Have You Considered… The DEPTHS of Your Mind???
Remember those moments when you say something and immediately think, “Was that really me???”
Most of the time, we think we know ourselves but these moments are like we’re a completely different person. The example I always think of is this one time in Grade 5… (how all good stories start 😁).
I decided to go beyond playing with the elementary-school colouring kits and use some colourful vocabulary of my own… RIGHT as the entire class decided to stop chattering for my teacher to hear. It wasn’t even for a good reason. It was like someone else just took control while my brain was on autopilot.
Basically, we have these patterns about who we are and how we act, but they break down sometimes. And this example wasn’t just me being crazy 😵, because psychologists have been studying these unusual behaviours for a long time actually.
We’ve had over a century of research on those stranger aspects of our mind! You might remember hearing about Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and all those other wacky scientists from the past. A lot of those ideas from past psychologists are part of the mainstream culture now.
In this case, our culture has ideas about the hidden nature of our minds and what we don’t realise. As one specific example, here’s that theory applied to how we perceive success:
But these common messages don’t do a great job of explaining the full depths of the psychological theories about well… the depth of the mind. Psychologists like Carl Jung would have had a lot more to say about what my colourful outburst actually meant.
Essentially, when it comes to how deep the mind goes beyond our everyday interactions, it’s not just like an iceberg with a hidden layer but more like a bottomless pit.
This can seem a bit complicated, but (luckily for us) Carl Jung did all the digging for us to get to the bottom of this bottomless abyss! He created a simple model to help us understand all the complex nuts and bolts of our minds.
You, Yourself, and Your PSYCHE 🧠
To start off with Jung’s model, you have the psyche. It’s how he described all of someone’s mind. Everything you are (including your talents, fears, memories, unconscious thoughts, etc.) is part of this psyche.
What confused me about this is understanding HOW it’s meant to model the brain. It’s not like any of today’s brain scans or physical maps of the different parts of the brain:
Instead, it’s more like a map of the different patterns of thoughts in our brain and how they lead to our specific actions and beliefs. The typical illustration of the psyche is more like this:
So at its ̶h̶e̶a̶r̶t̶ brain, the psyche shows us the interactions between different types of mental processes. As you can see, it’s broken down into many parts, which are important tools to understand how we behave in different situations.
At the very centre of the psyche is the self. It’s exactly what it sounds like; it encompasses all the parts of yourself. All of your thoughts and actions (from being a cheerful fifth grader to an out-of-control, vulgar fifth-grader 😬) are found in the self (which makes sense, because they are part of you).
If our minds were that bottomless pit analogy, the self would make up the opening, the walls, the darkness… everything!
Now, the self has two main parts: the conscious and unconscious self. It’s easier to understand when you think about your own thoughts. If the Self made up all your thoughts, you have some conscious thoughts (“I want to have a banana smoothie!”) and other unconscious thoughts (how your mother always made delicious banana smoothies when you were young).
The Conscious Self: The Bit You CAN Understand
Most of the time, the parts you understand about yourself are the ones you consciously think about. One way Jung described this in his model was with a part of your brain called the ego. It represents the parts of yourself that you acknowledge/accept/are aware of.
Usually, the self is centred around the ego (which really says something these days 😄). In plain terms, that means out of all of the different things going on inside your head, you’re most aware of the things that you see every day and recognise (duh…)
In terms of our bottomless pit, the ego would be the fact that there’s a hole in the ground. Pretty much anyone can recognise that, even if they don’t know how deep it goes or if there’s anything in the hole.
On the whole, the ego is just a surface-level view of yourself — the easy-to-understand stuff after you get to know yourself for a little bit. Still, there’s a lot more to you than first meets the eye…
Speaking of which, what IS the part of you that first meets the eye? The charming personality that you show to the world? Carl Jung calls that part the persona.
If we think of the ego as the part of yourself that YOU understand just going about the day-to-day and not thinking too much, the persona would be that part of yourself that OTHERS understand. It’s what you cherry-pick from your ego and project to the world as your character.
As a personal example, I like to be funny in the way I present myself to the external world. That would be part of my persona. Someone else might value appearing smart and project that to the outside world. Your persona is completely under your control in that you decide what it’s made up of.
