Introduction

Carl Jung is often referenced as a scientific authority knocking on the door of spirituality. Although the peak of his work is almost 100 years old, his legacy is still very much alive. 

Jung’s scope of interests between psychology, culture, science and spirituality is what makes him such an interesting author to use in a lot of cultural product analysis and psychological tips. Just take a look a these:

Shadow work. Individuation. Collective unconscious. Archetypes. Animus and Anima. Synchronicity. Dream analysis. Active imagination. Introvert/extrovert personality types. And a bunch of corny YouTube videos.

All of this Jungian legacy, all of it relevant and useful if you want to improve your psychological life. It’s also a reflection of our modern condition. We seek advice on these topics, and the internet responds back with content.

So, his legacy is a well established recognizability on the internet. For that reason we should examine his teaching – and the content about his teachings.

The Appeal of Jungian Psychology in Modern Times

Precisely because the most talked about cultural products often describe things most intimate and common to us as human beings, Jungian work contributes a lot towards understanding these products and our affection towards them. Jung also dealt a lot with finding a way to fight anxiety and find a purpose in life in the process of individuation.

Make no mistake, chances are that you have stumbled upon the mentioned terms at least once, or you have probably actively searched for them.

These chances are further proven by the fact that 1 out of 5 adolescents feels anxiety, while Persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness is reported by 36.7% of the adolescent population in the USA (please check Center for Disease control and prevention fact sheet for a visual representation).

Jungian psychology does address these issues, but it still does not answer the question “why Jung”? Why not someone else?

The thing about Jung’s legacy and why he’s so popular nowadays is that a lot of his work is on the edge between spirituality and psychology. With it, there maybe exists a way to combine yourself (psychology) with “bigger” questions that spirituality often does tackle with. 

In other words, while psychology deals with everyday life. Spirituality, right or wrong, provides answers for the meaning of it. Jungian psychology examined these topics probably in more depth and width than any other author.

The reason why Jung is such a popular psychologist nowadays is his deep interest in all kinds of spiritual practices. In that way, spiritual insight is a form of psychological insight, and spirituality can be used as a beneficial psychological factor.

Carl Jung’s Contributions to Psychology and Spirituality 

Jung’s exploration of the collective unconscious revealed universal patterns and symbols shared across cultures, reflecting humanity’s innate spiritual heritage. Jung also recognized the significance of religious and spiritual experiences in individuals’ lives, viewing them as expressions of the psyche’s quest for meaning and transcendence.

He saw parallels between religious symbols and archetypes, suggesting that religious traditions provide symbolic language for understanding the mysteries of the human psyche. 

Jungian psychology as internet content

Well, the issue is, that these things do not go hand in hand so easily. Nor did Jung claim it. This can result in misuse of Jung’s theories.

The issue in these situation arises especially when we return to the significant population that does suffer from the sense of anxiety. If this population as an audience – something you become just by using the internet – misuses of spiritual and scientific theories becomes problematic. 

When your audience includes people facing mental health challenges or distress, presenting personal opinions or unproven ideas as “facts” endorsed by respected psychologists, like C.G. Jung, raises an important question: are you truly helping, or potentially causing harm?

This is the core issue we aim to highlight—how Jung’s scientific contributions are sometimes misused to lend credibility to questionable, pseudo-scientific claims.

Jung’s writing have an often purposeful ambiguity between psychological and mystical phenomena. This is misused by a lot of pseudoscientific news sites or even YouTube channels in order to bypass any complex understanding of the issues they deal with. Let’s check on some easier ones.

The Misuse of Jungian Concepts in video essays  

Synchronicity 

This might just be the case of lazy writing/generating content just so it can be delivered to the target audience. The story told in both videos (timestamps: 6:05 for the first video and 5:40 for the second) is a good example of how Jung’s terms and ideas like synchronicity can be misinterpreted.

Synchronicity is NOT seeking out meaningful connections in every random aspect of our lives, but experiencing a meaningful connection in a random aspect of our lives.

And let me be clear: synchronicity is one of ideas Jung wrote about that are between spiritual and scientific. He described synchronicity as an acausal Connecting Principle: Jung proposed that synchronicity operates on an “acausal” principle, meaning that the connections between events are not based on cause and effect. 

Instead, they are linked by their meaningfulness. This is a radical departure from the conventional scientific view, which typically seeks to explain phenomena through causality. Still, meaning is something inherently human.

While synchronicity definitely can have wider considerations it is a term strongly related to meaning. Meaning is a psychological experience; not something inherent to a thing or an event. By being a psychological experience the mind recognizes what it’s preoccupied with – and indeed some really strange, low probability events can happen. Synchronicity is a part of a wider set of tools of Jungian psychology, and taken out of context, can only create more confusion or paranoia. 

In other words, without critical examination, you can find patterns anywhere; even where they do not exist. Synchronicity in that way just becomes an imagined Cosmic validation, not an insightful moment you could experience.

