What Is Jungian Therapy?: A Guide to Jungian Therapy

If you have found your way to Jungian therapy, there is a good chance you are looking for something a little different from therapy focused primarily on changing a behavior, learning a coping strategy, or reducing a particular symptom.

Maybe you already understand why you do what you do, but the pattern keeps repeating anyway.

Maybe you have done a lot of work on yourself and still have the sense that there are parts of your inner life you cannot quite reach.

Or perhaps you are becoming less interested in asking, How do I make this feeling go away? and more interested in asking:

Why is this here? What is underneath it? What might I not yet understand about myself?

These are the kinds of questions that Jungian analytical therapy makes room for.

As a depth-oriented psychotherapist, my work is informed by Jungian psychology, psychodynamic therapy, and trauma-informed care. What continues to draw me to this work is not the promise that we can completely understand or master ourselves.

Quite the opposite.

Jungian therapy begins with the recognition that there is more to us than the conscious mind knows.

What Is Jungian Therapy?

Jungian therapy is a form of depth-oriented therapy rooted in the work of Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung and his approach to psychology, known as analytical psychology.

At its foundation is a relatively simple idea:

Not everything influencing your life is conscious.

We make choices, enter relationships, react emotionally, repeat patterns, dream, avoid, desire, and sometimes work against our own stated intentions for reasons we do not entirely understand.

A Jungian approach to therapy becomes curious about that not entirely.

Rather than focusing only on what is happening at the surface, we also pay attention to the unconscious psychological processes beneath our experiences. This may include early relationships and experiences, but Jungian work can also involve dreams, symbols, creativity, complexes, archetypal patterns, the shadow, and questions of identity and meaning.

The goal is not to analyze everything you do. It is to develop a deeper relationship with the parts of your psychological life that may already be influencing you without your awareness.

If this approach already sounds familiar, you can learn more about how I incorporate depth-oriented and trauma-informed work into online psychotherapy for adults.

Jungian Therapy and Depth Psychology

Jungian therapy is part of the broader tradition of depth psychology.

Depth psychology assumes that our conscious thoughts and behaviors are only one layer of psychological life. There are other layers beneath them.

Imagine that you know intellectually you do not have to please everyone, but you still feel panicked when someone is disappointed in you.

Learning to say no may be genuinely helpful.

But depth therapy might also become curious about the larger pattern.

What does another person's disappointment mean to you?

When did maintaining connection begin to require abandoning some part of yourself?

Who have you learned you need to be in order to belong?

The behavior matters. But so does the psychological world beneath the behavior.

Sometimes the question is not only, How do I stop doing this?

It is also, Why has some part of me needed to do this in the first place?

What Happens in a Jungian Therapy Session?

There is a misconception that a Jungian therapy session means spending an hour analyzing dreams or discussing archetypes.

It does not have to.

You also do not need to know anything about Carl Jung before beginning.

A session may start with something quite ordinary. A relationship. Something that happened at work. An argument you cannot stop replaying. A decision you are struggling with. A familiar pattern that has returned yet again.

The difference is often in how we listen to what emerges.

Rather than immediately deciding an uncomfortable feeling needs to disappear, we might become curious about it.

Rather than treating a repeated relationship pattern as evidence that you have simply made another bad choice, we might explore what feels psychologically familiar about the dynamic.

Depending on the person, Jungian-oriented therapy may also include dreams, imagery, creativity, active imagination, recurring symbols, or attention to what is happening within the therapeutic relationship itself.

There is not a Jungian checklist we need to complete.

The theory should serve the person, not the other way around.

Dreams, Shadow Work, and the Unconscious

Dreams and shadow work are probably two of the most recognizable aspects of Jungian psychology today, although both can become oversimplified.

In Jungian work, a dream is not necessarily a puzzle with one correct interpretation. Instead, we might explore its images, emotions, associations, and contradictions and become curious about what the dream brings into awareness.

The shadow describes aspects of ourselves that have fallen outside our conscious identity.

Those are not necessarily our “bad” qualities.

The shadow can contain anger or envy, but it can also contain assertiveness, creativity, desire, playfulness, ambition, tenderness, or other qualities we learned were not acceptable for us to embody.

I explore this idea much more deeply in my guide to shadow work and the shadow self.

Jungian therapy is not about digging around for everything that is wrong with you. It is about becoming more capable of recognizing and relating to parts of yourself that have remained outside awareness.

Jungian Therapy and Individuation

One of Jung's central ideas was individuation, the lifelong process of becoming a more whole and differentiated person.

I do not think of this as discovering some perfect, authentic self underneath everything else.

Individuation often involves encountering contradiction.

You can love someone and be angry with them.

You can be independent and still need other people.

You can be grateful for the person you have had to become while recognizing that the same identity may now be constricting you.

Sometimes psychological growth asks us to become less certain about who we are before something new can emerge.

In that sense, Jungian therapy is not necessarily asking, How do we get you back to normal?

Sometimes the more interesting question is:

Who are you becoming?

Who Might Be Drawn to Jungian Therapy?

People rarely come to therapy saying, “I'd like to individuate.”

They come because something hurts.

A relationship pattern keeps repeating. They understand their childhood intellectually but still feel its effects. They feel disconnected from themselves. They are navigating grief or a major transition. Or perhaps they have already done therapy and gained considerable insight but still find themselves thinking:

I understand all of this. So why am I still doing it?

A depth-oriented approach may resonate if you are curious about your inner world and want space to explore not only what is happening, but what may exist underneath it.

You do not need to be intellectual, artistic, spiritual, or particularly interested in Jung.

You do not even need to know what you are looking for yet.

Curiosity is enough.

Jungian Therapy FAQs

Do I need to know anything about Carl Jung?

No. You are coming to therapy to explore your life, not to take a class in Jungian theory. Your therapist's orientation should inform the work without requiring you to become an expert in it.

Does Jungian therapy always involve dream analysis?

No. Dreams can provide meaningful material, but they are not required. Some people bring dreams frequently. Others rarely remember them.

Is Jungian therapy only about the past?

No. Your history matters because it shapes the present, but Jungian therapy is also interested in what is happening now and what may be trying to develop next.

Is Jungian therapy the same as psychodynamic therapy?

Not exactly, although the approaches share an interest in unconscious processes, relationships, and recurring patterns. Jungian psychology also gives particular attention to dreams, symbols, archetypal experience, meaning, and individuation.

Going Deeper

One of the things I appreciate about Jungian psychology is that it does not assume the conscious mind already knows exactly where we need to go.

Sometimes we enter therapy wanting to get rid of anxiety and discover grief underneath it.

We arrive frustrated by a relationship pattern and begin to recognize how we have learned to abandon ourselves to maintain connection.

We think we need to become more disciplined and discover that another part of us is exhausted from performing.

Jungian analytical therapy does not offer a final, perfectly healed version of you waiting at the end of the process.

Perhaps that is not the point.

Perhaps the work is developing a deeper relationship with ourselves, with what we know, what we have pushed away, what we are still discovering, and what may be asking to emerge.

If you are looking for a therapist who works from a Jungian, psychodynamic, and trauma-informed perspective, you can read more about my online psychotherapy services to get a sense of how I work, the concerns I support, and whether this approach feels aligned with what you are looking for.