Jung’s Model of the Psyche

Imagine that two cartographers design maps of a particular territory. One cartographer describes what is on the surface of that territory; the other, however, makes a map, a geological survey. In Jung’s description of the geology of the psyche (in a collection of his talks published in 1925 as Analytical Psychology) there’s a sketch of the psyche (p. 133) made by Jung himself and reproduced below.

A = individuals; B = families; C = clans; D = nations; E= larger groups, such as
Europeans; F = primate ancestors; G = animal ancestors, in general; and H = the central fire

C indicate complexes and those with the letter A indicate archetypes.

The ego is shown orbiting in a band of consciousness around a central nucleus, the Self. The inner and middle concentric bands represent the collective and the personal unconscious, respectively. The functional units making up the personal unconscious are the complexes, and those of which the collective unconscious is composed are the archetypes. A close functional relationship exists between complexes and archetypes that complexes are “personifications” of archetypes;
complexes are the means through which archetypes manifest themselves in the personal psyche.

The Ego and the Self, as well as the Persona and the Shadow assembled in a schema.

Jung describes the persona as that which one is not, but which oneself and others think one is. It is a functional complex that comes into existence for reasons of adaptation or personal convenience but is by no means identical with the personality. The persona is exclusively concerned with the relation to objects.

The shadow is everything an individual refuses to acknowledge about himself. Qualities perceived as undesirable, unacceptable, or reprehensible are repressed or hidden from view in the shadow, the polar opposite of the persona.

The ego is a complex of ideas that constitutes the center of [one’s] field of consciousness and appears
to possess a high degree of continuity and identity.

The Self the unknown essence that transcends our powers of comprehension.  It is the ordering, structure ipving principle within the psyche.

As an empirical concept, the Self designates the whole range of psychic phenomena in humans. It expresses the unity of the personality as a whole. … It encompasses both the experienceable and the inexperienceable (or the not-yet experienced). . . . Insofar as psychic totality, consisting of both conscious and unconscious contents, is a postulate, it is a transcendental concept, for it presupposes the existence of unconscious factors on empirical grounds, and thus characterizes an entity that can be described only in part, but for the other part, remains at present unknowable and illimitable.

Jung’s psychology is essentially based on a biological model: the existence of archetypes embedded in the collective unconscious. The archetype is a primordial image that is determined as to its content only when it has become conscious and therefore informed by the material of conscious experience. The archetype in itself is empty and purely formal, nothing but a capacity in potential. It is the archetypal image that will make the archetype appear in consciousness. 

What better image, then, to see the archetype in the Invisible Man and the archetypal image in the Invisible Man dressed up, since our psyche “dresses up” the archetype with our personal experience.

A validation of Jung’s proposition that there is layer in our psyche, the collective unconscious, which provides the archetypal “geological” structure and that myths, fairy tales, legends, fantasies, and dreams give content to the events in our psyches, at the same time placing them in historical continuity and in a timeless, transcendent dimension comes from comparing two myths in two cultures separated by centuries and by geography. One is found among the Platonic Myths wherein, it is said, the soul of each (if us is given a unique daimon before we are born, and it has selected an image or a pattern that we will live on earth. The daimon is the soul companion that guides us, but at birth we forget. The daimon remembers, however, what belongs to us, and therefore, it is our daimon that is the carrier if our destiny. We must go back to childhood, because there we still had some idea, some grasp of what the intention of our daimon was. We need to get back to that if we don’t want to be sick.

The other one comes from West Africa. It says that before we enter this world, we draw up a contract with our double as to what we will do in the course of our life. Then, just before birth, we are led to the Tree of forgetfulness. We embrace it, and from that moment on, we have no conscious recollection of the contract. We must, however, live up to out agreements, for if we do
not we will become ill, and we will need the help of a diviner to contact our heavenly double to discover which articles of the agreement we are failing to fulfill.