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Old Monday, September 14, 2009
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Post Carl Jung

CARL JUNG

Carl Jung was born in 1875, which is 20 years after Freud so he is kind of the new generation. By the time Jung came along, the theory of evolution was more widely accepted than was true for Freud. He was the son of a protestant clergyman, the grandson of a clergyman and lots of his family worked in the church in various ways. He also had a great uncle and an aunt who made their living as psychics. So he grew up in a family atmosphere that was dominated by religion and psychic experience.

As a young man he was a loner. He was very bright and he did not mix well with the other kids. Through his later grade school years he got picked on by bullies because he was the odd one. He was picked on until one day when he was twelve, the two school bullies started picking on him and he just could not take it anymore. He flew into a rage, knocked one of them down, grabbed him by the feet and swung him around knocking the other one down. After that nobody ever picked on him.

He was a big guy, 6’2” 210 pounds, and very strong. He spent lots of time walking. By the time he was in his early teen, he would often spend whole weekends walking in the hills by himself. If it was the weekend and the weather was nice, he would often walk up into the hills after school and come back and go to school on Monday and not go home until after that.

His mother was chronically ill and rather negative. She used to talk to herself a lot, especially when she was doing homework. He said that if he listened to her talking to herself, it was the only time that she really made any sense. She was kind of free-associating. He was a brilliant student and that was part of the reason that he did not fit in. When the other kids were worried about different aspects of school, he had already finished studying or learning that particular thing years before except in the case of mathematics.

He was not good at mathematics. He was not good at mathematics up until he was in high school. He became ill in high school and was very glad when he was ill because he missed the mathematics test. Then when the next mathematics test came along he was behind and so he pretended to be ill. Then he overheard his parents talking to his uncle who was a doctor. The doctor said something like, “we should not expect too much of the boy”. Jung said that this was a changing point in his life because he did not want to have the kind of life in which one is pitied. He went back to school, concentrated on mathematics and ended up getting A’s from then on, despite the fact that it was not his strong subject. He had a sense of not wanting to be the one about whom not much was expected.

He was tortured by many religious questions when he was a young boy, in particular the question of how could a good God create evil in the world. Probably, although he never said this, this is the age at which he began masturbating and he was worried about sex. Then at age twelve he had a dream about God on his throne. From the throne, a turd falls on the Cathedral and breaks down the walls. Jung said he felt an “enormous and indescribable relief. Instead of the expected damnation, grace had come upon me and with it an unutterable bliss like I had ever known. I wept for happiness and gratitude”. Jung said that he finally understood that people like his father and the great cathedrals are a kind of phoniness, in which religion and God is portrayed as somehow different and separate from the real world. So the turd broke the cathedral because God encompasses everything and probably, personally, that included sexuality.

Most of Jung’s early life, he held his father in great contempt because, in speaking with his father and trying to talk with him about religious questions, he discovered that his father really did not know anything about God and that he was simply repeating platitudes. He held contempt for his father up until when he was in medical school and his father died. As the oldest son in his family, he then had to support the family. He ended up working as well as going to medical school after his first year and he said that for the first time he came to appreciate both his father and the male role in society in general and to appreciate the contribution and the sacrifice that his father had made.

Freud was a brilliant student and devoted to religious questions when he was young, and then he had dreams which led him to decide that he should study science. So he began to study science and was a brilliant student as he had been in other things. Then he had another dream that made him decide that he should study medicine. He began to study medicine as his particular area of science. He had other dreams that led him to study schizophrenia much against the advice of all of his advisors and faculty, because studying mental problems was considered the low end of things. They told him he would never make a career if he studied things like this and why didn’t he go into surgery or some other branch of medicine, but Freud followed his dreams.

Freud’s first job was working with schizophrenics in a famous clinic in Switzerland, and he was very innovative in his treatment, he developed the word association test. He used it with schizophrenics and he was the first person in western science to point out the orderliness and intelligence of the productions of the psychosis of schizophrenics. He wrote a paper and he sent it to Sigmund Freud who thought it was the most brilliant paper on schizophrenia that he had ever read. The two men began a correspondence. After a few years they met. They quickly became very close friends. Freud began introducing Jung as his intellectual heir. He arranged for him to become the first president of the International Psychoanalytic Association. Freud and Jung were invited to the United States together to give lectures at Clark University. Very quickly the two men began to have some conflict.

