Jung, Carl

Carl Jung's theory has influenced the profession of education via his expansion of Freud's theory beyond its sexual/gender connotation. While he held to many of Freud's concepts, his approach was more egalitarian and less demeaning to women. His ideas about differing personality types and the specific behaviors of each continue to be a foundation of professional practice.

Jung (1875–1961) was born in Basel, Switzerland, and studied medicine at the University of Basel. He was connected with the University of Zurich from 1900 to 1913, as a physician in the psychiatric clinic most of this time.

Jung's brief association with Sigmund Freud was of 6 years' duration, lasting from 1907 to 1913. Then he founded his own school known as analytical psychology. He made important contributions to psychology and adopted Freud's methods in modified form, with less emphasis on sex.

The conscious mind, according to Jung, focuses back on the past from time to time, during sleep, into what he termed the collective unconscious. Certain virtues, a fear, a longing, or a basic pattern of behavior Jung saw as a clue to what could be troubling an individual. Jung believed that faulty adjustment to life led to biochemical disorders.

According to Jung, the human psyche is made up of the collective unconscious, conscious, ego, and persona. The ego is reflective of individual experience partly existing in one's conscious and partly unconscious. In the collective unconscious, we find these premortise images, racial images established perhaps thousands of years ago. The two important archetypes are anima, the ideal male mate, and animus, the ideal female mate. The persona is a superficial social mask that the individual presents, or puts on while involved in a social relationship.

Jung presented the position that there are fundamentally two types of people: extrovert and introvert. His treatment centered on trying to maintain an equilibrium of feeling, thought, sensation, and intuition. When there is not an equilibrium, a complex is formed. Jung further defined the libido as a vital human force, but he questioned its exclusively sexual origin. He saw early childhood relation to the mother as nonsexual. She is the nourishing one, and the child's attachment to her stems from this need.

Jung saw humanity's salvation in the developmental process, which he called self-realization. This process involves the reconciliation of inner and outer impulses, of the psyche and its environment of man and society. Jung's profoundest belief was that persons must save themselves by achieving a wholeness of personality.

Both Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers's work reflected that of Jung. However, for educational leaders, Jung's most significant contributions were the concept of persona and the understanding that in interactions, “What you see is not what you get,” as well as his delineation of introverts and extroverts, with the understanding that every individual must be understood as an individual. Another highly influential work in leadership was imbued with Jung's thought. That was the seminal book by Joseph Campbell, in 1949, The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Campbell found in Jung's conception of the universal archetype the basis for his own scholarship, in Jung's Symbols of Transformation.

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