Jungian analytical psychology
season 1 episode 1 transcript:
Chase: Hey guys, it’s Chase, decided to do another video, actually technically my first. But a friend of mine starting talking to me, he’s like, “Hey man, maybe you should do your psychology stuff, and start educating people on what you know about Jungian analytical psychology,” so I was like okay, yeah sure, I’ll do that. So that’s what this video is.
Chase: So, I think I’m gonna be doing a lot of videos, this is just gonna be the first one, but I think I’m just going to focus on an introduction as to what it is I’m talking about. So the subject is Jungian analytical psychology, according to Carl Jung, which nowadays most people are complaining about, “Oh, you’re giving me an archetype, and making me be in a box, and that’s all I am to you, is just somebody in a box.” Yeah, no, that’s not actually how it works.
Chase: It’s a way of life. Jung talks about how people have cognitive senses, or cognitive functions, and cognitive senses and functions are basically … Sorry, I’m walking down a hill here, it’s very nice out, even though there are clouds everywhere. But that’s what I prefer, I’m from Seattle and I’m living in California, what can I say?
Chase: But yeah, cognitive functions, cognitive senses, which most people you don’t really hear about that when you take a MBTI test. MBTI is Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator, and Meyer-Briggs, although extremely popular and I will admit it’s useful, has its strengths, but it is not without its weaknesses. And quite frankly, I don’t have anything to do with it, I just don’t. I don’t like how Meyers-Briggs talks about how people can change their type at any time, or can change their letters, so it’s not ideal. That’s not actually how it works.
Chase: So yeah, there are 16 personality types, as they call them, or archetypes, according to Carl Jung, the father of analytical psychology. Sigmund Freud eat your heart out, I am very anti-Freudian, and prefer Jung every step of the way. I was taught Jung when I was homeless a few years ago, and I kept up with the study ever since. My mentor and his son taught me basically everything they knew, and I’ve been building and researching upon it since then.
Chase: So yeah, they introduced me to the 16 personality types, 16 different human souls or mindsets, as you would, that a person can have. But it’s basically 16 different approaches to life, basically. Ah, it’s raining now, love the rain. 16 ways of life. I like to think of them as like a way of life, and not actually like a box that someone gets put in. Everyone’s like oh yeah, we’re gonna take this MBTI test and it’s gonna tell us our personality. Well, the test is really inferior, and it’s not very accurate. I remember when I first took the test, I scored INFJ, and then after that I took it again, and I scored INTJ, and for years I thought I was an INTJ, but the actual truth of that is I’m an ENTP, also known as the visionary or originator, as some would call it.
Chase: Yeah, I’m definitely not an INTJ, the strategist or the INFJ, what I like to call the sage. Not a sage type, for sure, not the sage on the mountain. But definitely an ENTP.
Chase: So where does type come from? Well, I would like to say it’s something you’re born with, because people have their predispositioned personas right off the get-go, but we’ve observed that their approach to life, their way of life, it forms at an early age and it can change. And it also depends on environmental factors. It also depends on familial things.
Chase: My family, for example, didn’t like the fact that I was an ENTP, because I was overly sincere, and would say the wrong thing at the wrong time to the wrong person. It was true but untimely. And for the most part, my personality within my own family was rather rejected, which sucks. But it is what it is, everyone has to deal with this. It’s not just me because parents prefer certain types over other types.
Chase: Take fathers, for example, I am a father and I am guilty of this, my father did it with me. My father’s an ENFJ, and ENFJs want to become ISTPs, so they’re living vicariously through their children. They want at least one of their children, and whichever child is mostly like the ISTP, that’s the favorite of the ENFJ father, basically. And he was always trying to get me to work on cars with him, or build things with, ’cause he’s trying to aspire to become an ISTP himself, everyone wants to become their subconscious, right. Yeah well, that never happened.