On the voyage over to the United States to give their lectures, the first lectures on psychoanalysis ever in the United States, they interpreted each others dreams. Jung reports that Freud refused to acknowledge the accuracy of some of his interpretations because he said, that Freud said, it would damage his authority if he were to acknowledge the interpretations were true. Which basically this means that Jung was saying part of Freud’s theory was due to Freud’s neurosis rather than reality.

The two men began to have personal conflicts with one another. Freud felt that Jung was betraying him. Jung felt the Freud wanted a son and an heir rather than a colleague which is what Jung wanted. Jung thought that Freud was overly narrow in his dogmatism about his own point of view. Jung ended up resigning his presidency in the International Psychoanalytic Association, and Freud thereafter forbade anyone in the association from communicating with Jung. He publicly said that Jung had gone around the bend and decided to study religion instead of psychology.

Jung had a very thriving private practice as well as being appointed to faculty in various places in Switzerland. He was a very unconventional therapist. He said about his own therapy, “Sometimes I am a Freudian, sometimes I am a Jungian, sometimes I don’t know what I am, the main thing is to simply encounter the other person as a human being.”

Jung took patients sailing sometimes. He sang to some of his patients. He had a 35 or 40 year affair with one of his patients whom he brought home to live with him and his wife and his 5 children. When his wife was asked if she minded this she said, “Of course but what can you do with such a man?”

Jung had an emotional turmoil in middle age, just as Freud did, which roughly corresponded with WWI. From the ages of 38-41 he withdrew partially from some of his teaching responsibilities and instead said that he needed to concentrate on his own mind. If you ever listen to yourself you have an internal voice that comments and talks to yourself, and Jung said that he discovered that it was not one voice, it was several. Rather than suppressing this difference and trying to make it one, he decided it was his duty as a psychologist to investigate it. He discovered that there was not only the regular voice of himself, there was another voice that was a disembodied consciousness that we might call a spirit, there were some long dead relatives, there were a couple of women as well as several men. He carried on dialogues among these including sometimes he would speak all of their voices aloud as he was walking along. He would be walking along the street near his house and speaking several parts of a conversation. Neighbors would say, “There goes mad Dr. Jung”.

This ended at about the same time WWI ended. Jung’s critics said that he could not stand the real consequences or the reality of the war and he withdrew. What he said was that there is a similarity in the timing of things between people and the events around them that he called Synchronicity. He said that the world went mad at the same time that he went mad.

One patient wrote a remembrance of being analyzed by Jung and she said that one day she went up and knocked on his door. He came to the door and said, “Oh no! I cannot stand the sight of another one! Go home and analyze yourself today”. Then he shut the door and locked it.

Jung traveled widely. He spent time in the American Southwest with the Pueblo Indians. He also went to Tunis, Kenya, Uganda and India. At one point he traveled cross country throughout Africa right after WWI in the 20’s, from the west coast of Africa to the headwaters of the Nile and then up the Nile, at which time he said he understood for the first time non-western or primitive mind.
Jung lived until 1961.

What did he say about the mind in general? He said we have a Collective Unconscious. We obviously inherit a very structured mind and life is a process of bringing these structures to fruition. He called these structures:

Archetypes: the structural components of the Collective Unconscious. There are hundreds of them. There are behavioral patterns, primordial images what he called dominance or tendencies. Basically they are inherited potentials which we all have. What we are trying to do in life is to develop those potentials to bring them to fruition. Jung wrote, “Man’s task is to become conscious of the contents that press upwards from the unconscious. Neither should he persist in his unconscious nor remain identical with the unconscious elements of his being thus evading his destiny which is to create more and more consciousness. As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of their being”. In other words our purpose in life is to create more consciousness and we do this by discovering elements within ourselves and not really in the unconscious structures, but perceiving the world with the structures which lead us to seeing the world in a broader and deeper way.

