The
Written by Daryl Sharp
You can appreciate the scope of Jung’s work, and you can read everything he ever
wrote, but the real opportunity offered by analytical psychology only becomes
apparent when you go into analysis. That’s when Jung’s potentially healing
message stops being merely an interesting idea and becomes an experiential
reality.
Analysis is not a suitable discipline for everyone, nor does everyone benefit
from it or need it. But when you are overwhelmed by conflict or difficulties in
a relationship, or when you feel your life has no meaning, you could do worse
than see a Jungian. Although there may be as many ways of practicing Jungian
analysis as there are analysts, the process itself facilitates healing because
it relates what is going on in the unconscious to what is happening in everyday
life.
We generally seek a quick fix to our problems. We want an answer, a
prescription; we want our pain to be treated, our suffering relieved. We want a
solution, and we look for it from an outside authority. This is a legitimate
expectation for many physical ills, but it doesn’t work with psychological
problems, where you are obliged to take personal responsibility for the way
things are. Then you have to consider your shadow — and everyone else’s — and
all the other complexes that drive you and your loved ones up the wall.
What people want and what they need are seldom the same thing. You go into
analysis hurting and with some goals and expectations in mind. But pretty soon
your personal agenda goes out the window and you find yourself grappling with
issues you hadn’t thought of and sore spots you didn’t know were there — or knew
but avoided thinking about. It is very exciting, all this new information about
yourself. It’s inevitably inflating, and for a while you think you have all the
answers — but it can also be quite painful, since things generally get worse
before they get better.
It has been said that analysis is only for an elite because it’s expensive and
time-consuming. It is true that analysis involves a good deal of time and energy
and it’s not cheap. But I have worked with teachers and taxi-drivers, doctors,
actors, politicians, artists—men and women in just about every walk of life. Not
one of them was independently wealthy. The fee they paid was no small matter.
They were able to afford it by making sacri-fices in other areas of their life.
It is a matter of priorities — you put your money, your energy, into what you
value, and if you hurt enough you find a way.
Jungian analysis is not about improving yourself. It doesn’t make you a better
person, and it doesn’t insulate you from the slings and arrows of everyday life.
Analysis is about becoming conscious of who you are, including your strengths
and weaknesses. Analysis is not some-thing that’s done to you. It’s a joint
effort by two people to try and understand what makes you tick. The goal is not
perfection, but completeness.
In the process of working on yourself you will change, and that can create new
problems. Others may not like what you become, or you may no longer like them.
Indeed, it may be that as many relationships break up through analysis as are
cemented. When you become aware of your complexes, and start taking back what
you have projected onto a partner, you may discover there is not much left to
hold you together. A difficult ex-perience, certainly, but the sooner you
realize you aren’t in the right place, the better. Analysis makes it possible to
live one’s experiential truth and accept the con-sequences.
The particular circumstances that take a person into analysis are as
multitudinous as grains of sand on a beach. They could not be called unique,
however, any more than one grain of sand differs from another. True, they are
always related to the person’s psychology and life situation. But behind these
individual details there are general patterns of thought and behavior that have
been experienced and expressed since the beginning of mankind.
An understanding of these patterns, found the world over in myths, fairy tales
and religions—manifestations of what Jung called the archetypes — gives one a
perspective on mundane reality. A knowledge of archetypes and archetypal
patterns is a kind of blueprint which can be overlaid on an individual
situation. It is an indispensable tool for Jungian analysts, and an overtone
that fundamentally distingushes Jungian analysis from any other form of therapy.
From Jungian Psychology Unplugged, a work in progress.
