Carl Gustav Jung

Carl Gustav Jung, MD was a Swiss psychiatrist who founded the Jung Analytical School of Psychology. Jung broadened Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytical approach, interpreting mental and emotional disturbances as an attempt to find personal and spiritual wholeness. In his later years, he made a distinction between the repressed feelings and thoughts developed during an individual's life and those inherited feelings, thoughts, and memories shared by all humanity. These correspond to such experiences as confronting death or choosing a mate, and manifest themselves symbolically in religions, myths, fairy tales, and fantasies. 

Jung's therapeutic approach aimed at reconciling the diverse states of personality, which he divided not only into the opposites of introvert and extrovert, but also into those of sensing and intuiting and of feeling and thinking. By recognizing these elements an individual can achieve a state of wholeness of self. 

During the assessment phase of the treatment at InnerWisdom, the Meyer-Briggs Personality Type test, based on Jungian theory, may be administered as a way to better understand how each client learns new information and how easy it will be for him to change old, negative thought patterns and beliefs.  

Dreams

Jung believed that dreams were a telling and healing aspect of the human psyche. Dreaming, he believed, is a form of mental activity that occurs during sleep. Dreams are more perceptual than conceptual. Things are seen and heard rather than subjected to thought. Considerable emotion is commonly present, usually a single, stark emotion such as fear, anger, or joy, rather than the modulated emotions that occur in the waking state. Jung spent much of his life developing methods in which to interpret the dreams of his patients. 

Dream Therapy

Dreams are meaningful mental products, just as thoughts and daydreams are. They express important wishes, fears, concerns, and worries of the dreamer. Dreams reveal different aspects of an individual's mental functioning. Dream information, based on Jungian theory, explore the different aspects of the unconscious, and to help release trapped emotional responses that may be hindering the recovery process. 

Jung's Theory of Psychological Types

One of Jung's most important discoveries was his realization that by understanding the way individuals typically process information, they can gain insight into why they act and feel the way they do. In order to better understand the self, the individual needs to understand the way he characteristically perceives, and then acts upon that information.  

Jung realized the existence of these four basic psychological processes, which can be used either in the external or internal world, mean that people can use their mind in one of eight ways. He further noted that just as people have a preference for the hand they choose to write with, they also have a preference for the mental processes they use to perceive and judge the world.  

He described how the preferred use of these mental processes leads to important personality differences between people and is the essence of Jung's theory of psychological types. The theory describes how preferred mental processes for judging and perceiving the world, influence the way individual's typically feel, think and act in their daily lives. 

Jung Identified

Two core psychological processes:

• Perceiving - involves receiving or taking in information
• Judging - involves processing that information (e.g. organizing the information and coming to conclusions from it)

Two alternative ways of perceiving information:

• Sensing
• Intuiting

Two alternative ways of judging information:

• Thinking
• Feeling

Two ways to direct these mental processes:

• Extraversion - external world of people and things
• Introversion - internal world of subjective experience

http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/JTypes2.asp

Take the Meyers Briggs Personality Type Indicator here. 

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