#Jung: “The human psyche is a thing of enormous ambiguity. In every single case we have to ask ourselves whether an attitude or a so-called habitus is authentic, or whether it may not be just a compensation for its opposite. I must confess that I have so often been deceived in this matter that in any concrete case I am at pains to avoid all theoretical presuppositions about the structure of the neurosis and about what the patient can and ought to do. As far as possible I let pure experience decide the therapeutic aims. This may perhaps seem strange, because it is commonly supposed that the therapist has an aim. But in psychotherapy it seems to me positively advisable for the doctor not to have too fixed an aim. He can hardly know better than the nature and will to live of the patient. The great decisions in human life usually have far more to do with the instincts and other mysterious unconscious factors than with conscious will and well-meaning reasonableness. The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no universal recipe for living. Each of us carries his own life-form within him—an irrational form which no other can outbid. All this naturally does not prevent us from doing our utmost to make the patient normal and reasonable. If the therapeutic results are satisfactory, we can probably let it go at that. If not, then for better or worse the therapist must be guided by the patient’s own irrationalities. Here we must follow nature as a guide, and what the doctor then does is less a question of treatment than of developing the creative possibilities latent in the patient himself. What I have to say begins where the treatment leaves off and this development sets in. Thus my contribution to psychotherapy confines itself to those cases where rational treatment does not yield satisfactory results. The clinical material at my disposal is of a peculiar composition: new cases are decidedly in the minority. Most of them already have some form of psychotherapeutic treatment behind them, with partial or negative results. About a third of my cases are not suffering from any clinically definable neurosis, but from the senselessness and aimlessness of their lives. I should not object if this were called the general neurosis of our age.” ~C.G. Jung, “The Aims of Psychotherapy,” Practice of Psychotherapy, CW 16, para. 81–83 📸: The C.G. Jung House and Museum, Küsnacht, Switzerland. This is where Jung lived with his wife and children and saw his patients.

Glossary of Jungian Terms, by Jungian psychoanalyst Marion Woodman Anima (Latin, “soul”): The unconscious, feminine side of a man’s personality. She is personified in dreams by images of women ranging from prostitute and seductress to spiritual guide (Wisdom). She is the Eros principle, hence a man’s anima development is reflected in how he relates to women. Identification with the anima can appear as moodiness, effeminacy, and oversensitivity. Animus (Latin, “spirit”): The unconscious, masculine side of a woman’s personality. He personifies the Logos principle. Identification with the animus can cause a woman to become rigid, opinionated, and argumentative. More positively, he is the inner man who acts as a bridge between the woman’s ego and her own creative resources in the unconscious. Archetypes: Irrepresentable in themselves, but their effects appear in consciousness as the archetypal images and ideas. These are collective universal patterns or motifs which come from the collective unconscious and are the basic content of religions, mythologies, legends, and fairytales. They emerge in individuals through dreams and visions. Association: A spontaneous flow of interconnected thoughts and images around a specific idea, determined by unconscious connections. Complex: An emotionally charged group of ideas or images. At the “center” of a complex is an archetype or archetypal image. Constellate: Whenever there is a strong emotional reaction to a person or a situation, a complex has been constellated (activated). Ego: The central complex in the field of consciousness. A strong ego can relate objectively to activated contents of the unconscious (i.e., other complexes), rather than identifying with them, which appears as a state of possession. Feeling: One of the four psychic functions. It is a rational function which evaluates the worth of relationships and situations. Feeling must be distinguished from emotion, which is due to an activated complex. Individuation: The conscious realization of one’s unique psychological reality, including both strengths and limitations. It leads to the experience of the Self as the regulating center of the psyche. Inflation: A state in which one has an unrealistically high or low (negative inflation) sense of identity. It indicates a regression of consciousness into unconsciousness, which typically happens when the ego takes too many unconscious contents upon itself and loses the faculty of discrimination. Intuition: One of the four psychic functions. It is the irrational function which tells us the possibilities inherent in the present. In contrast to sensation (the function which perceives immediate reality through the physical senses) intuition perceives via the unconscious, e.g., flashes of insight of unknown origin. Participation mystique: A term derived from the anthropologist Levy-Bruhl, denoting a primitive, psychological connection with objects, or between persons, resulting in a strong unconscious bond. Puella aeternae (Latin, “eternal girl”): Indicates a certain type of woman who remains too long in adolescent psychology, generally associated with a strong unconscious attachment to the father. Her male counterpart is the puer aeternus, an “eternal youth” with a corresponding tie to the mother. Persona (Latin, “actor’s mask”): One's social role, derived from the expectations of society and early training. A strong ego relates to the outside world through a flexible persona; identification with a specific persona (doctor, scholar, artist, etc.) inhibits psychological development. Projection: The process whereby an unconscious quality or characteristic of one’s own is perceived and reacted to in an outer object or person. Projection of the anima or animus onto a real woman or man is experienced as falling in love. Frustrated expectations indicate the need to withdraw projections, in order to be able to relate to the reality of other people. Self: The archetype of wholeness and the regulating center of the personality. It is experienced as a transpersonal power which transcends the ego, e.g., God. Shadow: An unconscious part of the personality characterized by traits and attitudes which the conscious ego tends to reject. It is personified in dreams by persons of the same sex as the dreamer. Symbol: The best possible expression for something essentially unknown. Symbolic thinking is non-linear, right-brain oriented; it is complementary to logical, linear, left-brain thinking. Transcendent function: The reconciling “third” which emerges from the unconscious (in the form of a symbol or a new attitude) after the opposites have been differentiated, and the tension between them held. Transference and counter-transference: Particular cases of projection, commonly used to describe the unconscious, emotional bonds that arise between two persons in an analytic or therapeutic relationship. Uroborus: The mythical snake or dragon that eats its own tail. It is a symbol both for individuation as a self-contained, circular process, and for narcissistic self-absorption. ~Marion Woodman, Jungian analyst, The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter: Obesity, Anorexia Nervosa and the Repressed Feminine, pp. 131-132

