It’s a real honour, and it extends the overall pleasure that I’ve found in blogging on Jungian subjects for these last dozen-plus years! The chance to explore our life journey from a Jungian perspective in company with all of you is a never-ending source of new insight and depth.
I look forward to continuing exploration of topics like individuation, major life transitions and the meaning of key archetypes like the archetype of home for our everyday lives during 2022, and beyond. Allow me to thank each of you personally for reading and reflecting on these blog posts and sharing your own feeling, thoughts and life experiences through the years.
Jung’s 4 Psychic Functions – Basis of Personality Type
I wish each and every one of you a fulfilling 2022 that will be full of greater awareness, connection with the unconscious and meaning.
With every good wish to each of you individually for your personal journey,
BrianCollinson, Registered Psychotherapist and Jungian Analyst
Rob Ford, Toronto’s crack-smoking Mayor, dominates the media: but, from a Jungian psychotherapy perspective, one thing we don’t talk about is what Rob Ford shows us about our own collective shadow.
It’s easy to moralize about Ford’s very public, very sensational melt-down: he’s an easy target. What is not so easy or comfortable is the awareness that Toronto elected Rob Ford into his current role. The City of Toronto voted for him, and in many ways, he reflects aspects of the collective shadow of the entire Greater Toronto Area.
I understand that this may seem like an outrageous claim! Let me explain: Rob Ford’s attitudes may be repugnant to us, but they reflect aspects of our collective psyche that we would really rather ignore.
1. Convenient Self-Delusion
T.S. Eliot famously wrote that “humankind cannot bear very much reality.” Many would see the public pronouncements of Rob Ford and his closest supporters as a case in point.
First we’re told that one newspaper has a vendetta against Mr. Ford, which is gradually widened out to the whole press corps and then eventually to the Chief of Police. Similarly, Mr. Ford admits to outrageous public incidents of out-of-control alcohol use, smoking crack cocaine, and driving under the influence, but is in such denial that he seems to genuinely believe that it’s O.K. because “everybody does it”.
It’s commonly held that Mr. Ford maintains these self-delusions to avoid the necessity of threatening change. Yet, dare we look at our own delusions, which allow us to stay locked in behaviors that, on the deepest level, we really know we must change? For instance, how many people in our culture are locked into ever-increasing levels of debt, that they tell themselves will somehow be magically reversed?
2. Them: It’s Their Fault
Related to the above is the tendency to blame or scapegoat others for ills in society or our own lives. When things are going wrong, we can easily blame others or outsiders for the bad developments. Rob Ford is famous for his blaming of “left-wing elites” or the press or “thugs” for social ills or his own personal difficulties.
Prof. Nathanael J. Fast of Stanford University has researched the incredibly contagious properties of blaming and scapegoating others, and the ways in which they can spread with incredible rapidity through an organization or a society.
Many accuse Rob Ford of this kind of scapegoating. But can we see our own shadow, and the ways in which we, too, scapegoat? We do it on a social and political level: we also do it in communities, places of employment — and families.
3. Enable Me — Or You’re No Friend of Mine
Many feel that Rob Ford surrounds himself with people who all reinforce a distorted view of the world. They find this to be particularly true of his family’s apparent denial of his rampant substance abuse issues.
But, we also often surround ourselves with voices that reinforce the way we already see the world, or confirm us in existing behaviour patterns — because it makes us comfortable, even if it’s not true.
4. Without My Job I’m Nothing
Some allege this is the real sticking point in terms of Rob Ford actually leaving the Toronto mayor’s job: without the job, he has no concrete identity to which he can cling . Rather than be nobody, he clings to the mayor role like a life preserver.
We might regret such an attitude in Mr. Ford, if he does indeed hold it. But it might be good to have a very serious look in the mirror. How much of our own identity is tied up with our work persona? Who would I be without my job? Would I feel like I was anybody? These are very serious questions for early 21st century people.
