Personification

1. Etymology

Personification names the tendency of psychic contents or complexes to take on a distinct personality, separate from the ego. Related: automatic writing; active-imagination; spirits (naive reading).

2. Plain summary

Every relatively autonomous complex tends to appear as a personality—statements in the first person, as if an actual someone stood behind them. The ego may also deliberately personify unconscious contents via active-imagination to ease dialogue with the unconscious.

Samuels: fundamental activity—experience becomes a psychic “person”; met in dreams, fantasy, projection. Enables seeing psyche as autonomous systems; depotentiates threat; makes interpretation possible. Jung took over spontaneous personifications as names (shadow, self, great mother, etc.). Analysis explores relation to one’s personifications; inability to personify tends toward mere personalizing. Hillman (noted as follower literature—not CW) develops the theme; house flag as secondary.

Examples (exhaustive house list for this Index lemma — common personification motifs named across Jung’s essays and standard Jungian lexica; not a claim that Jung’s CW contains only these):
complex-as-personality; first-person utterances; spirits naive reading; deliberate active-imagination; dreams / fantasy / projection; autonomous systems; depotentiate / interpret; Jungian named figures; vs personalize-everything; dual-stamp complex / objectivation.

3. Academic elucidation

In analytical psychology personification is complex autonomy as psychic person—CW 7 ¶312. Descent Press keeps Sharp and Samuels (pp. 107–108) in §4. Prefer CW 7 ¶312; CW 9i ¶51; CW 5 ¶273.

4. Lexicon

Sharp (1991)

Personification. The tendency of psychic contents or complexes to take on a distinct personality, separate from the ego. … Every autonomous or even relatively autonomous complex has the peculiarity of appearing as a personality… The ego may also deliberately personify unconscious contents … using the method of active imagination…

(Sharp, 1991) — cites CW 7 ¶312 in Sharp’s lemma.

Samuels, Shorter & Plaut (1986) — personification p. 108

personification A fundamental psychological activity whereby all that one experiences is spontaneously and involuntarily personified, i.e. becomes a psychic 'person'… 'the fact that the unconscious spontaneously personifies... is the reason why I have taken over these personifications in my terminology and formulated them as names' (CW 9i, para. 51).

(Samuels, Shorter, & Plaut, 1986/2013, p. 108)

5. CW concordance — sample, not exhaustive

… every autonomous or even relatively autonomous complex has the peculiarity of appearing as a personality, i.e., of being personified. This can be observed most readily in the so-called spiritualistic manifestations of automatic writing and the like…
(Jung, 1928/1966, CW 7, pp. 269–270, ¶312)

The fact that the unconscious spontaneously personifies certain affectively toned contents in dreams is the reason why I have taken over these personifications in my terminology and formulated them as names.
(Jung, 1939/1968, CW 9i, p. 285, ¶514)

… it was Miss Miller’s spirituality, which, personified as the Aztec, was far too exalted for her ever to find a lover among mortal men.
(Jung, 1912/1967, CW 5, p. 280, ¶273)

See also: complex; active-imagination; projection; ego; objectivation; persona; shadow.

References

Jung, C. G. (1966). The relations between the ego and the unconscious. In H. Read, M. Fordham, G. Adler, & W. McGuire (Eds.), The collected works of C. G. Jung (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.) (2nd ed., Vol. 7, pp. 269–270, ¶312). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1928)

Jung, C. G. (1968). Conscious, unconscious, and individuation. In H. Read, M. Fordham, G. Adler, & W. McGuire (Eds.), The collected works of C. G. Jung (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.) (2nd ed., Vol. 9, Pt. 1, p. 285, ¶514). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1939)

Jung, C. G. (1967). Symbols of transformation. In H. Read, M. Fordham, G. Adler, & W. McGuire (Eds.), The collected works of C. G. Jung (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.) (2nd ed., Vol. 5, p. 280, ¶273). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1912)

Samuels, A., Shorter, B., & Plaut, F. (1986). A critical dictionary of Jungian analysis. Routledge.

Sharp, D. (1991). Jung lexicon: A primer of terms & concepts. Inner City Books.