We also have Four Mental Functions that go along with our basic attitude. They are in opposite pairs as well.

Thinking and Feeling-We have a contradiction between thinking and feeling. Some people emphasize one at the expense of the other.

Sensing and Intuiting-In sensing, one pays attention to the details of experience, the particularities, whereas in intuiting, one tries to go beyond the information given, in getting a global impression of the thing.

Isabella Briggs Meyers, who is the chief author of the Meyers Briggs claims that there is another dimension in Jung’s writing, although Jung did not say so, which she called:

Judging and Perceiving-Judging people are evaluating things whereas perceiving people are enjoying the experience.

The basic Jungian distinction is where do you find meaning in the world? Is the meaning in the way your outside is organized or the way your inside is organized?
So you go to the Grand Canyon. What is good about visiting the Grand Canyon? Is it the canyon itself or is it your reaction to or experience of the Grand Canyon? It is both of course, but which is more important to you? Most psychology students will tell you that it is the experience that is more important. And again, it is not either/or, it is more or less. We all have both of these polarities in us, we find meaning in both, but people are almost always polarized, so they emphasize one more than the other just as we all both think and feel, but emphasize one more than the other.

There are two types of psychology students. There are critical types and research types. The research types, on average when tested, come out thinking and the clinical types tend to come out feeling.

Example: What would a sensing person say about the Grand Canyon? “Look, there must be seventeen different shades of orange!” An intuiting person would say, “Wow”. That is the difference between sensing and intuiting.

So we have tension between these opposites. This tension is what pushes the personality to growth. Jung thought that we had energy and he called it libido, but he did not say it was as Freud said it was. Jung said that energy in the mind follows physical laws most of the time, but not all of the time. We come to places where we cannot explain the workings of the mind in terms of energy. Freud’s mistake was reducing it to something like physical laws, but the truth is we do not fully understand physics sufficiently. When something does not work, instead of dismissing it, as Freud would tend to do, he said we must acknowledge the limitation of our understanding of energy itself. However, in general, libido followed different physical principles.

1. Principle of Opposites: For every action there is an equal, but opposite reaction (Derived from Newtonian Physics). For example if you are standing on something with wheels and you throw a ball you will move in the opposite direction. Jung said that the same thing happens in the mind. So if we are emphasizing introversion or inside things consciously, than unconsciously we will direct energy towards the opposite, towards outside things.

2. Principle of Entropy: Things tend to balance out. Any closed system seeks the state of least differentiation. Example: If you pour a cup of hot water and a cup of cold water together you end up with uniformly warm water. The hot and cold water do not stay separate. This is what happens with energy in the mind. When there is a tension like this, one side is emphasized too much, then there is a tendency to move in the opposite direction.

3. Principal of Equivalence: a conservation of energy. Energy does not disappear, nor is it unlimited. If you invest energy in one side of a polarity, then there is not as much left to invest in the other side that is why we have balance. Energy is limited so if you invest energy in one thing, you cannot simultaneously invest it another.

Freud was right. Things that are repressed return, but not for the reasons Freud thought. Freud thought that this energy pushed them up. Jung says the repressed return, not because there is energy attached to them, but because we need to reclaim them in order to further our growth.

Valuing: the investment of libido. We value different things. Introverts value what is going on inside so they invest psychic energy in it. Extroverts value things outside. We all value differently thinking/feeling, judging/perceiving and particular things. We may value the archetype of mother more; we may invest in some other archetype. Freud was wrong about their being a single instinct. We actually have many instincts. Jung did not give a full catalogue, but he did give a number of them. We have an instinct toward sex and procreation. We also have instincts for nutrition. We have an instinct to gain power. We have an instinct to be active, to do things. We have an instinct towards creativity, towards developing ourself, making ourself whole, towards individuation or self-development.

Individuation: developing the full potentials of the Collective Unconscious. We are becoming the individual that we have the capacity to become.

We value differently also depending upon our circumstances. For example, if any of us had been living for the last twenty years in the Eastern Horn of Africa where there is mass starvation and warfare, do you think you would have the same values as you have today? Would you be investing yourself in the same things that you are today? The answer is very likely not. You would probably value security, and things of that sort. You probably not be nearly as interested in psychology, unless you thought you would get food or money by attending a psychology class.

