Learning about yourself through psycho-babble ...
I've had two marriages to mental health professionals (a Social Worker and a Psychologist), read self-help books for years and even went for occasional bouts of therapy myself. I think my amateur status in the field is probably at risk. I can speak psycho-babble like a pro. ;-)
In the last couple of years I've discovered that Jung's teachings appeal to me far more than any of Freud or his disciples. Evidently, I'm not alone. It seems that popular self-help books relating to archetypes are a genre of their own recently. My own favorites were: Carol S. Pearson's books The Hero Within and more recently Awakening the Heroes Within. Deepak Chopra's The Return of Merlin was a fictional recreation of the Arthurian legends with ample room for connecting with the larger than life myths from that era. Several other Jungian students have also helped me make sense of my life. I have video-tapes of the series "Bradshaw on Homecoming" and "Bradshaw on Creating Love" and was moved each time I watched them. For a guy who looked to me like a Baptist Preacher he sure evoked things far more productive than any conventional belief system (religious or psycho-dynamic). My most significant teacher was Thomas Moore who wrote Care of the Soul and Soulmates both of which are amazing in the wealth of useful insights for life they offer.
Recently, someone turned me on to a personality index called the Myers-Briggs. It's based on some of Jung's work too but what impressed me (I normally balk at these kind of tests) was that there's not a right or wrong way to be. It just places people on 4 different scales of polarity that when taken together give you a pretty good image of who you are and what kind of things appeal to you. I was blown away at how accurate my type felt to me. I'm an ENFP. If you want to hear about my quirky charm check out the description at " http://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/academic/psychology/alt.psychology.personality/profiles/enfp". If you'd like to take the test yourself go to "http://sunsite.unc.edu/jembin/mb.pl". Or you can use the following two dandy buttons to get to the sites (aint the web just amazin!):