I’ve been reading this.
- So out of all the sensations thoughts feelings intuitions and imaginations you experience you choose a few and call it “I”. This is the ego, the brain function you identify with. It is the medium of your experience, but it is not “You.”
- Your Self consists not only of your conscious (i.e. ego-centered) mind but also of your unconscious processes. The unconscious consists of all experience lying below the threshold of conscious awareness (something impossible to measure).
- Acknowledging the unconscious, learning of it even though it may seem repugnant and hideous on first contact, is an important ordeal in the life of a person. It connects us with our animal self, from which we are not separate despite how we rationalize all of our behavior.
- The urge to create is an “autonomous complex,” it grows like a plant in the psyche’s soil.
- Art, religion, folklore, and myths are all projections of the unconscious as well as calls for discovery of the unconscious. As you contemplate gods you discover the echo of those gods within you.
- We inherit primal inner images or archetypes of experience, which remain unconscious and only bubble to the surface when relevant. This inherited knowledge explains instinct and intuition, knowledge and actions which take place without conscious effort and without having been learned.
- Extroverted people are focused on the outside objective world; introverted people, while still looking out at the objective world, see not always what’s actually there, but what the object of their attention represents in their own unconscious. They constantly project aspects of themselves onto the world, and so are dealing with their own thoughts and feelings even as they talk with somebody or solve a problem or confront a danger.
- Men inherit and carry in their unconscious an archetype for womanhood, the aenima, which every important woman in his life (from mother to wife) will represent in some way, or she’ll at least be a vessel to carry the aenima’s projection. Women likewise have an idea of manhood, the animus.
- There are four primary brain functions, and any one of them can become dominant in a personality and so determine much else in a person’s development: sensing, thinking, feeling, and intuition (familiar if you’ve ever taken a meyers-briggs personality test). Each function has characteristic effects on the personality if the ego chooses to identify itself with it. The ego typically identifies with the strongest function, most able to deal with the problems which the world presents (so the choice is arbitrary but also purposeful).
An incredible set of hypotheses, the book’s been difficult reading but has borne delicious fruit.