However, his concept of the unconscious differs very much from that of Freud. Jung believed that the unconscious is much more complicated and is made up of two functional divisions, the personal unconscious which is similar to Freud’s description of the unconscious; and the collective or racial unconscious which is much more influential and primordial.
According to Jung, human behaviour is guided by two potential forces the unconscious and teleology. The unconscious includes everything about the human past, while teleology includes everything about the future, like one’s aims, aspirations and intuitions. Thus, psychic life results from an interaction of the past with the future.
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The main agency which guides the past and the future is the ego which he calls the ‘conscious mind’. The ego is made up of conscious perceptions, memories, thoughts, feelings, etc. Beyond this ego lies a bigger interacting system which influences human behaviour. This Jung calls the personality or the psyche.
The collective unconscious or transpersonal unconscious is one of Jung’s most fascinating and significant concepts. It is the most powerful and influential system of the psyche and in pathological cases, it overshadows the ego and the personal unconscious.
The collective unconscious is considered to be the storehouse of latent memory traces inherited from man’s ancestral past, a past that includes not only the racial history of man as a separate species but also his pre-human or animal ancestry, as well.
It is the heritage of man’s evolutionary developments which got accumulated as a consequence of repetition over generations. Thus, all human beings have the same collective unconscious. This universality of the collective unconscious is attributed to similarity of the structure of the brain in all races of people.
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This similarity in turn is due to common evolution. Just as man is born with the capacity for seeing the world in three dimensions and develops this capacity through experience and training, so is he born with many predispositions for thinking, feeling and perceiving according to definite patterns and contents which become actualized through individual experiences. For example, man is predisposed to be afraid of darkness or snakes because, it may be assumed, primitive man might have encountered many dangers in the dark and was a victim of poisonous snakes.
These latent fears may never develop in modem man unless they are strengthened by specific experiences, but nonetheless the tendency is there and makes one more susceptible to such experiences. Some ideas are easily formed such as the idea of “Supreme Being or God” because the disposition has been firmly imprinted in the brain and needs very little reinforcement from individual experience to make it emerge into consciousness and influence one’s behaviour.
These latent or potential memories depend upon inherent structures and pathways that have been engraved on the brain as a result of the cumulative experiences of mankind. To deny the inheritance of these primordial memories, Jung asserts, is to deny the evolution and inheritance of the brain. He says, “The form of the world into which he is born is already inborn in him as a virtual image.”
The unconscious, both personal and collective, can be of immense service to man. “The unconscious holds possibilities which are locked away from the conscious mind, for it has at its disposal all subliminal contents, all those things which have been forgotten or overlooked as well as the wisdom and experience of uncounted centuries which are laid down in its archetypal organs.”
On the other hand, if the wisdom of the unconscious is ignored by the ego, the unconscious may disrupt the conscious rational process by seizing hold of them and twisting them into distorted forms. Phobias, delusions and other irrationalities stem from neglected unconscious process.
The components of the unconscious are called by various names – archetypes, dominants, primordial images and imagoes. An archetype is a universal thought, or idea which contains a large element of emotional and motivational force. This force creates images or visions that correspond in normal wakeful life to some aspect of the conscious situation. For example, the archetype of the priest produces an image of a priest figure which is then identified with an actual priest.
The two images often fit together compatibly because the archetype itself is a product of racial experience with the world and these experiences are much the same as those that any individual living in any age and in any part of the world will have. That is to say the nature of a priest or what they do has remained more or less the same throughout the history of the race.
Archetypes originate due to constant repetition of an experience for generations. For instance, for countless generations, men have seen the sun and the moon rising and setting. The repetition of this impressive experience eventually became fixed in the collective unconscious as an archetype of the Sun God and the Moon God, the powerful light-giving heavenly bodies, and became objects of worship.
Archetypes do not always exist in isolation, but penetrate into consciousness by way of certain associated experiences. The best sources of archetypal knowledge are myths, dreams, visions, rituals, neurotic and psychotic symptoms, etc.
Some of the well-known archetypes identified by Jung are. Birth, Rebirth, Magic, Demon, God, Power, The Virgin, The Child, The Mother and The Wise Old Man. The archetypes so identified are treated as separate functional systems of the psyche.
Some of the concepts used by Jung to explain the functioning of the psyche are given below:
The Persona:
The persona is a mask which is adopted by the person in response to social demands, norms and conventions. It is the role assigned to him by the society and expected of him. The purpose of the mask is to make a definite impression upon others and often to conceal the real nature of the person.
The persona is the public personality, those aspects which one displays to the world and to oneself. Often this is different from the private personality. This archetype develops out of experiences of the race. In this case, the experiences consist of social interactions involving the assumption of a social role which has served man through the ages. Hence, this persona or mask is developed and nurtured throughout one’s life.
The Anima and the Animus:
It is a well-known and accepted fact that human beings are bisexual on a physiological level. The male secretes both male and female sex hormones, as does the female. On the psychological level too masculine and feminine characteristics are found in both sexes. Jung describes the feminine side of man’s personality as anima, and the masculine side of the woman’s personality as animus.
These archetypes, although conditioned by the sex chromosomes and sex glands, are the products of the racial experiences of man with woman and woman with man. By living with woman in society through the ages, man has become masculinized and by living with man in society woman has become feminized to an exaggerated degree. The anima in men and animus in women often seek expression in conscious behaviour in an attempt to restore the balance between feminine and masculine concepts.
The Shadow:
The shadow archetype consists of the animal instincts which man has inherited and thus, indicates the animal side of man’s nature. This could be inferred from the display of violence, aggression, injury to oneself and others in thought, feeling, words or action. It is rather unconventional to engage in an elaborate discussion on Jungian concepts.
In the above paragraphs the concept of motivation and other important terms and concepts in Jung’s theory have been briefly touched upon. Here an attempt is being made to present more explicitly the implications of these concepts for motivation.
The reader might have noticed that in explaining all these concepts, Jung emphasises their functional and motivational nature. The archetypes are really systems of libido or psychological energy and can, therefore, initiate and regulate behaviour.
The neurotic symptoms, dreams and creations of art are all basically expressions of archetypal motivation. Jung makes a clear distinction between organic motivation, on the one hand, and independent psychological motivation, on the other.
The archetypes are essentially psychological motives very crucial from the point of view of the total and harmonious development and growth of human nature. To a certain extent their individual motivational meanings can be subsumed under the general motive of psychic growth and harmony-which Jung calls the motive for integration or individuation.
The term, individuation, means a total, integrated and complete development of the individual. We may here see that to a great extent, Jung anticipated the humanistic model of motivation which stresses the process of self-actualization. But the Jungian concept went far beyond into a metapsychology while the humanistic model of self-actualization is still constrained by the concept of adjustment and is existential in its approach.
Jung’s approach to motivation was not, however, entirely based on archetypal motivation. While archetypal motivations constitute the inherent, natural and basic motivational characteristics of the human psyche, there is also another source of motivation which manifests itself in non-adjustive behaviour like dreams, neurotic symptoms, etc.
These sources are named by Jung as ‘complexes’. Complexes are formed out of unfulfilled wishes in day-to-day life. These complexes also motivate behaviour. The operation of complexes in his theory is very similar to the operation of the unconscious motives formulated by Freud.