The insights of Carl Gustav Jung are becoming increasingly popular. Christian therapists and spiritual directors, writers and theologians interested in spirituality and ordinary Christians are finding insight and guidance in his writings.

Individuation

His model of human maturation, which he describes as individuation, sensitively explores the multi-dimensional aspects of human personality. In particular, it takes account of the unconscious, the shadow side of our personal and cultural reality. While Jung shies away from use of the Christian symbols, "God" and "sin", arguing that the area of his interest is psychology rather than theology, his paradigm helps us explore our experience of an inner divinity and our awareness of a connection between our perverse behaviours and distortions in the unconscious. It also gives us insight into the way God heals us as well as the nature of the wholeness to which he calls us.

The aim of this chapter is to introduce you to Jung's thought. The treatment will be brief, rather than exhaustive, and detail will be sacrificed in the interests of clarity.¹

It is my aim to look briefly at Jung's view of the structure of the self and at his model of personality types.

The Self

For Jung, the Self, which represents the total personality, is made up of the ego and the unconscious.

The Ego

The ego is that part of us of which we are aware, the conscious aspect that is the source of our rational deliberations. Associated with the ego is the persona, the image of ourselves that we present to the world. Each of us has a number of personae, reflective of the roles we play in the family, at work and in society. The persona is a mask, a repertoire of behaviours appropriate to the roles we fulfil. In ordinary circumstances, our personae are a healthy accommodation to social reality.

However, when a person over-identifies with a persona, when they fool themselves into believing that they are their persona, they become seriously deluded. Blocking recognition of their shadow side, they inflate the ego to the extent that it imagines it is the whole self. Paradoxically, this gives enormous power to the shadow, lifting it to surface levels of the unconscious, where it may suddenly manifest in what the person takes to be [31] behaviour that is grossly out of character. Alternatively, it may float off into shared family space and be assumed as an identity by one of their children. The child slips on the shadow personality, like a wet suit, and lives it out, much to the distress of the parent, who cannot understand why he or she has produced such a child.

The Unconscious

Jung argued that the unconscious was made up of two elements, the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious.

The Personal Unconscious

The personal unconscious is that aspect of our shadow territory that is comprised of material, aspects of the self, images and behaviours that have been repressed, that is, unconsciously rejected.

Repression is the means by which the self excludes from view material that it cannot tolerate or resolve. It is a process that is essential to our psychological survival. It is also inevitable. In order to live in any community we need to be accepting of the values of that community, that is, to accept what the community accepts and to reject what the community rejects.

This acceptance of communal values begins the moment we are born, through a process of socialization. In fact, it is actually underway during the period we are in utero, through the physiological/ psychological connectedness between the mother and the foetus and through the preparations the family and the community make for the baby's arrival.

No society accepts our total potentiality. Therefore, in every culture certain aspects of our body/self are rejected as unworthy. The rejected elements are repressed into the unconscious. We in the West have traditionally repressed our feeling and our bodies, including our sexuality. These have been relegated to the shadow side of our reality.

Family pathologies, which perpetuate themselves through the generations, together with dysfunctional behaviour associated with sub-groups within the community to which we belong, including churches, also help determine what is repressed.

Because we are not whole, because we are missing aspects of our totality, because we are born into a world where we are burdened with the guilt of others and are caught in the matrix of their dysfunctional behaviour and because the mature exercise of the freedom with which we have been gifted is a learned response that involves our making mistakes, we will frequently behave in angular and destructive ways. Because it is too painful for us to live with the memory of too many mistakes, we will repress our awareness of them. Our personal unconscious is also burdened with these repressed memories.[32]

The Collective Unconscious

The collective unconscious, to which Jung referred, was layered in strata. From his work on the analysis of dreams he identified seven of these, the more ancient of which reached back to our reptilian beginnings and beyond. What he was arguing was that we have inherited sedimentary residues from generations and cultures preceding us, residues that occasionally surface in the symbolism of our dreams.

Archetypes

According to Jung, the material in the personal and collective unconscious attaches itself to archetypal forms, around which it constellates. These archetypes, similar to Platonic forms, are permanent structures in the unconscious of individuals. They are not content specific, though they are part of the content of the unconscious. They are like the formwork into which concrete is poured, or, more accurately, they represent the idea of such formwork, of which all types of formwork are concrete embodiments. The mother archetype, for instance, constructed, over millennia, out of people's experiences of mothers and of being mothered, we carry within us as a template.² When it is accessed, the archetype of the healthful Mother can be healing.

The archetypes with which we are more immediately familiar are the shadow, the anima and the animus.

The Shadow

I have used the expression, "the shadow side of our reality", to refer to the unconscious. I have done this because the image evoked by this expression clearly epitomises the hiddenness and the threat of the unconscious. Jung, however, in speaking of the shadow, was referring to a specific archetype, that, in dreams, frequently manifests as a shadowy same-sex personality. It is comprised, in the main, of neglected aspects of the personality.

The Anima and the Animus

Jung also argued that all people have both masculine and feminine aspects. He used the terms "anima" and "animus" to describe our contra-sexual elements. The anima is the feminine, or Yin, aspect of the man and the "animus", the masculine, or Yang aspect of the woman.

