judgment See AKRASIA, FACULTY PSYCHOLOGY,. KAN. Jung, Carl Gustav (1875–1961), Swiss psychologist and founder of analytical psychology, a form of psychoanalysis that differs from Freud’s chiefly by an emphasis on the collective character of the unconscious and on archetypes as its privileged contents. Jung, like Freud, was deeply influenced by philosophy in his early years. Before his immersion in psychiatry, he wrote several essays of explicitly philosophical purport. Kant was doubtless the philosopher who mattered most to Jung, for whom archetypes were conceived as a priori structures of the human psyche. Plato and Neoplatonists, Schopenhauer and especially Nietzsche (to whose Zarathustra he devoted a seminar of several years’ duration) were also of critical importance. Jung was a close reader of James, and his Psychological Types (1921) – in addition to an extended discussion of nominalism versus realism – contains a detailed treatment of Jamesian typologies of the self.
Jung considered the self to be an amalgamation of an ‘ectopsyche’ – consisting of four functions (intuition, sensation, feeling, and thinking) that surround an ego construed not as a singular entity but as a ‘complex’ of ideas and emotions – and an ‘endosphere’ (i.e., consciousness turned inward in memory, affect, etc.). The personal unconscious, which preoccupied Freud, underlies the endosphere and its ‘invasions,’ but it is in turn grounded in the collective unconscious shared by all humankind. The collective unconscious was induced by Jung from his analysis of dream symbols and psychopathological symptoms. It is an inherited archive of archaic-mythic forms and figures that appear repeatedly in the most diverse cultures and historical epochs. Such forms and figures – also called archetypes – are considered ‘primordial images’ preceding the ‘ideas’ that articulate rational thought. As a consequence, the self, rather than being autonomous, is embedded in a prepersonal and prehistoric background from which there is no effective escape. However, through prolonged psychotherapeutically guided ‘individuation,’ a slow assimilation of the collective unconscious into daily living can occur, leading to an enriched and expanded sense of experience and selfhood.
See also FREUD, JAMES, NIETZSCH. E.S.C.
