The Integral Message
Personality Theory of Carl Jung
Born in 1875 Carl Jung made a major contribution to the study of the mind. Along with his senior colleague Sigmund Freud he laid the foundation for the flourishing of the various sciences of the mind in the first half of the twentieth century. Their great contribution lay in the work to open a comprehensive understanding of the unconscious mind. Jung particularly built his understanding around three domains of the mind. The conscious mind, the personal unconscious mind and the collective unconscious mind.
​
The latter two, both realms of the unconscious, he referred to as the shadow for it is not easily accessible to awareness. They are related to the conscious like a reflection or a shadow The former, the conscious mind he refers to as the persona. This is the domain of the mind that is readily available to both oneself and others.
​
The conscious mind is the locus of one’s consciousness, the ego. It displays the characteristics of awareness, management and freewill. The unconscious domains both record one’s life experience but also carry the human potentiality. Jung spoke of these as archetypal, like the bedrock of a river, that shapes the river. The archetype that is the bedrock of the entire person is the Self Archetype. Jung saw this as the interface between the divine and the human.
​
The relationality of life centres upon the relationship of the ego and the Self Archetype. Around this personality axis Jung saw the purpose of life as the reconciliation of all domains of our experience, all opposites to come together in complementarity. He called this process as the pathway to fulfilment ‘individuation’.
​
The second note of importance when addressing the relationality of the integral era through the Jungian personality model is to see that the unconscious is the reflection of the totality of the external world. Hence the three polarities consistent with those of Panikkar’s are the self archetype and the ego, the ego and the unconscious, and the unconscious and the self archetype. These are the three that emulate the polarities between, God, neighbour, and self.