Jung also thought that we had an instinct for religion although not any particular religion.

So we have six basic mental processes and we have our experience of the world. We try and combine them and devote our energy to those things that lead to our personal development.

Just like Freud, Jung said that consciousness is “a small island in a vast sea.” And our Ego are the conscious ideas, which are the center of our experience. Our sense of identity is never complete; it is constantly evolving throughout our life. Our Ego fashions a Persona and sometimes we get confused between our self and our Persona or our Social Mask, but when we have that confusion we tend to get stuck and we have a phony and inflated sense of our self that does not quite work for us.

Jung said that there were no stages in development, but very clearly people develop throughout their lives. There is a great change that occurs in middle age. There is second puberty more profound than the first. Young adulthood and middle age are very different. We begin to focus on the balancing of our imbalances. In middle and old age we worry about the meaning of things more than we do when we are young. We generally shift. When you are in early adulthood you are mostly concerned with things like sex, procreation, making a living and raising children. When you reach middle age, there is a shift towards cultural and spiritual pursuits. We redirect our energy, or we more greatly value, using Jung’s terminology, we invest more energy into spiritual and cultural things beginning in middle age. So there is a radical shift in our valuations. We begin the process that he called individuation, which inevitably involves:

Enantiadroma: The process of which we begin to balance the things, which we have, that are imbalanced in our life. We begin to redirect energy towards that which we have not directed energy or which we have starved for energy earlier in our life. We often tend to overvalue it. So we shift and become unbalanced in the opposite direction, then we shift again and go back the other way, until at some point we reach a balance between polarities. In middle age we have to reach a balance between introversion and extroversion, between thinking and feeling and between sensing and intuiting. So we have to in essence equally invest in both, although in the process we sometimes shift and we value the one that we have been undervaluing for awhile until we value it more.

The furthering of the process of individuation beyond Enantiadroma has four necessary parts. Jung thinks that most people do not complete these. Most people get stuck in their development and do not fully develop themselves because it is not an easy task.

Four tasks of Individuation:

1. Examination of the Shadow: The shadow is the part in us that is animalistic. It is the part of us that contains “the reprehensible thoughts and feelings”. It is really pretty awful. Think about a couple of people whom you dislike the most. What is it about them that you dislike the most? Whatever you dislike in other people, you find in yourself. Whatever it is that you despise most in life, you discover that you actually are! Most people find this so offensive, that they are unable to do it. So this is the first sticking point for most people or why they are unable to develop. They shy away from acknowledging the parts of themselves that they do not want to admit.

2. Tearing Down the Persona: The persona is a social mask that we wear and it is very useful in many situations. You go up the theater and you buy a ticket, you do not want to have a personal relationship with the person who sells you the ticket, but when you reach middle age you begin to want that. You begin to realize that there is no impersonality; there is only individual experience. So there is the desire for genuiness, which is always there in all of us to some extent, but there is a loosing of the willingness and interest in the kind of social status and self gain that we had when we were younger. We begin so that we really do want the personal relationship with the person who sells tickets at the theater. It is an exposing of ones self. You go through life not portraying yourself as you really are in almost any situation. For most of the time, you present a socially acceptable personality to the world, and it changes depending on your audience. Whereas later in life you lose the sense of necessity for that. At least some people do. You strive instead for a personal genuiness.

3. Emergence of Masculine and Feminine-of Animus and Anima: We all fully embody both of these we are all completely masculine and completely feminine and we need to discover these in ourselves. They are actually there in us and we need to manifest both. We need to bring both our masculine side and our feminine side to full development without the emphasis of one at the expense of the other.

4. Emergence of Archetypes of Wisdom: Wise old man or sage, the great mother, the crone. The problem with the emergence of these archetypes or the discovery of them within your self is that they lead to a phony self-inflation. You can use the archetype of sage or great mother as a persona, instead of actually understanding them. Example: Ronald Reagan saying profound lines from his movies that had nothing to do with the situation. This is a pretense of wisdom.

