Jungian psychology, also known as analytical psychology, is Carl Jung’s approach to understanding the conscious and unconscious dimensions of human life. Its concepts—including archetypes, persona, shadow, and individuation—offer ways to explore the patterns we live, the roles we inhabit, and the parts of ourselves we have yet to recognize.
I first began to understand what those ideas could mean in everyday life during my sophomore year at the University of Montana.
In a barber shop.
The lesson has stayed with me for more than thirty years. It is also part of the story of why I created InsightBridge.
While studying in the university’s Wilderness Studies Program, I had a professor named Randy Bolton. He taught a course I remember as “Wilderness and Drama,” deeply rooted in Carl Jung and Jungian psychology. In particular, it was rooted in Jung’s notion of archetypes.
Randy wanted us to choose an archetype and live it.
He wanted us to know it inside and out. To embody it. To discover what it felt like to move through the world from within that pattern of being.
An archetype, in Jungian thought, is an underlying pattern that can find expression in images, stories, relationships, and human experience. Familiar figures such as the mother, the wise elder, or the trickster give us ways to imagine such patterns. They do not exhaust what an archetype can mean.
Randy’s assignment gave those ideas a place in our lives. We were being asked to experience something, pay attention, and learn from what happened.
And Randy didn’t just talk the talk. He walked the walk.
I don’t think I ever knew what Randy’s primary archetype was.
Maybe a joker. An entertainer. Perhaps what Jungian writers would call the trickster.
But Randy’s way of entertaining went far beyond enjoyable entertainment. He insisted that the audience become an equal part of the performance.
Life supplied the material. A conversation, a reaction, an unexpected encounter: everything could become grist for the mill. Everything could become a performance to be learned from.
There might be a setup. There might even be very specific instructions. But what people did once the situation began was alive and unpredictable.
Randy’s primary theatrical interest, as I experienced it, was the theater of life. Life as a performance in which we were already participating, whether we knew it or not.
One day, at the end of class, he told us that our next class would take place at a barber shop.
We were to meet across the street. We were not to enter all at once.
First, two female students would walk in. Randy anticipated that the barber would tell them to leave. They were to sit there with blank expressions, unfazed.
About thirty seconds later, a clean-cut, well-dressed male student would enter and take a seat. That, Randy explained, would break up the tension.
Then another male student, less neatly dressed and less clean-cut, would enter and sit down.
Finally, a group of about four students of mixed gender would walk in.
And then, Randy told us, we would see what unfolded.
We did as instructed.
Randy was already in the chair, having his hair cut, deep in conversation with the same barber he had been going to for twenty years.
The two female students walked in. As Randy had predicted, the barber told them to leave. They sat there as though they hadn’t heard him.
The other students followed, one arrival after another.
When the final group entered, the barber put down his scissors and looked at Randy.
The exchange, as I remember it, went something like this:
“Randy Bolton. I know you! These are your students! But what are you up to bringing them here? What do I have to do with them, and what do they have to do with me?”
“They have to learn from you,” Randy said.
“From me?! I never went to college! What can they learn from me?”
“Let’s just continue the conversation we were having before the first students came in. They’ll learn!”
And we did.
We learned about the value of leather-soled shoes. We learned about tradition. We learned about fixing old things rather than simply buying new things.
But something else was happening, too.
We were watching people meet one another through expectations about appearance, gender, belonging, and authority. Who seemed to fit in that room? Who did not? Who was permitted to teach, and who was expected to learn?
The barber had asked what we could possibly learn from someone who had never gone to college. Randy had already answered him by bringing us there.
His experience mattered. His stories mattered. The way he understood the world gave us something to consider.
With Randy’s coaxing, the conversation became a living encounter with ideas we had been exploring in class. The barber did not need to know Jung’s terminology for us to recognize its relevance to what was unfolding.
We learned about boundaries and about the shadow. We considered masculine and feminine archetypal images. We explored the prankster, lover, warrior, king and queen, father, mother, and healer.
Some of those names belong to broader Jungian and later archetype traditions rather than a single fixed list handed down by Jung. What mattered in our course was the experience of examining them.
And we learned that one person could embody several patterns at once.
Yes—as a way of understanding experience, archetypal images can illuminate different aspects of the same person. We do not have to reduce ourselves to one character.
Someone may be protective in one situation, playful in another, and nurturing in a third. The person who holds authority at work may be a learner elsewhere. A willingness to fight for something important can coexist with tenderness.
