,
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The term
“Analytical Psychology” is coined by Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung, born
in 1875 and graduate of the Medical School of the University of Basle (1902). Jung was Freud’s student who gradually
detached from Freudian psychoanalysis and created his own theory and school in
1911, thus becoming alienated from Freud and his circle (De Laszlo, 1959). Although Analytical Psychology started as a
school of psychoanalysis, it has become part of what is called depth psychology
and transpersonal (originally a Jungian term).
Depth psychology is an area of psychology that stands between the
psychodynamic and the humanistic theories, while transpersonal is even more
humanistic, esoteric, and metaphysical (Slattery & Corbett, 2004).
Today,
Depth psychology is very popular, though still severely criticized by the
mainstream academia for being too esoteric and also for Jung’s tendency to be
too flexible with his ideas and give different definitions of his theoretical
concepts from time to time. Jung’s
answer was that this is actually good, since his style reflected the
ever-changing world of psychological phenomena and made him even more credible
for being adaptable, observant, and sensitive to this world of psychological
phenomena (Fadiman & Frager, 2002).
Today, we
can talk about the classic Jungian tradition and a number of Post-Jungian
theories; the last one may not be discussed in this paper. The purpose of this paper is to offer a brief
overview of the basic tenets of Jung’s Analytical Psychology. This discussion will be divided into four
sections: the view of human nature, the theory of healthy personality, the
theory of conflict (dysfunction) and the theory of counseling (central
constructs of the Counseling Process). It
should be noted that the emphasis is not in a discussion of psychotherapeutic
techniques, but Jung’s life philosophy and theoretical orientation and how it
could be implemented in modern counseling.
View
of Human Nature
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Jung believed that the sole purpose of
human nature is to kindle a light in the darkness of our mere existence
(Campbell, 1971). In Jung’s own words,
“analytical psychology is daily concerned in the normal and sick alike, with
disturbances of conscious apprehension caused by an admixture of archetypal
images” (Campbell, 1971, p.57). Archetypal
images are images of symbolic content whose meaning is unconscious and they are
manifested throughout different cultures and religions, as they all have human
nature in common. As the human kind
physically evolved so did the human psyche (soul), a term coined by Jung, and some
of the contents of the unconscious of modern people resemble the products of
ancient people. Those products are the
archetypal images (Jung, 1964).
In childhood, the person has not formed its
personhood and has not claimed yet its individuality, but it depends on its
parents (Campbell, 1971). In
adolescence, there is an eruption of feelings and instincts and that causes the
person to claim his or her personhood and individuality (Campbell, 1971). Unlike Freud, Jung placed more emphasis on
middle adulthood, because this struggle is the one between the consciousness
and the unconscious, an attempt of the person to get more conscious, and the
nearer we approach this stage the greater the achievement and maturity in life (Campbell,
1971). In aging, life is not expanding
or mounting, but there is an inner process that leads the constriction of life,
which is natural and it requires our adaptability in dealing effectively with
that (Campbell, 1971).
Thus, human nature is rather essentially positive
or good, but there is always a dark side hidden that needs to become conscious
and that necessitates a “Promethean struggle”, as Jung said, to enlighten or
make conscious the unconscious operations of one’s psyche throughout the life
span of development, as in Greek mythology, Prometheus enlightened the human
kind with the gift of fire (Campbell, 1971).
Consciousness streams from the
senses and our perception and it is our knowing and realization of our positive
traits and problems alike (Campbell, 1971).
Emotion, for Jung, is the
chief source of consciousness. Emotions,
values, and feelings link psychological events and life. (Fadiman & Frager,
2002). Will is the energy that is the
disposal of consciousness or the ego.
Will relates to learning cultural habits and attitudes, customs, values,
morals, feelings, and emotions and it has power only on conscious
processes. Jung believed that will is of
recent development and that it does not exist in indigenous and ancient tribes
and cultures and instead, it was substituted for ceremonial actions. Energy of nature is borrowed from the
original unconsciousness and from the original flow of events through rituals,
dances, and ceremonies that have been used in order to control this energy
(Fadiman & Frager, 2002). This
struggle is the one between consciousness and the unconscious, which can be personal unconscious and collective unconscious, also called transpersonal unconscious, and world
unconscious (Campbell, 1971).
Our
ego is that part of our conscious
personality which stands in the middle of the person’s external and internal
reality. Our ego directly relates to
consciousness and the unconscious. Other
part of our conscious personality is our persona. Persona
is a mask of our personality or the public image that we want to show to
others acting as a defense mechanism to protect oneself (Campbell, 1971).
Our
personal unconscious consists of contents that lack consciousness, which is our
awareness and knowing of the psychical contents. Feelings and memories that are
anxiety-provoking or uneasy to emerge to consciousness, all those are the
contents of the personal unconscious (Campbell, 1971). The personal unconscious is a collection of
personal experiences while the collective unconscious is not; we do not possess
it, in other words (Campbell, 1971).
Jung agreed with Freud that the unconscious (Freud) or personal unconscious
(Jung) can only wish. The personal
unconscious contains wishes, feelings, affects, needs, and ideas that we do not
realize. As we do not realize them, they
remain just wishes, feelings, thought, affects, and ideas that cannot be
materialized. Jung agreed with Freud
that our personal unconscious is very egocentric and infantile. Two parts of our personal unconscious are the
self and the shadow (De Laszlo, 1959).
Our self
is the central archetype and therefore it is the archetype of centeredness.
