Together with Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler, Carl Gustav Jung was one of the
founders of psychoanalysis or the so-called ‘modern depth psychology’, a field of science
focusing on dealing with the unconscious energies which move through each of us.
In spite of being highly praised by Freud, Jung departed from his teachings,
eventually founding his own school of psychology called ‘analytical psychology’. Some of the most
important concepts in Jung's work are personality typology,
individuation and also archetypes like persona, the shadow, anima and animus. In this context,
an archetype is a universal model common in many cultures which influences human behavior.
In spite of the fact he is mainly considered a psychoanalyst, Jung made huge contributions
to the realm of philosophy. His particular take on the subject is often referred to as “Jungian
Philosophy”. He wrote many books like Psychology of the Unconscious, Man and His Symbols,
The Archetypes and The Collective Unconscious, Modern Man In Search of a Soul, The Psychology
of the Transference, ‘Memories, Dreams, and Thoughts’, and The Relations Between the Ego
and the Unconscious. His entire work was about how to help people navigate through
the complexity of their psyche, to help them understand themselves better in order to heal.
Jung was particularly interested in the process of individuation, how to express
the true essence of your personality, and how to develop yourself into a mature and whole person.
When people can harmonize their consciousness, the part of the psyche which is aware of and
responsive to its surroundings, with their unconsciousness, the part of the psyche
in which mental and psychological activities take place without the individual’s awareness,
they can understand their Self, which is their psyche as a whole, unifying the consciousness
and the unconsciousness. Learning how to know yourself is crucial, so to help you learn more
about how to know yourself better, here are 7 teachings from the wisdom of Carl Jung:
Draw Mandalas
Carl Jung said: “The mandala is… the path to the center, to individuation.”
According to Carl Jung, the self can be represented in the form of a Mandala,
which is a circle containing different sectors:
It is a diagram with different components in it, each one representing an aspect that reveals the
Self. Oftentimes, it looks like a circle, which according to Jung, reflects a sacred space.
When you draw your own personal Mandala,
it becomes one of the best ways to see your inner Self in its most essential aspects.
At the center of the figure, the core of the self resides.
The Self is the central aspect of an individual’s personality and life. Then, around the circle,
are the outer world and inner world. The top half is the outer world and represents our
surroundings and environment. The bottom half shows the inner world, what is deep inside us.
The outer world is in connection with consciousness, ego and persona. Consciousness
is everything that we know directly, ego is the entity that helps us organize everything that we
perceive, think, memorize and feel, and persona is essentially the role that we play in society.
When the ego is overwhelmed with feelings, perceptions or thoughts,
some of them are redirected to personal unconsciousness,
often coming back into our consciousness for a brief moment while dreaming.
The inner world, on the bottom half, is in connection with the collective unconsciousness,
with the shadow, anima and animus, all of which are sources of communication
between the consciousness and the collective unconsciousness.
Collective unconsciousness is separate from personal unconsciousness.
It is the part that binds people together through invisible ways. Jung used this concept to explain
the similarities in mythologies around the world. He believed that the collective unconsciousness
had a profound influence on the lives of individuals, containing symbols, so-called
archetypes - that provide individuals meaning regarding the life experiences they go through.
The Shadow, part of the inner world, is considered to be the most dangerous aspect of the Self,
consisting of all the unnaceptable animalistic, aggressive or sexual instincts. Usually,
people are not very aware of their Shadow, which is often projected onto other people and objects.
The anima and animus duo is related to a masculine-feminine polarity. Anima
is the feminine side of the male form while animus is the masculine side of the female form.
Self is the overarching energy that integrates and organizes our personality by bringing together the
conscious and unconscious processes. Mandala is not only a form of art, but also a psychotherapy
tool which each of us can use. For a period of time, Jung used to draw mandalas every day and
he analyzed the state of his psyche by looking at the mandala he had just drawn. He also encouraged
his patients to draw their own mandalas. There are many training courses in how to draw mandalas
and we can also try to draw one each day in order to understand ourselves a bit better.