Looking back, I see Randy’s invitation to embody an archetype as an experiment in attention. What could we discover by trying to live a particular quality more consciously? What happened when that quality helped us? What happened when we carried it too far?
The warrior might lend us courage to hold a boundary. But what if we began treating every disagreement as a battle?
The healer might draw us toward another person’s suffering. But what if we could no longer distinguish caring from needing to be needed?
These are questions to explore. An archetype gives us a language for inquiry; it does not decide who we are or excuse what we do.
That openness is part of InsightBridge’s approach to self-awareness and personal development.
The barber-shop encounter gave us a way to think about Jung’s concept of the persona: the face we present to the social world. A professor, a barber, a student—each role carries expectations. How much of a person do we assume we know once we recognize the role?
The shadow concerns aspects of ourselves we do not readily acknowledge or accept. Those can include uncomfortable impulses, but also capacities we have learned to hide.
Jung’s anima and animus concepts addressed inner figures he described through masculine and feminine symbolism. They belong to a historically gendered theory; they need not be turned into rules about what men and women should be.
The Self, in Jungian psychology, concerns the whole psyche, conscious and unconscious, rather than only the identity we know and describe.
We also explored thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition—Jung’s four psychological functions. In brief, they concern reasoning, evaluating worth, perceiving what is present, and apprehending possibilities or implications. “Feeling” here involves valuation, not simply being emotional.
And I remember the barber telling stories of coincidences that felt significant. Through Randy’s prompting, those became a way to consider synchronicity, Jung’s idea of meaningful coincidence without an apparent causal connection. We were exploring the meaning people found in experience, not establishing proof of a hidden force.
There was so much to learn in that room.
And so much about individuation.
Individuation is central to Jungian psychology. It describes a process of becoming more whole through a more conscious relationship with the different dimensions of the psyche.
I think of its everyday implications when I notice how easily we confuse a role with the whole of ourselves.
I am a father. A founder. A psychotherapist by training. I carry responsibilities associated with each. But there are also questions, tensions, and possibilities that no single title can contain.
For me, reflection means making room to encounter those things honestly. It means considering what I have overlooked and how I want to respond now that I have noticed it.
That process can include taking responsibility while retaining compassion for ourselves. Our article When Self-Reflection Turns Into Self-Criticism explores why that distinction matters.
Given all of that, it should come as no surprise that, more than thirty years later, I created InsightBridge.
Jungian psychology is one of the major influences behind the platform. Its attention to patterns, symbols, shadow, and individuation helped shape the kind of reflection I wanted to make available.
Through ongoing conversations with BridgeAI, InsightBridge’s proprietary AI reflection system, members can put experiences into words, consider questions, and revisit recurring themes. Conversational journaling gives them a place to examine how they understand their lives.
Then an Insight Professional adds a human perspective through personally written Reflection Letters. Depending on the membership, those letters arrive monthly or every two weeks, drawing on what the member has shared.
That combination of AI reflection and human witnessing is important to me. Another person may notice a question worth asking, a tension worth exploring, or a possibility the writer has not yet considered.
The purpose is to support self-awareness and a greater sense of agency: more room to consider how we want to act. It is also consistent with the spirit of individuation, though no conversation or letter can certify that someone has become whole.
Neither the AI nor the Insight Professional has the final word on who you are. A reflection is something you can examine, question, or disagree with.
You can read more about the experience in InsightBridge’s frequently asked questions.
InsightBridge is neither therapy, coaching, nor counseling. Its use of Jungian ideas is for personal reflection and development, not Jungian analysis or clinical treatment.
Nor do I think of membership as sitting in a classroom learning definitions of Jungian psychology.
The comparison that stays with me is that barber shop.
An ordinary place. An ordinary conversation. Someone with something to say. Someone else willing to ask a question that opens the experience a little further.
That is the spirit I hope InsightBridge carries forward.
We bring our lives into the conversation: our traditions, our assumptions, the roles we inhabit, and the moments that leave us wondering. We pay attention to what unfolds. We consider what it asks of us.
Randy told the barber, “They have to learn from you.”
More than thirty years later, I am still learning.
If you would like to explore the questions arising in your own life, you can begin with a free InsightBridge session. You can also explore more perspectives on journaling and personal growth in the InsightBridge blog.
You do not have to know Jung’s terminology to bring something real to the conversation.