Becoming Your True Self - The Psychology of Carl Jung

this video is sponsored by the book summary service blinkist the first 100 people to use the link in the description will receive one free week of unlimited access and 25 off a full membership we feel as though we are in the driver's seat of our mind driving according to our conscious will but upon only a little introspection we realize at least in many cases we are merely following a built-in navigation system that exceeds our knowledge and understanding we perceive but the display screen atop an entire complex software run on an even more complex hardware if

we do not attempt to familiarize ourselves with this navigation system how it works where it's trying to go and how to override it when it sends us the wrong direction we risk aimlessly traveling the world ending up somewhere uninteresting at best and disastrous at worst 20th century swiss psychiatrist carl jung is perhaps one of the greatest and most capable minds that has ever attempted to do this to explore itself from the inside and conceptualize a complete understanding of this sort of internal navigation system from the top down [Music] jung was born in 1875 in caswell

switzerland to a relatively impoverished royal pastor paul young and a depressed eccentric spirit-seeing mother emily young jung was a very introverted and isolated child who spent much of his time alone engaging in activities of make-believe projection disassociation and analyzing the adults in his life during early childhood he strongly disliked and underperformed in school to the point of almost neurosis regularly fainting to get out of it however as age and maturity would have it and after his father expressed stern concern over his potential incompetence jung somewhat dramatically shifted to engaging more intensely in his education reading

actively on his own especially that of philosophy and religious texts following secondary school after determining that he did not want to follow the family's path of a religious vocation jung would end up pursuing medicine at the university of basel after getting his completed medical degree from the university of zurich in 1902 he would work at a psychiatric hospital under the prominent and well-connected psychiatrist eugene bluhler several years later he would leave the hospital and begin his own private practice as jung became more successful and well known in his field he would soon become acquainted with

the extremely popular groundbreaking and controversial psychologist of the time who still holds this title today sigmund freud the two would meet for the first time in 1907 upon which they would talk for around 13 hours straight this would quickly develop into a strong friendship and professional association they traveled the world and lectured together analyzed each other's dreams and discussed various aspects of their psychological studies and theories however freud being of a much greater professional stature at the time as well as being substantially older than jung created a dynamic in the friendship that was much more

like a father-son or teacher-pupil relationship this would unfortunately pose problems as jung's career advanced and began to encroach on freud's the two would soon find themselves in disagreements over fundamental aspects of each other's theories ultimately these disagreements jung's tendency toward a somewhat mystical consideration of the human mind as opposed to freud's more scientific reductionist approach the nature of their father-son relationship and jung's desire for professional independence all caused the two to split their friendship off in 1913. following and as a consequence of this breakup from around 1913 to 1918 jung experienced a sort of mid-life

psychological breakdown during this he spent much of his time introspecting and writing about psychological experiments he conducted on himself exploring into the recesses of his unconscious this period of transition independence and psychological turbulence would ultimately concretize his views of the mind and his career as an independent theorist of psychology [Music] put simply the primary objective of jung's career was to understand the nature of the psyche and then develop theories and methods to aid in the integration of all its components so to create a singular unified state of wholeness in this context the psyche here simply

refers to the complete personality of the individual including feelings thoughts and behaviors the combination of the unconscious and conscious mind the continuous striving toward integrating the psyche through a process of self-realization and becoming a maximized authentic individual for jung was the fundamental goal of life and psychological understanding man's task he wrote is to become conscious of the contents that press upward from the unconscious as far as we can discern the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being for jung there is a constant interplay between the unconscious

and conscious realms of the psyche which combine to create our complete personality most of this however develops and exists in the unconscious realm beneath our immediate awareness and control thus a significant portion of who we really are what we really like and are capable of and the reasons we do the things we do persist within a realm we don't actively understand or have access to and so in order to come into a more authentic and complete state of being the individual must attempt to make this portion of the psyche conscious by tapping into it and

integrating it into the whole of their awareness jung would call this process individuation in order to better understand this it is important to understand jung's model of the psyche which he divided starting with the broader dimensions into consciousness personal unconsciousness and collective unconsciousness breaking each of these three realms down consciousness is as one would typically think of it the realm of personal awareness where one identifies explicitly and knowingly with themselves at the core of this is another structure young identified the ego the ego sits at the center of consciousness and provides a sense of personal

distinction creating the story one tells themselves about themselves in order to maintain continuity in their identity the ego is expressed in the conscious realm by what jung called the persona which is the outward efforts of appearance which the individual actively displays to the world this persona however is often disjointed from the individual's true self as it displays the character that one thinks or wants to be according to what the ego deems is appropriate to a particular society and role and not what is true to who the individual actually is in order to execute and maintain