For example, one patient of Jung drew these three mandalas, at different times:
The first one shows the four stages of the moon, then on the second mandala, the sun appears,
which reflects a bigger difference between the surroundings and unconsciousness - thus,
a lesser connection between the self and the surroundings. Then, in the end, in the third
mandala, the sun is about to set. The patient had drawn the last mandala shortly before his death.
As colors, yellow usually represents intuition, blue represents the mind, red represents feelings
and brown represents sensations. Based on what colors and shapes we use when we draw the mandala
- ideally with the help of a psychotherapist - we can identify the corresponding
archetypes that could then be interpreted to make sense of our internal struggles.
Understand your subconscious impulses According to Jung: “Everyone carries a shadow,
and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.”
The Shadow is one of the most important archetypes according to Jung. It is a part of our
subconscious that comes to the surface in the most unexpected moments, often taking us by surprise.
The Shadow is that part of ourselves that we fail to recognize and which comes to the surface
through dreams or through subconscious impulses in daily life. We’ve all had moments when we did
something yet immediately after had no clue why we did it. Perhaps we got angry at something or
someone out of the blue, went into a different room, or we answered a question in a bizarre way,
without knowing the reason. Perhaps it was the Shadow that directed us?
The more rigidly you act in real life, the more you follow rules made by others or your
self-imposed rules disregarding your emotions, the more you fail to acknowledge your Shadow.
If you do so, you will fail to know yourself. Ergo, you can only truly know yourself if you also
know your Shadow. And this process of knowing your Shadow can take a good amount of effort.
Often the things we discover in our Shadow are unpleasant as our Shadow includes the
dark parts of ourselves, our aggressive tendencies, and repressed sexual desires…
anything that we cannot accept in our everyday social behavior.
But the bitter irony is that the more we try to keep away from those dark parts,
the more they control our lives in invisible ways. And when this happens we often project all those
negative attitudes onto others. For example, every time you talk intensely negatively about
someone else, you can be confident that all those negative traits are also inside you,
in your Shadow, otherwise you would not be so passionately involved in that discussion. When you
judge someone for how they look, perhaps you say they are overweight, badly-dressed, or too skinny,
chances are you are insecure about yourself as well and to avoid feeling anxiety, your psyche
makes you project those negative feelings which are part of your Shadow onto others.
To stop projecting and start taking control of your Shadow,
you need to first become aware of when you are projecting.
Stop yourself every time you think or talk with passion about something negative in other people
and examine yourself in the same way. Is there any other negative feeling that you need to be
aware of and is it related to you personally? For example, if you catch yourself speaking
badly about a colleague who uses their charisma to get away with anything at work, it is likely
that you actually wish you had that charisma yourself to get ahead in life in the same way,
but you don’t know how to do it, so instead you prefer to accuse the other of playing unfairly.
By questioning yourself, you can discover many unpleasant things about yourself, and,
by discovering them, you will know what you need to work on so you can become free of them and that
way they won’t control your life anymore. Knowing your Shadow is a part of knowing your true Self.
Know your fears In the words of Jung:
“Find out what a person fears most and that is where he will develop next.”
Jung treated many patients suffering from anxiety disorder and he understood that what they needed
most was the courage to face their own fears. He found it to be good practice to analyze their
fears, because, after that analysis, he could understand in which direction they should develop.
Unfortunately however, many choose not to take any risks in life,
preferring to give up on their dreams than to fail and potentially embarrass themselves.
When this tendency overwhelms individuals, they can become neurotic.
No matter how courageous we look to society, we all have our own fears.
Nobody in the world is truly fearless.
What we can learn from Jung’s studies on his patients regarding facing their inner fears,
is that, by analyzing our fears, we can discover which area of our life we should work on.
If we permanently avoid facing our fears, we will remain in a cocoon, in a comfortable space,
but that will not make us happy in the long run. By refusing to look inside ourselves,
by refusing to know ourselves better and finding solutions for our fears, we will stop growing.