I want to tell Speaking of Jung listeners about our new Amazon Storefront. I’m always asked to recommend books. Our website does have a comprehensive Books page but I’m also curating lists for our Amazon Store. Search for it 🕵🏼‍♀️ (X doesn’t like links).

“If we are blindly living out an archetype, we are not containing our own life. We are possessed, and possession acts as a magnet on unconscious people in our environment.” Source: “Many people, for example, think life is a meaningless merry-go-round if they are not being transported by love like Prince Charles and Lady Diana, or living for a cause like Mother Theresa, or dying for a dream like Martin Luther King. They measure their standard of behavior by comparison with figures who carry immense archetypal projections—Marilyn Monroe, John F. Kennedy, Michael Jackson. A mask ceases to be a mask. Instead, with the help of dyes and surgery, the mask becomes the face. Cosmetics are identity or character or Fate. By identifying with an #archetype instead of remaining detached from it, they turn life into theater and themselves into actors on a stage, thus falling prey to demonic as well as angelic inflation. Without the container, they confuse the sacred and profane worlds. We are the descendants of #Freud and #Jung, and while poets and madmen had free access to their #unconscious before those two giants, the world of the archetype is now an open market for the general populace without any ritual containment. If we are blindly living out an archetype, we are not containing our own life. We are possessed, and possession acts as a magnet on unconscious people in our environment. Everyday life becomes a dangerous world where illusion and reality can be fatally confused.” ~Marion Woodman, Jungian analyst, The Pregnant Virgin: A Process of Psychological Transformation, p. 20

This week’s Patreon Post will be all of my notes from Ep. 119 of Speaking of Jung: Jungian analyst J. Gary Sparks on his last book, The Call of Destiny: An Introduction to Carl Jung’s Major Works (Inner City Books, 2023). Here’s a sample. Gain full access to our weekly Patreon posts for just $5 per month. (Links below.) “Human nature is a mixture of opposites, and Christianity only symbolizes the light side of those opposites. Jung wants us to recognize a natural law that there will be an emotional balancing reaction to the light side consisting of a swing to the other, dark side. The Christian image of God introduces an instability into the civilization that worships in the Christian framework. Why is Jung so concerned about Christianity? He is not indulging in this discussion because Christianity is the ‘better’ religion. It is just that Christianity is the religion that has defined Western civilization. It’s not that Judaism is less important or Islam is less important in themselves, but the nature of our Western civilization has been shaped by Christian ideas and images more than by any other religion. Jung is delving into Christianity as a way to understand the Christian civilization and, in turn, how we both make up that civilization and are shaped by it. Jung puts the point this way: The coming of the Antichrist is not just a prophetic prediction—it is an inexorable psychological law … .¹⁷¹ In other words, because Christianity defined God as light, it forced Western civilization into a position of subsequently living out the dark in a period of history. A main point follows, which is what we’ve been leading up to. …” ¹⁷¹ C.G. Jung, Aion, The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, vol. 9ii, par. 77. ~J. Gary Sparks, Jungian analyst, The Call of Destiny: An Introduction to Carl Jung’s Major Works, p. 112 ▪️Full episode – speakingofjung.com/podcast/2… ▪️Join us on Patreon – patreon.com/cw/SpeakingofJun…

