Jung

cliff notes:

• Jungian psychoanalysis: we are all fragmented and divided, and knowingly or not, we’re all searching for our souls
• acquired mind; Taoist, culture shapes our personality, usually conventional, the outer world that has structure and order
• unconscious — the inner world, chaotic as ocean waves during a storm, — everything within us that falls outside of awareness; we are, in truth, mostly unconscious beings
• individuation process was Jung’s way of explaining the path to optimal personal development for an individual, the process, simple or complex as the case may be, by which every living organism becomes what it was destined to become from the beginning
• purpose of this individuation process is to increase the individual’s consciousness; with greater consciousness individuals can heal the splits in their mind between what’s conscious and unconscious, bringing them to wholeness in their psyche
• first portion of life is mainly external as we seek to meet our basic needs
• the second part of life can represent a turning inward toward a deeper part of ourselves, inward turn starts the individuation process
• the masculine seeks autonomy, the feminine seeks communion [^1]
• repressing doesn’t eliminate the opposites or the tension itself it only makes them more destructive in our psyche by strengthening our shadows. When we deny these internal tensions, we enforce our delusions and self-deception
• any time we try to favor psyche over instincts—mind over body, spirit over nature—or vice versa, we cut ourselves off (dissociate) from a part of what we are
• Jung’s “Aion, Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self”
• the process of actualizing oneself and becoming more complete also reveals one’s special, individual structure; “individuality” embraces our innermost, last, and incomparable uniqueness, it also implies becoming one’s own self
• as we individuate, we connect and identify with the entire human family
• Jung described self as the “totality of the whole psyche,” distinguishing it from the ego that represents a small part of this whole psyche.
• extravert, intravert (Jungian), ambivert
• Feeling, Thinking, Sensation, Intuition types; one function of four is superior, opposite - inferior; superior function - is conscious, inferior - unconscious
• the key to individuation, according to Jung, lies in developing our inferior function

“The way is not without danger. Everything good is costly, and the development of the personality is one of the most costly of all things.”

[^1]: "... The woman becomes the vehicle of nature; the man becomes the vehicle of the society, the social order and the social purpose." — Joseph Campbell