Chase: So based on that, I ended up getting stuck in my shadow, my INTJ shadow, and because of that, I was stuck there for years and years and years, and it actually really inhibited my development personally, my approach to life, my way of life, because my type was not accepted by my family, or my church, or my community as a child, not really. Why? Well, it’s because the ENTP’s pretty rare, it’s three percent of the population, basically. So when you’re around three percent of the population, people just think you’re weird, you know, when the reality is, you have a valid way of life approach that no one can really challenge you on, because it’s just who you are. It’s not that you’re being put in a box.
Chase: So let’s look at what this way of life actually means. Every human being has their personality type, right. We could talk more later about where it comes from, but for right now, it’s a way of life, it’s their approach to everything. It’s how a person makes decisions. It’s how they gather information, and how their mind combines decision-making and information-gathering, also known as perceiving, to approach life, basically, approach this existence that we’re in together.
Chase: And within existence, we have to make decisions about it, and we need information with which to make decisions, or sometimes we make decisions to gather information, or other times decisions present themselves because we’ve gathered so much information, and we notice patterns. And decisions are birthed from perception, information gathering, but also perception is also birthed from decision-making. It just goes in both ways. Some are more primary or secondary, depending on which of the 16 types is using those cognitive senses, cognitive functions.
Chase: But each human being actually has four, four, four personalities inside of them, four human beings inside of them actually. And this is where I differ a lot from the MBTI. It’s actually where I differ from one of my mentors. He believes that there’s only three, mostly because he’s a Trinitarian Christian, and I don’t have anything against Trinitarian Christians as a people, but I do not agree with utilizing that form of belief system to try to explain the human psyche. That’s not my thing, I try to be more scientific about it, and at least do the research.
Chase: So my other mentor, his son actually turned me on to the idea that there’s actually four, so what are the four sides of the human mind? Well, you have the ego, and that’s basically the primary place that the human mind usually resides, it’s where it’s most comfortable. It’s where it is almost all the time.
Chase: And then there’s also the shadow, which is the unconscious side of the mind. There’s also the subconscious, which is where someone is trying to aspire to be, but it’s also their polar opposite. So if you’re around people whose egos are the same as your subconscious, there’s going to be some conflict, that just goes without saying.
Chase: My mother, for example, is the polar opposite of me, and there is definitely some conflict there on a regular basis. It makes life more interesting that way, and crazy chaotic, and it can make it very hard. But from a parent/child relationship, there’s not much you can do about that.
Chase: There’s also the superego. Now superego is the subject of much debate, but in religious circles the superego would be the source of man’s sin nature, or what corrupts the soul basically. And corruption is a problem, it’s a part of the human condition that we all suffer, basically, and there’s not much you can do about that. And as incorruptible as people try to imagine themselves to be, the superego exists.
Chase: Martin Luther, not Martin Luther King but Martin Luther, said that sin nature is the self bending in upon the self, and it’s really interesting to me, because that’s what the superego’s trying to do. It sits on the complete opposite spectrum in the human mind as the ego, and it is consistently trying to pull the ego down to itself, so it can replace the position of the ego because it desperately wants to become the primary.
Chase: So, a great example of the superego is actually in one of the recent Batman films. Heath Ledger’s portrayal of the Joker, Heath Ledger being an ENTP, a Joker being an ENTP, but he’s stuck in his superego side, and he’s this demonic entertainer, demonic trickster basically. Parasitic trickster is another way of putting it, and this entertainer’s superego, it just exists to see the world burn, as Alfred in the film put it, because the world is so screwed up, because the ego tried everything it could do to cope with the world. The subconscious tried to do everything it could do to cope with the world. The shadow, or the unconscious mind, tried to do everything it could to cope with the world. And they all gave up, basically.
Chase: So in the Joker’s mind, they just gave up, so they gave it all to the superego. And the superego’s like great, my turn, I’m just gonna start burning everything down because there is nothing of value here. Well, when you burn everything down, then new life comes, and that’s kind of like the eerie hope of the superego, at least in that case, and that eerie hope, it doesn’t happen that way as people plan. But that’s the perspective of the superego, at least in an ENTP, is to be destructive for the sake of life, that’s how they justify it at least, even though there is no justification.
