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Jung (1947) Perceived the Psyche as a Dynamic Interactive System that attempts to organize itself through “the equilibration of all kinds of opposites” (1947/1954, p. 207). The healthy psyche is an ongoing process between conscious and unconscious as two fields, a term and concept Jung adopted from William James. As two modes of psychic knowing and experiencing that relativize each other, these move along a vector toward individuation, understood as psychic balance. Via the interplay between these psychic complementarities, another term from James, psychic health is achieved through alternating rhythms of integration and disassociation. The practitioner is to enter into, attend, and participate in the self-reflective process by which a patient recognizes and negotiates the rhythms of opposites.
As a young psychiatrist working under Bleuler with an inpatient population, Jung perceived neurotic dissociation and more florid splitting as indications of an ego incapable of holding itself sufficiently intact to metabolize these tensions in the face of outer and inner challenges. This perspective emphasized the disassociative nature of symptoms, which informs much clinical work today.
In Jung's view, although symptoms emerge from unmetabolized residues of past experience, as psychic energy is also prospective (1928), they are also attempts from the unconscious to break through binding constructs of a fixated ego. Seemingly meaningless, each symptom may be unpacked for the meaning of both its contents and dynamic purpose.
Jung also approached the psyche as “a multiplicity within a unity,” based on his theory of complexes. In 1904, he used the word-association experiment to track feeling-toned autonomous complexes—bundles or quanta of energy operating outside the ego's ken, like splinter or