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Jung was wary of founding a `school' of psychology, and his co-workers recall many occasions on which he made statements along the lines of "thank God I am Jung and not a Jungian." This being the case, the term `Jungian' is a bit of a misnomer. Jung himself preferred the term `analytical psychology.'
Contemporary analytical psychology has diversified considerably in recent decades, establishing a range of methods and viewpoints, and exploring areas that were insufficiently studied by Jung himself (most notably child psychology).
After the break with Freud, Jung questioned how such divergent views as Freud's, Adler's and his own could develop out of Psychoanalysis. The result of his questionings was Psychological Types (volume 6 of the Collected Works), in which Jung outlines a framework within which psychological orientations can be identified. The now much misunderstood terms `extravert' and `introvert' derive from this work. In Jung's original usage, the extravert orientation finds meaning outside the self, in the surrounding world, whereas the introvert finds it within. Jung also identified four modes of experience, four functions: thought, feeling, sensation, and intuition. Broadly speaking, we tend to work from our most developed function, and we need to widen our personality by developing the others. In addition, the unconscious often tends to manifest through the inferior function, so that encounter with the unconscious and development of the inferior function(s) can tend to progress together.
The four functions may be extraverted or introverted.
This model has been amended by some subsequent analytical psychologists.
Central to analytical psychology is encounter with the unconscious. The result is greater adaptation to reality (both inner and outer), and more developed consciousness. We experience the unconscious through symbols, and an essential part of the process is to learn its language. Jung recalled how during his time with Freud he was looking one day at a notice in a foreign language, and he reflected on how the notice doesn't conceal its meaning, but simply requires us to learn how to read it. He considered that maybe Freud had attributed a concealing and distorting function to the unconscious when in fact what's required is to understand how the unconscious expresses itself.
Blocked or distorted development of the personality is characteristic of neurosis, and in psychosis consciousness is overwhelmed by the unconscious. The aim of psychotherapy in Jung's view is to develop a situation where consciousness is not swamped by the unconscious, but neither is it shut off from it. The encounter between consciousness and the symbols arising from the unconscious enriches life and promotes psychological development, individuation.
Jung's concept of the collective unconscious is often misunderstood as some kind of race memory, with the archetypal symbols being somehow transmitted, perhaps genetically. In fact, what Jung meant by the term is that we share a common psychological heritage, just as we share a common physical one. Symbols have a certain similarity and fall into similar patterns in different places and times, simply because the human mind is basically similar. Thus we can often understand the symbols arising from the unconscious by comparing them with similar processes occuring elsewhere. Jung said that it isn't a matter of inherited images, but rather of an inherited predisposition to experience certain images. Many of the commonly repeated criticisms of Jung's work seem to be based on a misunderstanding of this last point.
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