Jung and analytical Psychology.
The structure
of the mind according to Jung.
Jung points to the importance of
more extensive knowledge of the normal psyche. He believes that diseases are
disruptions of normal processes (and not entia per
se). He describes the mind as a self-regulating system similar to the
homeostatic mechanisms of the body.
Psychology is a science of the
psyche; of consciousness ànd of the products of what
we call the unconscious psyche.
We cannot explore the
unconscious simply because it is unconscious and therefore we have no relation
to it, only to its products that enter our consciousness. We are restricted in
understanding the unconscious psyche because it is always expressed by
consciousness and in terms of consciousness.
Consciousness, Jung says, is
like a surface of a skin upon a vast unconscious area of unknown extent. The
area of consciousness is a restricted field of momentary vision, a point of
contact, a relation
between what we consider “I” (ego) and what we consider not-“I”.
Consciousness is in that view the product of our perception and orientation in
the world outside us. It is important to realize that our ego, in Jung’s view,
is our consciousnesses point of reference; nothing can be conscious without an
ego.
So Jung defines the ego as our
center of consciousness; a complex of psychic facts; constituted by general
awareness (of body and existence) and by memory data (recorded past
awareness?). “The ego is only a bit of consciousness which floats upon the
ocean of the dark things” (the inner things), Jung says.
Jung distinguishes a number of
functions that enable consciousness to become oriented in its relationship with
facts and data coming in from the environment (ectopsychic
facts) and those “popping up” from the unconscious (endopsychic
facts).
The ectopsychic
functions are (according to Jung):
1. Sensation; the sum-total of awareness of external facts I
perceive through the function of my senses – something is
2. Thinking is perception and judgment; it tells me what a
thing is
3. Feeling in Jung’s terms is the rational, differentiated function of
giving value, the worth of this thing for me
4. Intuition is a not-exactly (Jung’s word)-sensory perception of
subliminal data that enable me to look around a corner (beyond the time/space I
am in).
These psychological functions have
their specific energy and are usually controlled by our will; we can use,
not use or suppress them with any chosen intensity and we can ideally direct
them by our willpower (intention).
But they also can function
involuntarily or even unconsciously.
Jung designed a diagram/model
for his four ectopsychic functions and claims that
two different functions contradict each other (E and F on one axe, S and I on
the other); they become polarities. Jung talks about a dominant function which
is the more conscious differentiated (civilized) function in a person, and the
inferior function, the function that is more primitive and always associated
with an archaic personality in this person. In our differentiated functions we
are aware; we have free will, but when it comes to the inferior functions we
are quite unaware and have no control. In the discussion Jung says something
interesting; he is convinced that no truth can be established without all four
functions. This seems to put man in a difficult position. We need all four, but
an individual cannot have two opposing functions in the same degree of
perfection at the same time. I think Jung indeed needs to explore the fourth
dimension; just like he says: “when you speak of dynamics and processes you
need the time factor”. Jung is reluctant to discuss this further and warns for
prejudice where more philosophical or religious approaches are concerned.
I suspect we will get to these
issues in his later work?
Jung thinks that there is always
part of our personality which is still unconscious, which is still becoming. We
are unfinished; we are growing and changing. Our potentialities lie in the
shadow-word of the dark side of our ego.
It is interesting to see that in
Jung’s view the direction of growth is indeed a direction of growing
consciousness and differentiation. With consciousness and differentiation we
have control, we can use our free will; our functions can be handled by
intention. It is amazing to see that Jung seems to limit our potentiality to
the dark side of our ego, leaving the trans-personal area outside what we could
ultimately call “I”. I will come back to this later when I discuss Jung’s
collective unconscious.
The endopsychic
functions Jung mentions are:
1. memory: the faculty to reproduce things that have faded
out of consciousness. (These are facts that have once been conscious, so they
are not really from the unconscious in Jung’s meaning.)
Now we
come to the components that have their source in the unconscious, dark sphere
of our mind; the shadow-world. Whereas we seem to have some control over our
memories, the level of our control over the next components seems to diminish
to almost zero. Here “we” (our Ego) seems to lose its grip completely…
2. the subjective components of conscious functions: our dispositions
to react in a certain way (not so favorable mostly).