Chase: But the trick is, like with any human mind, any of the 16 types, ENTP or otherwise, you wanna make sure that when you’re in your life, that your ego and your subconscious and your shadow can handle everything. Try not to rely on the superego too much. To be fair, though, that’s impossible in the long run, because there are situations where you just have no choice but to use your superego. And it can be used for good things, but it’s mostly used for evil purposes. Not the best, but we have it for a reason, and it’s just one of our additional coping mechanisms that our mind has.
Chase: But yeah, type is a way of life. It’s not a box. You’re not being put into a box when you take a test. People think, “Well, I’m an INTP, so I behave like this, or you think I’m this type, so that means you think I’m this way, and I’m bad here and good here, but I actually have good qualities here.” Yeah, that’s not how it works. Type is so insanely complex. Think about it this way. You have four cognitive senses, and a cognitive sense or cognitive function, same thing, they’re homonyms of each other, cognitive functions … There’s four of them per side of your mind. There’s four of them in your ego, there’s four of them in your unconscious, there’s four of them in your subconscious, four of them in your superego.
Chase: And each sense is like a spectrum with which your mind can tune into, basically. So you’re tuning in, and you’re tuning into things like ethics or rationale or logic or morals, or you’re tuning into your own past, or you’re tuning into the moment in the physical environment around your, or you’re tuning into the future, your personal future or everyone’s future. So the human mind, everyone’s mind is tuning into these eight different frequencies with these cognitive functions, and there’s four per side per sub-soul of the human soul, basically.
Chase: That means there’s 16 of them in your head, right, and then you have to multiply that by four, so it ends up becoming four times four times four times four. The amount of complexity and the dimensions within one human mind, psychologically speaking, is almost uncountable, it’s gigantic. And for people to be reduced down to a simple test, it’s not it. To claim that you’re being put in a box, that’s not it. Psychological archetypes are a way of life, it is how you approach life. It is who you are, it is your nature. That is what type is, it is your nature.
Chase: I’m an ENTP, it’s my nature to be an ENTP. It is my nature to see into the future, to prognosticate, to have some semblance of precognitive capability, to be logical, to be very caring, to be insecure at trying new things like YouTube videos, right. It’s also normal for ENTPs to be moralless, but they have ethics, right, it’s a trade-off. No one type has it all, no one type is better than the other.
Chase: But that’s the main point I’m trying to make with this video guys. It’s a way of life, it’s not a box. It’s who you are. It’s your nature, and no one has the right to tell you that your nature is one way or another. Your nature is you, and you need to be okay with being you, and people need to be okay with being you. That’s the important thing, that’s the most important. If there’s anything that you ever learn from me, it’s that.
Chase: It wasn’t until I discovered who I was, and that I was okay with who I was, that I realized I had to be okay with everybody else, because the one ultimate lesson here, it’s an old adage, love your neighbor as yourself. How can I love my neighbor as myself if I don’t even understand them? And how can I understand anyone if I don’t understand myself? That’s what type is to me, this way of life is to understand myself in such a way where I can understand others. And because I understand others, I’m less judgemental, I treat them respect, end up gaining more respect. I end up understanding them and am able to establish relationships with them on a regular basis, more than I’ve ever been able to before. And a lot of people, they don’t really understand that. Ignorance is the problem.
Chase: So I’m here to solve that problem, and enlighten people on what psychological type, Jungian analytical psychology, and archetypes actually are, and how useful they are, and what they mean. Things like the DISC system, MBTI, HEXACO, all these different personality tests that you find online, strength finders, all that. Yeah, they’re built on similar principles, but they don’t go deep enough, and no one’s willing to go as deep as they need to.
Chase: Anyway, if you’ve found this video helpful, please like and subscribe. I get it, it’s my first one, but I’ll be doing a lot more, and going into depth one type at a time, one cognitive function at a time, and show everyone how things really are in the Jungian analytical psychology world.
Chase: So with that, have a good day, I’ll see you next time.
