What Is Introversion And Extroverts?

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Carl Jung
Carl Jung, to this day, is one of the most influential psychologists in history. Not only did he influence psychology, but art, literature, religion, and another number of fields. His findings and works have shaped the ideas of extroverts and introverts, the collective unconscious, archetypes, dream analysis, complexes, individuation, and synchronicity, among other topics. He worked closely with Sigmund Freud for a number of years, before going on to conducting researches of his own and expanding upon Freud’s ideas.
Carl Gustav Jung was born on July 26, 1875, in Kesswil, Switzerland. He was an only child, out of a potential four, to his father Paul Jung, a Protestant pastor and philologist, and his wife Emilie Preiswerk, who endured …show more content…

He believed that we can be categorized as one of the two, “depending on the extent to which people exhibit certain functions of consciousness” (Biography.com, 2015). An introvert is known as “withdrawn and more interested in ideas over people who prefer a quiet isolated environment and take pleasure in solitary activities” (Erin, 2013), whereas extroverts are known as “more socially-oriented people who are stimulated by other people and the outside world” (Erin, 2013). Jung and his followers popularized the terms, but it was a concept presented by French psychologist Alfred Binet, “who called “knowledge we have of our inner world, our thoughts, our feelings” introspection and “orientation of our knowledge toward the exterior world as opposed to knowledge of ourselves” extrospection” (Erin, 2013). Jung also inspired what we know as the MBTI by differentiating four functions of the mind - thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition. He linked those with extraversion and introversion, and in turn created eight categories for psychological types. He believed these types could manifest themselves in dominant and secondary ways, in what he called the persona and the shadow. The persona “is the public version of the self that serves as a mask for the ego” (Goodtherapy.org, 2015), and the shadow “is a set of infantile, suppressed behaviors and attitudes” (Goodtherapy.org, 2015). …show more content…

Later in life he explored more of his own mind and unconscious, and came to the conclusion that along with our own personal unconscious’, there is a collective unconscious. “The personal unconscious involves knowledge and concepts that we have acquired during our lifetime but have forgotten or repressed. Collective unconscious refers to the collection of “memories” that are common to all mankind” (Erin, 2013). What Jung refers to as archetypes falls in with the collective unconscious, having based archetypes on religion and symbols found throughout mankind’s history. He was led to believe in our collective unconscious, due to the fact that we have had similar experiences happen time and time again. One of the many archetypes is the mother

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