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Freud was the Columbus who discovered the hemisphere of the unconscious. Jung may well be the Magellan to circumscribe the whole sphere of the psyche.
Double Unconscious. In the Jungian hypothesis, the mind has three layers: 1) the conscious, which is just about what everybody thinks it is; 2) the personal unconscious (corresponding, but only approximately, to Freud's unconscious), into which go forgotten facts and repressed emotional material; and 3) the collective unconscious, which is part of the heritage of the entire human race, and therefore a sort of common pool containing the instincts and some patterns for mental behavior.
What drives the psychic machine? Libido, says Jung, but he uses the word differently from Freud: Jung's libido includes all psychic energy. It can flow, says Jung, in either of two directions, in either of two dimensions. When it is flowing forward, from the unconscious to the conscious, a man feels that life is running smoothly as he goes about his business. Psychic energy must also flow in reverse, from the conscious to the unconscious, as when a man relaxes from an active to a pensive or dreamy state. But if this backward flow lasts too long, the libido is being attracted to something in the unconscious that is stirring toward consciousness. If this is not made conscious, it will attract around it similar material which then forms a knot or complex.
Psychic energy may also flow inward or outward. If in an individual it usually goes outward, he is an extravert. When he perceives an object or situation, his first reaction is to project his energy onto the object and away from himself. But if it flows inward, he is an introvert, and his first reaction is along the lines of "What will this do to me?" Jung then breaks down personality types into four classes, depending on which of the major psychic functions they rely on most heavily: sensation, thinking, feeling or intuition. Since anybody can be either extraverted or introverted in combination with any of the four main functions, Jung recognizes eight basic personality types. But he has said repeatedly —unfortunately for the thick-tongued dogmatism of cocktail-party conversation —that everybody is enough of a mixture so that the labels are only a rough guide. In fact, there are some rare souls who defy classification at all.
Archetypes for All. Things are not so simple in the Jungian unconscious. There, Jung sees a host of symbols which represent the archetypes. In writing of them, Jung, who has a vivid style and imagination, sometimes sounds almost as if he were writing about living beings. But the Jung archetypes are simply ancient patterns of human experience and feeling, repeated over and over in all ages and cultures. They occur in two principal forms: 1) in individual thoughts, dreams and visions; 2) projected as myths, customs or faiths.
When Jung started out as a practicing analyst, he found again and again that ancient symbols and rituals were repeated in the dreams of 20th century patients who could not possibly have heard or read of them. He concluded that mankind's collective unconscious 1) far predates the evolution of the