O segundo sujeito: o ser e o não ser na estrutura da psique humana segundo Carl Gustav Jung

Abstract

This research aims to present the alleged existence of a second subject within the psyche as a philosophical problem of human reality, highlighting how contradictory an individual can be in their deliberations and life experiences. The second subject can be conceptually portrayed as an unconscious second personality that inhabits everyone and interferes with our conscious actions. However, the first subject—or simply the subject—is nothing less than the ego, the gravitational center of our consciousness that forms our identity. At least, this can be stated based on what we know about the conscious and unconscious through the empirical and theoretical arguments of the medical psychotherapist Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), who founded the Analytical Psychology upon which this text is based. Thus, this work understands that the discussion reverberates what constitutes the human soul, here referred to as personality, distinguishing it from the psyche (an uncommon distinction). All possible understanding regarding this is applied in the first chapter of this dissertation, titled “The Functions of the Subject in Personality”. Subsequently, the various layers of the human mind will be explored in depth in the second chapter, presenting “The Structure of the Psyche” and how a one-sidedness in human development, exclusively favoring rationality, has contributed to psychic problems or illnesses—which, in turn, are possibly the source of social and political issues, as will be better understood in the closing of the third chapter when discussing “Self-Knowledge”. That said, the methodology employed in this work is a hermeneutics of the featured author's bibliography, interpreting most of his concepts presented in works such as Psychological Types, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, and The Symbolic Life, Vol. 1. These are, therefore, the primary objects of study throughout the chapters, without excluding other supporting works, such as the interpretations of the Brazilian Nise da Silveira, the German Marie-Louise von Franz, and the Swiss-Jewish Aniela Jaffé. Furthermore, some historical contexts will be revealed in this narrative, mainly in the details of the introduction, seeking to familiarize the reader with the figure of Carl Jung. Finally, due to the previously indicated contradiction in the individual's psyche, the presence of complementary opposite phenomena will be observed within different characteristics of the concepts of conscious and unconscious, formulating what this research calls being and non-being simultaneously. These oppositions deal with the presence of two opposite and contradictory poles that do not annul each other, thus forming a psychic complement from opposites. In other words, a dialectic of the psyche is developed through human contradictions that trigger a transformation—a change of the subject itself in the process of becoming. Therefore, the two sides of the individual, conscious and unconscious, are equally important within their own proportions and must be preserved for collective and individual psychic health.