Ego

The ego is the conscious part of the mind—your sense of “I” that helps you navigate everyday life.

It regulates your thoughts, feelings, and desires, and works to keep you safe, comfortable, and able to function within society.

Persona

The Persona is the social mask you present to the world—the version of yourself you develop to meet expectations and navigate roles and responsibilities.

It is shaped by conditioning, including social norms and life experiences, and is often mistaken for who we truly are.

Shadow

The Shadow refers to the parts of ourselves we reject or deny because they feel unacceptable or undesirable.

It can include traits like anger, jealousy, and selfishness—but also creativity, spontaneity, and intuition.

These parts don’t disappear. They remain in the unconscious and continue to influence our behavior, often without our awareness.

The Self or True Self

In Jungian psychology, the Self refers to the totality of the psyche—the deeper organizing center oriented toward wholeness and integration.

It includes both conscious and unconscious aspects of the personality and guides the process of becoming more fully oneself.

The term “true self” is often used more broadly to describe the experience of who we are beneath conditioning. Both point to a deeper dimension of the psyche beyond the ego.

Individuation

Individuation is the lifelong process of becoming who you truly are.

It involves bringing unconscious material into awareness and integrating previously rejected parts of the self.

This process often becomes more prominent in midlife, when the identity built earlier in life begins to feel limiting.

Personal Unconscious

The Personal Unconscious contains memories, experiences, and emotions that are not currently in conscious awareness but are unique to each individual.

“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 Collective Unconscious refers to the universal layer of the psyche shared by all human beings.

It contains inherited patterns of thought and behavior, expressed through archetypes—symbols and images that appear across cultures and time.