The dangerous thing though is that sometimes you choose to show the world something you really aren’t (if your persona doesn’t truly reflect some part of your ego). What if you tried to appear smart, but you really knew you didn’t have that expertise? 😖 Or if I tried to appear funny, but I knew that didn’t really match my personality?
There are a lot of implications to this idea. How do you actually figure out if your persona matches your ego? (ie. how you let others see you is the same as how you see yourself) The short answer is reflection and the long answer is a 30-minute article, so I won’t get too deep into this. Just be aware though that these models were invented for actual use, not just for fun articles :-)
In our bottomless pit analogy, the persona is the opening to the whole. What someone FIRST sees without examining the depths of the mind.
So these first two parts of the conscious mind are the ego and persona, which are smaller parts of the self. In other words:
Complete Self --> has surface-level Ego --> some of which you show in Persona
Beyond these conscious aspects though, there’s a whole another part of your psyche that neither you nor the outside world usually sees.
The Unconscious Self: The (Pretty Weird) Demon Within You 😱
The next parts of Jung’s model are definitely the more bizarre ones. He believed that these were responsible for the thoughts and behaviours you didn’t explicitly think about. In other words, they’re the hidden part of you that not even YOU are usually aware of.
The first is the personal unconscious. This is also basically what it says it is: the parts of your psyche with your own thoughts — BUT you don’t often notice them. This is also part of your Self (Jung’s overall term for the psyche from earlier) like the ego and the persona, but you can’t actively think about this.
In more concrete terms, if I admire being funny as part of my conscious mind, there might also be an unconscious reason for why I like that trait. What if when I was younger, I saw a Kevin Hart comedy special on a bad day and it cheered me right up! 😁 I might not think of that moment often, but it’s still there affecting the way I think.
Trying to pick apart most of the factors that make up our personal unconscious is like trying to find the bottom of the bottomless pit. Logic tells you that it has to be there SOMEWHERE… but where is it???
The other unconscious part of your mind in Jung’s model is the collective unconscious. This one makes your head hurt a lot more. It’s Jung’s way of describing how our external environment unconsciously influences us. (Translation: How things outside our minds affect it in ways we can’t see)
Jung argued that there was actually a shared set of unconscious beliefs among all our societies. This seems like a wacky idea, but think about how you live your everyday life and people go about doing what’s considered normal.
As an example think about what happens when someone gets on an elevator.
Even when it’s crowded, EVERYONE shuffles over to make room for the person who just got on. You don’t need to tell anyone where/how to move. You just somehow do it as if you all know what needs to be done.
Jung would explain this common, social thinking as a collective set of thinking that influences us all — even if we don’t explicitly realise it. Of course, nowadays psychologists would argue that isn’t a collective unconscious amongst all cultures; it’s just our personal unconscious-eseseses *googles plural of unconscious* reacting to our external environment.
Nevertheless, Jung’s model still was an interesting start to trying to explain these behaviours (remember this was 70 years ago 😅). Going back to our bottomless pit, this is trying to look at the land around the depths of our mind. Every once in a while, the world comes along and we see something beyond our own l̶i̶t̶t̶l̶e̶ big hole.
But how does it influence our mind? How come the collective unconscious is able to get everyone to behave a certain way without any explicit rules? Jung’s theory was that the collective unconscious affects our minds based on archetypes. (I know… lots of fancy words today ✨😉)
You might’ve heard this term in literature. It means the typical model of an idea that everyone can understand. For example, you always know which person’s the hero with the amazing superpowers on the journey to fight the no-good villain in his cave.
I don’t have to tell you which one’s the hero and which one’s the villain… you just KNOW. And Carl Jung knew as well.
Beyond psychology, he was interested in mythology and cultures. He studied the way people all around the world were able to understand these archetypes, which he used to explain the collective unconscious. It might be a big leap from unspoken elevator rules to heros and villains, but don’t worry — there’s a lot of archetypes out there ;-)
Overall, the key idea is that these two unconscious parts are what really form the depths of your mind. One is based on your own unconscious thoughts and the other on your environment’s. And just like the conscious parts of your Self had its own elements like the ego and persona, there are also smaller parts within your unconscious Self.
