In this lesson, we go over an individual, other than Freud, who had a significant impact on the psychoanalytic theory of personality. This individual was Carl Jung. He was a psychiatrist who was heavily influenced by Freud. In fact, Jung and Freud actually collaborated a lot until a disagreement led Jung to develop his own approach that he called analytical psychology. 

Jung disagreed with Freud’s belief that a person’s libido was the most important factor for their personality development. As a result, Jung shifted the focus from libido to the unconscious, proposing that the unconscious consists of two layers. The first layer, the personal unconscious, was the same as what Freud described as the unconscious. This layer contains the memories and emotional conflicts that a person is not consciously aware of. The second layer was the collective unconscious. From the names, you can tell a bit about the difference between them. The personal unconscious is specific to the individual, whereas the collective unconscious is shared by all humans. According to Jung, the collective unconscious contains all the memories inherited from our ancestors. Jung called these ancestral memories archetypes, and he believed that these archetypes had universal meaning. As an example, the circle archetype means “unified wholeness of the self.” Jung used these archetypes when he used his dream analysis technique with his patients. He believed that by looking for these archetypes would help tell him about the unconscious of the patients.