Jung: Glossary of Terms

ARCHETYPES. These primordial images reflect basic patterns or universal themes common to us all which are present in the unconscious. These symbolic images exist outside space and time. Though archetypes are infinite in number, Jung identified four major archetypes as playing a significant role in human personality and behavior: the Persona, the Shadow, the Anima/Animus, and the Self.

COMPLEXES. Usually unconscious and repressed emotionally-toned symbolic material that is incompatible with consciousness. "Stuck-together" agglomerations of thoughts, feelings, behavior patterns, and somatic forms of expression. Can cause constant psychological disturbances and symptoms of neurosis. With intervention, can become conscious and greatly reduced in their impact.

DREAMS. Specific expressions of the unconscious which have a definite, purposeful structure indicating an underlying idea or intention. The general function of dreams is to restore one's total psychic equilibrium. They tend to play a complementary or compensatory role in our psychic makeup.

INDIVIDUATION. Jung believed that a human being is inwardly whole, but that most of us have lost touch with important parts of our selves. Through listening to the messages of our dreams and waking imagination, we can contact and reintegrate our different parts. The goal of life is individuation, the process of coming to know, giving expression to, and harmonizing the various components of the psyche. If we realize our uniqueness, we can undertake a process of individuation and tap into our true self. Each human being has a specific nature and calling which is uniquely his or her own, and unless these are fulfilled through a union of conscious and unconscious, the person can become sick.

NEUROSIS. Jung had a hunch that what passed for normality often was the very force which shattered the personality of the patient. That trying to be "normal", when this violates our inner nature, is itself a form of pathology. In the psychiatric hospital, he wondered why psychiatrists were not interested in what their patients had to say.

PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES. People differ in certain basic ways, even though the instincts which drive us are the same. He distinguished two general attitudes--introversion and extraversion; and four functions--thinking, feeling, sensing, and intuiting.

• Extravert: Outer-directed, need for sociability, chooses people as a source of energy, often action-oriented.
• Introvert: Inner-directed, need for privacy and space; chooses solitude to recover energy, often reflective.
• Thinking function: Logical, sees cause & effect relations, cool, distant, frank, questioning.
• Feeling function: Creative, warm, intimate, a sense of valuing positively or negatively. (Note that this is not the same as emotion)
• Sensing function: Sensory, oriented toward the body and senses, detailed, concrete, present.
• Intuitive. Sees many possibilities in situations, goes with hunches, impatient with earthy details, impractical, sometimes not present.

STORY. Jung concluded that every person has a story, and when derangement occurs, it is because the personal story has been denied or rejected. Healing and integration comes when the person discovers or rediscovers his or her own personal story.

SYMBOL. A name, term, picture which is familiar in daily life, yet has other connotations besides its conventional and obvious meaning. Implies something vague and partially unknown or hidden, and is never precisely defined. Dream symbols carry messages from the unconscious to the rational mind.

SYNCHRONICITY. The meaningful coincidence of a psychic and a physical state or event which have no causal relationship to each other.