It is the union of conscious and unconscious and a deep, inner, and
guiding factor that is unconscious and seems to be different or alien even from
the ego (Fadiman & Frager, 2002). A
strong alchemic symbol or archetype for the self is the Sun (De Laszlo,
1959). Likewise, the position of the sun
in the person’s birth chart determines the main star sign of a person, which
puts him or her in a specific astrological type of personality (Campbell,
1971). Jung often found interesting
metaphors and archetypes in alchemy and astrology, where concrete ideas, such
as concepts of nature were used to attribute symbolism and abstract philosophical
meaning. It was more about self-discovery,
transformation of personality traits and maturation that as a metaphor, it follows
a parallel development to that of the process of the transmutation of
metals. This alchemical metaphor of
self-discovery and personal growth was for Jung the great opus (work) of the
alchemists than actually making gold, but rather finding the philosophical
“stone”, a metaphor for the archetype of “self” and the process of self-actualization
(Jung, 1964).
The shadow,
however, another archetype of the personality is all those feelings, thoughts,
affects, desires, and ideas that we consider unacceptable and therefore we deny
their relation to us and we project them to the environment as external
entities that do not relate and are not identified with our own identity. The word “shadow” itself refers to the dark
aspects of our personality that we keep unconscious and dissociate and detached
from our self-identity concept as a defense mechanism that protects the
consciousness and the ego (Campbell, 1971).
The Collective Unconscious, however, is
formed by the instincts and the archetypes together. Instincts and archetypes cannot be regulated
by the person itself. They are
biologically rooted and permeate all functions of a person’s life. They control the person, but the person can
hardly control them. Instincts are modes of action and they
can be separate or united in modes of action and actions whether they are
conscious or unconscious. The number and
functions of instincts cannot scientifically be calculated and classified, Jung
said, though modern physiology has made possible to understand to a certain
level the effects of hormones and glands (De Laszlo, 1959). Libido is
a sexual type of psychical energy that governs instincts, especially the sexual
instinct. The archetypes are uniform and regularly recurring modes of apprehension
whether we understand their mythological content or not. Each mode of apprehension is determined by a
factor. Those factors are primordial
images or archetypes and they are the self-portraits or mirror images of the
instincts. If an instinct is “refined”,
the “intuition” that it can provide us with can be incredibly precise (Campbell,
1971).
Archetypal images use symbols. Symbols, Jung noticed, are different by far
from mere signs. Symbol, he believed, is
a living thing, it is the expression to be characterized with one thing or
another and what’s why it is alive and pregnant with meaning (De Laszlo,
1959). Every psychological phenomenon
uses symbolism. There are two levels of
approaching a symbol: the symbolic and the semiotic. Semiotic is every view which interprets the
symbolic expression as analogous or abbreviated expression of a known
thing. The semiotic way, is for
instance, to recognize that the cross is expression of the Divine Love (De
Laszlo, 1959). By the way, Jung’s work
on Christianity and its symbols and archetypes, especially the early Church and
the Gnostics and the archetypal images of the Holy Communion and the fish
symbol (ichthyes in Biblical Greek),
was very influential and seminal (Fadiman & Frager, 2002).
Image for Jung, is not the psychic
reflection of an object, but the fantasy
image, an unconscious fantasy activity that is only indirectly related to
perception of the external object. Thus,
the concept of image can be seen from a poetic point of view (De Laszlo, 1959). In a few words, the operating forces of the
archetypes are the symbols and fantasy images that go beyond mere signs and
psychic reflections of external objects and they are sophisticated and dynamic
components of a deep psychological mechanism of the Collective Unconscious (De
Laszlo, 1959). The Collective
Unconscious contains the whole spiritual heritage of human evolution that as
its archetypal images, as it is mentioned above, in its entirety, the
collective unconscious is the same for all races, genders, cultures,
ethnicities, and religions and as Jung said (Campbell, 1971).
Sex and gender archetypes that manifest the
psychological aspects of masculinity and femininity are those of the syzygy (pair) of animus (masculine soul) in women and anima (feminine soul) in men. Jung wrote that a world that excessively
embraces masculine models of behavior may oppress a man’s anima and in order for his soul to reach equilibrium, he may react
to the point of becoming effeminate (Campbell, 1971). The older the man the younger
his anima that is usually the archetypal image of a little girl in old
men. The older the woman the younger her
animus that is usually a little boy in old women (Campbell, 1971. Snakes and phalluses are also sexual symbols
and, in particular, symbols of male fertility, virility, and masculinity. In Greek Dionysian Festivals, men were
dressed as satyrs dancing the Dance of
Phalloforoi or Phallus bearers, dressed with huge wooden phaloi fastened in a belt they wore on
their waist and similar rituals are also performed even day in Africa and
Oceania (Jung, 1964). Also, for Jung,
the Anima was the soul in general, as it literally means in Latin and as it
represented the symbol of feminine fertility and procreation, also found in
many ancient cults and religions, such as the worship of Mother Earth and the
Great Goddess (e.g. the Minoan Snake Goddess and Gaia/Earth or Demeter, the
Greek goddess of agriculture) (Campbell, 1971). Anima mundi
is the Soul of the World as it literally means in Latin and in this animistic
sense the entire world is an ensouled and
a living system. Myths and symbols, Jung
believed, were used as a metaphor to project thoughts, beliefs and explanations
about people of the past, nature, and the divine and they reflected all those
strong archetypes (Jung, 1964).
Some
powerful archetypes that we all share are the healer and the wise one. Also, powerful archetypes are the mother archetype and the father archetype, which are the
primordial images of parenthood. As our
parents are the first and most psychologically important for us, those two
archetypes frequently active in our lives (Jung, 1964). The mother
archetype appears in an infinite variety of aspects. It could be the bond with our biological
mother, a step-mother, a nanny, a relative, an older female friend, a
mother-in-law, or even a remote ancestress.
