Jung

Carl Jung was a Swiss psychologist who trained with Freud and drew from psychoanalysis but extended it and took psychotherapy into new territory. Whereas psychoanalysis focuses a great deal on the earliest years of life, Jung looked more into the second half of life. He developed the idea of the collective unconscious with its archetypal images that appear in dreams and mythology across cultures. He wrote about psychological type (thinking, feeling, sensation and intuition, as well as introvert and extravert), and this forms the basis of the Myers-Briggs test, used in psychometric testing. Among the archetypes are the "anima" (the unconscious female element in a man) and the "animus" (the unconscious male element in a woman): these can play an important role in romantic relationships. The aim of Jungian therapy is to integrate different elements of our psychological being, including our ‘shadow’, creativity and spirituality, in a process called individuation. While Jung wanted his approach to be seen as scientific, he was also interested in exploring the spiritual dimension and sense of meaning. He can be considered as straddling the psychoanalytic, humanistic, existential and transpersonal approaches.