Jung never gave a complete catalogue of the archetypes, but there are several very important ones that you ought to know.
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Archetypes

1. Persona-the social mask or the public personality which we adopt in order to protect ourselves from being too exposed in the social world. We both have this as a structure and we develop one. We have a pre-structured belief that people have a social mask so we see other people not as pure people but as creatures hiding behind a mask and we construct one ourselves. What we generally do is we pick some archetype to use as a public mask. If you think about famous people, you can think about what kind of archetypes they have. What are archetypes? They are recreations or structures of repeated human experiences. So we have an archetype for mother, father, brother, sister, grandmother, son etc…clearly these are things that have been repeated throughout human experience, so they are in our minds. We also have many other similar kinds of things. We have:

Wise Old Man or the Sage
The Great Mother, the Wise Old Woman or the Crone
Hero
God
Energy
Various Animals
The Joker or the Trickster
The Idea of Rebirth or Spirit or Prophet
Prophet and Disciple in various situations
The Eternal Triangle or a case in which there is one person loved by two others and there is jealousy

So we can adopt any archetype as a Persona as a public role we play to hide our true complexity and vulnerability


Examples: John Wayne would be the Hero
Madonna is the Seductress
Ronald Reagan Wise Old Man

2. The Shadow-the remnance of our animal history. Whatever is left over from our pre-human days is concentrated into the shadow, or our animal instincts, which contains all of our reprehensible thoughts and feelings. For example: the desire to rip out the throats of our enemies etc. He said that the shadow gives light to the personality. The animalistic nature is something basically necessary to human beings. This is also the archetype that we project into religion in various ways, sometimes into the idea of original sin; we are born with something awful within us or sometimes into something like the devil or an enemy. These are all actually structures within us rather than states in the actual world.

3. Anima and Animas-the archetypical masculine and feminine. Throughout history human beings have related with both men and women so we have archetypes for both masculine and feminine. We need to balance them both in both aspects in order to develop ourselves.

4. Self-the midpoint of personality. It is between conscious and unconscious. It is the point of stability in the middle of all personal polarities. Anytime you have a tension, the Self is actually in between the two poles of the tension. Development of the self is in some ways the goal of our personal development.

The most important part of personality or character of mind is the Collective Unconscious. We also have a:

Personal Unconscious: an unconscious that is composed of all of the repressed, suppressed, forgotten, weak and unimportant thoughts, impressions and feelings. It is vaguely like Freud’s Pre-Conscious. His understanding is that we can get at all of that. We can look at the contents of our Personal Unconscious although we very seldom do, mostly because we either find it uncomfortable or uninteresting. We organize information in our Personal Unconscious so that we have a personal mental organization as well as a collective one. We form:

Complexes: a personal way of understanding. They almost always form around an archetype and sometimes other archetypes, thoughts memories, and experiences are all understood in relation to that archetype. For Example: the guy who could no longer have sex after his mother died. Jung would say that he had a mother Complex. That mother in his mind was very closely associated with sexuality so when mother died, sexuality disappeared. Most people do not associate sexuality with mother in quite so close a way. So a complex is a personal organization of understanding of our lives in the Personal Unconscious.

Ego was basically our consciousness. The Ego for Jung was not like the Ego for Freud. For Freud the Ego was the most active part of the mind trying to reconcile, or a controlling factor. For Jung, the Collective Unconscious is seeking its own fulfillment. The consciousness if often controlled by the Collective Unconscious which often makes the decisions sometimes in spite of all of the plans of the Ego or the conscious mind.

Consciousness kind of sits on top of these things generally following the lead of the Collective Unconscious, but not always. The truth is that development is often painful and unpleasant. Most people are unwilling to go through the rigors involved. His sense if of being led on and not of particularly having choice. In essence, human choice is to face the truth or to avoid it. The truth is that we have to do what our Collective Unconscious tells us or in some way we are stunting our growth and denying our self.

The archetypes which he called the deposits of constantly repeated experiences of humanities, differ from our ancestral past. Jung said we have, “racial, tribal, and family archetypes over and above the universal ones”.



