November, 2010 | Brian Collinson

Vibrant Jung Thing Blog

Jungian Psychotherapy Symbol Book: A Personal Journey

November 23rd, 2010 · journey

The other night I watched the movie “O Brother Where Art Thou?” again. It’s one of my great favourites, for any number of reasons: it’s the directors, the Coen Brothers, at their finest; I think it’s as funny as can be; the music is wonderful; the cast is as talented as it gets; and, it’s — loosely — based on one of the greatest works of the human poetic imagination, Homer’s Odyssey. But the number one reason I appreciate this movie is that it’s based upon the symbol and myth of the journey, which is one of the greatest of all human archetypal patterns, and one that is of great importance for psychotherapy.

The Journey Symbol

Artistic and religious symbolism worldwide reflects the archetype of the journey. It’s one of the most universal expressions of the human condition and development of the course of human life. It is central to the Hebrew Bible (Exodus), the Christian Bible (journeys of St. Paul), Islam (the Haj) and countless other religious traditions. A vast amount of literature, poety and art reflects this theme. Jung himself, when he sought to characterize the two great movements in human life, referred to them, by using this symbol, as “the hero journey” and “the night sea journey”.

Destination

The whole point of a journey is that it has a destination. In both the Odyssey and O Brother, Where Art Thou? , the whole process may seem chaotic, but the process is actually moving somewhere, toward a specific end — imaged as the journey home. That is what the journey symbol conveys to us: if life is imaged as a journey, it is going somewhere. It has a specific end. Our lives are capable of having a meaningful direction, even if the present circumstances are completely disorienting. This is a constant theme in human myth, and it embodies a psychological truth. There is something in us that knows the way, even when our conscious ego does not.

This can be a very important thing to know in therapy, and in human life in general. But it must be something other than a glib platitude. Vague assurances that “it’s going to be OK” will acheive very little for suffering, struggling people. What people need is assurance, as they struggle, often with very deep, dark things that may have surfaced in their lives. They need to know that, out of real chaos, something meaningful and healing can emerge. The real therapist is someone who can go with the client on her or his journey, who can be right with the client, because the therapist knows, in some way that is deeper than merely intellectual, that this process has an inner meaning in the end.

Just for fun, here’s the official trailer from O Brother, Where Art Thou?:

What About Your Journey?

Do you ever think about your life in terms of it being a journey? Are there times when you’ve been particularly aware that it is a journey? Have there been times when it really feels as if you’ve lost the way? If you have, or you are, I would welcome hearing from you via a comment or through a confidential email.

Brian Collinson, Psychotherapist & Jungian Analyst

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PHOTO CREDIT: © Holger Karius | Dreamstime.com

TRAILER CREDIT: © 2000 Touchstone Pictures and Universal Studios. This trailer is the property of Touchstone Pictures and Universal Studios and is used here in the fair use context of critical discussion.

© 2010 Brian Collinson

Brian Collinson, 2238 Constance Drive, Oakville, Ontario (near Oakville / Mississauga border)

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Anxiety, Regret and Persona in “Death of a Salesman”

November 19th, 2010 · Anxiety, Father, Marriage, persona, psychological crisis, Psychology and Suburban Life, regret, Self, soul, symbolism, unlived life

I love theatre, and I’m lucky enough to live in the Toronto, Canada area. We have a lot of excellent theatre hereabouts, including the wonderful Soulpepper Theatre, which is not nearly so famous as it deserves. I was fortunate enough last Saturday to see Soulpepper’s production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. which was arresting and raw. It’s a profoundly psychological play, in the ways in which it deals with anxiety, regret and “persona“, or the false self.

Lots of people know the story of Willy Loman, the crumbling salesman at the centre of the play, and the drama of his decline and eventual death. Clearly Willy is retreating more and more from reality and from life — but what pushes him into this?

Anxiety

Clearly, Willy and his family live in an atmosphere of intense anxiety. In the initial scenes of Act 1, Willy has returned from a business trip because he cannot concentrate when driving, and has nearly driven off the road. The interactions between Linda and Willy are full of an unacknowledged but agonizing anxiety that pervades the whole of the play until the tragic climax. An important psychological question, though, is, “What is the source of this anxiety?”

Grandiosity and Failure

I believe the answer is found in the tension between Willy’s grandiose and idealized image of greatness, and his own very real sense of failure to live up to this idealized image of himself, to be the “well-liked” man whose fame precedes him, and for whom all doors open. Willy does not dare become fully conscious of this profound sense of failure. He can only look at it indirectly, or acknowledge it glancingly in his interactions with Linda. It seems when he does do this, he expects to be re-assured by Linda, to be argued out of his feeling. Right through the play Linda enables Willy by shoring up his illusions.