Because our contra-sexual parts are rarely developed, and, as a consequence, will express themselves immaturely, the terms "anima" and "animus" are, more often than not, used negatively, such as when Jung describes a battle royal between an male "anima" and an female "animus."³ The immature anima will sulk, or express itself petulantly, while the immature animus will confuse strident opinionatedness with logic. The [33] positive pole of the anima is represented by a warm, sensual, relational, libidinal Eros. Logos, calm, discriminating rationality, epitomises the positive pole of the animus.

Homeostasis

The human psyche, like its physiology, is self-regulatory. It benefits from a balancing mechanism that keeps all parts of the body/self in balance. This balance will be achieved either within or outside the individual. If it is achieved within the person, it will occur, either positively, through a gradual integration of the shadow elements of one's reality into the conscious self, or negatively through the growth in power of perverse elements of the unconscious and their manifestation in behaviour.

If we do not deal with shadow material internally it will externalise itself and resolve itself externally. This occurs, as has already been indicated, when the children of parents who deny their dark side, or that part of them that they have been socialised into repressing, assume the parental shadow as an identity and live it out. When it is the culture, rather than the individual, that fails to deal with its shadow side, the results can be disastrous, as was evident from the phenomenon of Nazi Germany, the disastrous influence of which Jung regretfully but accurately predicted in the early 1930's.

Maturation

Jung argued that individuation involved a gradual integration of the shadow side of our reality into that part of us of which we are conscious. He further contended that the unconscious was so structured that the process of self-healing and maturation was unbuilt, the psyche being programmed to elicit responses, conscious and unconscious, that would promote that end.

From a Christian perspective we can argue that this is how God made us and we can discern the voice of his Spirit in the intuitions and symbolic language of the unconscious. We can also see, in the activity of Jesus, in his life and death, an unrelenting passion to confront us with our unconscious and to encourage us to integrate the elements of ourselves that we have rejected into the conscious self, that is, to reclaim those parts of us that we have rejected.

Before concluding this brief sketch of the Jungian model of maturation I want to say something about Jung's personality typology.

The Four Functions

Jung argued that there were four basic human functions, which he located on two axes. The functions of sensation and intuition were located at opposite ends of the perceiving axis, which can be represented as a horizontal line. A vertical axis, crossing through the centre of that line, represents the judging, or valuing axis. At its apex is the thinking function and at its base is located the feeling function. Our position, in terms of developed or undeveloped functions, can be plotted on each of the two axes, with their polarities. The more developed any one of the functions, or, perhaps, the more over-developed, the less developed will be its polar opposite. For example, if I have over-developed my thinking function, then it is likely that my feeling function will be under-developed. [34]

The sensate function is a perceptive capacity based on attending to cues deriving from sensory input. The intuitive function is concerned with discerning mood, tone, feeling. The person with a developed sensate capacity will pay immediate attention to what people are wearing. The intuitive will scan the gathering to pick up atmospheric tone and relational cues.

People with a developed thinking function will evaluate reality by processing it through their minds. Their feelings, or their emotions, will also be filtered through their minds. Those with a developed feeling function evaluate events and situations with their feelings.

It is difficult for head people to understand what assessing circumstances through the feeling function involves. They may feel that it is being insinuated that "they do not have feelings." It is also likely that they will confuse, feelings, emotions and sentiment. Those out of touch with their feelings, which will sometimes be evident in an inability to distinguish between different emotions, will often confuse feeling with emotion, or with sentiment. They know what it is like to be angry and sad, and they may even cry during sad movies, but it will be difficult for them to approach and assess situations, or evaluate responses to those situations, through a feeling grid.

Jung argued that we each have a superior, or dominant function, a sub-dominant function and an inferior function. Our superior function is our most developed function and it can be on either axis. Our inferior function will be the opposite function on the same axis. The sub-dominant function will be on either side of the alternative axis.

Introversion and Extroversion

Jung also distinguished between introverts and extroverts. Introverts focus on the internal world. That is where they live, deep within themselves. They are intimidated and exhausted by company. While extroverts also need time out, they are stimulated, rather than enervated, by being with people. They draw energy from others and personal issues are resolved, not in the quietness of their internal space, but in interchanges with others. Introverts use their superior function in their inner lives, whereas extroverts employ their's in the external world.

This is a rough, generalised sketch. With each person there is an overlay of individual environmental factors which give specific shape to the four functions and their inter-relationship. Cultural factors also play a significant role, so much so, that, within any one culture, those functions that are underdeveloped, or repressed, are directly related to the neuroses from which those cultures suffer. For example, the West suffers from neuroses resulting from its repression of the feeling function and of sexuality. [36]

According to Jung, individuation involves, besides an integration of the shadow into the conscious self, a development of the least developed functions, and, therefore, a balancing of all four functions. It also involves effecting more of a balance between introversion and extroversion, with the extrovert becoming more self-reflective and the introvert taking a greater interest in the outside world and becoming more comfortable with an involvement with it. [37]

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