Jung 101 for Dummies - Three Concepts and How They Relate To You

Posted on January 05, 2023 by Josh Simon, One of Thousands of Life Coaches on Noomii.

One of my personal specialties is taking tough material and making it relatable to those not involved in the subject. Apart from that, I also have an unusual hobby on the side: adult psychology and development. This leads me to do weird things in my free time, like reading everything Carl Jung, the famous Psychologist from the early 20th century, ever wrote. That in itself is a gigantic undertaking. His published works occupy over 20 volumes and not all of his works are published. Needless to say, after years of reading, I am only about 1/3rd of the way through this task. However, even with that, how can one compress eight volumes of work into a relatable article. I’m going to try!

To make this easier, I’m going break down the work and focus on three concepts of Jung’s: complexes, The Self, and Archetypes. This by far is not the only set of concepts from Jung, but these three do pervade nearly everything he writes.

Complexes

Jung and his contemporary colleague/mentor/frenemy, Sigmund Freud, both fostered the wild idea in the 20th century that human beings are not totally aware of all their inner thoughts and feelings. This was a heated debate at the time. Both Freud and Jung proposed that there are indeed things going on below the conscious surface of our minds that we are not aware are happening. For Freud, these unconscious happenings mostly amounted to unfulfilled wishes to either kill or fornicate with our parents, which was more of a pointer to Freud’s own psychology than anything else. However, for Jung, things were not all about sex, nor were they all about power like they were for another student of Freud’s, Adler.

Jung proposed that these unconscious thoughts were about any number of basic instinctual things. Moreover, they operated on their own in a mostly independent fashion. Way back to his doctoral thesis, Jung saw that people have inner workings that can think, feel, talk, and act without the outer person even knowing or remembering it happened. He called these little independent inner demons “autonomous complexes”. They are particularly awake and active during dreams, according to Jung.

Despite the fancy psychology term, this amounted to all of us today implicitly understanding that we have subconscious minds and selves that don’t always think and act like our conscious selves!

The Self

Armed with the knowledge of these autonomous complexes living rent-free inside our heads, Jung began to piece out their anatomy in relation to the other parts of our conscious and unconscious selves. In the end, he realized he was not really sure what the “self” is, if it is anything, but he came up with a basic system to describe the outcomes of what we see in real-life people as they go about their day. It boils down to this:

Picture the surface of the ocean. Above the water is everything you are aware of. Beneath the water is everything you are unaware of. All of it is “you”. That water is the line between conscious and unconscious. On the surface of the water is a ship, a big iron-clad battleship for most people. The ship is there to protect the ocean from all the big horrible things outside of it. That’s your persona. The persona is like a Navy with a mission to protect the whole ocean. At least, it thinks that is what it is supposed to do. It is led and driven by Captain Ego.

It so happens that there’s also a submarine underneath the ship. It has the same job as the ship on the surface, except it protects against all the horrible things in the depths of the ocean. This submarine is what Jung called the “anima” for a male or the “animus” for a female. Your anima/animus is usually the opposite of your outer gender. Keep in mind, this stuff was written in the early 1900’s, so it may require a little more exploration and updating to parse out what really goes on with the animus/anima given today’s understandings of gender. The pilot of this submarine, usually opposed in almost every way to Captain Ego is The Shadow.

Most of us walk around all day at the mercy of that ego and its persona, except of course when the Shadow rears its face and does something out of the blue that we did not expect. It is much like that Billy Joel song, The Stranger. Listen to those lyrics. “We all have a face that we hide away forever…” Often when we have an inner conflict, it is arising due to some disagreement between the ego and the shadow.

Archetypes

Reading the section above, one may rightly ask, what are these ocean-going vessels protecting us from? Good question. For things above the surface of the water, it is a mostly obvious answer: the ship protects us against anything that threatens the ship. That could be your boss, your kids, your significant other, your friend’s baseball team, your opposing ideology, etc. However, what about below the surface?

That’s a much more interesting answer. The ocean has two major “zones”. Immediately below the water is your “personal unconscious”, which mainly contains things you saw or heard but didn’t pay attention to outwardly. There are complexes here and they mainly deal with stuff that happens in Life every day. But below that? The deep ocean is what Jung called the “collective unconscious” and that is where things get intriguing.

See, since humans evolved as a species, there have been perhaps 80 billion individuals. That’s 80 billion times where human minds have been born, formed, and died. According to Jung, there are only so many ways to do that, only so many possible permutations of thoughts and emotions and images that can form in the human mind over 80 billion repetitions. No matter where you were born, or when, we all have some of the same understandings: Day is light. Night is dark. There are mothers, fathers, siblings, children. Lovers are things we have or don’t have, want or don’t want, but they exist. There are seasons. Water is wet. Fire is hot. Air is for breathing. Food is for eating. All of these are universal understandings that seem really stupid to type out explicitly, yet these understandings are the basis of our instincts. We are born with them. They are ingrained into our neural anatomy. No one tells us what “Day” is. They may teach us the word “Day” in dozens of languages, but we already knew what “Day” was before learning the words.

So follow the logic from Jung here: Instincts give rise to images. Images give rise to ideas. Ideas make us do things, like telling stories and making explanations for what we see. That’s mythology. All of these understands produce ideas and mythologies that have commonalities between cultures and peoples. Every religion has a father, mother, lover, and other figure in it, whether that figure is a person, an animal, or a person with an animal’s head. That’s because these mythological ideas that arise from images which arise from instincts are Archetypes. The Archetypes reside in every one of us, deep below our consciousness, in our collective unconscious.

“Collective unconscious” doesn’t mean there is some mystical force that connects us all telepathically (although Jung did believe in telepathy). The collective unconscious is the collection of ideas and images that we all share, which come from our instincts, and because we are all humans, we all have them, the same ones.

Ok, so what?

It is useful to know that in your daily life, thoughts, feelings, and even changes in mood that you cannot quite explain often arise from something in the personal unconscious that is not getting the attention it requires. It is fine to ignore it briefly, like while you are out at the grocery store buying milk, but beyond that it needs to be resolved if you want to find balance again.
Deeper life issues usually arise out of Archetypal thoughts and feelings, i.e. puberty, adulthood, becoming a parent, retirement, aging, and so on. These life milestones usually bring some amount of protest from our deep unconscious self, or if not protest, a desire to know that things will be ok even in the face of impending death.

Jung also touched on the process he called “individuation” which is the essentially the process of making that barrier between the conscious and unconscious more porous and thinner, so you can have direct contact between the two and nip things in the bud as soon as they arise.

Now what?

Well, that means we all have a lot of work to do. Pretty simple stuff: learning how to contact your unconscious self, including your own anima/animus, learning to recognize when something is personal or archetypal, and then learning how to use all that to make things easier to solve and go through life! Not so bad.

While I am not a psychologist, I am a personal development coach, so if you would like some help thinking about these things from various perspectives, I can work on that with you. I can be reached for an appointment at spiral-coaching.com.