Archetypes Carl Jung

Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist and former disciple of Freud who tried to bridge the gap between psychology and spirituality. Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung believed that archetypes are models of people, behaviors or personalities. Jung suggested that the psyche was composed of three components: the ego, the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious. According to Jung, the ego represents the conscious mind while the personal unconscious contains memories, including those that have been suppressed.

Carl Jung is a great bridge for Westerners to a way of life which can, after all, help us access those truths. A necessary step in this direction, however, is a confrontation with our self. Jung calls the dark side

He called these tendencies the Archetypes. The identification of archetypes is a relatively modern phenomenon. They are both images and emotions and both have to be present to radiate. Archetypes are connected to the individual by the bridge of emotions. The shadow is an archetype that consists of the sex and life instincts. The shadow exists as part of the unconscious mind and is composed of repressed ideas, weaknesses, desires, instincts and shortcomings. One of Jung’s most compelling ideas is the shadow. Jung describes the shadow as those inferior aspects of the psyche that we’re not too proud of. As such, attentive detection and conscious integration of the shadow would seem to offer a genuine solution to taming the darker aspects of humanity, as well as harnessing its highest potentials, especially if willingly practiced by a growing percentage of the world population. The shadow might be a desire frowned on by our conscience or peers. It could be a bizarre or unhealthy interest that the powers of civilization have apparently quelled. This archetype is often described as the darker side of the psyche, representing wildness, chaos and the unknown. These latent dispositions are present in all of us, Jung believed, although people sometimes deny this element of their own psyche and instead project it onto others. The archetypes most clearly characterized from the empirical point of view are those which have the most frequent and the most disturbing influence on the ego. These are the shadow, the anima and the animus. The most accessible of these, and the easiest to experience, is the shadow, for its nature can in large measure be inferred from the contents of the personal unconscious. With a little self-criticism, one can see through the shadow – so far as its nature is personal. But when it appears as an