For example, your fear of public speaking might prevent you from advancing in your career,
you avoid speaking up during big meetings or participating actively in business conferences.
Overcoming your fear can only happen once you start getting to know your fear better;
identify it, acknowledge it, then find reasons why this fear is unfounded.
In the case of our example, analyze the ideas you had in your mind
and why you didn’t put them forward. Were they better than those of your colleagues?
If yes, then, you had no reason to not express your idea in the meeting.
To start speaking more in public, you can practice in front of a mirror, or better yet,
record yourself and review the video. Not only will you be able to see what you do and don’t
like and correct for it, you will also get more comfortable hearing your voice and seeing yourself
in that context, which means you will feel more confident, which will improve your performance.
If your fear has deeper roots, perhaps caused by a traumatic event during your childhood,
then you need to look deep inside your memory, ideally with the help of a licensed
psychotherapist, to identify and confront those moments. To really know yourself and evolve,
one of the best ways is to face your fears and the roots of those fears.
Face your emotions Carl Jung tells us:
“People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls”.
According to Jung, psychological diseases like neuroses have always been
at the base of legitimate suffering. This suffering is often buried so deep inside us
that it becomes very difficult to deal with. The painful emotions that we often
fear to face are developed from trauma, rejection, loss, failure or abandonment.
It is not enough to be mentally aware of those buried emotions,
it is also important to have the courage to feel them in their raw form, to truly face them. When
we are too afraid to face them, we mask them, we go into self-harming activities, addictions,
or we close our hearts, adopt more rigid behavior, and are afraid to show our suffering.
The way to stop running away from facing our soul is to understand first that it is not the event
that traumatized us, but rather the set of beliefs we built afterwards around that event. Maybe after
you suffered that traumatic episode, you started to see yourself as a worthless human being,
not good enough or deserving enough. Once you identify these beliefs,
you need to start questioning them, find evidence in your present life that these
beliefs are not true and build a better, more positive belief-system about yourself.
For example, imagine you were raised in a dysfunctional family, with alcoholic
parents that regularly neglected you, making you feel worthless, but also ashamed of them.
Just as your parents neglected you as a child, as an adult you find your partner is doing the same
and all those past memories now come and haunt you. The sadness you feel because of
your partner will be amplified by the sadness you have from your childhood, making everything worse,
preventing you from focusing on even your most basic daily tasks, potentially even resulting
in clinical depression. You should not run away from those early memories about your childhood,
but rather investigate the belief-system you inherited from it, and question it.
One example of a belief that influences you negatively can be that you think you are not
lovable enough, that you do not deserve love, that if someone got to know you better, they wouldn’t
like you and, if they do show they like you, you believe there must be something wrong with them.
You need to change such a belief system with a better one. One that better reflects the worthy
person you are today. An example of a belief system that would help you feel more lovable
could be to start telling yourself that indeed you are not perfect, but nor is anyone else,
and that’s fine. You try to work on yourself every day, putting effort into self development, trying
to be fair with other people, you give your best in your work and go all-in on your relationships.
Have your own validation first, then look for other people’s validation.
You can only build positive emotions on a solid foundation of self love, a good knowledge of
yourself and what you are capable of. Your vision of yourself will become clearer if you investigate
your deepest emotions, your inner suffering and the beliefs you’ve built around it.You cannot
really know yourself if you don’t have the courage to examine your soul and emotions inside out.
Understand your dreams To quote Carl Jung:
“Dreams are the facts from which we must proceed.”
Jung considered dreams as being messages from the unconscious. They have the role to reestablish
the psychic equilibrium. Whatever was not fully processed by the conscious mind during the day
comes back to haunt us in our dreams. Jung believed that dream material mainly contains
repressed feelings that we don’t want to face anymore, so he created a method for interpreting
the dreams that he called ‘active imagination’. First of all, the patients had to write their
dream just after they woke up from sleep. Then, they had to identify the key symbols appearing in
the dream and make associations between them, connecting them with their daily life events.
