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Overview of Psychotherapy | The Literature
Week 1 | Introduction to Analytic Psychology | Brian Ostafin
Article 1 | Analytical Psychotherapy | Claire Douglas
Overview
Analytical psychology, the psychodynamic system and personality theory created by
Carl Gustav Jung, builds upon Freud's and Adler's perspectives, offering an expanded view of
humanity's personal and collective realities. The goals of psychotherapy are reintegration,
self-knowledge, and individuation, with a heartfelt awareness of the human condition,
individual responsibility, and a connection to the transcendent replacing a wounded, one-
sides, rationalistic, and limited send of self.
Basic concepts
The cornerstone of Jung’s psychological system is his concept of the psyche, the inner
realm of personality that balances the outer reality of material objects. Jung defined psyche as
a combination of spirit, soul and idea: he viewed psychic reality as the sum of conscious and
unconscious in processes.
Jung’s description of the personal unconscious is similar to, but more extensive than,
Freud’s. in Jungian theory, an individual’s personal unconscious contains not only material
unacceptable to one’s ego and superego and therefore repressed, but also material unimportant
to the psyche, temporarily or permanently dropped from the conscious.
The collective unconscious is Jung's term for the vast, hidden psychic resource shared
by all human beings. Jung discovered the collective unconscious through his patients'
disclosures, his own self-analysis, and cross-cultural studies. He found the same basic motifs
expressed in fantasies, dreams, symbols, or myths. Images that emerge out of the collective
unconscious are shared by all people but modified by their personal experiences.
Jung called these motifs archetypal images and depicted the collective unconscious as
organized in underlying patterns.
An archetype is an organizing principle, a system of readiness, and a dynamic nucleus
of energy.
While the collective unconscious reveals itself to a person by means of such archetypal
images, the personal unconscious makes itself known through complexes. Archetypal images
flow from the collective unconscious into the personal unconscious by means of a complex (a
sensitive, energy-filled cluster of emotions, such as an attitude toward one's father or anyone
resembling him; emotionally charged associations of ideas and feelings that act as magnets to
draw a net of imagery, memories, and ideas into their orbit).
In more extreme cases, a complex may overpower an individual so that the person
loses touch with reality, becoming psychotic; a psychotic woman who has a mother complex
may believe she is Mother Nature and the mother of everything and everybody on earth.
Other systems
Jung started to develop his own form of psychoanalysis and to treat patients before he
met Freud. However, his debt to Freud is great. Perhaps most important to Jung was Freud's
exploration of the unconscious through free association, his focus on the significance of
dreams, and his stress on the role of early childhood experiences in the formation of
personality. Perhaps the most salient difference between Freud and Jung resulted from Jung's
belief that the quest for meaning was as strong a need as the sex drive. Jung believed that
certain people would profit most from a Freudian analysis, others from an Adlerian analysis,
and still others from a Jungian analysis. He viewed Adler's theory of dreams as similar to his
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own. Both theories held that dreams could reveal what an individual wanted not to recognize
in himself or herself (what Jung called the shadow aspects of the personality).
Harry Stack Sullivan's good me and bad me reflect Jung's concepts of positive and
negative shadow (the rejected or unrecognized parts of one's personality). Alexander Lowen's
bioenergetic theory follows Jung's theory of typology, and Jung's four functions of thinking
feeling, sensation, and intuition loosely parallel Lowen's hierarchy of personality functions.
Holistic therapies of all varieties, from the Adlerian to the most modern, share with Jung the
idea of a person made up of many parts in service to the whole, with the individual having a
normal urge toward growth and healing. Self-actualizing theories, such as those derived from
Abraham Maslow's work, stress the forward-looking and optimistic parts of Jung's
psychology, while the person-centered psychology of Carl Rogers echoes Jung's human
interest and personal devotion to his patients.
Personality
Theory of Personality
Jung's theory of personality rests on the concept of a dynamic unity of all parts of a
person. The psyche is made up of conscious and unconscious components with connections to
the collective unconscious (underlying patterns of images, thoughts, behaviors, and
experiences). According to Jungian theory, our conscious understanding of who we are comes
from two sources: the first derives from encounters with social reality, such as the things
people tell us about ourselves, the second from what we deduce from our observations of
others. The personal unconscious is, affected by what Jung called the collective unconscious,
an inherited human factor that expresses itself in the personal unconscious by means of
archetypal images and complexes.
The most important fragment of the Self, the ego, first appears as the young child
gains some sense of identity as an independent being. The ego in early life is like an island of
consciousness set in an ocean of personal and unconscious material.
The personal shadow balances the ego in the personal unconscious. The shadow
contains everything that could or should be part of the ego but that the ego denies or refuses to
develop. The personal shadow can contain both positive and negative aspects.
The persona is the public "face" of an individual in society. Jung named the persona
for the Greek theatrical mask that hid the actor's face and indicated the part he chose to play.
The persona shields the ego and reveals appropriate aspects of it, smoothing the individual's
interactions with society. The development of an adequate persona allows for the privacy of
thoughts, feelings, ideas, and perceptions, as well as for modulation in the way they are
revealed.
Jung believed that the task of the first part of life was strengthening the ego, taking one's
place in the world in relationships with others, and fulfilling one's duty to society.
