Home » Mind & Soul » Jungian Psychology » A Jungian Perspective on Personality Development

A Jungian Perspective on Personality Development

© Bonnie McCarson

What do the words “personality development” mean to you? Becoming a more charming, charismatic person, a stronger person? We think of an individual as having a pleasing personality, an irresistible personality – perhaps we could go on and on with the adjectives. But let’s look at the word “personality” as Jung did in “The Development of Personality.” There he launches into a discussion of the education system’s attempts at “personality training,” which he sees as an effort to mass-produce people who will fit into the cogs of modern society.

Being an educator, I have to agree with Jung that society through its efforts to educate does follow an assembly-line mass production model. Standardized curricula and testing, as well as many other movements in contemporary education, in the name of producing good citizens who will fit into society, often tend more to squelch personality than to enhance it. But Jung goes on to say that the idea of developing personality is not for children anyway. It is adults he addresses when he says, “for what is usually meant by personality – a well-rounded psychic whole that is capable of resistance and bounding in energy – is an adult ideal.” (Storr 193). Then he goes on to explain that within every adult there is an eternal child who is always in the process of becoming that psychic whole. (Storr 194).

As children we probably all experienced talking about or being asked about what we wanted to become when we grew up. Most children change their ideas and answers numerous times before reaching adulthood. The early years often produce more whimsical fantasy-oriented ideas. We nearly all want to be heroes in some sense of the word. But practicality and the necessity for finding a way to earn a living wear away the more fanciful aspirations, and as adults we often settle into the mundane, looking on those childhood thoughts as childish.

In a sense, however, if we are to develop our personalities to the fullest extent possible, as individuals we become the heroes or heroines in our own personal dramas. While we are making a living in some ordinary way, we can still be engaging in our personal hero’s quest for the “fruit of a full life” and “the achievement of personality” which Jung says is “nothing less than the optimum development of the whole individual human being.” (Storr 195). There is no “training” in the specifics of how to achieve this, no formula that spells in out in ten easy steps so that one can program oneself to the quick accomplishment of the goal. It is more an approach to how one lives life than a specific method.