By searching for synchronicity in everything you devalue the meaning for yourself, and place your choices in the hands of something abstract and unverifiable. This is in stark contrast with what Jungian psychology wants: to foster, enable and empower individuals to make choices for themselves, by themselves. 

These are the reasons why that kind of watered down content is not beneficial for either your spiritual explorations nor for your psychological growth.

The purpose of these videos is to keep you engaged with YouTube for 20 minutes and that’s it. If you want a spiritual experience, dwelling on a corny story how everything bad happens for the reason of your own benefit won’t facilitate much except the YouTube algorithm.

If, on the other hand, you feel anxious and want psychological advice, the inability to perceive the synchronic kind of events (which is totally reasonable and expected) can push you further down the path of self-doubt and anxiety. Like geez, even the angels are not helping!

Collective unconscious

Timestamp: 3:30

This is also one of the really interesting concepts provided by Carl Jung. And is also (mis)represented a lot. And a lot of it comes from popular culture.

Video game series like Persona and their “Sea of souls” made a great metaphor for the collective unconscious, just as TV series like Twin Peaks did. The trend towards finding shared patterns in religions and finding shared mythological patterns, like Ancient aliens series, also contributed to popularizing this concept.

But let’s take a step back for a bit. “Sea of souls” is a great metaphor for an idea that Jung had a different idea about then it being “a realm” of its own. 

Collective unconscious is not a place to visit, nor it’s a metaphysical space from which parts of our identity emerge. It’s a much more mundane psychological fact, an instinct that’s the same for every human. Just like each fully healthy person is born with a liver, so too is every healthy person born with a certain brain predispositions.

These predispositions are called archetypes; the total amount of them is the collective unconscious. And just like you wouldn’t say there’s a collective liver, or realm of the liver, the idea of collective unconscious is often misrepresented.

In other words, it does not prove the existence of spiritual beings, God or whatever: it does prove our natural inclination towards them. It can also lead us to explore spiritual beings, God or whatever; but a metaphor should not be taken literally. Any spiritual path is difficult and time consuming, and just mindlessly consuming something you want to believe will restrain your interests in these topics.

Shadow and shadow work

I want to end on a positive note. There is a lot of carefully written and delivered content on how to do shadow work. But when this term gets applied to social groups and social media, we get a really messy pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo. 

The shadow and shadow work often gets associated with something otherworldly dark that gets a hold on us. This is especially true when the stakes are more vague and refer to our “collective consciousness”. To demystify this term, “collective consciousness” often just means our culture. Or even more specifically, culture usually just means the things we see on the internet.

In Jungian psychology, shadow work is a psychological process that with assistance or through introspection you are probing, questioning and encountering the repressed aspects of yourself.

Shadow work can be used as a spiritual tool as well, especially because it can go deep in our unconscious. But oftentimes “shadow work” is used as an excuse to block, reject or silence any and all criticism regarding one’s spirituality or worldview. It’s represented as a purge of negative influence – a fight of light versus dark. And by doing this, you are doing the exact opposite of encountering your shadow.

Let’s take an example of how NOT to do shadow work. In an interesting video-essay The Narcissist Scare Sarah Z shows how not coming on terms with a shadow (in this case, a projected “narcissist”) gets radicalized to “light” – in this case a dark empath we recognize ourselves in.

And it’s no wonder that Carl Jung’s terminology is misused in these scenarios. Just the words themselves have a strong emotional value that soothes the ego. In spiritual circles it’s often associated with warriors of light concept, and by saying “I’m fighting the shadow of our collective mind” you get this important, eternal image of a fight between light and dark, good and evil, true and false. And of course, you’re on the good guys side. 

But in practice, what does it really mean? Are you “fighting the shadows of collective consciousness” by writing angry posts to people who trust the science? Are you angry at the media? Do you block real people for disagreeing with you? How does the fighting make you feel?

Why?

The best way to investigate these issues is to actually do shadow work yourself. By no means is this an exhaustive “how to” guide, but as I said, I want to end on a positive note. The link below is a short video on how exactly to start the shadow work.

Conclusion – Balancing Scientific and Spiritual Interpretations of Jung

Jung really did write a lot about psychology AND spirituality. His work can be a great addition to understanding either of those.

And when dealing with a human mind, we also have a responsibility to understand how complex and delicate it is. Someone’s casual or misguided approach can have a lot of bad implications for the people seeking advice, therapy or a spiritual guidance. 

Spirituality and psychology are two interrelated things. But don’t mistake one for the other. It is perfectly fine to work on these two separately through different methods.

Synchronicity, Collective Unconscious and Shadow Work are some of the most common Jung’s ideas that are misrepresented or misused. Misuse of Jung’s theories relies on capitalizing on people wanting assistance or wanting to provide assistance; or at best, it relies on people wanting more from life.

But relying on a superficial understanding of Jungian psychology can be harmful in the long run; that’s also the reason why it’s so important to be critical if someone is intentionally or not misusing Jung’s work. Because these things are way too important to be taken lightly.

Verdict: C.G. Jung is trustworthy, but often misrepresented.