Bowlby diverged from Freud in a very distinct way. Freud thought that we have two basic instincts, survival and procreation (sex). Whereas Bowlby is adding something that is built into us, an instinct which is different from Freud’s conception of instinct. It supposes that there must be some kind of structure built into us before we are born that is not developed, as Freud suggested, through our associations to the satisfactions and frustrations of our basic psychological needs. Freud’s approach, that is building everything up from a few basic building blocks is called an Atomistic Approach. There are several alternatives. Another theory is called:

Teleology: Rather than a causal point of view, or the past causes the present, the future causes the present. This is not causality in the same sense. Sometimes it is described as causation by design. You can think about attachment in that way. If you did not know that we had an attachment instinct, you would not be able to predict a baby’s behavior at about age one when it develops stranger anxiety becoming more upset upon separation from parent, hence developing the secure base phenomenon. It is only because we have this idea that this is the way children are going to become, that we are able to better understand children’s behavior. You will recall when the Robertson’s first observed these things; they couldn’t understand them and tried to fit them into a Freudian framework that simply did not work. This is why Bowlby had to step outside of that framework to create the theory of attachment to make it work.

Teleology assumes that humans are already built complex and what we have are potentials for growth. In psychology, the potentials for growth are in our mind. Similar to when we are born, we have the capacity to grow to a certain height and grow in a whole variety of ways. Jung argues that we are very complexly structured from birth and what life is about is bringing into fruition these very potentials. In some ways this is a modernistic approach. That is that it is an approach that the humanists adopted a few decades after Jung.

Is this true? Think about the contrast. If the past causes the present than you would not be able to see any structures in human beings that were not brought about by commonalities in their environment. Whereas if we are more pre-structured in some ways, then we will expect to see some things emerge regardless of environment. This is kind of like the last aspect of instinct from the ethological point of view; it appears in muted or altered form even when normal opportunities for its expression are absent. Attachment is actually a teleological argument rather than an atomistic argument.

Do you believe in a certain kind of biological predestination? Do you believe that you are born with certain potentials? Was Beethoven predestined to be a composer? Was Michelangelo predestined to be a sculptor? Are you predestined to have certain traits or characteristics? Do you see the world in particular ways because of the way you were born? Are we born with different talents, tendencies and abilities to perceive?

Question: What about environmental influences? Answer: We are talking specifically about just the genetic component. It is not that environment does not have an effect, what we are arguing about is, are we simple and everybody pretty much the same built up in reaction to the environment, or are we very specifically different?

It is clear that we are born different. It is not the case that we all learn the same things easily or with equal difficulty. So the question then becomes, in what way are we structured? How would you go about finding out? What in general are the structures with which human beings are born? What mental structures or potentials are we born with? One way to find out would be to look at other species and find ways that we are different and we are pretty different even from our closest relatives, the chimpanzees, bonobos and orangutans. We are similar in many ways, particularly physical ways, but they do not create culture in the same way or certainly not to the same degree that we do.

How far does this go? Is your whole life and every move predestined?

Example: Movie Predator-The alien has different kind of eyes than we do. The alien sees infrared instead of visible light. It sees things the same as long as it were the same temperature. If not, then for instance, it can see the heart beating in the lizard for instance. Cannot see Arnold at all.

Example: The Dalia is a big showy flower that is pinkish-purplish, or is it? If we were a bumblebee seeing in ultra-violate light, it would not look like all one color. You would see bulls eye or spiral patterns. Which does it really look like? What is reality? Are we connected with reality?

The truth is that we have a piece of it and we think that it is real. This is because we are born with a particular potential. We discover in the world, in some sense, what we are predestined to discover. We see things the way human beings do which is only part of the story. There are many things that we do not see.

Cats use their sense of smell mainly and we use our vision. We are a visual dominant animal. We adjust everything to fit the way our vision sees it like with the bar at the Exploritorium

Not only are we born with potential, but also the world into which we are born is already born in us. Jung said, “The world into which man is born is already inborn in him as a virtual image.” That is, what we have the capacity to experience is a potential with which we are born and is not in reality itself. If we give this, that human reality is not the reality, but only a piece of it, what else can we say about human potentials and human interior design? What are our potentials?

One way to sort it out is that we can look towards universal human potentials and we can do this. We know one of human beings most unique properties is the degree to which humans create culture. So we can look at culture across time and space. We can look at different groups of people separated by years and miles. What we find when we do this, and Jung spent years and years studying this, is we find marked similarities. He suggested that the things that are reproduced by people separated by thousands of miles and hundreds of thousands of years must in some way be built into human beings. So just like our perception, culture is also built into us in some way or at least the potential for culture, and culture develops in a limited number of possibilities, which are determined by the structure already born into the human mind.

