Analytical Psychology or Jungian Psychology, as it is more popularly known, is a deep psychology that studies the psyche, aiming to understand the reasons for human suffering.

He dedicates himself both to the issues of daily life and to his problems of behavior and adaptation difficulties. Its main focus is psychological suffering, or, poetically speaking, soul aches.

 

Its broad theory dialogues with varied fields of knowledge, such as Psychiatry, Neurology, Philosophy, Ethnology, Mythology, Arts and Literature, ultimately all sciences and fields of

knowledge that can contribute to the understanding of human behavior, in different aspects of personal, professional, affective, sexual and social life. As everything is part of

human culture, all kinds of knowledge have been integrated into their deep psychology and his work received the collaboration of the most brilliant minds of his time.

Dr. Carl Gustav Jung is one of the most prominent minds of the 20th century. Its concepts are inserted in many fields of psychology and psychiatry today, and a considerable number of them are part of the common vocabulary, such as archetype, synchronicity, introversion and extraversion, persona and shadow. His theory of psychological types spawned tests and parallel theories used both in psychotherapy as in Human Resources and sociological studies.

 

The concepts of Self, Archetype, Collective Unconscious and self-regulation of the psyche are a crucial point in the development of Jungian psychology. Jung claims that the psyche has a tendency to compensate for the unilateral position of consciousness, similar to the development where the body tends to regulate itself, compensating for some malfunction

physicist. This means that any unilateral behavior or attitude tends to be compensated

by the unconscious, because the psyche craves balance. In this sense, psychological suffering, symptoms such as depression, panic syndrome, anorexia, chemical dependency, among so many others would be a sign that the conscious and unconscious psychic life is out of balance, and these symptoms would be a way to make the individual look for ways to self-regulate, even that being felt as disastrous, they give the alert, just as high blood pressure warns us that something is not going well, that we need to take better care of ourselves.

 

The unconscious works for the self-regulation of the psychic apparatus in the same way as the body works for the balance of the organs and bodily functions. However, being the selective conscience, this it requires direction, and consecutively, the exclusion of everything that is irrelevant. In this way, the consciousness is one-sided, and what has been excluded now belongs to the personal unconscious.

Jung differentiated Freud's concept of the unconscious, this difference changes considerably the understanding and psychotherapeutic conduct of the analysts guided by the two schools, the popularly called "Freudians", and "Jungians".

 

Freud describes the unconscious as the instinctive psyche, the 'id', and the "collective consciousness" as "super-ego", in which the individual can be both conscious and unconscious, since contents can be repressed. The "ego" is the conscious part of the personality, and has to deal with the "id" drives and the social conventions required by the "super-ego".

 

Jung describes two concepts of the unconscious, the personal unconscious as a layer more surface of the unconscious, which derives from personal experiences and, in a more

deep, the collective unconscious, which is innate, universal, from where patterns of behaviors that are more or less the same everywhere and in all individuals, with small variations according to the culture where each individual is inserted. O collective unconscious constitutes a common psychic substrate of a supra personal nature, which is present in each one of us.

 

The contents of the personal unconscious constitute the private and private side of psychic life which, for one reason or another, it is not in consciousness, whether for pathological reasons or not. The content of the collective unconscious, on the other hand, is represented by archetypes, which can only be known for their images, which are always opposite, antagonistic and complementary to symbols. An archetype is never good or bad, because it encompasses the totality of the symbol, and individual experience can "constellate" different facets of the same archetype.

For Jung, archetypes are universal archaic patterns represented by images that they derive from the collective unconscious and are the psychic counterpart of instinct. They are potential inherited, which, when restored, enter consciousness as images, or manifest themselves through behaviors or interactions with the outside world. They are autonomous and invisible, which are transformed upon entering consciousness and adopt a particular expression for individuals and their cultures.

 

Archetypes have a numinous character, that is, they are overwhelming and felt as an experience mystical, religious, and relatively autonomous. They cannot be integrated simply by rational means, as they demand a dialectical procedure, a real "reaching an agreement" with them. In other words, the subject needs to establish a "dialogue" with the symbols archetypal, in a kind of inner conversation, where the analyst can help as a facilitator, playing the role of the transcendent function.

 

The main archetypes that structure the personality are: Ego, Persona, Sombra, Anima, Animus and Self. Other archetypes are, of course, very important, and tools invaluable in order to explain and understand personality development as well as the

analytical process, such as: archetype of the Great Mother, The Father, The Child, The Hero, The Old Wise, and The Old Wise.

 

Clinical work requires knowledge of how these archetypes work in the psyche, as well as

as of egoic structure and of Complex Theory, among others.

 

Solange Bertolotto Schneider

 

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