“Jung defined #consciousness as ‘the function or activity which maintains the relation of psychic contents to the ego.’⁷⁵ In that way he distinguished it conceptually from the psyche itself, which is comprised of both consciousness and the #unconscious. Also, although we speak of ego-consciousness, in Jung’s model the #ego is not the same thing as consciousness, but simply the dominant #complex of the #conscious mind. Of course, in practice we can only become aware of psychic contents by means of the ego. In other words, the more we know about what’s going on in our unconscious, the more conscious we become. Becoming conscious preeminently involves discriminating between #opposites. Since the basic opposites are consciousness and the unconscious, the first hurdle is to acknowledge that there are some things about ourselves we’re not aware of. Those who cannot do this are doomed forever to skim the surface of life. For those who can admit to another side of themselves, there is then the daunting task of discriminating between a whole range of other opposites—thinking and feeling, masculine and feminine, good and evil, and so on. And then there is the crucial difference between inner and outer, oneself and others. Jung describes two distinct ways in which consciousness is enlarged. One is during a moment of high emotional tension involving a situation in the outer world. We feel uneasy for no obvious reason, or strangely attracted to someone, and suddenly we understand what’s going on. The other way is what happens in a state of quiet contemplation, where ideas pass before the mind’s eye like dream-images. Suddenly there is a flash of association between two apparently disconnected and widely separated thoughts. In each case it is the discharge of energy-tension that produces consciousness. These sudden realizations and flashes of insight are what we commonly experience as revelations. In Jung’s model of the psyche, consciousness is a kind of superstructure based on the unconscious and arising out of it: ‘Consciousness does not create itself—it wells up from unknown depths. In childhood it awakens gradually, and all through life it wakes each morning out of the depths of sleep from an unconscious condition. It is like a child that is born daily out of the primordial womb of the unconscious. . . . It is not only influenced by the unconscious but continually emerges out of it in the form of spontaneous ideas and sudden flashes of thought.’⁷⁶” ⁷⁵ “Definitions,” Psychological Types, CW 6, par. 700. ⁷⁶ “The Psychology of Eastern Meditation,” Psychology and Religion, CW 11, par. 935. ~Daryl Sharp, Jungian analyst, Digesting Jung: Food for the Journey, pp. 85-86 [Emphases added.] Read more from this book excerpt in this week’s Patreon post. Contribute just $5 per month for full access.

“Jung writes: ‘Everything of which I know, but of which I am not at the moment thinking; everything of which I was once conscious but have now forgotten; everything perceived by my senses, but not noted by my conscious mind; everything which, involuntarily and without paying attention to it, I feel, think, remember, want, and do; all the future things that are taking shape in me and will sometime come to consciousness: all this is the content of the unconscious.’⁷⁸ And that is why, in spite of our best efforts, we will all, always, be more or less #unconscious.” ⁷⁸ “On the Nature of the Psyche,” The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, CW 8, par. 382. ~Daryl Sharp, Jungian analyst, Digesting Jung: Food for the Journey, p. 88 📸: Agfa Brovira

Later today I'll be doing a book reading on my YouTube channel (jungianLaura) from the new book, Jung's Life and Work, a.k.a. The Protocols.

NEW! Speaking of Jung, Ep. 153: Zürich-trained Jungian psychoanalyst Fiann Paul returned to discuss the relationship between depth psychology and psychedelic experiences, as well as the founding of the International Jungian Psychedelic Association. speakingofjung.com/podcast/2…