3. emotions and affects are endopsychic
components which effect us and seem to come from
outside ourselves; our control is decreased to almost zero and we feel like we
are possessed by our own inner side. You are in a real emotion (when you have a
feeling you have control).
4. invasion is an extraordinary condition in which a person
is seized upon by his unconscious; anything may come out of him. He suffers a
loss of self. Jung calls this factor in many cases not pathological but merely
undesirable.
Jung speaks of two classes of
the unconscious;
First the personal unconscious, or subconscious mind that is entirely made up
from personal elements that constitute the personality as a whole.
Then there is the collective
unconscious. The contents of this sphere cannot be ascribed to individual
acquisition but rather to
patterns peculiar to mankind in general. Jung calls these
collective patterns archetypes. They contain mythological motifs.
In Jung’s view the personal
unconscious is something we can (and ultimately should?) become aware of. The
collective unconscious however cannot be made conscious at all. Contents of it,
images mostly, behave as if they do not exist in ourselves, we cannot integrate
them in our own consciousness. We need to project them to become conscious of
them, so if they become activated, we become aware of certain things in our
fellow man. It reminds me of Martin Buber[1] who claims there can be no
experience of self without the other. I think he is right.
Jung explains the phenomenon of
a collective unconscious by saying that our mind, just as our body, has its
history. In that sense our mind has been built up in the course of millions of
years and represents the history of mankind. This is why archaic images are
embedded in our (collective) unconscious. Cayce talks about the Akashic records where all souls record their experiences on
the earth-plane. If individual souls (in this vision) have a history, these
records hold mankind’s history.
The beauty of Jung’s view is
that these “records” are more or less available to man in the form of
archetypes; in the collective unconscious.
“The deepest layer we can reach
in our exploration of the unconscious mind is the layer where man is no longer
a distinct individual”, says Jung. There our mind widens out and merges into
the mind of mankind – not the conscious mind, but the unconscious mind of
mankind, where we are all the same. On this collective level we are no longer
separate individuals, we are one.
Jung claims that this is because
the basic structure of the mind is the same in everybody. Somehow it seems to
me that he avoids to put to words the possibility that
we share something which could be called a universal mind. He mentions the
wholeness and the fact that fundamentally we are identical with everybody and
everything, but he stops right there (at least he does in these lectures). He
gives me the impression that he considers the collective unconscious something
hidden deep inside us (his diagram “the Psyche”), unconquerable, whereas I
would prefer to think it is surrounding us, and we participate in it.
I would like to introduce a
simple model here I designed in a Gestalt paper two years ago. I envisioned two
individual psyches as two icebergs floating in a sea of collective
unconsciousness. The original iceberg model comes from Fuhr[2] who explains that we are aware/conscious with only our tip (above the water) and that
the unconscious part of our psyche lies under the surface (in his terms the “Mittlerer Modus”). I expanded this sea-less model to a
two-iceberg model: You and I, both icebergs in the sea, in continual osmotic
contact with the water (imagine the exchange of melting and re-freezing). If we
can feel ourselves floating in this sea, we can also feel that we are connected
there, actually have the same origin, are equal.
And of course this brings me to
thoughts in a direction of the perennial philosophy. If growth means to become more
conscious, as Jung suggests, I do not understand why he stops (here) at the
boundaries of the collective unconscious. I agree that we have no way of
integrating things that are not already part of us, but he contradicts himself
when he says that our mind has its history. That would mean that the collective
unconscious is indeed, and has always been, available to us, especially if we
accept the concept that we participate in it. I envision that we are indeed
able to access data from what Jung calls the collective unconscious. It forms our
context, on a personal level, but also on a human-kind or universal (or should
I say transpersonal-) level.