This concept is also behind the myths of the Great Mother and the Great
Goddess cult and symbolism, as a fertility symbol and as a representation of
motherhood, which can also have both positive and evil meaning (e.g. Virgin,
Sophia/Wisdom Goddess, Cybele-Attis, the nightmarish goddesses/bogies, such as
the Greek Empousa and Near Eastern Lilith, the Greek fate goddesses Moira,
Graeae and Norns) (De Laszlo, 1959).
Other archetypes are related to or
symbolize stages of development, such as the divine child and the healer, the
hero, and the wise one (Jung, 1964). In most
cultures and especially today in the modern western world, youth is always
overemphasized and overindulged, as it is identified with the future and the ideal
age hence the divine child archetype.
The healer archetype is the healing potential we have and the healing
image of ourselves that can be used to heal ourselves, look for healing in
others or provide healing to others (Jung, 1964). The hero
archetype is the potential to overcome our limitations and do something
beyond our capacities or our perceived capacities. The hero cult in Greece (e.g. Hercules,
Odysseus, Theseus, Perseus, Alexander the Great, etc.) as well as in other
cultures from West (e.g. Percival, King Arthur, etc.) to East (e.g. Ramayana,
Varuna, etc.) is evident of the impact of the hero archetype (1964). The wise one archetype resembles the
archetypal image of the mentor and the voice of experience and maturity. There is also the Power archetype that
symbolizes the need for and the archetypal image of power. Jung was influenced a lot from Nietzsche in
developing his theory of the power archetype (Fadiman & Frager, 2002). Archetypes appear in all civilizations,
mythologies and cultures (Jung, 1964).
Powerful archetypal or primordial images are also those of the egg,
which gives life, and the tale-eating snake, which symbolizes eternity, time,
and the recycling process of life and cosmos.
The egg occurs in many different cultures, from the Neolithic to the
Greek mystery cult of Orpheus (Jung, 1964).
Another common archetype is the quaternity,
the sacred number “four” (e.g. four corners of a house or street, four walls of
a room, four quarters of the horizon, four seasons, four colors, four elements,
four castes, etc.) (Jung, 1961).
Jung noticed that people’s unconscious
archetypal images are as instinctively as the ability of geese to migration in
formation, as the ants’ ability form colonies, as the bees’ ability to perform
their tail-wagging dance that communicates to the hive the exact food location
(Jung, 1964). Jung compared different
visions, daydreams and dreams of very different people, both mentally stable
and mentally unstable, from different cultures, people who had never met each
other and he spotted out the same patterns of symbolism and archetypal images
(Jung, 1964). For instance, a modern
professor who had never read a very old alchemical book had a “vision” of the
same picture of the woodcut of the book’s cover that depicted an androgynous, a human figure where both
masculine and feminine qualities were united.
Jung interpreted that as the person’s need to reach his anima which he was alienated from. People from different cultures that were
never met used in their art the same symbols, such as the Ixion’s wheel (man
crucified on a wheel), from Greek mythology, that was depicted in sub-Saharan
rock art and the Greek meander that is commonly used in Pre-Columbian art
(Jung, 1964).
Jung did not present
archetypes just as primordial images and visualized manifestations of symbols. He went one step further: he identified them
as structures and building blocks of the collective unconscious that is also
called world unconscious or transpersonal.
And that is because they exist a
priori, go beyond the confinements and limits of personhood and
individuality, and connect human nature with the cosmos and its maker, the numinous and the presence and essence of
the “numinosity” (Campbell, 1971). Numinous
is also the content of the God archetype and God image (imago dei in Latin).
Jung was profoundly influenced from Goethe and especially his Faust on developing his theory on the
God archetype (Fadiman & Frager, 2002).
Jung’s ideas on God, the divine, numinous and religion strongly
influenced Bill Wilson and others in the foundation of AA (Alcoholics
Anonymous) (Fadiman & Frager, 2002).
Numinous
communicates with people through synchronicity,
or meeting/collision of two unrelated events or incidents. This phenomenon, Jung said, has nothing to do
with human nature, weather it is physical or psychological, but it is rather a
mysterious and still unexplainable concept of physics (Campbell, 1971). It is important to note that the two events
collide without any causal relationship.
There are two types of synchronicity according to Jung. First, it when an inwardly event, such as a
dream, a premonition, a daydream, a vision, or a fantasy are unexpectedly seen
in the external world. Second, it is
when identical thoughts, dreams, etc., occur at the same time in two different
places (Jung, 1961). For instance, it
has already been mentioned that Jung had many cases of clients who had seen the
same dream without ever being met.
An example
of synchronicity is when Jung had a client telling him about a dream of an
Egyptian scarab, when all the sudden a flying scarab entered the window of
Jung’s office. It is like an archetype
communicates directly to the individual via the intervention of numinous or a
cosmic force that is beyond human physiology or human psychology, thus it does
not relate to the body or psyche (Campbell, 1971). But even for the body, Jung had said that it
is almost metaphysical. The body and the
external world can only be known as psychological experiences. Our perceptions are limited due to our human
nature and all we know is what our psyche allows us to know and discover. However, Jung always stated that he was
solely interested in the psyche and not in the body or the spirit (Fadiman
& Frager, 2002).
