How To Know Yourself Better - Carl Jung (Jungian Philosophy)

Together with Sigmund Freud and Alfred  Adler, Carl Gustav Jung was one of the founders of psychoanalysis or the so-called  ‘modern depth psychology’, a field of science focusing on dealing with the unconscious  energies which move through each of us. In spite of being highly praised by  Freud, Jung departed from his teachings, eventually founding his own school of psychology  called ‘analytical psychology’. Some of the most important concepts in Jung's  work are personality typology, individuation and also archetypes like persona,  the shadow, anima and animus.

In this context, an archetype is a universal model common in  many cultures which influences human behavior. In spite of the fact he is mainly considered  a psychoanalyst, Jung made huge contributions to the realm of philosophy. His particular take  on the subject is often referred to as “Jungian Philosophy”.

He wrote many books like Psychology  of the Unconscious, Man and His Symbols, The Archetypes and The Collective Unconscious,  Modern Man In Search of a Soul, The Psychology of the Transference, ‘Memories, Drams, and  Thoughts’, and The Relations Between the Ego and the Unconscious. His entire work was  about how to help people navigate through the complexity of their psyche, to help them  understand themselves better in order to heal. Jung was particularly interested in the  process of individuation, how to express the true essence of your personality, and how to  develop yourself into a mature and whole person.

When people can harmonize their consciousness,  the part of the psyche which is aware of and responsive to its surroundings, with their  unconsciousness, the part of the psyche in which mental and psychological activities  take place without the individual’s awareness, they can understand their Self, which is their  psyche as a whole, unifying the consciousness and the unconsciousness. Learning how to know  yourself is crucial, so to help you learn more about how to know yourself better, here are  7 teachings from the wisdom of Carl Jung: Drw Mandalas Carl Jung said: “The mandala is… the  path to the center, to individuation. ” According to Carl Jung, the self can be  represented in the form of a Mandala, which is a circle containing different sectors: It is a diagram with different components in it,  each one representing an aspect that reveals the Self.

Oftentimes, it looks like a circle, which  according to Jung, reflects a sacred space. When you draw your own personal Mandala, it becomes one of the best ways to see your  inner Self in its most essential aspects. At the center of the figure,  the core of the self resides.

The Self is the central aspect of an individual’s  personality and life. Then, around the circle, are the outer world and inner world. The top  half is the outer world and represents our surroundings and environment.

The bottom half  shows the inner world, what is deep inside us. The outer world is in connection with  consciousness, ego and persona. Consciousness is everything that we know directly, ego is the  entity that helps us organize everything that we perceive, think, memorize and feel, and persona  is essentially the role that we play in society.

When the ego is overwhelmed with  feelings, perceptions or thoughts, some of them are redirected  to personal unconsciousness, often coming back into our consciousness  for a brief moment while dreaming. The inner world, on the bottom half, is in  connection with the collective unconsciousness, with the shadow, anima and animus, all  of which are sources of communication between the consciousness and  the collective unconsciousness. Collective unconsciousness is separate  from personal unconsciousness.

It is the part that binds people together through  invisible ways. Jung used this concept to explain the similarities in mythologies around the world.  He believed that the collective unconsciousness had a profound influence on the lives of  individuals, containing symbols, so-called archetypes - that provide individuals meaning  regarding the life experiences they go through.

The Shadow, part of the inner world, is considered  to be the most dangerous aspect of the Self, consisting of all the unnaceptable animalistic,  aggressive or sexual instincts. Usually, people are not very aware of their Shadow, which  is often projected onto other people and objects. The anima and animus duo is related to  a masculine-feminine polarity.

Anima is the feminine side of the male form while  animus is the masculine side of the female form. Self is the overarching energy that integrates and  organizes our personality by bringing together the conscious and unconscious processes. Mandala is  not only a form of art, but also a psychotherapy tool which each of us can use.

For a period of  time, Jung used to draw mandalas every day and he analyzed the state of his psyche by looking at  the mandala he had just drawn. He also encouraged his patients to draw their own mandalas. There  are many training courses in how to draw mandalas and we can also try to draw one each day in  order to understand ourselves a bit better.