Ken Wilber[3] thinks also of growth as
becoming more conscious when he describes the human evolution in his book “Up
from
The beginning point in his view
is a oneness, wholeness without consciousness, whereas
his destination-point for the human psyche would be the full consciousness of
this wholeness. When I follow this train of thought I note that at that stage
on consciousness one is no longer divided in “I” and “the other” (duality).,
One is conscious and no longer “needs” the Ego, as Jung suggests, to be
conscious of….
Let me try to link the idea of wholeness to Jung’s concept of
synchronicity. He says that, as he speaks of our psyche in terms of dynamics
and relationships, he considers all relative (except for the mythological
pattern, which he considers profoundly unconscious as we saw). Doesn’t he imply
that, at least our personal psyche, is a whole
(conscious and unconscious).
Jung is very careful in describing what he means by synchronicity:
“there is a peculiar principle of synchronicity active in the world so that
things happen (miraculously) together somehow and behave as if they were the same,
and yet for us they are not”. If we assume with Jung that even when we are not
aware of it all is indeed relative/related,
synchronicity becomes a fact of life: all is connected, even beyond our
personal entities. This suggests a wholeness, a
universal “system” in which we participate, doesn’t it? Jung believes that the
human psyche is a self-regulating system. With synchronicity in mind this makes
even more sense; the whole is looking for balance and all parts of this whole
are interconnected, also in their effort to make the whole more whole.
Jung mentions three methods of
analysis to approach the dark sphere of man; the unconscious:
1. the word association test
2. dream-analysis
and
3. the method of active imagination
The word association test is in
Jung’s method not used for the study of mental associations, but to discover
disturbances of reaction which indicate that a deeper layer of psychic contents
is hit. Jung calls this a complex: a usually repressed and hidden
conglomeration of associations characterized by peculiar or traumatic
feeling-tones. It is a sort of picture of a more or less complicated
psychological nature, like a partial personality really (I’ll come back to that
later). Because it is highly toned it is difficult to deal with; when something
is important to us we tend to handle it with hesitance. So this complex causes
a disturbance in our normal behavior (complex disturbance).
The actual test is done as
follows: The operator reads out a list of well-known words (stimulus words) and
instructs the test person to react as quickly as possible to each of these
words with the first word that comes to mind. The operator marks the time of
each reaction and then repeats the procedure and asks the test person to
reproduce his/her former answers.
The prolongation of the reaction
time is important as are other disturbances because all these reactions are
beyond the control of the will in Jung’s view. (If you submit to the experiment
you are done for, and if you do not submit to it you are done for too) In order
to increase the effect of critical stimulus words the words can be arranged in
such a way that they occur within the presumable range of perseveration of an
emotion that is sensitized by another stimulus word. This method is used in
criminal cases only.
Jung mentions how he reads an
individual’s story by looking at the test results. In his examples however he
does evaluate the actual responses the test person gives and this person’s
context.
Where then lies
the healing capacity of this approach?
Jung claims that by uncovering
complexes the patient is invited to integrate thus far hidden and repressed
parts of him/herself into his/her (conscious) personality. (I am sure we will
come back to what Jung calls the individuation process; the step-by-step
identification with the totality of one’s personality, of one’s self).
His hypothesis is: If one can
accept one’s sin (or any psychic content) one can live with it. If one cannot
accept it, one has to suffer the inevitable consequences.
In order to accept (integrate)
something, it has to be conscious. One has to have awareness of a psychic
content (and possibly of its workings) before one can take responsibility for
it consciously. This is the basic principle of Gestalttherapy
so I am very familiar with it. The beauty of this approach lies in the promise
that awareness of her processes brings a person in a position of detachment;
she can look at herself from somewhere outside of herself, from a center of
consciousness beyond ego (we’ll come back to this). In this way we can
objectify our behavior or psychic contents. We are no longer a victim of the
world around or inside us.
We are no longer a victim of
life, but have become creators of it.
In one of the discussions Jung
mentions a client who, by painting pictures and than studying its features,
objectified the unconscious contents of her schizophrenic experiences. She
needed to feel her connection with mankind to feel normal (right) and
recognizing (being aware of) the archetypes in her pictures helped her with
that.