Theory
of the Healthy Personality
Jung believed that what
makes a person healthy is individuation
that is one of the most important concepts of Jungian/analytical
psychology. It is the process of forming
and specializing the individual nature or the formation of the person’s own
individual personality. Therefore, it is
a process of differentiation. This takes place, usually, in middle
adulthood. Keeping one’s soul and mind
healthy is to achieve individuation (De Laszlo, 1959). Individuation is a process of natural
necessity, but also hindrance, because it is part of nature to develop our own
personality, but it can also be painful and “injurious” or traumatic, as trying
to stay sociable and acting as members of society, we need at the same time to
follow collective standards and thus, put ourselves into boxes and categories
(De Laszlo, 1959). Also, individuals
with “deformed” personalities make up an unhealthy and abnormal social group. Therefore, individuation should outbalance
all negative forces that make the person vacillate between the two extremes of isolation and artificial mutilation of individuality and often gravitate towards
one of them (De Laszlo, 1959).
The
process of individuation is to embrace our uniqueness and achieve self-realization, that is reaching full
understanding of one’s situation and nature, and move on to self-regulation, which is the ability to
maintain a control over one’s psyche and life and finally, self-actualization, that
is the use of individual’s full potential, by harmonically integrate the
person’s unconscious and aspects of its personality (De Laszlo, 1959). Moreover, the process involves the person’s
struggle to develop its ego, protect
it and make it strong enough to endure the pressures of the process until
individuation is achieved. Also, it is
essential to make the contents, nature, and dynamics of one’s shadow conscious
from unconscious, realize the difference of its persona with the ego, unveil the persona (take off the mask), and discover
the unconscious self and put it in the center of both conscious and unconscious
personality. Also, the person should stay
in touch with his anima or her animus and discover the rest of the
archetypes that are primary in his or her life (e.g. hero, healer, God, power,
divine child, etc.) (De Laszlo, 1959). That
means, we have to be true and real with ourselves, realize how we act and how
we are perceived by other people, remain congruent with ourselves, match
beliefs with acting and realize our weaknesses as well as avoid gender
stereotyping behavior and prevent ourselves from being alienated to the other
sex and gender (De Laszlo, 1959).
The way to
perform with process of individuation is called Transcendent Function. Jung
explained that although it may sound like that, this term has nothing
metaphysical or mysterious (De Laszlo, 1959).
This function arises from the union of unconscious and conscious
contents. The parallelism of
consciousness and unconscious or Dissociability
of the Psyche, is due to the purpose of both acting in a compensatory and
complementary way to prevent anxiety. It
is like a filter or an immune, homeostatic or self-regulatory system of the
psyche to prevent consciousness streaming from being flooded with unconscious
material that would overload the psyche with enormous amounts of energy. By dissociating the unconscious from
conscious and bringing excess material to unconscious, psychical energy gets
low and consciousness can function under less pressure and in better logical
coherence (De Laszlo, 1959).
The
reasons for this relationship of unconscious and consciousness are: a) consciousness
possesses a threshold intensity which its contents must have attained, so that
all the weak elements remain in the unconscious; b) because of its directed
functions, consciousness exercises an inhibition, which Freud called “censorship”,
but Jung preferred the term “inhibition” that is applied to all incompatible
material and as a result they sink into the unconscious; c) consciousness
involves the momentary process of adaptation,
where the unconscious contains not only the forgotten material of the person’s
past, but also all the inherited behavior traces constituting the mind
structure; d) the unconscious contains all different combinations of fantasies
which have not yet attained threshold intensity, but eventually may come to the
light of consciousness (De Laszlo, 1959).
It is a healthy function to produce fantasies freely that may be
manifested in dreams, symbolism, creativity, and daydreams (De Laszlo,
1959). Also, introspection, the process of examining our inner world, is
crucial for maintaining a healthy self-regulation (De Laszlo, 1959).
Jung’s
greatest and most popular theory of the healthy personality is that of the
Psychological types whose influence has also led to the creation of the
Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test and a long series of other career and
personality tests for matching people’s career personality and mentality and
lifestyle with nature, type, and setting of work or just classifying their
personality traits based on the four psychological types of Jung: extroversion
and introversion, sensation and intuition, thinking and feeling. Later on, besides Jung’s four psychological types,
also perception and judgment were added, though Jung did not really have them
as distinctive types and did not pay attention to their definitions (De Laszlo,
1959). Psychological types are
manifestations of the person’s idiosyncratic ego formation (De Laszlo,
1959). Jung noticed two distinctions
among people: extroversion and introversion.
The extroverts are more interested in the objects of their environment
while the introverts are more interested in their inner self, their
subject. All people possess both
extroversion and introversion and only the predominance of one or the other
determines the type (De Laszlo, 1959).
Second
distinction is sensation and intuition.
Jung believed that sensation must strictly distinguished from feeling,
as it is the psychological function of transmitting a physical stimulus to
perception while feeling a person’s subjective interpretation of that given
sensation or any stimuli, which can be not only external but also internal or
rather inner stimuli. Sensation is
divided into concrete and abstract sensation (De Laszlo, 1959). Concrete sensation may be in the form of a
mix of feelings and thoughts about something that was sensed through our
senses, such as come from smelling a flower or gazing the sky that is a
positive sense. However, in abstract
sensation, aesthetic representation of the sensed is more complex and higher
and it resembles the function of the artist who will take the sensation of
smelling the flower or gazing the sky into painting a flower or the sky, thus
adding his creativity into that process.
Thus, concrete sensation is a reactive phenomenon while abstract
sensation, as any type of abstraction, is an act of will (De Laszlo, 1959).
Jung
considered sensation and intuition as two opposite concepts. That is because sensation is conscious while
intuition is by Jung’s definition the psychological function of transmitting
perceptions in an unconscious way. The
source of those unconscious perceptions are either outer or inner or
associations of any one of those (De Laszlo, 1959). Intuition, although it may superficially
appear as feeling, thought, sensation or perception, is neither of those and
what makes it different is its definition as an instinctive apprehension,
irrespective of the nature of its contents.
