At a dim sum lunch, a colleague takes the last har gow. You smile and say "No problem, you have it", but a flash of resentment crosses your mind, and you promptly tell yourself off for being petty. At home that evening, you're still thinking about it. Why does something so small leave such a wake? And who, behind that "no problem", was the one feeling resentful?
Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist and, for a time, Freud's closest collaborator. After their break in 1912–13 he developed his own "analytical psychology". Like Freud, he believed the unconscious drives us; unlike Freud, he saw it not only as a warehouse of repressed wishes but also as a source of constructive forces that move a person towards wholeness.[1,2]
Jung's best-known idea is the collective unconscious: beneath personal experience, a layer of the psyche that all humans share. A child who has never seen a war still understands, watching a war film, who the hero is and who the villain is. Jung called figures like the hero, the mother, the wise old man and the trickster archetypes. Life, in this view, draws out possibilities that were already there.[1,3]
Jung's is a psychology of integrating opposites, and two terms carry it. The ego is the centre of consciousness, which lets us understand and adapt to reality; the Self is the whole psyche, including every possibility not yet lived. To fit in, we push some sides of ourselves away as we grow; the task of a life, which Jung called individuation, is to take them back, gradually, so that ego and Self come closer.[]
