The first decades of the 20th century saw a raft of psychological terms fall into popular usage. Freudian notions of 'denial' and 'displacement', 'projection' and 'transference', were the first to become part of everyday language; thanks to Alfred Adler, feelings of 'inferiority' and 'superiority' (and the forms of compensation that accompanied the former) were soon common parlance; and courtesy of Carl Jung's
Psychological Types (1921), more than a few educated men and women in public began to identify themselves as 'extraverts' or 'introverts', while examining the 'complexes' that inhibited them.
Another aspect of Jungian theory, barely touched upon in
Psychological Types, was destined to cast a longer and more beguiling spell on popular psychology. 'The collective unconscious,' wrote Jung in his essay
The Structure of the Psyche (1927), 'appears to consist of mythological motifs or primordial images ... In fact, the whole of mythology could be taken as a sort of projection of the collective unconscious.' The archetypes that Jung initially had in mind were essentially sub-personalities of the ego - the
persona (a people-pleasing mask) was juxtaposed against the
shadow (the negative qualities hidden by the persona); the
anima was the male sexual essence, versus
animus, for females. Over the course of four decades, this therapeutic symbolism would expand to include mandalas (expressions of the 'the specific centre of the personality') and UFOs (a fantasy that swapped heaven for interstellar space). To ignore these powerful archetypal symbols was, in Jung's mind, 'to rob the individual of his roots and guiding instincts', to let her become a mere 'particle in the mass'.
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