For example, one patient of Jung drew  these three mandalas, at different times: The first one shows the four stages of the moon,  then on the second mandala, the sun appears, which reflects a bigger difference between  the surroundings and unconsciousness - thus, a lesser connection between the self and the  surroundings. Then, in the end, in the third mandala, the sun is about to set. The patient had  drawn the last mandala shortly before his death.

As colors, yellow usually represents intuition,  blue represents the mind, red represents feelings and brown represents sensations. Based on what  colors and shapes we use when we draw the mandala - ideally with the help of a psychotherapist  - we can identify the corresponding archetypes that could then be interpreted  to make sense of our internal struggles. Understand your subconscious impulses According to Jung: “Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s  conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.

” The Shadow is one of the most important  archetypes according to Jung. It is a part of our subconscious that comes to the surface in the most  unexpected moments, often taking us by surprise. The Shadow is that part of ourselves that we  fail to recognize and which comes to the surface through dreams or through subconscious impulses  in daily life.

We’ve all had moments when we did something yet immediately after had no clue why  we did it. Perhaps we got angry at something or someone out of the blue, went into a different  room, or we answered a question in a bizarre way, without knowing the reason. Perhaps  it was the Shadow that directed us?

The more rigidly you act in real life, the  more you follow rules made by others or your self-imposed rules disregarding your emotions,  the more you fail to acknowledge your Shadow. If you do so, you will fail to know yourself.  Ergo, you can only truly know yourself if you also know your Shadow.

And this process of knowing  your Shadow can take a good amount of effort. Often the things we discover in our Shadow  are unpleasant as our Shadow includes the dark parts of ourselves, our aggressive  tendencies, and repressed sexual desires… anything that we cannot accept  in our everyday social behavior. But the bitter irony is that the more we  try to keep away from those dark parts, the more they control our lives in invisible ways. 

And when this happens we often project all those negative attitudes onto others. For example,  every time you talk intensely negatively about someone else, you can be confident that all  those negative traits are also inside you, in your Shadow, otherwise you would not be so  passionately involved in that discussion. When you judge someone for how they look, perhaps you say  they are overweight, badly-dressed, or too skinny, chances are you are insecure about yourself as  well and to avoid feeling anxiety, your psyche makes you project those negative feelings  which are part of your Shadow onto others.

To stop projecting and start  taking control of your Shadow, you need to first become aware  of when you are projecting. Stop yourself every time you think or talk with  passion about something negative in other people and examine yourself in the same way. Is there  any other negative feeling that you need to be aware of and is it related to you personally? 

For example, if you catch yourself speaking badly about a colleague who uses their charisma  to get away with anything at work, it is likely that you actually wish you had that charisma  yourself to get ahead in life in the same way, but you don’t know how to do it, so instead you  prefer to accuse the other of playing unfairly. By questioning yourself, you can discover  many unpleasant things about yourself, and, by discovering them, you will know what you need  to work on so you can become free of them and that way they won’t control your life anymore. Knowing  your Shadow is a part of knowing your true Self.

Know your fears In the words of Jung: “Find out what a person fears most and  that is where he will develop next. ” Jung treated many patients suffering from anxiety  disorder and he understood that what they needed most was the courage to face their own fears.  He found it to be good practice to analyze their fears, because, after that analysis, he could  understand in which direction they should develop.

Unfortunately however, many choose  not to take any risks in life, preferring to give up on their dreams than  to fail and potentially embarrass themselves. When this tendency overwhelms  individuals, they can become neurotic. No matter how courageous we look to  society, we all have our own fears.

Nobody in the world is truly fearless. What we can learn from Jung’s studies on his  patients regarding facing their inner fears, is that, by analyzing our fears, we can discover  which area of our life we should work on. If we permanently avoid facing our fears, we  will remain in a cocoon, in a comfortable space, but that will not make us happy in the long  run.