As we go through the process of individuation, we come to know ourselves better and we have an increased knowledge of our archetypes. As we do this, the energy that is caught up in polarities is liberated. The polarity between introversion and extroversion, sensing and intuiting, thinking and feeling, masculine and feminine and all other polarities we create. We gradually let go of that tension and the energy then comes to rest in the self. The self is the mid-point of the personality; it is an archetype as well as something actually there in the personality so we all are innately born believing that other people have a sense of self. It is the mid-point between all polarities. Between conscious and unconscious and all other polarities. So it is harder for things to bother us. Things that drove us nuts when we were younger do not bother us so much when we begin to balance things out.

Emergence of Archetypes of Wholeness: The main one of these is called The Mandala. A Mandela is anything that is symmetrical about an essentially empty center. They can be extremely simple to very complex. The idea is that there is a center and there is nothing there and everything revolves around it in a symmetrical way. It is a center with things balanced about it. The center is our self, and self is neither conscious nor unconscious. It is in-between. It is the middle of all polarities. And of course remember, Jung thinks that self does not necessarily develop. He thinks that most people chicken out at some point and lapse into comfort or mediocrity. Profound and difficult reflection is needed before we can do anything or before we can engage in any growth or move towards individuation.

One of the things that frequently happens is that you see people in middle age in some ways regressing. They regress when the development of Ego is blocked. They reinvest libido or energy in more primative archetypes as a way of finding a path around whatever it is they are blocking. Some people get stuck there.

Jung did not interpret neurotic symptoms as negative things. Neurotic symptoms are in some way, trying to deal with the difficulty of development. The symptoms themselves are neither positive nor negative. They have to be interpreted always as some failure in development with which the person is working. They can be positive if we then deal with something missed or something that we have skipped.

Neurosis: A failure to develop. Anytime that we are not putting our energy into the things that we need to do to grow. So somebody could be living a completely socially appropriate life, and Jung would regard him or her as massively neurotic if they were living in variance with their natural tendencies. So you could look at somebody, and as near as you could tell, everything in their life is going well, they are conventionally successful in every way. But if they are not following their natural tendencies, this could be a massive fraud, a kind of socially acceptable neurosis that is in essence messing them up because the main thrust of our lives is the development of our potentials. Our potentials differ. So if we are doing something that everybody is saying “rah, rah, rah,” it may keep us from development, because we may get stuck in that and want that applause rather than going towards what we actually need to develop ourselves. So you cannot judge anyone in conventional terms.

Dreams

Jung thought that Freud was too simple in his view of dreams. Freud said that dreams are wish-fulfillments. Jung said actually, there are many kinds of dreams. Some of them are wish fulfillments, but most of them are not. Dreams can be either/or some combination of both personal dreams, and collective dreams. That is, there are some dreams that everybody has across time and culture. There are some that come from our personal unconscious and some that come from the collective unconscious. Sometimes dream do fulfill our wishes, but they are more likely to do other things.

One might be to restore our balance. You recall that much of Jung’s idea about psychology, and the way the mind works, has to do with imbalances in energy. Often what happens is that we emphasize one thing consciously, which deprives the other end of the spectrum of energy, or takes energy away from it. Often what happens is that we have dreams that devote energy to the neglected side of ourselves. If we are extroverts we will have dreams that have to do with our insides, if we are introverts we will have dreams that have to do with the focus on things external to us.

Sometimes dreams express our fears, things that we are either not conscious of or do not know how to solve.

Sometimes they simply mirror our life. That is, they present to us what we are going through is life.

Sometimes they provide warning. They can provide warning about either internal or external events. Jung went through a period in which he was a little bit crazy. This happened almost coincidentally with World War One. The year leading up to WWI, he had all kinds of emotional difficulties. What he believed is that he was expressing his fears for the future of the world through the dreams and emotional reactions that he had in that period.

Sometimes dreams reflect our Teleological orientation. They reflect the development or the directions in which we need to go in order to develop. They picture for us what we need to do that we are not doing. Sometimes in doing that they anticipate the future. They tell us where we are going even though we are not conscious of having that sense of direction yet.