How many structures are born into the human mind and what are they? Nobody has ever developed a catalogue of them. Jung’s claim is that there are hundreds of them if not thousands. Do we have hundreds of possibilities built into our minds? According to Jung’s we are predisposed or born with the idea of things like circles, triangles and squares. So it is very easy. Little kids can pick these up very early on whereas some animals cannot.

Question: Is this like Socrates Forms?
Answer: No. Reality is somewhere else and the forms are in our minds. These forms are not reality, they are in our minds. Jung once said for instance, “if you find out someone’s belief about God, it tells you almost nothing about God, but lots about the man.” We can look at the way we perceive and think, and it tells us more about us than it does about the world itself.

We must be born with some structure. The structure for all of these potentialities Jung called:
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We also have Four Mental Functions that go along with our basic attitude. They are in opposite pairs as well.

Thinking and Feeling-We have a contradiction between thinking and feeling. Some people emphasize one at the expense of the other.

Sensing and Intuiting-In sensing, one pays attention to the details of experience, the particularities, whereas in intuiting, one tries to go beyond the information given, in getting a global impression of the thing.

Isabella Briggs Meyers, who is the chief author of the Meyers Briggs claims that there is another dimension in Jung’s writing, although Jung did not say so, which she called:

Judging and Perceiving-Judging people are evaluating things whereas perceiving people are enjoying the experience.

The basic Jungian distinction is where do you find meaning in the world? Is the meaning in the way your outside is organized or the way your inside is organized?
So you go to the Grand Canyon. What is good about visiting the Grand Canyon? Is it the canyon itself or is it your reaction to or experience of the Grand Canyon? It is both of course, but which is more important to you? Most psychology students will tell you that it is the experience that is more important. And again, it is not either/or, it is more or less. We all have both of these polarities in us, we find meaning in both, but people are almost always polarized, so they emphasize one more than the other just as we all both think and feel, but emphasize one more than the other.

There are two types of psychology students. There are critical types and research types. The research types, on average when tested, come out thinking and the clinical types tend to come out feeling.

Example: What would a sensing person say about the Grand Canyon? “Look, there must be seventeen different shades of orange!” An intuiting person would say, “Wow”. That is the difference between sensing and intuiting.

So we have tension between these opposites. This tension is what pushes the personality to growth. Jung thought that we had energy and he called it libido, but he did not say it was as Freud said it was. Jung said that energy in the mind follows physical laws most of the time, but not all of the time. We come to places where we cannot explain the workings of the mind in terms of energy. Freud’s mistake was reducing it to something like physical laws, but the truth is we do not fully understand physics sufficiently. When something does not work, instead of dismissing it, as Freud would tend to do, he said we must acknowledge the limitation of our understanding of energy itself. However, in general, libido followed different physical principles.

1. Principle of Opposites: For every action there is an equal, but opposite reaction (Derived from Newtonian Physics). For example if you are standing on something with wheels and you throw a ball you will move in the opposite direction. Jung said that the same thing happens in the mind. So if we are emphasizing introversion or inside things consciously, than unconsciously we will direct energy towards the opposite, towards outside things.

2. Principle of Entropy: Things tend to balance out. Any closed system seeks the state of least differentiation. Example: If you pour a cup of hot water and a cup of cold water together you end up with uniformly warm water. The hot and cold water do not stay separate. This is what happens with energy in the mind. When there is a tension like this, one side is emphasized too much, then there is a tendency to move in the opposite direction.

3. Principal of Equivalence: a conservation of energy. Energy does not disappear, nor is it unlimited. If you invest energy in one side of a polarity, then there is not as much left to invest in the other side that is why we have balance. Energy is limited so if you invest energy in one thing, you cannot simultaneously invest it another.

Freud was right. Things that are repressed return, but not for the reasons Freud thought. Freud thought that this energy pushed them up. Jung says the repressed return, not because there is energy attached to them, but because we need to reclaim them in order to further our growth.

Valuing: the investment of libido. We value different things. Introverts value what is going on inside so they invest psychic energy in it. Extroverts value things outside. We all value differently thinking/feeling, judging/perceiving and particular things. We may value the archetype of mother more; we may invest in some other archetype. Freud was wrong about their being a single instinct. We actually have many instincts. Jung did not give a full catalogue, but he did give a number of them. We have an instinct toward sex and procreation. We also have instincts for nutrition. We have an instinct to gain power. We have an instinct to be active, to do things. We have an instinct towards creativity, towards developing ourself, making ourself whole, towards individuation or self-development.

