What is Jungian Career Counseling?

Career Counseling is essentially a process that can help you to come to know yourself and the world of work better in order for you to make career, educational, and life decisions. 

Career counselors work with people across the full spectrum of life’s stages, including adolescents and young adults just entering the work force, experienced professionals contemplating a career change, parents returning to work after taking time to raise a child, or people who have recently lost a job and are now looking to return to work.

Add to this picture the variety of settings in which career counseling can take place — individual, group, college, unemployment center — and there seems to be no shortage of opportunities to get career assistance and advice.

So, why add Jungian Career Counseling to the mix? What does a Jungian approach bring to an already crowded field?

A Fruitful Pairing

Recently, I received this encouraging tweet in my Twitter feed:

Jungian career counseling is simply the application of Jungian psychology to the field of career exploration. As the writer of the tweet above indicates, it may not be the first pairing that comes to mind, but in practice it can be a very fruitful marriage.  

There are two ways that a Jungian approach brings depth and value to the world of career exploration. The first of these concerns perspective, the particular lens through which a person’s work experience is viewed.  In Jungian Psychology this perspective is called individuation, which is the process by which a person becomes a unique individual, the self they were meant to be. 

The second aspect which distinguishes Jungian career work from more conventional approaches is in the area of technique. Powerful methods for engaging the unconscious mind such as dream interpretation and active imagination allow for a more individually tailored exploration process than a mere reliance on inventories and assessments.

Individuation and Work

When Maryann came to see me she was suffering with a very common problem. She had a deep aversion to what she called “the checklist life.” This, she explained, was a life in which a person simply did what was commonly expected — checking off each item of life’s checklist in turn — without a sense of the meaning each one might have for that person individually.

Graduate high school? Check.
Go to college? Check.
Get a job? Check.
Get married? Check.

Much of our thinking about work and career perpetuates this kind of checklist approach, in which the various activities of life are seen as a series of discrete tasks to be accomplished as opposed to being expressions of the individual as a whole.  In other words, they are part of our doing, but not necessarily of our being.

This split between being and doing is reflected in the world of career development with it’s recent discovery of “work/life balance.” This concept suggests there is a separation between work and life that must find some kind of balance. Jungian psychology puts it’s focus not on balance, but wholeness, which is expressed in the concept of individuation.

Individuation is the term given to the natural unfolding of the wholeness of the individual. According to Jung:

“Individuation is a natural process. It is what makes a tree turn into a tree; if it is interfered with, then it becomes sick and cannot function as a tree, but left to itself it develops into a tree.”

What prevents a tree from becoming a tree, or an individual from becoming themselves is, among other things, conforming to social expectations at the expense of their unique, personal development. In a conversation reported by Ira Progoff,  Jung uses the example of an artist who goes against his artistic calling to illustrate the power of the individuation impulse:

“If a person is meant to be an artist, but does something else, then pretty soon this development which is blocked will produce all kinds of symptoms, and in the end he will find himself painting whether he wants to or not, or else he will be very sick.” 

The implication for career counseling is clear. A Jungian approach is not simply concerned with matching a person’s skills and abilities with a “best fit” job. It is to attempt to find an alignment between a person’s natural gifts and a work that is a meaningful expression of those gifts — in other words, a work that gives a person the feeling that they are doing what they are “meant” to do.

 If you are interested in a getting a deeper understanding of the concept, this video gives a nice overview of the individuation process. 

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Techniques of Jungian Career Counseling

The main thing that distinguishes a person on the path of individuation from others, according to Jung, is that:

“They hear the inner voice, they act on it, they do not go against it — that is what counts.” 

The techniques, then, that are necessary for Jungian Career Counseling, with it’s goal of encouraging the individuation process, are those that can help a person hear and act on the inner voice. The two primary methods of this approach are, accordingly, dream interpretation and active imagination.

I have addressed working with dreams in some of my previous blog posts which can be found here, here, and here. Active imagination is, as the name suggests, a more active engagement with the unconscious. Instead of just receiving a dream and interpreting it, the individual enters into a dialogue with the figures and images of the imagination. 

Both of these techniques help a person to get below their habitual understanding of themselves to a deeper sense of the life that wants to be lived through them, the “tree” into which they are already growing, to use Jung’s earlier image of individuation. 

To put this into the language of career, I would say that this level of work connects an individual with the living vocational energy within them — their calling — before it is confined in, and defined by, the conceptual language of career and economics. As Jung teaches:

“Concepts are coined and negotiable values; images are life.”

Jungian vs. Conventional Career Counseling 

Jungian career counseling is not for everybody. Many people are not convinced by the idea that work should be meaningful or an expression of their deepest self. For those of us who can get too enthusiastic about our preferred methods, Jung offers this warning:

“No one develops his personality because somebody tells him that it would be useful or advisable to do so. Nature has never yet been taken in by well-meaning advice. The only thing that moves nature is causal necessity, and that goes for human nature too.”

For those who are convinced, who have felt the inner necessity to have a work that expresses their unique individuality, a Jungian approach is invaluable. It’s capacity for deepening a person’s sense of fulfilling one’s purpose in life is, in my experience, unsurpassed.

As a Jungian career counselor I certainly do not reject the approaches of more conventional career work. In fact, I frequently make use of them. Often these approaches, however, do not penetrate deeply enough to be able to reflect the essence of the person with whom I am working. And for many people, it is only when that essence, that inner voice, is expressed that life feels full and meaningful.

A Jungian approach to career counseling facilitates the expression of the inner voice.