Rob Ford can be seen as a mirror of our own shadow. It’s only through self-compassionately and courageouslyacknowledging the shadow and the undiscovered self that we can grow towards our own wholeness and completeness, and become rooted in ourselves. This is the heart of the work of individual psychotherapy.
Does it seem shocking that a rock musician like the late Lou Reed should be in a post on Jungian therapy and individuation?
Lou Reed passed this week, and he was a very controversial figure — even polarizing. But there is one thing that even his enemies admit: he was an individual.
Out of Long Island
Reed was born into Long Island suburban respectability. He struggled with 1950s reality, not least of all because the homoerotic dimensions of his character didn’t fit into conventional 50s life. So, it wasn’t long before he found himself in New York City, where he created the avante-garde rock group Velvet Underground and became part of the circle around artist Andy Warhol.
Shadow and the Wild Side
Many of us became aware of Lou Reed in 1972, when he released “Take a Walk on the Wild Side“. Popular culture in North America had never seen the like: a completely unapologetic celebration of gay and transvestite life in New York City. Astoundingly, it became a huge hit. As a Jungian, the powerful attraction of this song for many people who would not even remotely identify with the LGTB communities is striking. Perhaps it stems from the sense of basic acceptance and groundedness that Reed communicates, as if he were saying, “Here I am. This is me. I neither hide, nor sugar coat, nor apologize for who I really am.” His straightforward expression and self acceptance resonated deeply with many who were neither gay nor transvestite, especially younger people.
Artistic Individuation
Reed was a pioneer in opening up issues of gender identity as experienced in our culture. He challenged, and even shocked, in ways that later artists like David Bowie would emulate–in considerably tamer forms. He opened up profound questions about masculine and feminine, the ways in which they relate, and how each of us experiences those realities. He actually touched upon many themes found in Jungian therapy: masculinity and femininity; creativity and receptivity ; sexual and contrasexual. Similarly, he expressed much around shadow: things of which we are barely conscious, or, unconscious; things on the periphery or edges of society, propriety or respectability.
Reed was simple and direct in his art. While seeing himself fully as a serious artist, not an entertainer, or “rock star”, Reed knew that his art was rock, and he was fiercely passionate about attaining his artistic vision. He famously once said “Rock songs should have one chord, maybe two…three and you’re getting into jazz” — but he was a passionate admirer and student of the art of jazz genius Miles Davis, bringing a Davis-like focus to his own work.
Lou Reed was strongly and unabashedly always himself.
Playing the Part of Oneself
To me, his song “Sweet Jane” seems to embody the soul of Lou Reed:
There’s some evil mothersThey’ll just tell you that life’s just made out of dirtThat pretty women, baby, they never really faintAnd that villains always blink their eyesAnd that children are the only ones who blushAnd that life — Life!– that life is just to die…But I want to tell you something:Anyone who ever had a heartOh, they wouldn’t turn around and break itAnd anyone who’s ever played a partThey wouldn’t turn around and hate it…
Lou Reed passionately and courageously played the part of himself, and he embodied the self acceptance and journey to the self that Jungian therapy sees as fundamental to individuation.
The symbolic may be the commonplace, as a Jungian psychotherapist well knows; other than pets like dogs, what could be more commonplace in suburban life than cars?
Not only are cars commonplace in suburban life; they are common in our dreams. The ancient gods had their vehicles or mounts that they typically rode; so our vehicles often appear in dreams as representations of our “way of getting through life”.
Automobile as Possibility
When Henry Ford mass produced the automobile, he created a world of transportation possibility that had been previously unimaginable. So often the auto represents a real dimension of freedom in the lives of individuals.
The Car and Our “Drive”
It’s not accidental, in our culture that we refer to a highly motivated individual as “driven”. We can easily relate driving to a way of being aggressively in control: driving can be a direct expression of aggression. This association with aggression is at the root of many road rage incidents.
