PSY 305:
PERSONALITY
ASSESSMENT I
Dr Abiodun Adekunle Ogunola
Department of Psychology, OOU
The topic for today is:
THE NEOPSYCHOANALYTIC
APPROACH
CARL JUNG
The Systems of
Personality
In Jung’s view, the total personality, or
psyche, is composed of several distinct
systems or structures that can influence
one another.
The major systems are the ego, the
personal unconscious, and the collective
unconscious
The Ego
The ego is the center of consciousness, the part
of the psyche concerned with perceiving,
thinking, feeling, and remembering.
It is our awareness of ourselves and is
responsible for carrying out the normal activities
of waking life.
The ego acts in a selective way, admitting into
conscious awareness only a portion of the
stimuli to which we are exposed.
The Attitudes: Extraversion and
Introversion
Much of our conscious perception of and reaction to our
environment is determined by the opposing mental
attitudes of extraversion and introversion.
Jung believed that psychic energy could be channeled
externally, toward the outside world, or internally, toward
the self.
Extraverts are open, sociable, and socially assertive,
oriented toward other people and the external world.
Introverts are withdrawn and often shy, and they tend to
focus on themselves, on their own thoughts and feelings.
The Attitudes: Extraversion and
Introversion
According to Jung, everyone has the
capacity for both attitudes, but only one
becomes dominant in the personality.
The dominant attitude then tends to direct
the person’s behavior and consciousness.
The nondominant attitude remains
influential, however, and becomes part of
the personal unconscious, where it can
affect behavior.
Psychological Functions
As Jung came to recognize that there were
different kinds of extraverts and introverts, he
proposed additional distinctions among people
based on what he called the psychological
functions.
These functions refer to different and opposing
ways of perceiving or apprehending both the
external real world and our subjective inner
world. Jung posited four functions of the
psyche: sensing, intuiting, thinking, and feeling
Psychological Types
Jung proposed eight psychological
types, based on the interactions of the
two attitudes and four functions.
EXTRAVERSION sensing, intuiting,
thinking, and feeling
INTROVERSION sensing, intuiting,
thinking, and feeling
Sensing and intuiting are grouped together as
nonrational functions; they do not use the processes of
reason.
These functions accept experiences and do not evaluate
them. Sensing reproduces an experience through the
senses the way a photograph copies an object.
Intuiting does not arise directly from an external
stimulus; for example, if we believe someone else is with
us in a darkened room, our belief may be based on our
intuition or a hunch rather than on actual sensory
experience.
Extraverted thinking
Logical, objective, dogmatic
Extraverted feeling
Emotional, sensitive, sociable; more
typical of women than men
Extraverted sensing
Outgoing, pleasure-seeking, adaptable
Extraverted intuiting
Creative, able to motivate others and to
seize opportunities
Introverted thinking
More interested in ideas than in people
Introverted feeling
Reserved, undemonstrative, yet capable of
deep emotion
Introverted sensing
Outwardly detached, expressing
themselves in aesthetic pursuits
Introverted intuiting
More concerned with the unconscious than
with everyday reality
The Personal
Unconscious
The personal unconscious in Jung’s system is
similar to Freud’s conception of the preconscious.
It is a reservoir of material that was once
conscious but has been forgotten or suppressed
because it was trivial or disturbing.
There is considerable two-way traffic between the
ego and the personal unconscious. For example,
our attention can wander readily from this printed
page to a memory of something we did yesterday.
The Personal
Unconscious
All kinds of experiences are stored in the
personal unconscious; it can be likened
to a filing cabinet.
Little mental effort is required to take
something out, examine it for a while,
and put it back, where it will remain until
the next time we want it or are reminded
of it.
The Collective
Unconscious
The deepest and least accessible level of the
psyche, the collective unconscious is the
most unusual and controversial aspect of Jung’s
system; to critics, it is the most bizarre.
Jung believed that just as each of us
accumulates and files all of our personal
experiences in the personal unconscious, so
does humankind collectively, as a species, store
the experiences of the human and prehuman
species in the collective unconscious.
The Collective
Unconscious
This heritage is passed to each new
generation.
Whatever experiences are universal—that is,
are repeated relatively unchanged by each
generation—become part of our personality.
Our primitive past becomes the basis of the
human psyche, directing and influencing
present behavior.