It is an irrational perceptive function and the highest form of
cognition, thus Jung agrees on this with Spinoza (De Laszlo, 1959). Intuition is subjective (i.e. unconscious
facts of subjective origin) and objective (i.e. subliminal perceptions of an
object) as well as concrete (i.e. reactive process following directly from
given circumstances) and abstract (i.e. willful or directed process of
transmitting perception to unconscious) (De Laszlo, 1959).
Third
distinction is the feeling and thinking types.
Feeling as a process of the relationship between the ego and a given
content and therefore it is a subjective process, which may be in every respect
independent stimuli, though chiming in with every sensation. Feelers rely on their own subjective feelings
(De Laszlo, 1959). Thinking has its own
laws and brings given presentations into conceptual connection. Thinking is an apprehensive activity divided
into active and passive thinking. Active
Thinking is an act of will passive thinking is rather an occurrence and it can
be manifested in Jung’s early term fantasying, which he later called Intuitive
Thinking. Also, Jung called directed
thinking Intellect as a rational
function or rational thinking while he called intellectual intuition the
passive intuitive thinking or irrational thinking, since it is undirected. Thinking directed by feeling is just thinking
dependent upon feeling and not intuitive.
Jung disagreed with some psychologists who called associated thinking
what he just called mere presentation of associations and that is because real
thinking is limited in linking up representations by means of a concept or an
act of judgment whether it was intended or not (De Laszlo, 1959). Thinkers, unlike feelers, rely on their objective
logic and look for facts while feelers rely on their subjective feelings and
look for affect, which is increased
feeling (De Laszlo, 1959).
The basic
functions of the psyche are the four we just examined: thinking, feeling, sensation,
intuition. Jung called the least
developed of the four inferior function (Fadiman
& Frager, 2002). Any individual has
different strengths and weakness.
Whatever of the four basic functions of the psyche is the inferior one,
it always has a resemblance of primitive and mysterious. Jung said that our inferior function brings
us closer to God, because it makes us feel so disempowered that we desperately
seek for His help. Even those who do not
believe in God or in one God, but in many or in nothing at all, still they feel
a kind of awe and mystery due to their inferior function (Fadiman & Frager,
2002). As already mentioned, a fourth
distinction was added by post-Jungians such as the creators of the Myers-Briggs
and that is the pair of perception and judgment. Perception is a function of receiving and
registering sensation. Judgment is a
willful act of classifying, manipulating, and controlling information. People who use more their perception go with
the flow and stick less to schedule, are more flexible, spontaneous, and less
predictable. Those who trust their
judgment more, are more critical to others and self-critical, strict, rigid,
organized, schedule and goal-oriented, the leave nothing to chance, and they
take step-by-step actions (De Laszlo, 1959).
Fantasy and intuition
are basic in Jungian theory. Those are
functions of the unconscious strongly related with dreams. Dreams are part of an important function of
the psyche that keeps us healthy. We
need to sleep enough hours and have dreams, though dreams do not concern
themselves with health or sickness (De Laszlo, 1959). The dream is a fragment of involuntary
psychic activity, just conscious enough to be reproducible in the waking state
(De Laszlo, 1959). This activity takes
place in the unconscious and its fragmentary release in the form of a dream manage
to pass subliminal perceptions can enter consciousness. The dream presents the
most “irrational” factors of all psychic phenomena. Logical coherence and morality may be minimal
or of “bad” quality (De Laszlo, 1959).
Meaning of the dream has two levels: manifest
content, which the way it appears to the dreamer, and compensatory content, which Freud actually called latent content and it is the hidden
symbolic message of the dream, the one that awaits interpretation (De Laszlo,
1959). This symbolic substrate of dreams
is a composite of symbols and archetypes and it reflects their dynamics and
constant interaction (De Laszlo, 1959).
It is
common among Jung and his followers, including Jeremy Taylor, well-known in Jungian
dream work, that a few principles of the nature of dreams were observed in
their clinical experience. All dreams
come in service of health and wholeness and no dream comes to inform the
dreamer about what the dreamer already knows.
Also, the dreamer is the one knows or who can find a way to know what
the dream really means, because the dreamer is the one who has the dream. Dreams do not necessarily have only one
meaning. There are often many latent
meanings that await interpretation depending on the nature and type of
dream. Dreams, as products of the
collective unconscious, speak its universal language, which is the language of
metaphor and symbol that is embedded in archetypes (Fadiman & Frager,
2002).
Theory
of Conflict (Dysfunction)
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When
individuation cannot take place harmoniously and smoothly, but there are energy
discrepancies and outbalanced forces in the dynamics of the persona, the ego, the
self, the shadow, and the anima or animus, as well in other archetypes, such as
the mother archetype or the father archetype and instead there are mother
complex constellations or father complex constellations, then disease and
dysfunction take place and begin to form (De Laszlo, 1959).
Complexes are psychic fragments which
have spit off due to traumatic influences or incompatible tendencies (Jung,
1961). Jung used association experiments
or tests for his clients where client would be stimulated by a word and come up
with word associations. Then, word
associations were graphed, so that statistical data could be processed for
comparisons. Those experiments were used
as complex indicators and proved that complexes interfere with the intentions
of the will and disturb the conscious performance by producing memory
distortion and blockages in the flow of associations (Jung, 1961). Obsessions may take place in a conscious
state or influences in speech and action may occur unconsciously (Jung, 1961). In cases of psychosis, such as when there are
auditory hallucinations, voices are manifestations of the complexes that in
client’s mind take life of their own in the form of an ego-character reminding us of the “spirits” in ghost stories and
“automatic writing” (Jung, 1961).