The Car and Persona / Identity
in North American society generally, and in suburbia in particular, the car that a person drives is seen as directly connected to a person’s social mask or persona. In modern suburbia, the car one drives can easily mark one as an estimable, successful person… or not. So one aspect of car ownership is that it can become something that we hide behind — as something that hides a person’s individuality. A Jungian psychotherapist knows that cars in general, and especially in suburbia, are part of personal identity, and also hide it.
The Isolating Container
Most cars constitute a sealed off vessel that travels down the road. This can lead to a sense of being cut off from the external environment. What happens in the world outside the car is something that doesn’t affect me, and from which I’m disconnected.
One complaint that Europeans often have about North American cities and suburbs is that they are “60 Kilometre / Hour Cities” where we whizz by things in our cars at 60 KPH, and we are disengaged from the outer world outside our automobile containers, except for the endpoints of our journeys.
Does our car dependency symbolize disconnection from other people and the world; life in a world of isolation, tunnel vision, alienation from nature, as John Brack’s painting seems to portray?
The Car in Your Dreams
As 21st century people, and especially as suburban folk, we often find ourselves in our cars in our dreams. Often, there can be a lot to be learned from these dream car journeys.
In your dream, where are you going?
How are you getting there?
Who’s driving your car? You, or someone else?
The images of car travel in our dreams can often tell us a great deal about our lives, and the needed direction of our journey towards wholeness.
Does Hermes Drive A Mercury?
When a Jungian psychotherapist works in individual therapy with a client, material objects from our everyday lives can take on great symbolic importance, and reveal much about our individual lives.
A Jungian psychotherapist has a passionate interest in symbols, and one of the most strikingly visible symbols in suburban life must surely be: dogs.
“CAVE CANEM” – “Beware the Dog”, Pompeii, Italy 1st C., A.D.
“Yes, Brian”, you say, “I get it. There are dogs in suburbia. OK. Big deal. So what?”
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Suburbia as Doggy Homeland
Dogs are almost omnipresent in suburbia. Clearly, in our culture as a whole, and in suburbia in particular, dogs are very important to very many people. To a Jungian psychotherapist, this importance is both psychological and symbollic. The recent CBC documentary Dog Dazed opens up this more psychological aspect of dog ownership powerfully.
In suburbia, what is the psychological function of the dog?
Well, there are several important things to note about our dogs…
Dogs Don’t Desert
Dogs are by nature social, and instinctively adapted to life in packs. This social aspect of dogs likely made them the first animal to ever be domesticated.
One of the things that endears us to dogs is that they are particularly responsive to human affection and care. These are beings both very different from ourselves, and very open and eager to be emotionally connected to us.
Dogs don’t desert their masters. As a result in myth, and many religious traditions they are portrayed as accompanying their masters to death and into the afterlife. This symbolism was common in ancient Egypt, as Manchester Museum Egyptologist Campbell Price tells us.
As a result of these attributes, dogs have a very deep, even archetypal place in the human psyche.
Dogs as Instinct
Another aspect of dogs is revealed in the way that they represent the body and instinct in life.
Humans have long relied on the dog’s superior senses — superior hearing, ability to detect scents, sureness of direction — to extend the range of our own senses. We are acutely aware that, in certain of these respects the dog’s abilities are unquestionably superior to our own.
Dogs in human life may also be symbolic of instinct. Given their nature, they unquestionably represent an instinctual desire to be social, to affiliate, to “be part of”. Similarly, they can represent the sexual instinct for humans; the territorial or boundary-maintaining instinct, and the instinct to hunter and to track.
In addition, dogs embody for us a simple ease with bodily life. We may say that a person is not comfortable in his own skin; we would never say that about a dog.
The Dog Within
A Jungian psychotherapist sees suburbanites’ love affair with the dog in terms of our deep yearnings for connection, and for unconditional love and acceptance. Similarly, that the dog is a symbol of our desire to be connected with the simplicity and self acceptance of bodily, instinctual life is not lost on a Jungian psychotherapist. The journey of individual therapy is a journey to connection, beginning with acceptance and then love of oneself and welcome of instinct and body.
