A Jungian conscience: Self-awareness for public relations practice

• Consciousness and conscience are required for ethical practice.
• Current approaches to public relations ethics emphasise external, rational approaches.
• Jungian psychology offers avenues for raising self-awareness.
• These tools are applicable to public relations as a field and to practitioners.
• Conscious public relations practice enhances professional ethics.

This article relates Carl Jung's theories of consciousness and conscience to contemporary public relations practice, applying Jungian methods of self-awareness to public relations as a field. The chapter concludes with challenges for practitioners, individually and as a profession, to increase self-awareness, an essential prerequisite for ethical practice. It takes an interpretive approach, drawing on literature from Jungian scholarship, organisational psychology and moral philosophy. These explorations are developed at book-length in Fawkes (2014. Public relations ethics and professionalism: The shadow of excellence. London and New York, NY: Routledge), but here the focus is on practice and practitioners’ access to conscience through consciousness. After a brief summary of the Jungian psyche and the role of consciousness in activating conscience, this paper suggests questions and reflections for the profession and its constituent practitioners. This discussion is strongly linked to developing an ethical attitude (Solomon (2001). Journal of Analytic Psychology, 46(3)), one based not on rules or codes but on individual and collective self-awareness.