Jungian Terms
Get started understanding Jungian Psychology with these terms.
Ego
The ego is essentially the conscious mind. It is your sense of self or “I” that helps you navigate everyday life. The ego regulates your thoughts, feelings and desires. Its goal is to keep you physically comfortable and safe and to help you fit into society.
Persona
The social mask you present to the world. The conscious personality you assume in order to navigate social responsibilities and roles.
The Persona is a constructed identity that people often believe is who they really are, but it is in fact shaped by our conditioning since early life (i.e. social and cultural norms, life experiences, etc.), and is not the true “Self.”
Shadow
The shadow refers to the hidden aspects of our personality that we reject or deny because we view them as undesirable or socially unacceptable.
It includes a spectrum of traits and emotions such as anger, selfishness, jealousy, unfulfilled desires, impulses we feel ashamed of, and even our creativity, spontaneity, and intuition.
Like the persona, the shadow forms subconsciously from the time we’re born and we begin absorbing information about which behaviors, emotions, or characteristics receive approval and which ones are discouraged. In our search for belonging, we create our persona around the “positive” qualities that we believe will help us find acceptance and the rest gets repressed into the “Shadow.”
The rejected parts of ourselves don’t just go away. They remain in our unconscious where they influence our behaviors, thoughts, feelings, and motivations without our conscious awareness.
The Self or True Self
Jung described the Self as “The God Within Us.”
The Self is the totality of the psyche, including all of its potential. The goal of the Self is wholeness, and Jung called this search for wholeness the process of individuation.
Individuation
Individuation is the lifelong process of becoming your unique or true Self, independent of social values and norms. This process requires making the unconscious conscious and integrating your Shadow qualities in order to achieve psychological wholeness.
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” – Carl Jung
In the first part of your life, the ego is necessary for adapting to our environment and surviving. At midlife, it begins to be constricting. There is a calling for something deeper and fuller, but the ego resists because it fears change and wants us to remain in our comfort zone. Individuation is the process of overcoming the Ego’s resistance in order to become whole.
“The first half of life is devoted to forming a healthy ego, the second half is going inward and letting go of it.” ―Carl Jung
Personal Unconscious
The part of our unconscious mind that contains our individual experiences, feelings, thoughts, and memories. Anything that is specific to our individual life that we are not presently conscious of.
“Everything of which I know, but of which I am not at the moment thinking; everything of which I was once conscious but have now forgotten; everything perceived by my senses, but not noted by my conscious mind; everything which, involuntarily and without paying attention to it, I feel, think, remember, want, and do; all the future things which are taking shape in me and will sometime come to consciousness; all this is the content of the unconscious.’ Besides these we must include all more or less intentional repressions of painful thought and feelings. I call the sum of these contents the “personal unconscious.” - Carl Jung
Collective Unconscious
The universal part of our unconscious that is common to all people.
A part of our psyche that is connected to all human beings from throughout time, through patterns of thinking and behavior we are all born with (similar to the way we are born with biological instincts).
These are expressed through archetypes (in the form of images and symbols).
