What Is Jungian Therapy and Is It Right for You?
What Is Jungian Therapy?
A clear overview of what it is, how it works, the concepts it draws on, and who it tends to fit.
Sagebrush Counseling
Learn more about Sagebrush Counseling ›Sagebrush Counseling offers Jungian-informed individual and couples therapy, fully virtual. Licensed in New Hampshire (LCMHC), Maine (LCPC), Montana (LCPC), and Texas (LPC). Wherever you are in those states, sessions come to you.
Jungian therapy is a form of depth psychology developed by the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung in the early twentieth century. It takes seriously the idea that a significant portion of what drives human behavior, emotion, and suffering lies outside conscious awareness, and that the work of therapy involves bringing that unconscious material into a more conscious relationship with the self.
This post explains what Jungian therapy is, what happens in sessions, the key concepts it draws on, and who it tends to be a good fit for. If you are already familiar with the basics and want to see how it compares to CBT, see the post on Jungian therapy vs CBT.
Where Jungian Therapy Comes From
Carl Jung trained under Sigmund Freud and was for a period Freud's closest collaborator and designated successor. He broke from Freud in 1912 over fundamental disagreements about the nature of the unconscious, the role of sexuality in psychological development, and the significance of spirituality and culture in the psyche.
Where Freud emphasized repressed sexual drives and early childhood trauma as the primary content of the unconscious, Jung proposed something broader. He distinguished between the personal unconscious, which contains material specific to an individual's experience and history, and the collective unconscious, a deeper layer shared across humanity and expressed through recurring symbols, images, and patterns he called archetypes.
Jung's framework draws on a remarkable range of sources: comparative mythology, alchemy, Eastern philosophy, religion, anthropology, and decades of clinical observation. This breadth is part of what makes Jungian therapy distinctive and part of what makes it genuinely harder to reduce to a simple protocol than more structured approaches.
"The goal of Jungian therapy is not the removal of symptoms. It is individuation: the ongoing process of becoming more fully who you are."
Core Concepts
Understanding a few key Jungian concepts helps clarify what the therapy is working with.
What we have disowned
The shadow contains the qualities, impulses, and aspects of ourselves we have rejected, denied, or never developed, often because they were unacceptable to our family or culture. Shadow work involves recognizing and integrating these disowned parts rather than projecting them outward onto others. The shadow is not only negative: it also contains undeveloped strengths and capacities that were suppressed alongside the unacceptable material.
The mask we wear
The persona is the face we present to the world: the role, the professional identity, the version of ourselves calibrated for social acceptability. A well-functioning persona is useful and necessary. Problems arise when it becomes rigid or is mistaken for the whole self, when you can no longer locate yourself behind the mask. Much of what brings people to therapy involves a persona that no longer fits.
The inner opposite
Jung described the anima (in men) and animus (in women) as the inner contrasexual figure: the constellation of qualities associated with the opposite gender that live in the unconscious. These figures shape how we relate to others, particularly romantic partners, and what we project onto them. Making these projections conscious is a significant part of depth psychological work in relationships.
Becoming who you are
Individuation is Jung's term for the lifelong process of psychological development: differentiating oneself from collective norms and conditioning, integrating unconscious material, and moving toward wholeness. It is not about becoming special or separate, but about becoming specifically yourself rather than a generic version of what you were shaped to be. Jungian therapy supports this process directly.
Patterns in the collective unconscious
Archetypes are universal patterns or themes that appear across cultures, religions, myths, and dreams. The hero, the mother, the trickster, the wise old man, death and rebirth: these are not invented by individuals but inherited as part of the collective unconscious. They appear in dreams and fantasies as images, and working with them helps locate personal experience within a larger human context.
Messages from the unconscious
Jungian therapy takes dreams seriously as meaningful communications from the unconscious rather than random noise. A dream is understood as a spontaneous expression of the unconscious psyche, often compensating for one-sidedness in conscious life. Working with dream imagery, following the associations and amplifications it generates, is a central practice in Jungian work. You do not need to remember or analyze dreams, but engagement with them deepens the work.
