The Psyche

What is the Psyche?

The psyche, according to Jung is the complete personality of the individual.

Why is it important to understand the Psyche?

According to Jung, knowing the psyche is the first step to understanding the true nature of the individual and through self-realization live a fulfilled life.

Jung divides the psyche into three parts-

• Consciousness

• Personal Unconsciousness

• Collective unconsciousness

Consciousness

The first of the psyche, according to Jung is called the Consciousness.

Consciousness is the realm of personal awareness. This part of the psyche is explicitly known to us. The most important part of the consciousness is the Ego. The Ego sits in the middle of the psyche. The Ego's main function is to maintain continuity in the personality through the years and project persona.

The persona is the outward appearance that the ego projects. Persona is what one wants to be and wants others to believe. This is not who we are but what we believe ourselves to be.

Personality is what we are. But the Ego represses the elements that don’t align with the persona and sends it back to the realm of unconsciousness.

Jung believed that the Ego filters the elements it considers aligning with the persona and rejects what doesn’t align with the persona it is trying to project to others.

Personal Unconsciousness

This realm of the psyche sits below the consciousness. This concept of personal unconsciousness was developed by his mentor Freud, but Jung further divided unconsciousness into Personal and Collective unconsciousness.

According to Jung, whatever Ego represses and sends backwards because it does not align with the persona it is trying to project, sits in the realm of personal unconsciousness. This is what a person is, but the Ego to maintain continuity sends some feelings and thoughts backwards.

Collective Unconsciousness

This is where Jung’s work in psychiatry and psychology differs from all other authors.

According to Jung, Collective unconsciousness contains universal elements that are inherited through a sum total of human history. The collective unconsciousness is similar to biological evolution. The mind through evolution passes information to its offspring forming a collective unconsciousness.

This results in the following generation imitating the behaviour of the previous generation. The brain according to Jung, learns the behaviours of the previous generations and passes it on to the next generation, forming almost a chain of behaviour which is common in every generation. The unbroken chain of psychological predisposition is passed on for generations without our knowledge and every individual is subjected to these predispositions.

In his early practice as a Psychiatrist, Jung found common behaviours and recurring similarities in his patients. Later in his mystical studies, he also found similarities in arts, myths and literature in different myths and cultures. These cultures even though separated through distance or time had no contact with one another but had similarities in their works. Jung worked on these patterns and came up with four archetypes.