Sometimes they are searching for a sense of direction either an ethical one or a personal one.

Sometimes they are a synthesis of solutions to problems that we have, things that we are unable to deal with because of our particular imbalances in our waking life. When we reverse the polarity during sleep then we are able to solve them.

Some dreams are telepathic.

Rather that all dreams being a wish fulfillment, for the most part, they seem to try and balance the conscious and the unconscious and bring them into closer alignment.

Jung also thought that dreams were not disguised. Rather they were a process that he called symbolic thought or mythic thought, which is a pre-rational or pre-scientific kind of thinking in which we think by intuition using symbols for things rather than concrete forms for them. So what you need to know in order to interpret the dreams, were the symbolic background of the person. In one of his case histories of a woman, he said that he was the only person capable of interpreting the dream because the woman had a mixed heritage. He was the only person that he knew who was expert in all three of the basic symbolic languages in this woman’s background. Part of it came from the alchemical symbolic system that was developed in Europe in the Middle Ages, part of it was Jewish and he was very familiar with different forms of Hebrew and Jewish culture, and part of the family was from Syria. So what happens is, we are basically dealing with typical symbols and using them in a dream in ways that are intuitively meaningful, but not necessarily logically meaningful. Because we do not fully understand our unconscious, the dreams mystify us at times although; they are always very sensible when you look at them symbolically. Because we have different backgrounds, the same thing can mean something differently to different people. One symbol for one person can mean something different for another person. It can be something different for the same person in different dreams, because most of us have a mixed background. So we have symbolic structures that are unconscious that are somewhat mixed.

So let’s suppose that a man dreams about putting a key in a lock.
What would Freud say about this dream? He would say that it is intercourse.

What would Jung say? He would say that sometimes it is about intercourse, but more often it is not, it is about something else. It could be something about unlocking one’s future. It could be about solving a problem. It could be about discovering what is next in your development. It could be about opening up new possibilities in life. So dreams are never as simple as Freud suggested.

A woman had a dream about inheriting her father’s sword. What would have Freud said about that? He would have said that she was taking possession of her father’s penis. Jung said that it had nothing to do with sexuality at all. Rather the woman wanted to have her father’s skills and abilities. These she could use to cut through difficulties in her life.

Also the way that people look at things in dreams has to do with their type. You must understand a person’s type when interpreting their dreams. He recorded another dream in which a bunch of horsemen were riding across a field. The person having the dream was the only person who was able to jump over a ditch that was at the end of the field. He said that if thought that this person was an extrovert, this might mean something like there were dangers ahead and you had to be careful, but you could overcome them. But because this person was an introvert, it basically was a message to him that he had to take more chances. He was restraining himself in life and if he pushed himself to do things he was uncomfortable with in the real world, then he could move forwards.

Jung also suggested that if you find someone who has a series of dreams, particularly dreams that are symbolically related, they are more central and important to the person in their period of growth than are individual and isolated dreams.

What do you think? Are dreams symbolic? Are they the language of your unconscious presenting you with things that are important to you to think about, but which you do not have a good conscious way of dealing with?

Pathology- in general is a violation of our natural tendencies. This means that we are failing to follow our natural path of development. When we are having trouble, being neurotic or psychotic, it is because we are doing something that does not fit with who we actually are. Often it is a failure to continue our process of individuation. What we need to do is to bring opposites into balance in a general kind of way. We want to hold onto one because we are comfortable with it and afraid of its opposite. Often we do not develop because the world makes it very hard for us. Neurotic reactions particularly are often in response to our situation in the world in which bad things happen to us or we are in some way frightened of the reaction of what would happen if we furthered our development.

Jung said that we should not negatively judge symptoms. If somebody has neurotic symptoms, sometimes they are quite useful to the person. Sometimes they are a way that the person is redirecting their energy in order to overcome some barrier that they are not able to overcome in any other way. Symptoms themselves are neutral. They are neither good nor bad, except of course sometimes they make life a little difficult. But we do not need to deal with the symptoms; we need to deal with what is producing the symptoms.

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Sarfraz Mayo