What Sessions Look Like in Practice
A Jungian-informed session does not follow a fixed protocol. There is no agenda set at the start, no homework assigned in the structured CBT sense, no thought record to complete. The session follows what is alive for you in that moment, and the therapist's job is to help you pay attention to what is there rather than what you think should be there.
In practice this might mean:
- Exploring a recurring dream in detail, not to interpret it definitively but to follow its imagery and see what associations arise
- Noticing a strong emotional reaction to something that seems disproportionate, and asking what it might be connected to beyond the immediate trigger
- Examining a relationship pattern that keeps repeating across different partnerships or friendships
- Working with a feeling of meaninglessness or stagnation that does not fit the profile of clinical depression but is real and persistent
- Using active imagination: a Jungian technique of entering dialogue with figures from dreams or the imagination as a way of engaging directly with unconscious material
Sessions tend to be exploratory rather than prescriptive. The therapist is more interested in following the thread than in fixing the symptom. This can feel unfamiliar if you are used to structured approaches, but for many people it is precisely the kind of engagement they have been looking for.
The therapeutic relationship itself is also significant in Jungian work. Jung emphasized that therapy is not something a therapist does to a patient but something that happens between two people. The therapist's own psychology is part of the field. This is why ongoing supervision and personal analysis are central to Jungian training.
Interested in Jungian-informed therapy?
A free 15-minute consult is a low-stakes way to talk through what you are dealing with and whether this approach is the right fit. Fully virtual, available across NH, ME, MT, and TX.
Who Jungian Therapy Tends to Fit
Jungian therapy is not the right fit for everyone, and it is worth being honest about that. It is particularly well-suited for:
- People who feel stuck despite doing everything right. You have read the books, tried the CBT, understand intellectually what you are doing but cannot stop doing it. Something deeper is running the show.
- People in significant life transitions. Divorce, career change, midlife, loss of a parent, the arrival of children, retirement. Jungian therapy understands these transitions not as problems to solve but as thresholds with meaning.
- Creatives and people with a rich inner life. If you are someone who dreams vividly, thinks in images and symbols, and is drawn to mythology and story, Jungian therapy engages that material rather than setting it aside.
- People dealing with questions of meaning and identity. Not "how do I manage this anxiety" but "what am I doing with my life, and why does it feel hollow." Jungian therapy takes those questions seriously as the real presenting problem.
- People who have tried other approaches without lasting change. If skills-based or protocol-driven work has helped temporarily but the underlying pattern reasserts itself, Jungian therapy looks at what is generating the pattern rather than addressing the pattern itself.
Jungian Therapy Online
Jungian therapy works virtually. The depth of the work is determined by the quality of the relationship and the willingness to go into difficult material, not by the physical location. Many people find that the slight formality of a screen-mediated session is useful, creating a frame that makes it easier to go into depth without the social diffusion of an in-person room.
Sagebrush Counseling offers Jungian-informed therapy fully virtually, with no drive and no waitlist. Sessions are available for clients in New Hampshire, Maine, Montana, and Texas. For a full overview of what is offered, see the Jungian therapist page or the services page. Common questions about how virtual sessions work are answered on the how online therapy works page.
Common Questions
Do I need to believe in Jung's ideas for the therapy to work?+
What is the difference between Jungian therapy and psychoanalysis?+
Is Jungian therapy only for people with serious psychological problems?+
How do I find a Jungian therapist?+
Can I do Jungian therapy alongside other forms of treatment?+
Do I need to remember my dreams to do Jungian therapy?+
Reach Out Today
Jungian-informed therapy, fully virtual. NH, ME, MT, and TX.
This post is for informational purposes only and does not constitute therapy or professional advice. If you are in crisis, call or text 988. For appointments: sagebrushcounseling.com/contact.
