Discover the Hidden Depths of Your Personality with Jungian Psychology
For Jung, your personality is vast, far more unique and complicated than you realise.
Below the surface of your conscious identity, stormy forces thrash and howl, longing to be recognised and integrated.
We all share the same grounds of being – the collective unconscious – and tapping into this source will expand your personality and help you grow psychologically.
In this article, I’ll outline how Jungian thought understands the unconscious and what this means for discovering the hidden dimensions of your personality.
The collective unconscious is the source of our being
Our conscious minds evolve from the collective unconscious – the grounds of our being as humans and the source of the universal patterns of life fundamental to our nature.
It’s home to all the aspects of our humanity – the full scope of our character.
Positive qualities lie in the unconscious
In Freudian psychology, the unconscious is the realm of our base desires and impulses – those instincts we suppress to function in society.
In the Jungian tradition, the unconscious is also the dwelling place of positive qualities: inspiration, creativity, our undiscovered potentials, and maybe even our best selves.
We grow by tapping into the potentials contained in the unconscious and integrating them into our conscious awareness.
Why are some qualities latent while others aren’t?
In Jungian psychology, the conscious ego forms by adopting the qualities that are reinforced by our culture or environment and suppressing the qualities that are disregarded.
This means that important qualities like compassion, creativity, vulnerability, and so on can be repressed if they don’t align with the values of one’s culture.
For Jung, these traits lie buried in the unconscious, and can be awakened through individuation.
We all feel the urge towards individuation
Jung taught that the unconscious elements of our humanity want to be recognised.
The urge towards individuation is felt when the latent potentials of the unconscious rise towards our conscious experience and demand our attention.
We can spot these in our dreams, desires, fears, and complexes.
Jung recommends practices like active imagination that help develop self-awareness, as knowing oneself is a precursor to change.
Tap into the unconscious to expand the personality
For Jung, expanding the personality relies on tapping into:
The collective unconscious: The full spectrum of qualities available to humanity
The personal unconscious: Our unique reservoir of forgotten memories, repressed experiences, and personal complexes
Below the borders of the conscious ego are deep forces of strength, growth, renewal, and creativity.
The unconscious is the spiritual plenitude that exists outside the mundane world of conscious experience that Ginsberg hinted at in his advice on creating prophetic art.
Unconscious elements emerge ceaselessly, like waves on the shores of our conscious ego. Change requires opening the borders of the ego and allowing these elements to mix with our conscious qualities.
As we live the realisations we gain from self-awareness practices, the borders of the ego then expand to accommodate these new qualities.