Neuroses or everyday psychological
problems without the quality of insanity or loss of reality testing, such as hysteria, now called conversion
disorders, were thought to be caused by totally of organic factors. A neurosis is characterized by its relative
autonomy of its complexes, while in psychoses, such as schizophrenia the
complexes have become autonomous and disjoint.
While in hysteria (conversion disorder) delusions maybe brought to
control, in paranoia (i.e. paranoid schizophrenia) it cannot get into control
(De Laszlo, 1959). The opposite happens
in psychoses (loss of reality testing) (De Laszlo, 1959).
Ego
inflation may take place when instead of putting the self in the center, the
ego is placed instead. Then, person’s
individuation is abnormal and maladapted and it may lead to developing a
narcissistic personality. When the
individual deals with the anima or the animus, then tremendous energy is
unleashed and the ego develops instead of the self (Fadiman & Frager,
2002). In myth, culture, and religion,
there are examples where the ego gets inflated.
Such is Melanesian myth of mana
or energy and power found in people, objects or supernatural beings. The ego identifies with the wise man or wise
woman (also called “wise one”) and then the person is obsessed with the idea
that he or she is a sage who knows everything and often even reaches the point
of believing that he or she has any liberty to power abuse. Such people with a “mana personality” can be
quite dangerous to society and nature and, of course, to themselves (Fadiman
& Frager, 2002).
Jung was
among the psychologist who proved the psychological etiology and pathogenesis
of neuroses as well as of psychoses, though some of both, especially the second,
may related to organic causes (De Laszlo, 1959). When the personality is injured by
uncontrolled forces of the unconscious, either personal and/or collective, and
the ego is affected by that, then the result is neuroses that may relate to
anxiety, stress, conversion and somatoform disorders or mild neurotic forms of
personality disorders. However, when
whole regions of the normally controlled contents of the psyche are lost, the
ego’s reaction is inadequate, and consciousness is conquered by the uncontrolled
and overwhelming of the unconscious, then it is a psychosis. In severe psychoses, such as schizophrenia,
the ego so inflated that it breaks in to pieces, so ego fragmentation takes place (De Laszlo, 1959).
Excessive
releases and interventions of the unconscious can causes problems in everyday
relationships to the point of family and individual dysfunction in the form or archetype complex constellations (De
Laszlo, 1959). Jung said that even if archetypes were proved
nonexistent, still we should reinvent them in order to protect our values
before they disappear into unconscious.
Thus, archetypes are basic structures of the unconscious that interact
with consciousness in such a way that is a matter of urgent psychical hygiene
to attend them and develop a healthy relationship with them. When a whole elemental force of an original
experience falls into the unconscious, then a fixation acts compensatory and
psychical energy is fixated on the subject image of whose elemental force of an
original experience was lost into the unconscious and such can be the mother
image. Thus, when the mother archetype
functions in a way that it creates a complex to the individual, then there is a
mother complex constellation with
other people who may activate this complex by doing something that
unconsciously remind the person of the mother figure. For instance, the unpleasant, complaining,
erratic, and neurotic wife that finds everything wrong is of this kind. She becomes “nothing but femininity” and her
unconscious fixation on her womb image becomes a burden in every relationship,
as she often acts in a way that people may mislabel as “hormonal” or
“cyclothymic” (De Laszlo, 1959).
The “Nothing
but-Daughter” Complex is when a daughter gets identified with her mother to
the point she becomes a nonentity and her instincts are paralyzed through
projection that is projecting her own contents and behaviors to others and in
this case her mother. Such women often become totally dedicated and
self-sacrificing wives of men who are totally dedicated to their careers and
themselves (De Laszlo, 1959). Since
those wives are nothing, but masks themselves totally governed by their
personas, all they do is playing in semblance of naturalness until the point
their relationships become so fake and so dysfunctional that problems within
marriage and in their internal world arise, as well (De Laszlo, 1959).
The “overdeveloped Eros” complex is
responsible for the wrecking of many marriages and the development of people
with personalities dependent on their mothers.
Libido is overinvested in persons/subjects as libidinal cathexis (fixation) (De Laszlo, 1959). However, it does have some positive
characteristics that societies could not afford without them, such as the
“mama’s boy” and the devoted wife who acts like a “mom” to a man stifled by
mother solicitude (De Laszlo, 1959).
Such a woman of this complex is nothing but Mom and such a man of this
complex is nothing more than a Dad. Such
a marriage can degrade to having a house that is rather a breeding-pen. Their mother is the oppressive matriarch was
nothing but an egocentric person who would get attention and devour all her child’s
energy (De Laszlo, 1959).
A father complex would be either the weak
or the strong paternal image. The strong
one is abusive cruel father and husband, often drunk and high on drugs beats up
his passive and submissive wife or the career man who is too absorbed with
himself who has no time for his children and who may just offer them money
instead of love or even none of them (De Laszlo, 1959). Displacement of anger and/or other emotions
can happen, here, to other people or objects, as an ego-defense mechanism,
especially in children and adolescents as well as the battered woman, instead
of directly dealing with the situation (De Laszlo, 1959). The weak one is the frail paternal figure
that is often undecided, irresponsible, overly introvert, withdrawn and
reserved, sometimes chronically unemployed, passive, indifferent and often
interested only in sex, thus acting just as a stunt or sometimes not even
that. He is often allusively exploitative,
submissive to a caregiver woman who is the bread winner and he, in a
compensatory way, lets her dominate him and run the household (De Laszlo, 1959).