Individuation: developing the full potentials of the Collective Unconscious. We are becoming the individual that we have the capacity to become.

We value differently also depending upon our circumstances. For example, if any of us had been living for the last twenty years in the Eastern Horn of Africa where there is mass starvation and warfare, do you think you would have the same values as you have today? Would you be investing yourself in the same things that you are today? The answer is very likely not. You would probably value security, and things of that sort. You probably not be nearly as interested in psychology, unless you thought you would get food or money by attending a psychology class.

Jung also thought that we had an instinct for religion although not any particular religion.

So we have six basic mental processes and we have our experience of the world. We try and combine them and devote our energy to those things that lead to our personal development.

Just like Freud, Jung said that consciousness is “a small island in a vast sea.” And our Ego are the conscious ideas, which are the center of our experience. Our sense of identity is never complete; it is constantly evolving throughout our life. Our Ego fashions a Persona and sometimes we get confused between our self and our Persona or our Social Mask, but when we have that confusion we tend to get stuck and we have a phony and inflated sense of our self that does not quite work for us.

Jung said that there were no stages in development, but very clearly people develop throughout their lives. There is a great change that occurs in middle age. There is second puberty more profound than the first. Young adulthood and middle age are very different. We begin to focus on the balancing of our imbalances. In middle and old age we worry about the meaning of things more than we do when we are young. We generally shift. When you are in early adulthood you are mostly concerned with things like sex, procreation, making a living and raising children. When you reach middle age, there is a shift towards cultural and spiritual pursuits. We redirect our energy, or we more greatly value, using Jung’s terminology, we invest more energy into spiritual and cultural things beginning in middle age. So there is a radical shift in our valuations. We begin the process that he called individuation, which inevitably involves:

Enantiadroma: The process of which we begin to balance the things, which we have, that are imbalanced in our life. We begin to redirect energy towards that which we have not directed energy or which we have starved for energy earlier in our life. We often tend to overvalue it. So we shift and become unbalanced in the opposite direction, then we shift again and go back the other way, until at some point we reach a balance between polarities. In middle age we have to reach a balance between introversion and extroversion, between thinking and feeling and between sensing and intuiting. So we have to in essence equally invest in both, although in the process we sometimes shift and we value the one that we have been undervaluing for awhile until we value it more.

The furthering of the process of individuation beyond Enantiadroma has four necessary parts. Jung thinks that most people do not complete these. Most people get stuck in their development and do not fully develop themselves because it is not an easy task.

Four tasks of Individuation:

1. Examination of the Shadow: The shadow is the part in us that is animalistic. It is the part of us that contains “the reprehensible thoughts and feelings”. It is really pretty awful. Think about a couple of people whom you dislike the most. What is it about them that you dislike the most? Whatever you dislike in other people, you find in yourself. Whatever it is that you despise most in life, you discover that you actually are! Most people find this so offensive, that they are unable to do it. So this is the first sticking point for most people or why they are unable to develop. They shy away from acknowledging the parts of themselves that they do not want to admit.

2. Tearing Down the Persona: The persona is a social mask that we wear and it is very useful in many situations. You go up the theater and you buy a ticket, you do not want to have a personal relationship with the person who sells you the ticket, but when you reach middle age you begin to want that. You begin to realize that there is no impersonality; there is only individual experience. So there is the desire for genuiness, which is always there in all of us to some extent, but there is a loosing of the willingness and interest in the kind of social status and self gain that we had when we were younger. We begin so that we really do want the personal relationship with the person who sells tickets at the theater. It is an exposing of ones self. You go through life not portraying yourself as you really are in almost any situation. For most of the time, you present a socially acceptable personality to the world, and it changes depending on your audience. Whereas later in life you lose the sense of necessity for that. At least some people do. You strive instead for a personal genuiness.

3. Emergence of Masculine and Feminine-of Animus and Anima: We all fully embody both of these we are all completely masculine and completely feminine and we need to discover these in ourselves. They are actually there in us and we need to manifest both. We need to bring both our masculine side and our feminine side to full development without the emphasis of one at the expense of the other.