Willy’s Persona

In Jungian terms, Willy is firmly in the grips of a persona (Latin for “mask”) or false self with which he identifies and tries to present outwardly to the world. But it is deeply at odds with who he really is, and his attempts to carry off this masquerade are costing him more and more emotionally and — dare we say it — spiritually. Willy is in a horrible dilemma: the only image he has of himself is as a “well-liked” salesman — and yet he knows that he has failed profoundly in realizing this ideal. However, there is no other sense of himself that he can find to hang onto, and so he is drowning.

Biff

So Willy does what parents often do in this kind of situation: he transfers all of his hopes for success and greatness to his sons, and in particular, onto his eldest son, Biff. However, whatever wounds Biff may be dealing with, he cannot ultimately bring himself to live out the unlived life and fantasies of his father. After initially succumbing to his father’s illusory picture, Biff refuses to enable his father further, saying “we’re a dime a dozen, you and I!” to Willy, which is the very thing that Willy cannot, will not accept.

Regret

The picture is further complicated for Willy by his profound regret, particularly for an incident in which he was discovered by Biff with another woman with whom he was having an affair in a hotel room. This incident has a profound and fateful effect on Biff. Miller’s dialogue masterfully shows how Willy can neither really face and be honest with himself for what he has done, nor can he release himself from the torture of his regret. Finally, this regret will lead Willy to a horrific act of atonement, which is intended to restore Biff to the path of “greatness” — as imaged by Willy.

“The Woods are Burning”

What is it to be consumed by false self, by persona? What are its inner psychological effects? I believe that playwright Arthur Miller captures this powerfully in one phrase that Willy uses several times throughout the play: “the woods are burning!” In dreamwork and in fairy tales, the deep woods, which are dark and where one’s view is limited, are often the image of the unconscious. The image of the woods burning, of a huge forest fire in the unconscious symbolizes the psychological reality in a profoundly eloquent way. The true self may be ignorred, and may be pushed into the unconscious, but not without powerful, often devastating consequences.

What about You and I?

The false persona and false self are real things in human life, not just art. It can be a devastating thing to live with a false sense of who one is, and without any real connection to the true self. I have had personal experience with the ways in which such an over-identification with the persona can bring a person into difficulties. I was fortunate to have the help of a good psychotherapist to get me through that extremely difficult period.

Staying as true to the real self as possible is an ongoing process in life, a genuine psychological work. This is especially true in a society like ours, which becomes more success and image-oriented with every year, or so it seems. Are these issues which you, too, have encountered in your life, or are addressing right now?

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PHOTO CREDITS: © Maik Schrödter | Dreamstime.com

© 2010 Brian Collinson, 2238 Constance Drive, Oakville, Ontario (near Mississauga)

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A Jungian Psychotherapist’s Symbol Book

November 11th, 2010 · analytical psychology, Carl Jung, dreams, Jungian, Psychology and Suburban Life, symbol

I’ve decided to do an ongoing series of posts on this blog that discuss particular symbols, and their significance for analytical psychology and psychotherapy. I want to do something that gives a sense of some key symbols that might appear in dreams, art and elsewhere in our lives, as perhaps Carl Jung would identify them. WHY do I want to do this?

Simply put, because symbols are very important in human life, and have an enormous capacity to enrich human life. They are also often poorly understood. For one thing, a symbol is not the same as a sign. To see what I mean, consider the following.

If you encounter this critter when you’re driving your car, there is really no mystery about it. The meaning that this thing is intended to convey could be put into one or two sentences, the chief of which would be, “When your vehicle gets to this point, come to a complete stop, and then proceed when it is safe to do so.” Or words to that effect. No mystery there.

A Sign Can be a Symbol

But let’s say that you encounter a vivid image of a stop sign in a dream. Its meaning in that context may be nowhere near as apparent or as cut and dried as it is when one encounters STOP as a road sign. Its meaning might well be a whole lot deeper, and it may carry a great deal more emotion — if for instance it is occurring in a dream that is about a key love relationship, or about a career that one has pursued for a long time, that is now threatening your health.

My example is a rather simple one, but I think that you’ll see my point. A symbol is not at all the same thing as a sign.

Definition of a Symbol?

