Carl Jung's Personality and Iceberg Theory Explained

Introduction to Carl Jung

Carl Jung grew up during the late nineteenth century in Switzerland within a Protestant Victorian culture — a culture that had a profound impact on the values held by many individuals of that era. Jung's father was a pastor, and Jung himself, following the completion of medical school in the early 1900s, became a psychiatrist as well as a disciple of Sigmund Freud (Boeree, 2006).

The Iceberg Metaphor and the Human Psyche

Sally Palmer Thomason (1992) describes the human psyche as something that "could be compared to a giant iceberg — the conscious mind is like the small exposed tip that is seen above the waterline; the far greater part, the unconscious mind, lies unseen, hidden beneath the surface" (Thomason, 1992). This vivid metaphor captures a central principle of Jungian psychology: that the greater portion of mental life operates below the threshold of awareness.

Briggs-Myers and Myers, in their work Gifts Differing: Understanding Personality Type, note that Jung first articulated his theory of psychological type over seventy years ago. Jung also wrote of "archetypes — those symbols, myths and concepts that appear to be inborn and shared by members of a civilization, transcending and not depending on words for communication and recognition" (Thomason, 1992).

Although different cultures develop their own differentiated forms of archetypes, Briggs-Myers and Myers maintain that archetypes are ultimately universal. They suggest that if personality type "is such a concept, and if it is universal across cultures, religions, and environments, what a challenge lies before us. It could even be possible for the 'aha' reaction experienced upon recognizing something about oneself, or the reason for a difference from someone else, to extend to an international family across political and economic borders, in order to bring understanding and respect and acceptance of the differences between people of different nations, races, cultures, and persuasions" (Peter Briggs-Myers, March 1995, in Briggs-Myers and Myers, 1992, p. xv).

The Collective Unconscious and Archetypes

Boeree (2006), in Personality Theories, describes Jung's life work as the "exploration of this 'inner space.'" Jung brought to this exploration a background in Freudian theory and was particularly knowledgeable in the symbolism of complex mystical traditions such as Gnosticism, Alchemy, Kabbalah, and similar traditions in Buddhism and Hinduism (Boeree, 2006, p. 1). Jung additionally possessed a capacity for lucid dreaming and occasional visions.

Jung's theory divides the human psyche into three separate components: (1) the ego; (2) the personal unconscious; and (3) the collective unconscious (Boeree, 2006, p. 1). The aspect that makes Jung's theory particularly memorable and unique is the collective unconscious. This dimension functions as a kind of "psychic inheritance" — a "reservoir of our experiences as a species, a kind of knowledge we are all born with" (Boeree, 2006, p. 1). However, it is not possible for an individual or for society at large to become directly conscious of it. As Boeree explains, it "influences all of our experiences and behaviors, most especially the emotional ones, but we only know about it indirectly, by looking at those influences."

Conclusion and Recommendations for Further Research

It is clear that Jung's work is compelling and thought-provoking, and one must readily admit upon reading his theories that Jung's theoretical framework carries a certain ring of truth. Jung not only crosses the chasms effectively created by cultural differences but also manages to integrate the various physical and psychological personality types that form the collective unconscious — types so intricately linked through various channels that they may, in the view of this writer, even correspond to an intricate encoding within human DNA.