In lecture four Jung points to
the importance of raising a personal disease (or disturbance) to a higher and
more impersonal level. Connecting the client with the general human meaning of
his particular situation has a healing effect.
In general one can assume that a
client, knowing that he does not stand alone in his ailment, is taken out of
his isolation. This knowledge lifts him out of himself (detaches him from the
personal or ego) and connects him with humanity. He may find a transpersonal
meaning in his suffering, or even better: mobilize the forces of the
unconscious to such an extent that the body begins to react in a normal way
again (a symbol or mythological motif can work these wonders).
Back to the
word-association test.
Jung claims he has empirical
proof of the physiological difference between conscious and unconscious
reactions. He discovered for example spasms in the thorax in the latter. This
is the basic idea behind his evaluation of response-time in the word association
test and it is interesting.
Highly toned feelings often are
associated with physiological reactions (changes in breathing, the beating of
one’s heart, blood pressure, secretions of intestines, the
skin) and in that way these complexes do have their roots in our bodies.
I envision that the unconscious
complexes are actively repressed, more or less willingly hidden, and I know
from my personal experience that indeed we can bring those complexes “in the
open” by bringing these disturbances in our body into awareness. If we wait too
long in doing so the body itself might signal us that something is “wrong” by
becoming painful or sick.
Jung acknowledges this when he
says that a complex with its given tension or energy has the tendency to form a
little personality of itself. A complex can interfere with you, with what you
intent to do or say or even think. Jung even considers a complex to have a
certain will-power, a consciousness with a sort of ego as its center (this
personification of complexes is not in itself necessarily a pathological
condition!).
He concludes that a unity of
consciousness is an illusion; our unconscious consists of an indefinite number
of complexes or fragmentary personalities.
When we accept the concept that
our image of the world is a projection of the world of our self (as the world
of our self is an introjection of the world) this is
exactly what makes our projections (as products of our unconscious) so
interesting to Jung (and psychologists in general), they are the key to our unconscious.
In the fifth lecture Jung comes
back to the process of projection (and transference as a specific form of it).
He defines projection as a general psychological mechanism (involuntary,
automatic, spontaneous) that carries over subjective
contents of any kind into an object or person. As soon as you realize (become
conscious of) your projections they dissolve because from then on you re-own
them (you know they belong to you) and all the projected energy can be
reclaimed. Instead of projecting something “out there” (poverty principle), you
realize it belongs to you (wealth principle) and you can make use of it as you
please. (If you fall desperately in love with someone it is as if he is lovable
(and you are not??) until you realize that you are the one that loves.)
Roberto Assagioli
designed his psychosynthesis based on this concept.
Jung claims that all activated
contents of the unconscious have the tendency to appear in projection. He even
says: “the general psychological reason for projection is always an activated
unconscious that seeks expression”.
Prove of the self-regulating
system at work? I believe so. In terms of Gestalt: that what needs healing, to
become whole (is an un-finished Gestalt) will present itself as fore-ground.
In Jung’s view personal
projections can and should be dissolved through conscious realization
(awareness). The impersonal projections however cannot be destroyed because
they belong to the structural elements of our psyche. The archetypes intervene,
so to say, in for example a dangerous situation. A person reacts in the way
mankind has always reacted. Instead of drowning in the chaos of his unconscious
psyche and its projected world, this person is able to objectify the impersonal
images and relates to them in a detached way. He steps out of the puddle of his
ego-concerns and connects to his basic “reality” (structure) of being human.
Jung speaks of this condition of detachment as a sort of center within the
psyche of the individual that is non-ego.
Man has to keep in touch with
the collective unconscious according to Jung; his psychic and spiritual health
depends on it. Jung claims that man has his religions for that reason.
No wonder that Jung is so
intrigued by his methods of analyzing these products of our unconscious.
Whatever a psyche creates/projects tells us something about that psyche and its
hidden components, and gives us an opportunity for healing or growth.
Which brings
us to the second approach to the unconscious:
Dream-analysis. Presumably we are dreaming all the time, but during the
day we are not aware of it because consciousness is too clear. At night dreams
can break through and become visible.