A Jungian psychotherapist who didn’t take into account the impact of family would have a pretty distorted picture of suburban life.
There’s all kinds of material out there focusing on family dynamics, the importance of good parenting, and having a good marriage. There’s much less on the impact of the family on the life of the individual in suburbia.
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Two Parents, Two Cars and the Requisite Number of Kids
There’s a collective ideal of marriage and family that underlies suburban life, even to this day.
There is an expectation in suburbia of how families should look and function — an image. While that has changed somewhat over the last 50 years, it’s not really that dissimilar from the vision of family life held out to people in early suburbias like Levitttown in the late 40s and very early 50s. What’s more, it doesn’t fit the reality that many people live.
When Your Life Doesn’t Fit the Pattern
Unconventional in suburbia?
A Jungian psychotherapist is well aware that, if the structure of an individual’s family is atypical for suburbia, it can sometimes be demanding to live here. Single parents in a suburban situation often know this. Often, so does the family with a member who is differently abled, or suffering from serious illness. Or the family that has lost a child, or suffered a serious economic setback.
All such experiences take persons out of the everyday awareness of suburbia, and bring them into a new consciousness concerning very difficult situations. This is true for families, and even truer for the individual.
Family Has Meaning: So Does Individual Life
Family is meaningful, and has a great importance for the vast majority of people. As Jung notes the archetypes that underpin family are some of the very most significant in human life — they powerfully affect us.
Yet, the clinical experience of the Jungian psychotherapist shows that, even if a person has an extremely meaningful, loving family life, the question still remains: “What is meaningful for me, as an individual?”
Family and Identity
Suburbia can pressure the individual to find meaning in life solely in terms of family, but that is often insufficient.
Individuals may respond to such pressure by floating above family life in disengaged ways, never really investing in the supposedly key relationships in their lives, like the relationship to a significant other, or the relationship to kids.
On the other hand, the individual may totally succumb to straitjacketing family roles, and avoid the necessity to individuate in fundamental ways.
Avoiding both of these dangers requires creative relationship to others — to letting in their needs and the individuality in empathic ways. It also necessitates creatively taking the inner journey and exploring our own unique needs and individuality. The work that the Jungian psychotherapist does with individuals concerns itself in depth with the call of life to become and remain our individual selves in the midst of suburban life.
Money in all its aspects is highly significant in suburban life, as any Jungian psychotherapist well knows.
This isn’t surprising: money has immense psychological importance, overall.
What do I mean by that?
Money as Energy
Psychologically and symbolically speaking, a Jungian psychotherapist thinks of money as representing a form of stored energy. The money we earn effectively results from the expenditure of our life’s energy.
As a result, money is fundamentally tied up with our hopes and dreams, for ourselves, and just as importantly, for those whom we love. It is also powerfully associated with our fears and insecurities. Let’s make no mistake: financial crises, recessions or other situations of financial threat, personal or collective, are powerful emotional events.
These psychological facts take on a particular nuance or flavour in suburban settings. In suburbia, success and affluence are highly prized, and deeply tied up with personal identity.
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Money Complex and Social Self
Basically, everyone has a money complex. Money issues can leave us in the grips of many different strong emotional states, but money “gets” to almost all of us, one way or another, whether as extreme competitiveness or extreme worry, or other emotional states.
The world’s great financial organizations and institutions gives us the impression that money is one of the most rational — even mathematical — of things in human life. Actually, money is one of the most emotional things on earth. Again, this emotionality is often heightened in suburbia, where outward trappings of affluence and success are a highly prized part of our social masks. The social collective stresses the need to be, and to be seen to be successful– in order to have any worth.
Songwriter Aimee Mann explores the complexity around “looking successful” and money in her insightful song, “Freeway” — “You’ve got a lot of money / But you cannot keep your bills paid.”