What, really is a symbol? In my opinion, that’s a whopper of a question. I think that people have some sense of it, but it is extremely hard to put into words. Here is one definition, by Jungian analyst June Singer:

“the images which people create or discover as expressions of the not-yet-known”

Singer, June, Boundaries of the Soul, (New York: Anchor Books, 1994) p. xxxvii

This is not a perfect definition — it definitely has some holes in it. Yet I think its heart is in the right place, and it points us in the right direction.

Symbols Have Emotional Power

Symbols can have tremendous emotional power. When they resonate with us, they can affect us right down to our very core. And sometimes, after we really encounter them, they can even change us, right down at the center of who we are.

I hope to have some fun opening up for you some of the key symbols, from a Jungian perspective. My approach is probably not going to be systematic or comprehensive, but I hope that you’ll find value in the symbols that I bring to your attention.

Are You Concerned with Symbols?

Are symbols something that concern you, even if you don’t usually refer to them using that term? For instance, do you ever find yourself puzzling or turning over an image in a dream, and wondering “What the heck does that mean?”? I would be extremely interested to hear how symbols engage you. If you have a story or a reflection you’d like to share, let me know via a comment or through a confidential email. I’d like to keep this relevant, by discussing the things that matter to you.

Brian Collinson, Psychotherapist & Jungian Analyst

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Brian Collinson, 2238 Constance Drive, Oakville, Ontario (near Oakville / Mississauga border)

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An Oakville Psychotherapist’s View of Work Life Balance

November 4th, 2010 · Identity, Individuation, Jungian analysis, Lifestyle, Meaning, personal myth, psychotherapist, stress, therapy, work

The Toronto Globe and Mail has been running a series of articles on “Work Life Balance”. There is one of these articles that I found myself reacting to rather strongly. The article is entitled “Work-Life Balance: Why Your Boss Should Care” . In particular, the article contains the following paragraph:

“Our inability to balance our jobs and our home life is costing corporate Canada as much as $10-billion a year in rising absenteeism, lost output, lower productivity, missed deadlines and grumpy customers, according to estimates by business professors Linda Duxbury of Carleton University and Christopher Higgins of the University of Western Ontario.”

Now, in fairness to this article, it is part of a series of articles that the Globe has been running, that all have somewhat different perspectives on work-life balance. It is also true that this article states that it focuses on the management perspective in a very up-front way. Nonetheless, I feel that, from the perspective of a therapist, this article loses sight of a number of important things.

Work Life Balance is an Individual Thing

First, it’s not the job of corporations to sort out the individual’s work-life balance issues, nor is it within the corporation’s competence. The task of a corporation is to make money for its shareholders, plain and simple. The large corporation, as much as the state, is an entity composed of masses of human beings. However, the matter of work-life balance is a matter that is important to individuals, and it is only on that individual level that the question of the right relationship of life and work can be solved.

Work Life Balance is Not Fundamentally an Economic Issue

Second, the study emphasizes the cost to employers of distorted work-life balance. However, it doesn’t appear that any corresponding analysis was done of the financial benefits to corporate Canada of people working hours that are weighted on the heavy end. If that calculation were done, and if it were established that there was a net financial benefit to corporate Canada in encouraging overwork, would that conclude the matter, making overwork a good thing? Unquestionably not. Otherwise, you have reduced the value of the individual’s life purely to their economic role.

Work-life issues are not properly analyzed in terms of financial cost-benefit or markets. They are only properly analyzed in terms of individual decisions, and in terms of what the individual values in his or her life.

Individuals Have to Take Responsibility for Their Own Lives

Individuals can’t offload their responsibility to find a personal solution to these issues to any corporation or other employer — or to any other collective entity. Individuals have to really take hold of this issue, take personal responsibility for it, and examinine it deeply in the light of their own deepest values. From the point of view of the therapist or Jungian analyst, the answers to those life questions are going to be fundamentally tied up with the individual’s understanding of his or her own personal identity, and with the story that the individual tells him or herself about her or his life — his or her own personal myth.

A Question of Identity

And that requires that individuals distinguish their work identity and social self — the roles they play, what Jung would call the persona — from their true identity, which rests upon the things that the individual most fundamentally values. The journey of psychotherapy is to go in search of what that true identity is, even when it may conflict in some ways with the standards and norms of society and family.

How Does This Affect You?

Are you wrestling with issues around balancing work and life? Have you faced particular times when this issue has come to the fore for you, and required decision, discernment or endurance? I would really welcome any of your comments or life stories, either as comments on this post or as confidential emails. I would really appreciate your thoughts and reflections.

Brian Collinson, Psychotherapist & Jungian Analyst

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