Your Other Half was Within you the Entire Time! ❤️
And that isn’t just inspirationally sappy wish-wash. There’s psychological reasoning behind it 🤪
Jung’s first element within the unconscious is the anima/animus. It doesn’t have anything to do with anime, unfortunately. It refers to the part of you that’s responsible for behaviours typically expected of the opposite sex.
If you were male, you would have an anima that has female characteristics to some extent. If you were female, you would have an animus that has male characteristics to some extent. It varies from person to person, but Jung’s belief was that it rounded out males and females’ minds.
Since it varies between people though, the idea was also that some people might have more conflict accepting their anima/animus (especially if their culture has polarised images of male/female roles). And because this is part of the unconscious mind, people wouldn’t entirely know where this conflict was coming from and how to resolve it.
In our bottomless pit analogy, it would be like having two opposite characteristics at the same time. Think having height vs. depth 🤔. All that matters is whether you measure from the top or the bottom (wherever that is ;-)
These days, there’s obviously a lot more discussion around loosening up gender norms than 70 years ago, so Jung’s ideas were very novel at the time. Who knows? Maybe some were able to use this new model to find more clarity with those parts of themselves that didn’t meet social norms back then.
Then, we get into the OTHER other-half-that-was-within-you-the-entire-time! But this one isn’t as positive 😨. Jung calls it the Shadow. And it’s just as eery as it sounds.
The idea of the shadow is that it’s made up of all the parts of yourself that you repress/hold back. While you show your persona (what you project out) to the world, you hide your shadow from the world. It makes up the part of you that you don’t want others to see.
This is one of the most interesting parts of Jung’s model of the psyche as it shows people the negative parts of themselves they can’t acknowledge. Almost everyone has problems like this, so this has become an increasingly important concept in the Jungian model.
For example, if I saw that people around me hated something I like (perhaps making sculptures of pigeons 😁), then I might start to unconsciously stop myself from pursuing that activity. Even if I liked pigeons at heart, that part of myself would become part of my shadow and I would hide it from the world.
In our pit analogy, the shadow represents well… the shadow. People don’t often see its details and don’t really want to think about it. They’re looking at the light at the top of the hole.
One of Jung’s beliefs that stems from the shadow really well is individuation. Individuation for Jung was someone’s process of growth: finding control of all these parts of the psyche.
And a key (and challenging) part of individuation is finding and accepting your shadow. Repressing it has major downsides. Accepting it (making it part of that main ego you recognise) is the goal. Jung used this model in therapy to help people find their shadows.
And once they were able to accept their shadow (and their anima/animus for that matter), they didn’t have as many conflicting parts of themselves in their unconscious. These days, we would say they got over their insecurities. This just goes to show the practical implications of Jung’s model — there’s SO much you can do with it once you understand how it works.
On the whole, Jung’s model of the psyche is a great tool to simplify the complex workings of the mind. And since his work was such a major step forward in psychology (especially at the time), his theories informed a lot of our cultural beliefs.
As one example of the way he changed society, he expanded his work on the psyche with personality types and typologies like introversion and extraversion (we NEVER had those ideas before him, which is crazy to imagine because of how prevalent they are today 😮)
To go into the details of how THAT brilliant theory works would be an article for another day :-) For now, the underlying model of the psyche that it stemmed from is still a major tool.
By understanding these different parts of ourselves, we can understand how we see ourselves and the world (both consciously and unconsciously). And by improving upon the negatives of our psyche and maximising its positives (individuation), we can better control ourselves and grow.
Key Takeaways
- Jung’s model shows how there are conscious and unconscious parts of our psyche influenced by our own thoughts and our environment.
- There are certain aspects of our personality that we accept (ego), others that we project (persona), and others still that we repress (shadow).
- By developing all these parts of ourselves (individuation), we understand and control more of the way we think.
Before You Go
Hey, I’m currently spelunking the depths of my mind to find its inner workings! If you liked this article, feel free to:
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To give me a speed-boost potion in exploring that cave ;-)
