Jung's Theory of Personality

A modern reappraisal

Clare Crellin

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781136019609
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Psychology
• Categoria: Personality in Psychology

This book provides a re-appraisal of Carl Jung's work as a personality theorist. It offers a detailed consideration of Jung's work and theory in order to demystify some of the ideas that psychologists have found most difficult, such as Jung's religious and alchemical writings. The book shows why these two elements of his theory are integral to his

Part I
The theory itself

Chapter 1
Jung’s theory of personality

Personality is the supreme realization of the innate idiosyncrasy of a living being … the most successful adaptation to the universal conditions of existence coupled with the greatest possible freedom for self determination.

(C. G. Jung, CW 17 1934a §289)

Psychoanalysts have tended to see Jung, Freud, Adler, and others primarily as psychoanalytical thinkers, whereas it is university departments of psychology that have included them in the study of the psychology of personality. Chapter 1 is in two sections. First is a brief summary of Jung’s personality theory to introduce the theory for readers not already familiar with Jung’s concepts and to establish what I am including. Section 2 introduces the question of how to evaluate Jung’s theory and defends the categorisation of Jung’s theory as a theory of personality by clarifying the degree to which Jung is concerned with the questions that a personality theory addresses. I argue that, in addition to being viewed (uncontroversially) as a psychoanalytical theorist, Jung should indeed also be considered a personality theorist inasmuch as his work has many themes in common with those of personality theorists contemporary with him. Hence his work can be evaluated systematically using a framework of criteria for evaluating personality theories.

1 The theory

Introduction

I begin with some general observations. In defining Jung’s theory of personality broadly I am proposing that what in his work may be thought of as metaphysics (alchemy), thought processes (archetypes), and ethos (religion) are best understood as integral elements of his personality theory and that it is these very elements that make Jung’s a challenging, innovative, and useful theory today.

Jung’s is an unconventional developmental theory and a total theory of human nature. The developmental aspect of his theory predominates. Jung pioneered an account of the intrapsychic organisation at each stage of life, covering both moral and spiritual development. Life is described in terms of positions and outlooks rather than functions. One of Jung’s assumptions is that there are tasks and moral aspects to being a person, in the sense of the need to attend to one’s duties to oneself as well as those of profession, family, and society (CW 4 1913 §419, §423–424). The assumption that there are inner duties of life that must be fulfilled touches on religion (see CW 18 1916b §1095; CW 13 1929d §80–81; CW 18 1945 §1378; and CW 10 1958c §722, where Jung compares individuation with Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress). This assumption underlies Jung’s interest in Eastern approaches such as Taoism, Buddhism, Zen, and yoga, which emphasise a way of living supported by the practice of inwardly directed tasks.

Inherent in Jung’s theory is a deep challenge to psychoanalytical theories which forefront parental influences and, indeed, to postmodernist ideas that people are predominantly culturally determined. Unlike object-relations theories which emphasise the formative influence of parents, Jung’s theory emphasises constitutional elements. Although the predetermined elements are modified by experience, the process is guided by inherited archetypes within the personality itself (see Chapter 5). Jung also posed questions for the field of personality theory by thinking differently about it. For example, his well-known typology is more about being than doing. The introvert–extravert difference is as much about a fundamental and possibly constitutional difference of attitude and epistemological approach to the world as it is about behaviour. Jung’s answer to the question ‘What causes personality as it is subjectively experienced?’ brings an element of mystery, of something ineluctable that is inherent in human nature and also purposive.

Whereas all theories of personality have implicit notions of a healthy, well-adapted, or well-adjusted way to live, in Jung’s theory this perspective is prominent and overt. However, whilst it is the case that Jung’s theory has much in common with religion in its emphasis on transformative and transpersonal aspects, it is not itself a religion – rather, it is a psychological theory of personality that suggests how religious ideas about the self can be understood in a modern secular world (see Chapter 2).

