Jungian therapy · Kansas City & Overland Park
An introduction to Carl Jung, a father of depth-oriented psychotherapy, and how and why his work is important to my practice.
Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist. He was contemporary to Sigmund Freud and in fact worked with him for a time but eventually broke off for many reasons. One reason in particular is that Freud and many predecessors saw the Unconscious as a living reality, but they believed it was a power battle of suppressions and infantile denial. Jung understood that the foundations of psychology are in the development of becoming who we are — consciousness and the Unconscious together. His word for the development of one’s personal psyche was individuation: the lifelong process of satisfying the drive to become — become you.
You’ve likely noticed many of Jung’s contributions in our current culture. Personality qualities such as introversion and extraversion are his terms. So are concepts such as archetypes, the shadow, the Self, complexes, the persona, and the idea that dreams compensate waking life. Jungians after him — analysts and writers who took his map into psychotherapy — treated the consulting room as a place where the unconscious could be met with respect, not only managed or explained away. That lineage still shapes how many depth therapists listen to dreams, symptoms, images, and the life that wants to come through a person.
Jung was the son of a Swiss Reformed pastor. Spirituality and religion run through his work alongside personality, typology, and the study of the psyche. His writings range across the length of a human experience of being human, and his work remains a great contribution to knowing the inner realities of being human.
What we do not know about ourselves we cannot have choice over. Our unconscious behavior is the living expressions we cannot see as ours. We get angry, yet because we are not an, "angry person" we don't recognize the fight we've started. So also might I act heroic, yet, because I hold my self-worth inaccurately low. In all cases our unconscious nature appears in our dreams, symptoms, moods and the images that will not leave us alone — asking for relationship, not only control.
Archetypes are the deep patterns through which human experience keeps taking form — mother, hero, trickster, wise old one, and many more. They are not costumes we put on; they are currents that move through myth, dream, and ordinary life when something larger than the ego is at work.
The shadow is what we refuse to be — and then meet first in other people. Until it is owned, it runs the show from behind. Meeting the shadow is less about becoming “good” than about becoming more whole, and more honest about what we carry.
Individuation is the lifelong work of becoming the person one actually is — not the person the family, culture, or persona required. It is not ego inflation and not mere social adjustment. It is the slow marriage of what we know of ourselves with what still waits in the dark.
Jung read the old alchemical images as a language of psychic transformation: breaking down, washing clean, joining what was split. The work is not about turning lead into gold in a lab. It is about what happens when a life is heated long enough that something truer can form.
Our psyche is not the state of our childhood conditions. Rather, our psyche, just like the body, naturally grows throughout our lives. And just like the body each developmental step has its own maturing steps that need to be taken. If missed or underdeveloped crisis occurs - none more famous than the midlife crisis as an example.
Jung is not the center of my practice; your work is the center. But I have been deeply affected by what Jung taught about developmental exploration through the meaning of our lives — taking seriously how we grow and develop into who we are and will become over time. There is a place we all can relate to Jung’s pursuit of integrating all that we are into one developed self.
I believe every therapist working beyond managing symptoms would benefit from Jung’s work, and although he is not my only influence, his was one of my earliest and most profound — and he gave way to the depth perspective I now hold.
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