Langmaid Practice

Wednesday 29 June 2011

Psychology on a Page 2: Jung

Carl Jung

Jung was the most spiritual of the great psychologists. For him, the unconscious was like a deep, vast sea upon which we are all afloat in our separate boats of consciousness. This sea, the collective unconscious, was populated near its surface by universal characters who we catch glimpses of in stories and tales that span the world. These characters, or archetypes, are thus universal. I have been fortunate enough to bump into them in my own practice. Below are two pictures, created by consumers in an Art-from-Within session that represent on the left, the Magician, on the right, the Trickster.

These images are, unsurprisingly, from a study on credit cards. These kinds of ideas, and his liking for guided fantasy, (which we have adapted and use as creative visualisation in groups), have made Jung very popular with marketing types. Who would not want to capture the Heroic or Mother Earth aspects of a brand to give it more appeal to deep motives in us all? At a deeper level, I suspect that many practitioners enjoy this framework as it allows for deeper meanings and less mechanical approaches to understanding our topics.

In our conscious lives, another of Jung’s great models has found a home in modern organisational psychology. Many managers or team members have used Myers Briggs (MBTI) to get a reading of their preferences in perception based on Jung’s ideas: I reproduce a simple version of the model here:

For Jung, daily life was a question of seeking balance between the four functions: Thinking, Feeling, Intuition and Sensation. No one function can be allowed too much dominance in any of us without its opposite number seeking expression, if only in a roundabout and sometimes destructive manner. We are all given all of these ‘cards’ in our deck – and we must play (use) them or they will play us!

You can download a pdf of this post here: Psychology on a Page 2: Jung

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