Suburban Life: A Troubled Marriage with Money
As a Jungian psychotherapist, a key area of investigation, and a key issue for people who see me in my practice, is the particular relationship between suburban life and money. It’s a potent, potent mixture!
The constant message of suburbia? Successful people live here. In fact, that’s why many chose to live in the more affluent suburbs. Certainly, “success” in this sense means financial success: having a lot of money. The not-so-subtle message in our society, which screams from every brick in suburbia, is that self-worth is directly connected to worth in dollars.
Upscale suburb living symbolizes success. And, very clearly, those living here need to appear successful. This can be an extremely trying pressure in economically uncertain times.
Self Worth and Money?
Human beings are worth infinitely more than their assets. There’s irreplaceable value in our individual uniqueness. Our culture doesn’t always affirm this. We need to live in the conscious awareness of our own uniqueness, and our own unique journey. A Jungian psychotherapist focuses on grounding people in their unique identity and worth.
Put a Jungian psychotherapist in suburbia and he or she soon realizes that an important part of suburban life is the process of dealing with expectations around image.
People’s presentation of themselves to each other is key in suburban life. And how we relate to our presentation to the world, to what Jung called the persona, can determine the whole course of a life.
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The Inevitability of Persona
We have to face it: we’re going to have a social mask. People can’t appear unfiltered and emotionally raw to the world — it would be intolerable.
So, we all develop ways of protecting ourselves — and others — in our various social environments. The way we do that is through our persona, which is a combination of what we show to others, and what we conceal. For the Jungian psychotherapist, this is an inevitable activity, with identifiable common characteristics in the suburban persona across North America:
Suburban Social Compromise
Persona is the sum total of all the compromises we make between the outer social reality and inner psychological reality. All the social compromises we make in suburban living can amount to a lifestyle — and to a specific persona, a suburban way of presenting ourselves to the outer world.
In today’s suburbia, it’s not uncommon to have limited contact with others, but that doesn’t mean that we are not strongly influenced by their opinions and expectations.
Often there is considerable pressure to avoid patterns of behaviour considered “eccentric”, and sometimes strong fear and suspicion of behaviour that departs from the suburban pattern. For instance, there can be considerable pressure to look prosperous and successful / “healthy” — and to give the impression of being “one of us”, and fitting in.
Don’t Mistake the Mask for Your Face
Suburban patterns of persona sometimes work better for people in the first half of adult life than they do in the second.
In the second half of life, what is more individual becomes more important. By this time people can be so confined by social role that they risk never getting to a position to express their true selves. Social masks can prevent us from expressing our real identity, confining us to rigid patterns of thought and reaction that we can never get past.
Suburbia and the Dance of Persona
For the Jungian psychotherapist, the key thing about image in suburbia is that individuals need to not be possessed by the social self, but to have the freedom to live from their authentic reality. There is a dance of individuation and masks that is involved in suburban life, and in the issue of our persona in suburban living.
How to live authentically in suburbia? Only by stepping away from the mask of suburban persona enough to gain some freedom. A key part of the work of the Jungian psychotherapist, in suburbia or elsewhere, is to help individuals to find the authentic life within that brings freedom from the mask.
Well, having both practiced as a Jungian psychotherapist in suburban or “edge” cities and having extensively studied suburbias, it’s clear that individuals face particular challenges in living in this kind of environment, while remaining true to themselves.
Whatever else is true, the suburban places of my life, like Mississauga, Oakville and Burlington, have a unique character from the perspective of a Jungian psychotherapist.
That Funny Word “Suburban”…
A suburb, simply put, is a residential area that is neither fully urban, nor is it rural. Often, the people who live in suburbia are people who hope to live closer to nature, or at least, with more space, than is possible in an urban setting. Often, this kind of space appeals to people with families.
Living in the Suburbs Has Unique Pressures
From the perspective of a Jungian psychotherapist it’s clear that there are unique pressures on suburban dwellers. Some of these are very tangible.
