Carl Jung Glossary

Return to Carl Jung

Instructor's addition: This glossary was created as a supplemental course resource and was not part of Dr. C. George Boeree's original text.

Structure of the Psyche

Ego: The center of conscious awareness and the part of the psyche associated with one's conscious sense of identity.
Personal Unconscious: Material from an individual's own experience that is not currently conscious, including forgotten, repressed, or otherwise unconscious memories and experiences.
Complex: An emotionally charged group of related thoughts, memories, feelings, and experiences organized around a common theme.
Collective Unconscious: The deepest level of the unconscious, which Jung believed contains inherited psychological patterns shared by human beings as a species.
Archetype: An inherited organizing pattern within the collective unconscious that shapes recurring human experiences, images, themes, and symbols.
Persona: The social mask or public role a person presents to the world. It represents the aspects of ourselves we choose to show in particular social situations.
Shadow: The archetype containing characteristics of ourselves that the conscious personality rejects, ignores, or fails to recognize. The shadow may include aggressive or socially unacceptable impulses, but also creativity, vitality, and undeveloped strengths.
Self: The archetype representing the unity and organization of the entire personality, including both conscious and unconscious aspects. Jung regarded the Self as the central organizing principle of the psyche.
Mandala: A circular or symmetrical symbol centered around a midpoint. Jung viewed mandalas as common symbolic representations of the Self, wholeness, and psychological integration.

Anima, Animus, and Archetypal Balance

Anima: In Jung's original terminology, the archetypal feminine aspect of a man's psyche.
Animus: In Jung's original terminology, the archetypal masculine aspect of a woman's psyche.
Syzygy: Jung's term for the paired relationship of anima and animus and the broader psychological union of complementary masculine and feminine principles.
First Test of Courage: A descriptive way of referring to the difficult process of confronting and acknowledging one's shadow rather than denying unwanted aspects of the personality.
Second Test of Courage: A descriptive way of referring to the process of confronting and integrating the anima or animus rather than remaining psychologically one-sided.
Mana: A term Jung borrowed from anthropology for an extraordinary spiritual, magical, or psychological power that may become associated with certain people, symbols, or archetypal experiences.
Neshama: A Hebrew term for soul or spirit that Jung discussed while exploring cultural and religious ideas related to the psyche.

Individuation and Psychological Development

Individuation: The lifelong process of becoming a more complete and integrated individual by bringing conscious and unconscious aspects of the personality into a more balanced relationship.
Self-Realization: The movement toward greater awareness and integration of the whole personality. For Jung, this involves recognizing and incorporating previously unconscious aspects of oneself rather than identifying only with the conscious ego.
Compensation: The tendency of the unconscious to balance one-sided attitudes or tendencies of consciousness by producing contrasting thoughts, feelings, fantasies, or dreams.
Progression: The forward movement of psychological energy toward adaptation to the external world and the demands of conscious life.
Regression: The inward movement of psychological energy toward unconscious material. Jung did not regard regression as necessarily unhealthy because it may allow neglected unconscious material to emerge and contribute to later development.
Transcendent Function: The psychological process through which opposing conscious and unconscious tendencies are brought into relationship and a new, more integrated position can emerge.
Transcendence: Moving beyond a rigid either-or conflict by integrating opposing psychological tendencies into a more complete whole.

Psychic Energy and Opposites

Principle of Opposites: Jung's idea that psychological energy develops from tension between opposing tendencies, such as conscious and unconscious, thinking and feeling, or introversion and extraversion.
Principle of Equivalence: Psychological energy does not simply disappear when it is removed from one activity, desire, or idea. It is transferred to another part of the psyche and may appear in another form.
Principle of Entropy: The tendency for psychological opposites to become less extreme over time as energy becomes more evenly distributed between them.

Past, Future, and Meaning

Mechanism: Explaining behavior in terms of prior causes and cause-and-effect relationships. This emphasizes how past events influence present behavior.
Teleology: Explaining behavior partly in terms of goals, purposes, and the future toward which a person is moving. Jung believed behavior could be influenced by both past causes and future possibilities.
Synchronicity: Jung's term for a meaningful coincidence in which events occur together without an apparent causal connection but are experienced as psychologically significant.

Eastern and Religious Concepts

Maya: A term from Indian philosophy often translated as illusion. Jung used Eastern ideas such as maya while discussing the difference between ordinary appearances and deeper psychological or spiritual reality.
Atman: In Hindu philosophy, the deepest spiritual self. Jung sometimes used comparisons with Atman when discussing the Self and the relationship between individual consciousness and a larger whole.
Jivatman: In Hindu thought, the individual self or individual expression of Atman. Jung drew upon such concepts when comparing Western ideas of personality with Eastern ideas of selfhood.

Dreams and Therapeutic Methods

Word Association Test: A technique Jung developed in which a person responds quickly to a list of stimulus words. Delays, unusual responses, repetition, or emotional reactions could suggest the presence of an emotionally charged complex.
Prospective Function of Dreams: Jung's idea that dreams may point toward possible future psychological development by revealing tendencies, possibilities, or directions that have not yet become conscious.
Active Imagination: A technique in which a person deliberately attends to images, fantasies, emotions, or dream material while awake and allows them to develop, helping conscious and unconscious material enter into dialogue.
Transference: The process in which a client projects feelings, expectations, and relationship patterns onto the therapist. Jung believed transference could involve both personal experiences and archetypal material.
Countertransference: The therapist's emotional reactions and responses to the client. Jung recognized that the therapist's own psychology becomes part of the therapeutic relationship.

Psychological Types

Attitude: Jung's term for the general direction of psychological energy. The two major attitudes are introversion and extraversion.
Introversion: An attitude in which psychological energy is directed primarily toward the inner world of thoughts, ideas, and subjective experience.
Extraversion: An attitude in which psychological energy is directed primarily toward people, objects, and events in the external world.
Functions: Jung's four characteristic ways of experiencing and evaluating the world: thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition.
Thinking: A judging function that evaluates experience primarily through logic, concepts, and relationships among ideas.
Feeling: A judging function that evaluates experience according to values, importance, acceptance, and rejection.
Sensation: A perceiving function focused on information received through the senses and on what is concretely present.
Intuition: A perceiving function focused on possibilities, patterns, meanings, and relationships that are not immediately obvious through the senses.
Psychological Type: A characteristic pattern formed by the interaction of a person's preferred attitude and psychological functions.
MBTI: The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, a personality inventory inspired by Jung's theory of psychological types. It uses the dimensions Extraversion-Introversion, Sensing-Intuition, Thinking-Feeling, and Judging-Perceiving. The last dimension was added by Myers and Briggs and is not one of Jung's original four psychological functions.
Judging: An MBTI preference describing an orientation toward structure, organization, and reaching decisions. It is paired with Perceiving and should not be confused with Jung's judging functions of Thinking and Feeling.
Perceiving: An MBTI preference describing an orientation toward openness, flexibility, and continuing to gather information. It is paired with Judging and should not be confused with Jung's perceiving functions of Sensation and Intuition.

Childhood Development

Anarchic Stage: Jung's description of very early childhood, when consciousness is fragmented and there is not yet a well-organized sense of self.
Monarchic Stage: A later childhood period in which the ego begins to develop and the child increasingly experiences a more unified sense of identity.
Dualistic Stage: A stage in which the child's ego becomes more clearly differentiated from other people and from the surrounding world.
Conservative Principle: The tendency to remain attached to familiar patterns from the past rather than adapting to present circumstances and continuing psychological development.

Return to Carl Jung

↑ Top