By refusing to look inside ourselves, by refusing to know ourselves better and finding  solutions for our fears, we will stop growing. For example, your fear of public speaking might  prevent you from advancing in your career, you avoid speaking up during big meetings or  participating actively in business conferences. Overcoming your fear can only happen once  you start getting to know your fear better; identify it, acknowledge it, then find  reasons why this fear is unfounded.

In the case of our example, analyze  the ideas you had in your mind and why you didn’t put them forward. Were  they better than those of your colleagues? If yes, then, you had no reason to  not express your idea in the meeting.

To start speaking more in public, you can  practice in front of a mirror, or better yet, record yourself and review the video. Not only  will you be able to see what you do and don’t like and correct for it, you will also get more  comfortable hearing your voice and seeing yourself in that context, which means you will feel more  confident, which will improve your performance. If your fear has deeper roots, perhaps caused  by a traumatic event during your childhood, then you need to look deep inside your  memory, ideally with the help of a licensed psychotherapist, to identify and confront those  moments.

To really know yourself and evolve, one of the best ways is to face your  fears and the roots of those fears. Face your emotions Carl Jung tells us: “People will do anything, no matter how  absurd, to avoid facing their own souls”. According to Jung, psychological  diseases like neuroses have always been at the base of legitimate suffering.

This  suffering is often buried so deep inside us that it becomes very difficult to deal  with. The painful emotions that we often fear to face are developed from trauma,  rejection, loss, failure or abandonment. It is not enough to be mentally  aware of those buried emotions, it is also important to have the courage to feel  them in their raw form, to truly face them.

When we are too afraid to face them, we mask them,  we go into self-harming activities, addictions, or we close our hearts, adopt more rigid  behavior, and are afraid to show our suffering. The way to stop running away from facing our soul  is to understand first that it is not the event that traumatized us, but rather the set of beliefs  we built afterwards around that event. Maybe after you suffered that traumatic episode, you started  to see yourself as a worthless human being, not good enough or deserving enough. 

Once you identify these beliefs, you need to start questioning them, find  evidence in your present life that these beliefs are not true and build a better,  more positive belief-system about yourself. For example, imagine you were raised in  a dysfunctional family, with alcoholic parents that regularly neglected you, making  you feel worthless, but also ashamed of them. Just as your parents neglected you as a child, as  an adult you find your partner is doing the same and all those past memories now come and  haunt you.

The sadness you feel because of your partner will be amplified by the sadness you  have from your childhood, making everything worse, preventing you from focusing on even your most  basic daily tasks, potentially even resulting in clinical depression. You should not run away  from those early memories about your childhood, but rather investigate the belief-system  you inherited from it, and question it. One example of a belief that influences you  negatively can be that you think you are not lovable enough, that you do not deserve love, that  if someone got to know you better, they wouldn’t like you and, if they do show they like you, you  believe there must be something wrong with them.

You need to change such a belief system with a  better one. One that better reflects the worthy person you are today. An example of a belief  system that would help you feel more lovable could be to start telling yourself that indeed  you are not perfect, but nor is anyone else, and that’s fine.

You try to work on yourself every  day, putting effort into self development, trying to be fair with other people, you give your best  in your work and go all-in on your relationships. Have your own validation first, then  look for other people’s validation. You can only build positive emotions on a solid  foundation of self love, a good knowledge of yourself and what you are capable of.

Your vision  of yourself will become clearer if you investigate your deepest emotions, your inner suffering and  the beliefs you’ve built around it. You cannot really know yourself if you don’t have the courage  to examine your soul and emotions inside out. Understand your dreams To quote Carl Jung: “Drams are the facts from which we must proceed.

” Jung considered dreams as being messages from the  unconscious. They have the role to reestablish the psychic equilibrium. Whatever was not fully  processed by the conscious mind during the day comes back to haunt us in our dreams.

Jung  believed that dream material mainly contains repressed feelings that we don’t want to face  anymore, so he created a method for interpreting the dreams that he called ‘active imagination’.  First of all, the patients had to write their dream just after they woke up from sleep. Then,  they had to identify the key symbols appearing in the dream and make associations between them,  connecting them with their daily life events.