For instance, suburban dwellers often have a commute to somewhere in their metro area that substantially eats into their day. Related to this is the fact that suburban folks pretty much need a car to do everything in their lives, and have to travel some pretty large distances to do the basics. In most suburban communities you can’t get the goods and services you need via walking or transit. So there can easily be a sense of disconnect from the physical environment, and from others living in the community.
A Jungian psychotherapist also knows that suburban community has two mirror opposite aspects: it can be both not enough and too much. In the midst of suburban communities, people can feel incredibly alone. Simultaneously, people can encounter immense pressure to meet collective expectations. around lifestyle, levels of consumption. and being “like others” in the neighbourhood. People can feel strong social pressure and feel extremely disconnected simultaneously.
The social pressure to be “like others” may result in huge financial pressure.
Being Yourself in the Suburbs is a Particular Challenge
At a certain point in life, often around the midlife transition, the challenge of living in a way that is uniquely one’s own takes on a level of urgency.
Often, a way of life that once met certain key needs starts to feel like just “going through the motions”. The need to find a way of living that is uniquely, authentically my own, may come from a pressing imperative — what a Jungian psychotherapist calls individuation.
Creative Individuation in the Suburbs
It can take a significant re-orientation to find a creative and meaningful life in the midst of a suburban lifestyle. One must overcome the relentless pressure of advertising and marketing, which continually portrays commodity consumption as individual and creative, when it is often at heart abjectly conformist. It can be an extensive process to get free of this and to get down to the discovery of what is uniquely me. This is an essential aspect of the work of the Jungian psychotherapist in suburbia.
The meaning of dreams in which the motif of “jewels” or “diamonds” appear can vary greatly — as Jungian therapy well knows — but these are often dreams of great
emotional power. It is more than a play on words to say that the diamond is a multi-faceted symbol.
Jungian therapy often sees the diamond as a symbol of the self in its entirety. But what the heck does that mean?
Precious from the Earth
Diamonds are created far within the depths of the earth. In the normal course of events, a human being cannot make a diamond. It requires the pressure and heat of the depths to do that.
Jungian therapy is aware that “the depths of the earth” often symbolize of the unconscious depths of the psyche. A diamond symbolizes the reality of the self: it is forged without human intervention in the depths, just as the self is created in the depths, in the vastness of the unconscious, independent of the conscious mind and ego.
Indestructible and Forever
Diamonds are famous for incredible hardness and durability. They symbolize the durability and resilience of the true self, and of the yearning that we all have for a connection to the lasting persistent nature of psyche, and of our own deepest identity In the times of life when we often feel most fragile and vulnerable on the conscious level, Jungian therapy knows a deep need of the individual is to come into contact with the reality and persistence of the self. Often the meaning of dreams revolves around encounters with this reality.
The Many Facets of Diamonds
Diamonds have very complex shapes. They often have many, many facets. In this way, they bear a resemblance to the human personality, which has a multitude of dimensions and aspects. Jungian therapy lives in the awareness that, like diamonds, we are multi-facetted — many facets not even being conscious. To understand the meaning of dreams containing the symbol of the diamond, we must understand the multi-dimensional beauty and wonder of the diamond as an image reflecting the endlessly diverse and multi-facetted reality of the individual self.
Here is a video by Maple Leaf Diamonds . If you can get past seeing the diamonds presented as mere “bling”, they portray the wonder and beauty of these strange stones, and the way in which they serve as an image of the wonder of the self.
Diamonds and the Life of the Self
What is the meaning of dreams where diamonds appear? Jungian therapy emphasizes that the answer to this question must necessarily be very individual. But it is highly likely that such dreams concern the fundamental reality of who we are. Have you had a dream in which diamonds or precious stones appeared? If so, we must wonder what such a dream might have been saying about your unique and infinitely varied self. Often, it is only in the journey to wholeness embodied by depth psychotherapies such as Jungian therapy that we can begin to find out.