Through this process of active imagination, Jung guided his patients through a process of reliving
the dream, while still awake. The purpose was to get to the story inside the story of the dream.
No matter how silly the story of the dream is, Jung believed there is always a deeper meaning.
By reliving the dream, we force ourselves to interact with the dream figures actively,
emotionally and, by living that emotion, we get in touch with the deepest layers of ourselves.
If Freud interpreted dreams only as ways to discover repressed sexual instincts, for Jung,
a dream can have more dimensions, including archetypes and cultural symbols. It is said
that Freud interpreted dreams at the objective level, while Jung did so at the subjective level.
According to Jung, if you dream that you talk to an old man that you don’t know and that man is
telling you something very important, it means that you should listen to his advice. That old
man represents the old wise man, an archetype, who is supposed to be your guide, a helper. When such
archetypes appear in your dreams, it means your life is going through a period of transformation.
The unconscious is not a harmless territory; therefore, we must be cautious if we are to
embark on the journey of dream interpretation. It is better to start with simpler dreams and
then to advance to more complex ones - maybe with the help of a psychotherapist.
By analyzing our dreams, we can understand a great deal about ourselves, who we are inside.
We can learn things that we never imagined about ourselves.
Take time to be alone Carl Jung teaches us that: “The highest,
most decisive experience is to be alone with one’s own self. You must be alone
to find out what supports you, when you find that you cannot support yourself.”
For Jung, solitude was highly important, declaring that for him it is a form of healing,
making the rest of life worth living. Empty gossip drained Jung of his energy and he often preferred
the company of his own thoughts. The experience of solitude gives you more power to face life’s
challenges, you then better understand the cause of any problem which affects you,
you find out what resources you have inside to face that problem. Also, it is a great time to
come up with creative ideas concerning your next steps toward anything you want to do in life.
Solitude is different from loneliness, solitude being a voluntary act, while loneliness
is an unfortunate situation when you feel disconnected from people without wanting to be.
In solitude, you can know yourself much better than when you are with other people.
When you are with other people, there is a large chance you will involuntarily start to copy some
of their behavior and, somehow, the authenticity of yourself becomes blurry in that interaction.
To really know ourselves, we need moments of solitude, when we are alone with our thoughts.
We should try to have a personal space in our home, a space where nobody disturbs us, where
we can meditate, write personal notes, write in a diary or, if this is not possible, we should take
long walks outside, alone, preferably in nature. You will soon feel the benefits of such alone time
and we will all get to know ourselves a little better each day we practice solitude.
Ask others what they think about you In our final quote from Jung for this video,
he says: “We may think that we fully control ourselves.
However, a friend can easily reveal something about us that we have absolutely no idea about.”
Although Jung spoke many times about the benefits of solitude,
which offers one of the best opportunities to investigate your soul, to know yourself better,
he also recognized that there are some aspects of our personality that might escape us
and only someone else, like a friend, family member or a lover can really spot those aspects.
During his lifetime, Jung met several people who had a strong impact on him,
helping him know himself better. Some examples are two of his mistresses, Sabina Spielrein
and Toni Wolff, who were both his lovers as well as his assistants. They not only helped Jung
understand himself better emotionally, but they also helped him in his work.
Wolff was the one who actually helped him define and name the concepts of anima and animus.
We should never neglect the role of others in our quest to know ourselves better.
For example, you might think that you are a kind person and a very good listener. To test
if this is true, ask your closest friend what they think about that. They might well tell you that,
yes, they know you care about them and they can count on you when they have serious problems,
but, when they try to tell you more details about the issues that they face,
you are too eager to try and fix the problems, cutting their speech short rather than letting
them explain properly and ‘get it off their chest’ which can often be more
helpful than trying to offer solutions based on partial information. What others can tell
us about ourselves might make for uncomfortable listening sometimes, but we need to ask anyway,
and ask for an honest reply, if we really want to know the hard truths about ourselves.
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