Jungian Concepts

ZIWA April Monthly Meeting
with Francis Garcia - Jung Institut Zürich

• 1. Individuation - what Jung saw as our most important goal in life, as it represents a process by which we become ourselves. We evolve and reach true self-acceptance, doing away with all masks and pretences. Through this process, people often found their true vocation or what they really were meant to be.


• 2. The Persona – Jung believed we each have an image or mask of ourself that we project to the world. Hence the way we dress or our accent form part of the persona we developed in childhood. Not only our upbringing but also school, friends, advertisers and society decree norms that we are expected to adopt. However, this persona is not the real us. For example, if someone enters the medical profession they are required to be calm, competent and in control. While we can become this type of person, we may forget to express our other sides not compatible with this persona. If too concerned with our persona, we could end up living our lives to please others. Indeed, in the process we may "lose" parts of ourselves, although never completely. Jung believed that the unfulfilled parts of our personality emerged in dreams, slips of the tongue and fantasies.


• 3. Ego – from the Latin meaning "I" is our personality as we consciously know it, part of our driving force. It is like the CEO of a company and like many CEOs it can be very controlling and dominating. Traditionally, men have been taught to develop stronger senses of ego than their female counterparts. To have a strong ego means to have a sense of what we want to achieve in life.


• 4. Anima and Animus – the notion that no one is wholly female or male. Anima is the feminine within the masculine and animus the masculine within the feminine. Jung believed that anima developed from 3 sources in a man; his mother, his experiences with women and his own femininity. If a man is unaware of his anima, he will unconsciously search for the perfect woman who can express it for him. On the other hand, women may project their masculine sides onto their men to express a side we are not comfortable expressing in society.


• 5. The Shadow – the thing a person wishes NOT to be. The negative side of our persona or the sum of all the negative qualities we wish to hide. However, our shadow also contains unconscious positive qualities that we never get the chance to develop because of our upbringing.