Theory
of Counseling (Central Constructs of the Counseling Process)
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The
concepts of self-realization, self-regulation, and self-actualization, described above, are
essential parts of the therapeutic goal in the counseling process of Analytical
Psychology, that is to enable the individual become fully functioning and use
full potential. Interpretation of symbolism
and archetypes is applied in fantasy, dream, and patterns of feelings,
thoughts, and behavior for exploring individual’s self and attaining balanced
and healthy relationships. The patterns
of the impact of client’s persona, ego, self, shadow, anima or animus, and
other archetypes affect them in their everyday social relationships (Fadiman
& Frager, 2002).
The therapeutic
stages are the analytic and the synthetic. The analytic stage begins with confession, in which the individual
begins to recover unconscious material.
Then, elucidation of the
unconscious material takes place, where the person starts to gain some
understanding of the nature and content of the unconscious material, but still
remains dependent on therapist’s guidance.
In the synthetic stage, education
helps the client move from mere psychological insight to new experiences and
the learning of new habits for individual growth. In the final part of transformation, the client-therapist relationship becomes
integrated and the client gets more independent and the relationship is now
transformed. The individual experiences
a highly concentrated individuation, though archetypal material is not necessarily
confronted. The individual practices
self-education, where the client takes more and more responsibility for their
own development (Fadiman & Frager, 2002).
The
counseling/therapy process is based on the Relational
Model where Relational Analysis is
implemented on counselor/therapist-client
rapport is essential to the course of the counseling/therapy process and
outcomes. In this process,
countertransference is explored. Jung
said that his therapy model is an analysis of irrational material, such as
those of the unconscious, including material from dreams and fantasies and
their archetypal and symbolic qualities, which have their own language and
their own logic, and therefore, as he said, he worked with cases and disorders
that rational therapies cannot treat, because they do not understand, do not
respect, and therefore they do not treat those (De Laszlo, 1959). Jung said that the therapist (or analyst as
he prefer to say), is has to maintain the
analytic frame by keeping track of the unconscious material emerging and
trying to make it conscious, thus cooperating with the unconscious instead of
opposing to it. Thus, the therapist
needs to take a distance from the client or analysand, curb his or her tendency
to be an authority figure or disclose too much information and should
consistently in every meeting keep the same neutral and anonymous attitude, the
one of the listener, observer, and interpreter of the material released during
the therapeutic process (Jung, 1933).
Countertransference is the therapist’s
answer to the client’s transference when
it projects a content of which the client is unconscious but which nevertheless
exists in the client. Client’s transference can be positive, as the client
unconsciously may see the therapist as, let’s say, a paternal or maternal
figure and may transfer those feelings to the therapist, thus enabling a trust
relationship and a close and warm rapport.
However, transference can be negative, as the client may displace
negative feelings he or she had from let’s say interacting with previous
therapists or from someone else and transfer those negative feelings to the
therapist, thus affecting rapport. Resistance and conflict may result so the
therapist needs work through those
and exploring client’s resistance and make enough and repeated interpretations
right away when the particular client’s resistance or conflict arises, so that
the client can be enlightened by realizing what I going on in therapy (Jung,
1933). Whether positive or negative the
transference, the countertransference can be just useful and meaningful, or as
much of a hindrance, according to
whether or not it seeks to establish that better rapport which is essential for
the realization of certain unconscious contents. Like the transference, the
countertransference may have some elements of hindrance sometimes, as it can be
compulsive and a forcible tie, because of its powerful impact to the client as
the therapist’s own words attempt to intervene to the unconscious and thus,
countertransference creates a "mystical" or unconscious identity with
the object of the countertransference (De Laszlo, 1959).
In the
framework of analytical psychology as a therapeutic/counseling model, it is
important to remember what Jung used to say about who is doing the therapy and
of course it is the clients who may know things about themselves that the
therapists would never have thought of.
Those hidden bits of knowledge and information are released in dreams
and words and the client, if is conscious and honest with himself or herself
and with the therapist, then may recognize them and disclose. Jung gave an example of a “normal” client, as
he called him who, although he didn’t have any obvious pathology, he had a
repeated dream that bothered him. He
first resorted to occultism, before the dream occurred and then to
psychology. He felt bad that he used his
dead boy’s memory in the dark business of occultism and he had this guilt that
caused the repeated dream of his diseased son. If the client had not disclose that, Jung
would never be able to know what was really happening With this client’s
personal information, interpretation of the guilt was therapeutic and the dream
did not appear again (Jung, 1933). Interpretation
works, Jung said, as the dream was a criticism of his unconscious that emerged
into consciousness and as that happened, self- realization took place, and the
goal of the dream was attained, so there was no point for the dream to repeat
itself, as there is no reason for a criticism or remark to repeat itself when
its goal of being attended is fulfilled (Jung, 1933).
Dream Analysis as interpretation of
dreams is the therapist’s task to enable the client to understand the latent or
compensatory meaning of the dream (Fadiman & Frager, 2002). When the dream seems to be threatening, then
there is an entire procedure of working with the dream that is dream work (Fadiman & Frager, 2002). In
this process, the meaning is broken down to its constituents and less
threatening meanings emerge as the dream transforms itself (Fadiman &
Frager, 2002). Thus, what at a first
glance, appears to be a formidable archetypal image of weird and strange
symbolism, it may actually hide a positive message what if followed, dreamer’s
wellbeing may be protected, as in the case of a young man who went to Jung
having the dream of his father driving drunk and damaging the car that son used
too. The client was frightened that
something bad will happened to his father or to the car or both of them or otherwise
his father had something to hide, but that was weird, because his father was
not an alcoholic and the son had nothing against him and his father had nothing
against his son either. Their
relationship was excellent and their lives were “normal” and there was no
pathology in the client. Then, what did
the dream want to say to the dreamer?