4. Emergence of Archetypes of Wisdom: Wise old man or sage, the great mother, the crone. The problem with the emergence of these archetypes or the discovery of them within your self is that they lead to a phony self-inflation. You can use the archetype of sage or great mother as a persona, instead of actually understanding them. Example: Ronald Reagan saying profound lines from his movies that had nothing to do with the situation. This is a pretense of wisdom.

As we go through the process of individuation, we come to know ourselves better and we have an increased knowledge of our archetypes. As we do this, the energy that is caught up in polarities is liberated. The polarity between introversion and extroversion, sensing and intuiting, thinking and feeling, masculine and feminine and all other polarities we create. We gradually let go of that tension and the energy then comes to rest in the self. The self is the mid-point of the personality; it is an archetype as well as something actually there in the personality so we all are innately born believing that other people have a sense of self. It is the mid-point between all polarities. Between conscious and unconscious and all other polarities. So it is harder for things to bother us. Things that drove us nuts when we were younger do not bother us so much when we begin to balance things out.

Emergence of Archetypes of Wholeness: The main one of these is called The Mandala. A Mandela is anything that is symmetrical about an essentially empty center. They can be extremely simple to very complex. The idea is that there is a center and there is nothing there and everything revolves around it in a symmetrical way. It is a center with things balanced about it. The center is our self, and self is neither conscious nor unconscious. It is in-between. It is the middle of all polarities. And of course remember, Jung thinks that self does not necessarily develop. He thinks that most people chicken out at some point and lapse into comfort or mediocrity. Profound and difficult reflection is needed before we can do anything or before we can engage in any growth or move towards individuation.

One of the things that frequently happens is that you see people in middle age in some ways regressing. They regress when the development of Ego is blocked. They reinvest libido or energy in more primative archetypes as a way of finding a path around whatever it is they are blocking. Some people get stuck there.

Jung did not interpret neurotic symptoms as negative things. Neurotic symptoms are in some way, trying to deal with the difficulty of development. The symptoms themselves are neither positive nor negative. They have to be interpreted always as some failure in development with which the person is working. They can be positive if we then deal with something missed or something that we have skipped.

Neurosis: A failure to develop. Anytime that we are not putting our energy into the things that we need to do to grow. So somebody could be living a completely socially appropriate life, and Jung would regard him or her as massively neurotic if they were living in variance with their natural tendencies. So you could look at somebody, and as near as you could tell, everything in their life is going well, they are conventionally successful in every way. But if they are not following their natural tendencies, this could be a massive fraud, a kind of socially acceptable neurosis that is in essence messing them up because the main thrust of our lives is the development of our potentials. Our potentials differ. So if we are doing something that everybody is saying “rah, rah, rah,” it may keep us from development, because we may get stuck in that and want that applause rather than going towards what we actually need to develop ourselves. So you cannot judge anyone in conventional terms.

Dreams

Jung thought that Freud was too simple in his view of dreams. Freud said that dreams are wish-fulfillments. Jung said actually, there are many kinds of dreams. Some of them are wish fulfillments, but most of them are not. Dreams can be either/or some combination of both personal dreams, and collective dreams. That is, there are some dreams that everybody has across time and culture. There are some that come from our personal unconscious and some that come from the collective unconscious. Sometimes dream do fulfill our wishes, but they are more likely to do other things.

One might be to restore our balance. You recall that much of Jung’s idea about psychology, and the way the mind works, has to do with imbalances in energy. Often what happens is that we emphasize one thing consciously, which deprives the other end of the spectrum of energy, or takes energy away from it. Often what happens is that we have dreams that devote energy to the neglected side of ourselves. If we are extroverts we will have dreams that have to do with our insides, if we are introverts we will have dreams that have to do with the focus on things external to us.

Sometimes dreams express our fears, things that we are either not conscious of or do not know how to solve.

Sometimes they simply mirror our life. That is, they present to us what we are going through is life.

Sometimes they provide warning. They can provide warning about either internal or external events. Jung went through a period in which he was a little bit crazy. This happened almost coincidentally with World War One. The year leading up to WWI, he had all kinds of emotional difficulties. What he believed is that he was expressing his fears for the future of the world through the dreams and emotional reactions that he had in that period.