Jung used metaphysical and philosophical terms, such as psyche, soul, and archetype. To put this into a historical context, in the early decades of the twentieth century, university chairs in psychology were situated in departments of philosophy, there being no departments of psychology as such. Philosophical issues such as the nature of free will were debated, while laboratory studies of memory were based on philosophical concepts (association of ideas). Meanwhile, a behavioural approach within pedagogical and comparative psychology (the comparative study of animals and plants) was developing. Between 1897 and 1930, entries in the Psychological Index, one of the earliest bibliographies of psychology, reveal that the categories of attention, emotion, conation (will), and aesthetics were major areas of psychological research (Crellin, 1987). The emerging discipline of psychology at this time took its information from a wide range of other disciplines including anthropology, philosophy, medicine, and natural history. In his early years, Jung had followed Wundt’s laboratory approach in his development of the word-association experiments. By 1913, he had come to find this unsatisfactory and focused increasingly on the images found in dreams and visions as a source of data for his developing ideas.

General characteristics of Jung’s theory

Jung’s concept of a person encompasses a basic inherited human ground plan which is at once physical and psychological; an organic substrate embodied and governed by instinct; the psyche, which consists of both unconscious and conscious processes; the persona (the outer social role); the ego (a self-conscious, self-reflecting autonomous complex); and the self (the potentially realisable expression of individuality). Jung was aware of the evolutionary history of the brain, which he conceptualised more in terms of processes than of structures.

Jung’s thoughts on the relationship of the conscious to the unconscious mind were influenced by early experimental psychology, such as the work on attention. In 1927, he stated that the unconscious should not be seen as ‘below’ but ‘around’ the conscious. Following William James, he proposed that consciousness emerges when a segment of the neural field is illuminated temporarily by conscious focused attention, the remainder of the field simply not having reached a sufficient threshold of activation to become visible (CW 8 1927/1931b §382fn). For Jung, consciousness is the phenomenological aspect of a continuous dynamic unconscious process of which it is a part.

Jung’s unconscious included inherited (collective) aspects such as the instincts, as well as personal aspects such as memories, knowledge, and experience. It is an organised and highly dynamic network of changing relationships between properties, such as temporary states and configurations, permanent innate capacities, learned skills, acquired memories, and immediate sense experiences and feelings.

Jung maintained that personality development involved exchanges of contents (information) between functions of the psyche. He proposed that these exchanges could bring about reconciliation between environmental demands and desired inner states which would otherwise be in conflict. An inversion, a movement of attention inwards, can lead to the discovery of a new attitude or position which balances compliance with social demands and the desire to follow instinctive urges. The notion of an optimal adaptation to both inner and outer environments combined individuality with social responsibility. Jung maintained that developed individuals have dual duties – to themselves and to others, as social beings. However, Jung states unequivocally that ‘duty to self is incomparably more important’ than the demands of social convention (CW 4 1913 §189), from which the individual needs to redeem his or her self by means of an introspective attitude. These ideas are contained in the concept of individuation (see what follows).

Inherited characteristics

Jung followed what are now largely regarded as uncontroversial Darwinian ideas¹ about inherited characteristics, which is to say that he supported the idea of a nature/nurture interaction, the inherited component of which is a universally human basic ground plan. The ground plan included temperament, which contributes to the person’s type, orientation, and dominant mode of functioning. He believed that inborn qualities, such as the child’s degree of sensitivity, create ‘a special way of experiencing infantile events so that such events are experienced more powerfully, are therefore remembered, and continue to exert an influence on the person’s development’ (CW 4 1913 §399).

Jung noted that children may scarcely resemble their parents, as the ancestral inheritance from earlier generations may dominate (CW 17 1927/1931a §93). He held that psychic inheritance derives from the child’s ancestral stock as much as, if not more than, from parents: ‘The mind … consists of the sum of ancestral minds, the “unseen fathers” whose authority is born anew with the child’ (CW 8 1928c §101). In genetic terms, this is a conventional notion, in keeping with the principles of Darwinian (Darwin, 1859: 210) and of Mendelian genetic inheritance, but its psychological implications required an expansion of the notion of the unconscious to include a collective unconscious.

