On Carl Jung

I've always known Carl Jung through MBTI — through the 16 personalities, the cognitive functions, the cleaner and more systematized version of something that, in its original form, was probably much messier, stranger, and more alive 🌿. But recently, while listening to a podcast episode about him while driving, something in my understanding shifted a little. What struck me was that Jung was not just trying to build a theory for the sake of building one. He was noticing patterns — in dreams, in symbols, in recurring human roles, in the strange ways people betray themselves and reveal themselves at the same time — and trying to describe something that seemed to repeat across completely different lives.

What stayed with me most was not merely the idea of archetypes themselves, but Jung's notion of the shadow 🌑: that the parts of us our ego rejects do not simply vanish because we do not want to identify with them. They go somewhere. They remain. They wait. And then, rather than appearing cleanly or directly, they emerge sideways — through behavior, through resistance, through overreaction, through the small distortions in our lives that do not make sense until we look at them more honestly.

When I think about my own life, I can see this pretty clearly. There have been many moments where what looked like laziness was not really laziness at all, but resistance; not a lack of care, but some deeper counterforce in me pulling against the very things I consciously said I wanted. Procrastination, avoidance, the strange tendency to delay what mattered most — those things feel different when seen through this lens. And even more clearly, I can see it in my earlier relationship to being gay 🏳️‍🌈. There was a time when certain expressions of queerness made me cringe, when fruitiness in other men evoked discomfort or even disgust in me, and when my instinct was to distance myself from it with a quiet internal "that's not me." But looking back now, it feels almost obvious that this was not really about other people. It was about a part of myself I did not yet know how to welcome.

And of course, if that part of me was rejected, then of course it did not disappear. It simply came out elsewhere — in shame, in hesitation, in distortion, in all the subtle ways repression makes itself known without announcing its name. There is something almost relieving about Jung's framework because it makes these contradictions feel less random and less morally damning. The parts of me I pushed away were not gone; they were simply insisting on their existence by other means. Not as punishment, exactly, but as a kind of psychic persistence: you may not want me, but I am still here.

That idea also changes the way I think about identity more generally. It suggests that the self is not something pure, singular, or permanently coherent, but something made up of many parts, some of which we gladly claim and some of which we would rather deny. And perhaps the task is not to sort those parts into "good" and "bad," nor to commit more perfectly to the version of ourselves we most admire, but to become capable of facing more of what is there. This is what Jung makes me think about when he speaks of wholeness ✨: not purity, not optimization, but integration.

It actually reminded me of Inside Out 2 🎬, especially that moment when Riley's more polished self-concept begins to fracture. Up until then, her identity had a certain simplicity to it — "I'm kind," "I'm a good person," the sort of statement that works as long as life does not yet complicate it. But once that image starts to break, she spirals, because she is forced to confront something more difficult and more true: that she is not just one thing. She is kind and not kind, confident and insecure, composed and messy, generous and selfish, all at once. That realization is overwhelming precisely because it destroys the fantasy of being reducible to one clean moral identity. But it is also a move toward truth. And that, to me, feels very Jungian.

I think for much of my life I have also been trying, in one way or another, to become a certain kind of self — more composed, more disciplined, more integrated, more "together." And when I fail to fully inhabit that ideal, I often experience it as failure rather than information. But perhaps that is the wrong frame. Perhaps the parts of me that avoid, delay, resist, or feel unsure are not merely flaws to eradicate, but signals to understand 🔍. Not excuses, obviously, but clues. Evidence of some unresolved tension between who I consciously want to be and what other parts of me still fear, still need, or still refuse.

This is also why Jung's attention to dreams 💭 feels newly compelling to me. I have already believed, for some time, that dreams matter — that they are not random static, but some kind of symbolic residue or communication from below the surface. But hearing more about how seriously Jung took them made me want to become more intentional about remembering them, recording them, and noticing what patterns recur. Because if there really are structures underneath our lives that we do not fully see, if there are recurring forms through which the psyche keeps trying to speak, then ignoring them does not make them disappear. It only makes them harder to understand.

And maybe that is the larger shift Jung offers me right now. Not the promise that I can perfect myself through enough insight, but the reminder that becoming more whole may have less to do with becoming "better" in the narrow, ego-approved sense, and more to do with becoming more complete 🌊 — more honest about what is in me, more willing to face what I once rejected, and more able to let the different parts of myself belong to the same life.