Through this process of active imagination, Jung  guided his patients through a process of reliving the dream, while still awake. The purpose was to  get to the story inside the story of the dream. No matter how silly the story of the dream is,  Jung believed there is always a deeper meaning.

By reliving the dream, we force ourselves  to interact with the dream figures actively, emotionally and, by living that emotion, we get  in touch with the deepest layers of ourselves. If Freud interpreted dreams only as ways to  discover repressed sexual instincts, for Jung, a dream can have more dimensions, including  archetypes and cultural symbols. It is said that Freud interpreted dreams at the objective  level, while Jung did so at the subjective level.

According to Jung, if you dream that you talk to  an old man that you don’t know and that man is telling you something very important, it means  that you should listen to his advice. That old man represents the old wise man, an archetype, who  is supposed to be your guide, a helper. When such archetypes appear in your dreams, it means your  life is going through a period of transformation.

The unconscious is not a harmless territory;  therefore, we must be cautious if we are to embark on the journey of dream interpretation.  It is better to start with simpler dreams and then to advance to more complex ones -  maybe with the help of a psychotherapist. By analyzing our dreams, we can understand a  great deal about ourselves, who we are inside.

We can learn things that we  never imagined about ourselves. Take time to be alone Carl Jung teaches us that: “The highest, most decisive experience is to be alone  with one’s own self. You must be alone to find out what supports you, when you  find that you cannot support yourself.

” For Jung, solitude was highly important,  declaring that for him it is a form of healing, making the rest of life worth living. Empty gossip  drained Jung of his energy and he often preferred the company of his own thoughts. The experience  of solitude gives you more power to face life’s challenges, you then better understand the  cause of any problem which affects you, you find out what resources you have inside to  face that problem.

Also, it is a great time to come up with creative ideas concerning your next  steps toward anything you want to do in life. Solitude is different from loneliness, solitude  being a voluntary act, while loneliness is an unfortunate situation when you feel  disconnected from people without wanting to be. In solitude, you can know yourself much  better than when you are with other people.

When you are with other people, there is a large  chance you will involuntarily start to copy some of their behavior and, somehow, the authenticity  of yourself becomes blurry in that interaction. To really know ourselves, we need moments of  solitude, when we are alone with our thoughts. We should try to have a personal space in our  home, a space where nobody disturbs us, where we can meditate, write personal notes, write in a  diary or, if this is not possible, we should take long walks outside, alone, preferably in nature. 

You will soon feel the benefits of such alone time and we will all get to know ourselves a  little better each day we practice solitude. Ask others what they think about you In our final quote from Jung for this video, he says: “We may think that  we fully control ourselves. However, a friend can easily reveal something  about us that we have absolutely no idea about.

” Although Jung spoke many times  about the benefits of solitude, which offers one of the best opportunities to  investigate your soul, to know yourself better, he also recognized that there are some aspects  of our personality that might escape us and only someone else, like a friend, family  member or a lover can really spot those aspects. During his lifetime, Jung met several  people who had a strong impact on him, helping him know himself better. Some examples  are two of his mistresses, Sabina Spielrein and Toni Wolff, who were both his lovers as well  as his assistants.

They not only helped Jung understand himself better emotionally,  but they also helped him in his work. Wolff was the one who actually helped him define  and name the concepts of anima and animus. We should never neglect the role of others  in our quest to know ourselves better.

For example, you might think that you are a  kind person and a very good listener. To test if this is true, ask your closest friend what they  think about that. They might well tell you that, yes, they know you care about them and they can  count on you when they have serious problems, but, when they try to tell you more  details about the issues that they face, you are too eager to try and fix the problems,  cutting their speech short rather than letting them explain properly and ‘get it off  their chest’ which can often be more helpful than trying to offer solutions based  on partial information.

What others can tell us about ourselves might make for uncomfortable  listening sometimes, but we need to ask anyway, and ask for an honest reply, if we really  want to know the hard truths about ourselves. If you enjoyed this video, please make sure to  check out our full philosophies for life playlist and for more videos to help you find success and  happiness using ancient philosophical wisdom, don’t forget to subscribe.  Thanks so much for watching.