As life grows louder, faster, and more crowded with information, a quieter question begins to rise within: Who am I—and what life is truly mine to live?
Invited by the Irvine Book Club, veteran attorney Shining Liang delivered a March 11 talk, “Jungian Psychology and the Path to the True Self,” drawing on her reading of multiple works on Jungian thought.
Through dreams, complexes, projection, personality types, archetypes, and individuation, she invited members to rethink a deeper question: Can life be about more than achievement, efficiency, and other people’s expectations—and become a journey toward wholeness?
Liang began by comparing Freud, Adler, and Jung. Freud asked why people suffer. Adler asked how people become stronger. Jung asked something deeper: How does a person become whole?
Shining Liang broke down three major psychologists for members
That contrast lifts Jung beyond the familiar image of a therapist or theorist and returns him to a larger human question : our task is not simply to fix what is broken or become more impressive, but to grow into who we truly are.
She noted that Jung’s formal term was Analytical Psychology. For Jung, people are more than symptoms or labels.
His work asks why we get stuck, why suffering repeats, and how we may find our way through dreams, emotion, inner conflict, and the unconscious.
Liang also highlighted what makes Jung endure : he did not preach perfection. He called us toward wholeness.
Perfection is often just a polished persona. Wholeness asks us to face fragility, contradiction, shadow, and all that remains unfinished.
For Jung, dreams matter. Liang explained that he did not treat them as prophecies, but as messages from the unconscious. We do dream—we simply forget.
But recurring, emotionally charged dreams often signal inner truths asking to be faced.
She pointed to dream images such as floods, caves, falling, entrapment, and even a distant blue sky as signs that the inner world may be speaking in its own language.
Liang stressed that Jung did not encourage formulaic dream interpretation. He urged people to listen: What is this dream trying to show me?
Has my life drifted too far from what my inner self truly needs?
To understand dreams, one must understand the unconscious—not as a passive storage room, but as a vast, active, creative realm.
Liang then turned to one of Jung’s most powerful ideas : the complex.
A complex, she explained, is not merely something that bothers us. It is a buried knot of emotional force, often shaped by childhood, family, hurt, inferiority, shame, or long-ignored longing.
When the outer world touches that knot, reason can give way. A person may become unusually sensitive, defensive, or overwhelmed. What looks like an emotional flare-up is often the surface of something much deeper.
She noted that feelings of inferiority are common. But once they harden into an inferiority complex, they can begin to shape judgment, relationships, and even life choices.
Perhaps most striking was Liang’s candor on projection. She shared that she once intensely disliked a temple master—only to later realize that the force of that reaction may have revealed something unresolved within herself.
Shining Liang brought Jung to life through personal insight
This is what Jung called projection : we place onto others the parts of ourselves we cannot accept, do not yet see, or do not want to admit. We think we are seeing them, when often we are really seeing ourselves.
The moment we step back from “the problem is them” and ask, “What exactly in me was touched?”—that is when real self-knowledge begins.
Liang then turned to the best-known gateway into Jung’s system : personality types and MBTI.
In Psychological Types, Jung identified two basic attitudes—introversion and extraversion—along with four core functions: thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition.
MBTI later transformed that framework into a widely used personality tool.
Liang did not dismiss MBTI, but she was clear: it can be a doorway, never the destination. Jung’s aim was never to lock people into fixed types, but to show that personality can grow and change through life.
IBC hosted a used-book swap to broaden reading horizons
These distinctions help us understand both ourselves and others. Once we see personality differences as differences—not flaws—many misunderstandings begin to ease.
From there, Liang moved to one of Jung’s central ideas : individuation.
It is not selfishness, nor simply “being yourself.” It is the lifelong work of seeing how the persona, shadow, projection, complexes, and archetypes shape us—and bringing those parts into alignment.
The persona is the social mask we wear. It helps us function in the world. But worn too long, it can blur the face beneath it.
Liang noted that many spend their lives becoming what others expect—stable, polished, successful—while growing inwardly weary.
Jung’s call was not to become more pleasing, but to return to the self beneath the mask.
Shining Liang’s Jung talk drew warm applause
Liang then moved to a deeper layer of Jungian thought : archetypes.
The hero, mother, caregiver, sage, and destroyer are not merely story figures or personality labels, but psychic patterns rooted in the collective unconscious.
Every archetype carries both light and shadow. What matters is not whom one resembles, but how one understands the forces within—and what one chooses to do with them.
Throughout the talk, Liang presented Jung not as an obscure theorist, but as a thinker who believed people can still grow and transform.
Personality is not fixed. Age, experience, and life itself can reshape us—toward greater wisdom, breadth, and self-awareness.
That is why Jung still speaks to us. Not because he offered easy answers, but because he believed each person is still becoming.
And when we stop trying to look right and begin facing our dreams, complexes, projection, shadow, and longing, the deeper self comes into view.
Then we realize : the light we seek is not outside us, but the one we are meant to awaken within.
IBC Vice President Jennifer Lin (left) presented a gift to Shining Liang
Profile | Lighting the Inner World
Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist and the founder of Analytical Psychology.
He looked beyond suffering to ask how people move through shadow, complexes, and inner conflict toward the true self.
His ideas on the collective unconscious, archetypes, the shadow, the persona, and individuation helped shape modern psychology and personality theory.