About Analytical Psychology

Analytical Psychology is the school of depth psychology founded by the Swiss psychiatrist C. G. Jung in the early twentieth century. As a young psychiatrist at the Burghölzli hospital, Jung came to see that the fantasies of his patients, which looked senseless, were attempts to make order from deep experience. That conviction led to his 1913 break with Freud and to his own “confrontation with the unconscious,” recorded in The Red Book. Where some approaches aim to correct a symptom or trace it back to childhood causes, Jung also looked forward, asking what the soul wants of a person. That question implies a telos, an aim toward which a life can be directed, and it is why Depth is the word we return to throughout this site.

Jung understood the psyche as a self-regulating whole ordered by the Self, the archetype of wholeness and a power larger than the ego. It includes a personal unconscious, built from your own life and gathered into complexes, and a collective unconscious shared across humanity, made of archetypes that appear as recurring images in dreams, fairy tales, myth, and religion. Among the best known are the persona, the face we present to others; the shadow, what we disown in ourselves; and the anima and animus, images of Soul and Spirit that mediate between ego and the deeper psyche. Depth does not mean darkness for its own sake. It means going beneath the presenting problem and the tidy explanation to the fuller pattern. Jung called the lifelong process of integrating that pattern individuation, and described it as a spiral that returns to the same material again and again, each time with a little more awareness.

Jungian work attends to that pattern through dreams, which Jung treated as a commentary by the unconscious on the present moment; through active imagination, in which one engages emerging images consciously; and through the relationship between analyst and analysand, shaped by transference and countertransference. It is open to anyone, and may especially help when zest has faded, meaning has thinned, or creative energy has stalled. You do not need any background to begin. Start with our glossary of key terms, or with whichever of our four areas, Ideas, Events, Therapy, or Training, speaks to what brought you to this page.