Jung’s Two Personalities: Psychological Implications

Jung’s Two Personalities: Psychological Implications

with Mark Saban

Saturday March 5, 2022
9:00 PST | 12:00 EST | 17:00 GMT  |  18:00 CET

2-hour session

The session is live and you will be sent the RECORDING.

In his book, Two Souls Alas: Jung’s Two Personalities and the Making of Analytical Psychology (2019), Mark Saban looksinto the way Jung uses his memoir to describe the experience of having two personalities. Saban argues there that Jung’s experience of the dynamic between these two personalities informs basic principles behind the development of Jung’s psychological model and indeed Jung’s entire mature psychology. He suggests that what Jung took from this experience was the principle that psychological health required the avoidance of one-sidedness and that this was achieved through the experience of tension between what Jung described as two conflicting personalities. It was this dynamic that powered Jung’s notion of individuation. In short, any one-sided position needs to be brought into tension with a conflicting ‘opposite’ position, in order that a third position can be achieved which transcends both of the earlier positions. This latter operation Jung called the Transcendent Function.In this talk, Saban will open up this notion, showing how it operates within both psychotherapeutic work and wider cultural and political spheres.

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To see the Full Dualities Program

Mark Saban PhD worked for 20 years as an actor and performer before training with the Independent Group of Analytical Psychologists, with whom he is a senior analyst. He is also a lecturer in Jungian and post-Jungian studies in the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex.

Publications: Mark co-edited (with Emilija Kiehl and Andrew Samuels) Analysis and Activism – Social and Political Contributions of Jungian Psychology (Routledge 2016) and wrote Two Souls Alas: Jung’s Two Personalities and the Making of Analytical Psychology (Chiron 2019) which won the International Association of Jungian Studies’ Best Book of 2019.

s the 2019 Zürich Lecture Series at the International School of Analytical Psychology. Based on his Ph.D. thesis, the book was published by Chiron in 2019.