The task of the second half of life was to reclaim undeveloped parts of oneself, fulfilling these
aspects of personality more completely. He called this process individuation and felt this life
task drew many of his older patients into analysis.
Typology is one of the most important and best known contributions Jung made to
personality theory. In Psychological Types (1921/1971), Jung describes varying ways
individuals habitually respond to the world. Two basic responses are introversion and
extraversion. Jung saw introversion as natural and basic. The extravert's reality, on the other
hand, consists of objective facts or incidents. The extravert connects with reality mainly
through external objects. While the introvert adapts outer reality to inner psychology, the
extravert adapts himself or herself to the environment and to people.
In his theory of typology, Jung went on to differentiate personality into functional
types, based on people's tendency to perceive reality primarily through one of four mental
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functions: thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition. Each of these four functions can be
experienced in an extraverted or an introverted way. According to Jung, a thinker finds rules,
assigns names, makes classifications, and develops theories; a feeling person puts a value on
reality, often by liking or disliking something; a sensing, type uses the five senses to grasp
inner or outer reality; and an intuitive person has hunches that seem to penetrate into past and
future reality, as well as an ability to pick up accurate information from the unconscious of
another person.
Most people seem to be born with one of these four primary functions dominant.
The dominant function is used more and is developed more fully than the others. Often a
secondary function will develop as the person matures, while a third, but weaker function-
such as feeling for the thinker, or sensation for the intuitive person — remains shadowy and
undeveloped. Jung stressed the importance of the least developed function. Largely
unconscious, it is often seen first in shadow and animus/anima subpersonalities.
Variety of concept
Enantriodromia
This word refers to Heraclitus's law that everything sooner or later turns into its
opposite. Jung believed enantiodromia governed the cycles of human history as well as
development.
The transcendant function
Bringing the opposites of one's conscious ego and the personal unconscious together
generates a conflict in the personality that is highly charged and full of energy.
Preoedipal development
In contrast to Freud's stress on the oedipal phase of personality development, Jung
focused on preoedipal experience. He was one of the first psychoanalysts to stress the
importance of early mother-child interactions. The initial relationship between mother and
child affects personality development at its most basic and profound level. Jung paid far more
attention to this stage and its problems than to the father-son complications of the Oedipus
complex. He placed the archetypal image of the Good Mother and Bad Mother at the center of
an infant's experience.
Psychopathology
Psychopathology derives in large part from problems and conflicts that arise in early
mother-child relationships but is made worse by other stresses. The psyche directs attention to
such disharmony and calls out for a response. Since the psyche is a self-regulating system,
pathological symptoms derive from the frustrated urge toward wholeness and often contain
within themselves the clue to their own healing. Thus, for instance, extreme switches between
love and hate for the same person typify an individual with borderline personality disorder
calling attention to faulty infantile development.
Defense mechanisms
Defense mechanisms are seen as attempts of the psyche to survive the onslaught of
complexes.
Psychotherapy
Theory of psychotherapy
The psychotherapeutic process can (and often should) stop when specific goals are
reached or specific problems are overcome. Nevertheless, analytical psychotherapy in its most
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complete form has the goal of self-actualization —helping patients discover and live up to
their full potential.
Processes of psychotherapy
Jung (1933/1966) delineated four stages in the process of psychotherapy: confession,
elucidation, education, and transformation.
Confession
The first stage, confession, is a cathartic recounting of personal history. During this
stage, the patient shares conscious and unconscious secrets with the therapist, who serves as a
nonjudgmental, empathic listener.
Elucidation
During elucidation, the therapist draws attention to the transference relationship as
well as to dreams and fantasies in order to connect the transference to its infantile origins. The
goal of this stage is insight on both affective and intellectual levels.
Education
The third stage, education, moves the patient into the realm of the individual as an
adapted social being. Confession and elucidation primarily involve exploring the personal
unconscious, while education is concerned with persona and ego tasks. At this stage the
therapist encourages the patient to develop an active and health-promoting role in everyday
life.
Transformation
Many people stop therapy at the completion of the first three stages, but Jung noted that
some clients seemed impelled to go further, especially people in the second half of life.
The transference does not go away for these patients, even though its infantile origins have
been thoroughly explored. These people feel a desire for greater knowledge and insight
leading them toward the final stage —transformation. Jung described this as a period of self-
actualization; the person in this stage values unconscious as well as conscious experience. The
archetypal image of the Self appears in the transference as well as in dream and fantasy; this
archetypal image of wholeness inspires the patient to become a uniquely individual self,
encompassing all that he or she can be, yet without losing a sense of responsible integrity.
Mechanisms of psychotherapy
Active imagination
To help his patients get in touch with unconscious material, Jung taught a form of
meditative imagery based on his own self-analysis. This came to be known as active image.
An analytical psychotherapist looks for the role a dream may play in relation to the patient's
conscious attitude. The therapist often explores the dream first on the objective level,
considering in what ways it accurately portrays an actual person or situation. A dream is then
probed for what it reveals about the patient's own behavior and characterization. The process
calls for clearing the mind and concentrating intensely, so that inner images can be activated.
Types of dreams
The initial dream, recurrent dreams, dreams containing shadow material, and dreams
about the therapist or therapy are especially useful to the therapist. The initial dream at or near
the start of therapy may indicate the path that a particular therapy may take and the type of
transference that may occur. Recurrent dreams, especially those from early childhood, suggest