this suitable appearance and self-esteem the ego filters various components of personal experience and selfhood either into or away from the conscious dimension what it filters away and restricts it represses and sends down into the unconscious realm one of jung's most unique and profound insights that differentiates him most notably from other psychologists is how from here he separated the unconscious into two distinct structures the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious the personal unconscious fit similarly into the ideas already understood and proposed by freud and others of the time in which after the ego represses and disregards

undesirable aspects of experience and selfhood these aspects are stored and concealed here just beneath normal awareness they still however continue to actively affect and interact back and forth with consciousness the collective unconscious however differentiates from the personal unconscious and other prior conceptions of the psyche in that according to jung it contains and facilitates universal elements that are inherited through the sum total of human history similar in some sense to how biological evolution works man has developed consciousness slowly and laboriously in a process that took untold ages to reach the civilized state and this evolution is

far from complete for large areas of the human mind are still shrouded in darkness wrote jung as a result of each generation of human offspring essentially imitating the behaviors of the previous generation to at least some degree an unbroken chain of psychological imitation is formed going all the way back to the beginning of human history thus a sort of reservoir of psychological predispositions structures and memories that have been formed by this chain is automatically inherited by each human being jung found this to be empirically demonstrable in both his own professional psychiatric practice finding recurring similarities

in the unconscious of a vast number of his patients as well as his historical and mythological research in which he noticed that similar motifs symbols and themes that appeared in his patients unconscious also were prevalent and consistent across art myths and literature within different cultures of different times even though these cultures often never even encountered one another in jung's view these shared motifs symbols and themes were expressions of the various psychic structures consistent across humanity which he called archetypes these archetypes in jung's model of the psyche essentially form the basis of the individual's personality by

predisposing specific cognitive tendencies within the combined unconscious jung would refer to all the repressed denied and unknown content which the ego does not want to identify with as the shadow lastly sort of nested within the shadow is what young broke down into the animus and anima which specifically referred to the suppressed feminine qualities in a male anima and the suppressed masculine qualities in a female and a must according to jung all the aforementioned structures of the psyche work together in active circulation to ultimately form what lies at the center the self the combined authentic totality

of the unconscious and conscious the self is who the individual actually is what they actually desire what they actually like what they are actually capable of and so on simply put getting the ego and a high degree of the persona as close to this as possible is the goal of individuation and ultimately a fulfilled life whether it's through methods like therapy introspection personal development toward authenticity or some combination ultimately for young it is the task of the individual to determine and strive toward this in all cases this sort of self-realization requires an effort of radical

self-acceptance and radical self-acceptance requires an effort of radical self-honesty in order to actively move deeper into the psyche each opportunity one takes to examine a personal feeling thought or action they must attempt to do so by accepting the complete and often undesirable potentiality of what it truly indicates about themselves that they are not always who they think or hope they are each of these capitalized opportunities personal or professional is like a small step down the stairwell into the unconscious as one goes further down however as they confront these deeper and darker elements of their being

hidden in the basement they must in jungian terms work to integrate their shadow the breadth of their potential faults and wickedness as opposed to rushing back up the stairs and denial one shadow does not disappear by looking away from it in the same way one cannot literally evade the light-casted shadow of their body by outrunning it there is no move or evasive tactic that separates the individual from their psychological shadow the danger rather is in the attempt to do so the ignorance and denial of it good does not become better by being exaggerated but worse

and a small evil becomes a big one through being disregarded and repressed the shadow is very much a part of human nature and it is only at night that no shadows exist wrote jung awareness of one's dark side allows one to more appropriately manage and recognize it when it sneaks up the stairs uninvited one must know of a problem to be able to fix it and it is an act of healing to admit that one is sick although self-acceptance and authenticity is perhaps simple and obvious enough sounding the act of actually working towards radical self-acceptance

and individuation is of course far from simple and obvious in the absolute sense it is almost certainly impossible in the above average sense it is still perhaps life's greatest and most difficult endeavor to truly and honestly accept your downfalls weaknesses potential evils and shameful or unpopular interests and qualities to admit what you see fear or hate in others is and could be inside of you to admit to yourself that you are not and will never be completely who you think and want to be that you are not as good as you had hoped and to

confront what your mind has worked a lifetime to keep from itself is a task that literally shakes the very core of the psyche however it is perhaps proportionally essential for a fulfilled and complete life ultimately young's work provides insights theories and methods to help the individual move through this process toward not only potentially gaining access to fixing the bugs in their navigation system but also in some sense access to the controls where now they can better input the destination coordinates according to where they actually can and want to go [Music] this video was sponsored by

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