JUNGIAN PSYCHOTHERAPY
Principles of therapy:
1. One should not have to fix an aim. The human being’s nature has far more to do with instincts and "other mysterious unconscious factors" than with conscious will and reasonableness.
2. Many clients are not suffering from any clinically definable neurosis, but from “the senselessness and aimlessness of their lives.”
3. Attention is given to the clients dreams. “If we carry the dream around with us and turn it over and over, something almost always comes of it...and the result means something to the patient and sets his life in motion again.”
4. “My aim is to bring about a psychic state in which my patient begins to experiment with his own nature…a state of fluidity, change, and growth where nothing is eternally fixed and hopelessly petrified.”
5. Clients are urged to paint what they have seen in a dream or fantasy... Jungian psychotherapy is interested in the living effect it has upon the client. When a client puts down on paper what he has passively seen, he turns it into a deliberate act. Gradually, over time, the client catches the interior agent and discovers that it is “eternally unknown and alien, the hidden foundation of psychic life.”
- Notes from "Encountering Jung: On Active Imagination" Edited by Joan Chodorow
THE FEMININE
In our modern culture, we are possessed by the intellect, technology and competition. Carl Jung has said that the only way to save western man is by the "restoration of feminine values, the quality of stillness, yielding, ambiguity, intuition, cyclical regeneration, the hidden and emotions" (Lucia Chambers). To some extent, all of us are androgynous and only when there is a synthesis of the masculine and feminine will the individual human being be able to develop psychic wholeness.
SHADOW WORK
Our shadow-side sometimes breaks through into our everyday life. They are the parts we do not accept about ourselves and oftentimes are accompanied with overwhelming emotion. During this time, we need a companion.
When we willingly accept and acquiesce to the healing process of our unconscious, we must confront ourselves. In this work, we are guided to live our lives without avoiding the low places of our shadow parts. One takes the lowest and hidden parts and transforms them into the highest. This means taking the poison and making it into medicine. The shadow can also be the positive energy for our needed healing, for every symbol that lives in our dreams and imagination has both a positive and a negative side. Thus, the shadow opens a doorway to a new place of existence and awareness.
Jungian depth psychotherapy is a journey of acceptance of who we are; we experience that the unconscious suffers with us and has compassion, and that the unconscious brings forth life.
Experiencing the shadow - from a colleague's journal.
MANDALA CREATION
Jung drew mandalas daily during one period of his life. "I sketched every morning in a notebook a small circular drawing, a mandala, which seemed to correspond to my inner situation at the time. With the help of these drawings I could observe my psychic transformations from day to day.…Only gradually did I discover what the mandala really is: ‘Formation, Transformation, Eternal Mind’s eternal recreation'." (Faust, 11) - Carl G. Jung
