Psychology's Shadow Side

Sigmund Freud and C.J. Jung were psychiatrists in the late 1800's and early to mid 1900's. Freud has generally been considered the most influential and a sort of "Godfather" of psychoanalysis, psychiatry, and psychology. His friend and would-be heir to his throne, Jung, split with him over a variety of issues including Freud's insistence that it all came back to sex. While Freud was more domineering and autocratic, Jung was retiring and reflective. That may partially explain why Freud gets all the credit and most people have barely heard of Jung. But here's a sample of contributions Jung made to popular culture. See if you've ever heard any of these:

1) Alcoholics Anonymous. Jung pioneered the idea of a higher power as a last chance to overcome substance addiction. He treated and shared these concepts with a friend who told the eventual founder of A.A.
2) Ever used the words "introvert" or "extrovert"? Ever taken a Myers-Briggs personality test as part of a job interview or evaluation? If so, you've unknowingly participated in Jung's all-encompassing theory of personality.
3) The word-association test was first conceived and developed by Jung to discover what a person's issues might be. While this has become a punchline in popular cultures, it also formed the basis for many aspects of psychological assessment of unconscious and projective material.
4) If you've flippantly noted that you or someone else has a "complex" about something - you're using a word Jung developed. The term refers roughly to a person's "issues" but more specifically to historical material that has gathered inside a person around specific conflicts (mother or father for instance) and which takes on more material as the person develops. If the complex was not unraveled it had the potential to extend its reach further into a person's life.
5) As you watched Darth Vader beg Luke to join him on the "Dark Side" you were watching Jungian Psychology in action. Star Wars writer George Lucas was heavily influenced by Jung scholar Joseph Campbell in this regard.
6) Depth psychology and dream interpretation are heavily influenced by Jung.
7) Countless movies rely heavily on Jungian archetypal psychology. The recent Batman series staring Christian Bale explicitly refers to Jungian archetypes and the Batman embodies much of Jung's ideas about the Shadow side of every human.
8) If you've participated in conversations in which someone states they have a "masculine" and "feminine" side, you're endorsing a Jungian idea.


The list goes on. Truthfully, I get tired of Freud getting all the credit, but that likely makes me more like Freud than Jung.

If you'd like to see Jungian concepts applied to a popular movie, here's an article doing that with the movie Groundhog Day. Link here.