Self and Shadow in the Light of Jungian Typology

In 1934, Jung wrote that the purpose of his work on psychological types was not to sort people into categories but as “a critical apparatus” to “organize the welter [confusion] of empirical material” that comes up when one plumbs the psyche. The psychological types, then, are not types of people, but types of consciousness. In this seminar, we will begin to learn to differentiate the eight types of consciousness that Jung identified: extraverted sensation, introverted sensation, extraverted intuition, introverted intuition, extraverted thinking, introverted thinking, extraverted feeling, and introverted feeling. We will explore how the types relate to common archetypal roles that each of us, at one time or another, take up—some comprising part of our ego identity and some belonging to the shadow.
Educational Goals
Improved clinical skills. Individual differences due to inborn type preferences are too often pathologized in therapeutic practice because they are not well understood by many therapists. In such cases, patients are not appropriately mirrored in therapy. Therapists may confuse an unconscious complex in the patient with the patient’s true ego center, reinforcing ways of coping that are not very adaptive for the patient. A goal of this seminar is to help therapists more accurately and empathically mirror their clients and identify challenges to the patient’s adaptation that are based on type mismatches.
Professional growth. Through the study of psychological types, therapists learn to know themselves better, including beginning to recognize the types of awareness that are relatively strong or weak in themselves and to identify previously unconscious biases based on psychological type. A goal of this seminar is to help therapists begin to find empathy for each of the eight types of consciousness and to find all eight types within themselves.