Sometimes dreams reflect our Teleological orientation. They reflect the development or the directions in which we need to go in order to develop. They picture for us what we need to do that we are not doing. Sometimes in doing that they anticipate the future. They tell us where we are going even though we are not conscious of having that sense of direction yet.

Sometimes they are searching for a sense of direction either an ethical one or a personal one.

Sometimes they are a synthesis of solutions to problems that we have, things that we are unable to deal with because of our particular imbalances in our waking life. When we reverse the polarity during sleep then we are able to solve them.

Some dreams are telepathic.

Rather that all dreams being a wish fulfillment, for the most part, they seem to try and balance the conscious and the unconscious and bring them into closer alignment.

Jung also thought that dreams were not disguised. Rather they were a process that he called symbolic thought or mythic thought, which is a pre-rational or pre-scientific kind of thinking in which we think by intuition using symbols for things rather than concrete forms for them. So what you need to know in order to interpret the dreams, were the symbolic background of the person. In one of his case histories of a woman, he said that he was the only person capable of interpreting the dream because the woman had a mixed heritage. He was the only person that he knew who was expert in all three of the basic symbolic languages in this woman’s background. Part of it came from the alchemical symbolic system that was developed in Europe in the Middle Ages, part of it was Jewish and he was very familiar with different forms of Hebrew and Jewish culture, and part of the family was from Syria. So what happens is, we are basically dealing with typical symbols and using them in a dream in ways that are intuitively meaningful, but not necessarily logically meaningful. Because we do not fully understand our unconscious, the dreams mystify us at times although; they are always very sensible when you look at them symbolically. Because we have different backgrounds, the same thing can mean something differently to different people. One symbol for one person can mean something different for another person. It can be something different for the same person in different dreams, because most of us have a mixed background. So we have symbolic structures that are unconscious that are somewhat mixed.

So let’s suppose that a man dreams about putting a key in a lock.
What would Freud say about this dream? He would say that it is intercourse.

What would Jung say? He would say that sometimes it is about intercourse, but more often it is not, it is about something else. It could be something about unlocking one’s future. It could be about solving a problem. It could be about discovering what is next in your development. It could be about opening up new possibilities in life. So dreams are never as simple as Freud suggested.

A woman had a dream about inheriting her father’s sword. What would have Freud said about that? He would have said that she was taking possession of her father’s penis. Jung said that it had nothing to do with sexuality at all. Rather the woman wanted to have her father’s skills and abilities. These she could use to cut through difficulties in her life.

Also the way that people look at things in dreams has to do with their type. You must understand a person’s type when interpreting their dreams. He recorded another dream in which a bunch of horsemen were riding across a field. The person having the dream was the only person who was able to jump over a ditch that was at the end of the field. He said that if thought that this person was an extrovert, this might mean something like there were dangers ahead and you had to be careful, but you could overcome them. But because this person was an introvert, it basically was a message to him that he had to take more chances. He was restraining himself in life and if he pushed himself to do things he was uncomfortable with in the real world, then he could move forwards.

Jung also suggested that if you find someone who has a series of dreams, particularly dreams that are symbolically related, they are more central and important to the person in their period of growth than are individual and isolated dreams.

What do you think? Are dreams symbolic? Are they the language of your unconscious presenting you with things that are important to you to think about, but which you do not have a good conscious way of dealing with?

Pathology- in general is a violation of our natural tendencies. This means that we are failing to follow our natural path of development. When we are having trouble, being neurotic or psychotic, it is because we are doing something that does not fit with who we actually are. Often it is a failure to continue our process of individuation. What we need to do is to bring opposites into balance in a general kind of way. We want to hold onto one because we are comfortable with it and afraid of its opposite. Often we do not develop because the world makes it very hard for us. Neurotic reactions particularly are often in response to our situation in the world in which bad things happen to us or we are in some way frightened of the reaction of what would happen if we furthered our development.

Jung said that we should not negatively judge symptoms. If somebody has neurotic symptoms, sometimes they are quite useful to the person. Sometimes they are a way that the person is redirecting their energy in order to overcome some barrier that they are not able to overcome in any other way. Symptoms themselves are neutral. They are neither good nor bad, except of course sometimes they make life a little difficult. But we do not need to deal with the symptoms; we need to deal with what is producing the symptoms.
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Sarfraz Mayo
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