Jung concluded (after working long enough with the client in order to do
his inquiry and get enough information about the client) that the client was a
typical “daddy’s boy”, he had an overprotective father who provided everything
for him and the young man was afraid that all his being was dependent on his
father’s wellbeing and sense of control.
Thus, this dream was a call for him to “wake up”, become aware of
himself and start claiming his individuality and develop his own life and
become independent (Jung, 1933). This
type of dreams that contain important meaning that can transform one’s life, if
one pays attention to it, Jung called it the “Big Dream” (Jung, 1933).
Dream
interpretation, Jung advised, requires exact knowledge of the conscious status quo and should be applied with
respect to client’s moral, ideological, and religious convictions. Fixed symbols, Jung believed, should not be
taken for granted (Jung, 1933). Even fixed
symbols may contain indefinite meanings and their interpretation depends on the
individual whose unconscious may have indefinite depths and contents and
therefore a therapist cannot rely on remedies or use other cases as templates
for dream interpretation. That is
because each client is unique and has a different and unique life story (Jung,
1933).
Art of the client’s self-education is Active
Imagination, though it is not really limited in stages of therapy and can be
done any time. The client is encouraged
to explore his or her imagination by employing any type of art (e.g. writing,
drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, etc.) in order to explore their
inner depths of their psyche (Fadiman & Frager, 2002). Also, very helpful is the conscious imaging
or guided imagery, which is step-by-step fantasizing a stress-reducing scenario,
such as going to the beach or going hiking.
Instead of a passive fantasy, active imagination is the active attempt
to engage the unconscious in a dialogue with the ego through symbols. What expressive media may be used depends on
the individual’s needs, interests, values, and skills (Fadiman & Frager,
2002). Jung built a medieval revival
tower in Bollingen, added wings to the tower, as his inner needs multiplied,
and produced many sculptures in his yard while he painted and drew murals and
illuminated manuscripts in Latin and high German script, including his famous Red Book and mandalas or Buddhist archetypal paintings that have a concentric
pattern of colors and motifs. Mandalas
stand for the archetype of self and centeredness (Jung, 1961). Jung thought that his Red Book was a product of automatic writing. In his Red
Book, Jung wrote about his active imagination of engaging in a dialogue
with his anima that he identified with the biblical figure of Salome and with
Prophet Elias as his self, which he
later on identified with Philemon, a Greek pagan of anti-monotheistic
sentiments who talked to him about a new era of spiritual development that is
coming soon (Fadiman & Frager, 2002).
Conclusion
Jung ‘s
analytical psychology is a psychodynamic model that originated from Freudian
psychoanalysis and broke up from it to develop in a theory and therapy model
that is also called Jungian Analysis or Jungian Psychoanalysis or Jungian
Psychotherapy, terms that have already be used here interchangeably. Analytical psychology gave birth to concepts
that were used from news areas of psychology to develop, such as depth
psychology and transpersonal psychology that moved Jungian theory and practice
from the analytical to the humanistic arena. Jung was the first to move the locus of
interest in the analytic tradition from early childhood to middle adulthood,
from the unconscious to conscious and separate the unconscious into personal
and collective and then he coined the terms “archetype” and “psyche” that
profoundly changed the world as we know it.
Analytical
psychology is unique in using myth, culture, religion, anthropology, folklore, philosophy,
and history in a way that was never used before. For the first time in history, a psychologist
was able to bridge the West and the East in his theory as we have already
seen. For the first time in history,
Jung accomplished to harmonically bridge science and spirituality and come with
new tools to explore this connection and decode inner deep structures of mental
processes and use them in therapy with many successful results. It is not an accident that analytical
psychology is so popular today, though still severely criticized by mainstream
academia.
Jung
thought that health is maintained if individuation is achieved and the persona
is unveiled, the self goes to the center of the psyche, the anima or animus is
in touch with the person’s consciousness and the ego is prevented from
inflation or fragmentation. Jungian
psychopathology is based on the idea that individuation is not well processed,
as the ego gets to the center of psyche instead of the self and all the other
archetypes, such as anima and persona and others may not be properly
attended. Jungian counseling can use the
two stages and their four sub-stages in order to enable the client with
self-exploration that goes beyond mere focusing on the past or the unconscious,
but it strongly attends current urgent needs of the client. The unique way to interpret and decode even
the strangest contents of a dream or fantasy can treat even severe psychoses,
as rational therapies cannot compete in dealing with irrational, disorganized,
and symbolic materials of the unconscious.
Metaphor, art, imagery, and creativity in active imagination and
self-education are unique and inspirational and they don’t just treat a certain
problem, but enable the therapist to first relieve the problem, approach it in
a positive way then find the source of the problem and all the pattern of
problems created so far and transform the person and change all negative
aspects to positive by kindling light in the darkness of the unknown.
References
Fadiman, J & R. Frager (2002). Personality
and Personal Growth. Fifth Edition. New Jersey: Prentice Hall.
C.G. Jung (1971). Excerpts of C.G. Jung. In J. Campbell (Ed.), The Basic Writings of
C.G. Jung. New York: Penguin Books.
C.G. Jung (1964). Approaching the unconscious. In C.G. Jung (Ed.), Man and his symbols.
London: Aldus Books Ltd.
Jung, C.G. (1961). Memories, Dreams, Reflections. New York: Pantheon Books.
C.G. Jung (1959). Excerpts of C.G. Jung. In V.S. De Laszlo (Ed.), The Basic Writings
of C.G. Jung. New York: Random House,
Inc.
Jung, C.G. (1933). Modern man in search for a soul. Florida: Harcourt Brace &
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Slattery,
D.P & L. Corbett (2004). Depth Psychology: Meditations in the Field. California: Pacifica Graduate Institute.
