Carl Jung's theory of Wholeness

Carl Jung's theory of wholeness best describes the internal force that drives human development. The core concept of Jung's approach was that each person possesses two separate personalities: an outer public self and a hidden, inner self that felt a special closeness to God. The interplay between these two selves affected the individual's striving for integration and wholeness.

Jung was fascinated by death, nature, and philosophy even as a youth. As Douglas (1995) notes, "Jung received a thorough education embedded not only in the Protestant theological tradition but also in classical Greek and Latin literature" (p. 99). Born in 1875 in Switzerland, Jung experienced striking mythological dreams and visions during his childhood. Jung's parents were a dysfunctional couple, and the youth reported terrifying dreamlike phenomena related to his mother, who suffered from emotional disorders and depression.

Even at an early age, Jung envisioned himself as being essentially two different entities: "Beside the world of the first personality, the schoolboy, there existed within Jung another world, the magical, mysterious realm of what he called the second self" (Staude, 1981, p. 23). The reconciliation of these separate entities was to become a central theme of Jung's psychological theories.

Jung developed an intense interest in the theories of one of his eminent contemporaries, Sigmund Freud. Their subsequent professional friendship lasted from 1907 to 1913. Initiall

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us. The personal unconscious consists of all the individual's mental experiences, both latent and repressed: "The contents of the personal unconscious are ordinarily readily accessible to consciousness when the need for them arises" (Hall and Nordby, 1973, p. 35). The collective unconscious is a storehouse of all latent images in common to all individuals, symbolic images that form the basis of myths and religions of all cultures. These symbolic images manifest themselves as archetypes: "Jung believed that humans have an inherited predisposition to form their personalities and to view reality according to universal inner patterns" (Douglas, 1995, p. 96). Typical archetypes are the Great Mother, the Wise Old Man, the Maiden, and the Eternal Youth. Some archetypes represent the hidden feminine aspect of the male personality or the hidden masculine aspect of the feminine personality. These aspects are referred to as the animus (male) and the anima (female). Jungian analysts seek to set up a dialogue between the conscious and unconscious minds of the patient. Jung believed that the personal unconscious revealed itself through complexes. Complexes were the means by which archetypal images flowed from the collective uncon

Category: Psychology - C