Parental and other cultural influences

Jung did not deny a role for social factors, experience, and learning in the development of personality. He stated, for example, that the will ‘is a psychological phenomenon that owes its existence to culture and moral education’ (CW 6 1921 §844). However, he emphasised unconscious forms of social transmission. His professional interest in similarities between children and their parents in their reaction-type data dates from his 1904 word-association tests. Jung explained these similarities as the result of a form of ‘identification’ with the mother in which the child enters into what he came to call a ‘participation mystique’ (a term he borrowed from the philosopher and anthropologist Lévy-Bruhl, 1857–1939). This resulted in the ‘daughter having the mother’s attitude … she simply took it over from the environmental influences’ (CW 17 1910/1946 §55). While he acknowledged this as a form of environmental influence, he stressed that the means of its transmission was neither conscious learning nor imitation (copying behaviours modelled by others such as parents). Instead, he proposed an unconscious process of identification (CW 6 1921 §742) in which unconscious projections founded on perceived similarity with the external objects and driven by the power of an innate ‘parent’ instinct become fused with memories of actual experiences. The resulting emotionally charged dynamic image is individually expressed in the form of the parental imago in the child’s psyche.

The child inherits the potential to create parental imagos as part of the human ground plan. The imago itself is formed from the inherited parent instinct and the influence of the actual parent/child experience together with the libido (life energy) invested in that experience, which provides a dynamic field of energic activity. The result is that ‘the children are infected indirectly through the attitude they instinctively adopt towards their parents’ state of mind’ and as a function of their level of sensitivity to their parents’ attitude (CW 17 1926/1946 §154).

One important element of the parents’ attitude was the degree of completeness of their own psychic development. Children, Jung said, may ‘get wind of’ and ‘live out’ aspects of the parents’ incomplete selves, their ‘unlived life’, and unwittingly become enslaved to their parents’ goals and desires rather than pursuing their own (CW 17 1928a §107). In this way, Jung’s developmental theory made a place for both nature and nurture. In the case of the child’s psychological development, it was the propensity to identify with the parents that Jung regarded as an inherited instinct. The ‘nurture’ element was the particular aspect of the parents’ mental life that the individual child identified with and adopted. Jung was exploring ideas about the nature of family relations and their unconscious influence very early in the twentieth century, before the development of family therapy and systemic approaches such as those of Bateson (1904–1980), Minuchin (1921–), or Palazzoli (1916–1999).

Jung held that, in addition to parents and family members, teachers influence children to the degree that they have fulfilled their own personality development. Consequently, Jung advised teachers to fulfil as far as possible the external and internal demands of their own lives. If successful, teachers could help to free children from their unconscious identification (participation mystique) with the parental environment. By developing a temporary relationship with a teacher as a substitute for the parent, ‘the child can let go of the infantile parental environment, from unconscious identity with his family’ and become ‘properly conscious of himself’ (CW 17 1928a §107–108).

Jung’s teleology

In a letter to Loÿ in 1914, Jung said ‘in the past nothing can be altered, and, in the present, little, but the future is ours and capable of raising life’s intensity to the highest pitch’ (CW 4 1914b §668); he also asserted, ‘the task is to be oriented towards the future through a deeper knowledge of the present’ (CW 5 1911–12/1952 §78 n. 18). Jung’s particular understanding of teleology underpins his idea of how a life should be lived. He held that the blueprint for the future is in the present and the past. It can be reached and made conscious by developing awareness. But its detail is not yet worked out and so cannot be known except in the outcome of all the individual choices that have been and are being made. Jung saw the task of individuation as teleological. However, although Jung assumes an inner movement in each individual to seek individuation, so that each i...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I The theory itself
• PART II Evaluating and reappraising Jung’s personality theory
• Afterword
• Appendix 1. Examples of significant archetypal figures and their psychic functions for personality
• Appendix 2. Textbooks reviewed in Chapter 6
• Appendix 3. Primary sources (Jung’s works) cited by textbook authors: by number of citations
• Appendix 4. Secondary sources on Jung cited by textbook authors
• Bibliography
• Index