Jung reminds us that our consciousness is only a surface, the
avant-garde of our psychological existence. He pictures our consciousness as a
head, burdened by a body that can walk only on the earth (unlike angels who
have winged heads), or as a head with a long saurian’s
tail.
So Jung studies dreams to learn what the tail is doing; what a
person’s unconscious is doing with his complexes. In other words: what is this
person preparing himself for, what (does he feel) is in store for him.
He is convinced that a dream does not conceal; we simply do not
understand its language. The dream is its own interpretation, the whole thing.
(Here of course he differs from Freud who thought that a dream was a distorted
and therefore unrecognizable representation of a secret incompatible desire.
Freud was looking for the complexes whereas Jung looks for what the unconscious
is doing with them…)
Jung starts his dream-analysis with the assumption that he does not
understand it. Amplification, the seeking of parallels, is than a logical first
step: find out where un-understandable words or images are used in other texts
or applications and try if the formula you discovered fits the dream story. You
can always ask the dreamer how a certain object appears to him to find its
context, so you know what tissue the word or image is embedded in.
When you are dealing with the personal unconscious, working with
dreams, you are not allowed to think too much or to add anything to the
associations of the client. The client has to sort out his own individual
associations in order to properly integrate the beforehand unconscious material
into his conscious personality.
Where the collective consciousness is concerned the client has no idea
where the contents of his dream come from and it is the therapists
task to provide the material. In this area client and therapist have the same
basic structure of mind, an universal language so to
speak. There the therapist can associate for the client. Jung impresses his
audience (and me) with his enormous mythological knowledge. It touches me when
he says that special knowledge is also a terrible disadvantage: ”it leads you in a way too far, so that you cannot explain
anymore”.
If the main substance of a dream is mythological, Jung speaks of a
mythological dream, or big dream. These dreams contain a general, collective
meaning and its dreamers have an instinctive tendency to tell them. History
prepares itself, Jung says; when the archetypes are activated and come to the surface in a number of
people, we are in the midst of history. Our personal psychology is just a thin
skin, a ripple upon the ocean of collective psychology.
Jung warns his audience that it
is not safe to interpret a dream without going into careful detail as to the
context. As dreams are the reaction to our conscious attitude, the natural
reaction of the self-regulating psychic system, they have a compensatory
function: they are an indication, a symptom, that the individual is at variance
with unconscious conditions, that somewhere he has
deviated from his natural path. Jung says: “my snake does not agree.”
I think this is a beautiful and
probably right way of looking at our dreams, or all true products of our
unconscious minds. I do believe in a self-regulating system, on a holistic
level even. (When Jung talks about synchronicity he surely points in the same
direction?) When, at the final stages of our individuation process we can
(almost) identify with our self, maybe our heads and tails will agree and small
dreams will no longer be necessary. Which still leaves us with humanity’s tail,
its historical burdens (Jung names Christianity, and I can feel his enormous
concern).
At the end of lecture three Jung compares an (analyzed content of a)
dream with the advise/opinion of a two-million-year-old man you come to as an
ignorant child. You always have the choice and thus full responsibility to do
with it what you want.
No therapist should try to hinder a client doing what he intents to
do.
He later says:” it is wrong to
cheat people out of their fate and to help them go beyond their level. If a man
has it in him to be adapted, help him by all means; but if it is really his
task not to be adapted, help him by all means not to be adapted, because then
he is all right.”
Since by active imagination the
material is produced in a conscious state of mind, the material is far more
rounded out than the dreams with their precarious language, Jung says. He
considers active imagination an invaluable tool in making the unconscious
understandable to a client.
He also describes the process of
painting or drawing pictures (I suppose any creative work) as a means to
objectify unconscious contents of our psyche.
Creating images, in any form,
has a definite healing effect on the “artist”, and Jung says: “it is almost
impossible to define this effect in rational terms; it is a sort of “magical”
effect, that is, a suggestive influence which goes out from the images to the
individual, and in this way his unconscious is extended and is changed.”