Carl Jung's Psychodynamic Theories

Psychodynamic theories acquired an important place in people’s social and cultural world. Formerly developed by Freud, they intend to explain human behaviour in relation to internal dynamics, i.e. the forces that drive it (Miller, 2011).

Carl Jung, an early colleague of Freud and one of the most influential contributors for the development of psychology as a modern science, conceived a theory for the structure of personality that became known as Analytical Psychology (Jones, 2007). His theory, characterised by its complexity and multiple interacting systems, rested on the principle that in addition to the personal repressed experiences originally referred by Freud, each individual inherited a collective unconscious (Cloninger, 2009). The collective

Persona is the way in which people present themselves to the world (Jung, 1969). It is the character that it is assumed and it is through it that people are able to relate to each other. The Persona has both positive and negative aspects. A dominant Persona can muffle the individual and those who identify themselves with their Persona tend to see themselves only in the superficial terms of their social roles as well as repudiate other parts of themselves. On the positive side, the persona serves to protect the Ego and the psyche of the various forces and social attitudes that attack the

Parsimony is the ability of a theory to provide simple yet clear and powerful explanations of the phenomena (Cramer, 2013). Researches (Cramer, 2013) have argued that this theory uses far too complex terms to explain simple and similar behaviours. For instance, a difference range of structures from the collective unconscious such as the shadow or any other archetype, can be accountable for unreasonable aggressiveness of a person. Other researches (Miller, 2011) have gone further and suggested that Jung’s theory does not explore, or at least make clear, the interactions if existent, between archetypes and how and the extent to which archetypes influence