In the quote above, Jung tells us some very important things about the nature of Jungian therapy, and about soul work, or depth psychotherapy, at its very deepest.
It’s important to be clear here what Jung means by “soul”. He is not concerned with the immortal, immaterial soul. He is speaking to what it is that makes us the subtle, unique and staggeringly rich individual beings that we all are.
What does he tell us here about soul and soul work?
1. The Soul is Complex; Souls are Diverse
Human beings embody overwhelming complexity. However much one learns about another human being, there is more to learn. And while we have much in common, each human being is incredibly diverse and different from the others, however much we try to hide that individuality.
2. We’re More Than Just Instinctive Reactions
There most certainly are a whole wide range of human instincts: this is something that evolutionary psychology and neuroscience are bringing home to us more and more. Yet a human soul cannot be reduced to a bundle of instincts. We relate to our instincts differently than the rest of the animal kingdom. Within us, the instincts are transmuted into another reality : the archetypal.
3. What Each Human Person Fundamentally is, is Beyond Imagining
We cannot take in the full reality of another human being. Each is an incredible mystery. We cannot be reduced to fully known or knowable quantities.
4. Each of us has Incredible Heights and Depths
There is a staggering range of possibilities that live within each one of us. There are within each of us incredible heights of nobility and wisdom to be discovered. Simultaneously, there are incredible dark recesses: feelings and possibilities that we would just as soon not face.
This is the territory of Jungian therapy and of “soul work”. To avoid turning the latter phrase into a glib slogan, we must take the soul, the inmost subjectivity of the individual in front of us, with utmost seriousness. Each encounter in soul work, is true engagement with the psyche of another, a unique journey of discovery.
Individual therapy and careful, gradual soul work are often key elements in what helps depression. “OK,” you’re saying, “other than a fancy buzzword or slogan, what is ‘soul work'”?
Saying anything about soul may seem strange in 2012. “Isn’t it just an irrelevant step back into the Middle Ages?” you may ask. Well, here’s why depth psychotherapists consider it important.
Doing Soul Work?
As I’ve stated in earlier posts, soul as used here has nothing to do with organized religion, astral projection or seances, but with connection with the deep images and experiences of inner life. It concerns the deepest and most intimate levels of what is going on inside a person.
How Does It Occur in Individual Therapy?
In a recent “Facts and Arguments” piece in the Globe and Mail newspaper, entitled “A psychiatrist’s double bind“, psychiatrist Gili Adler Nevo wrote of her experience of soul work in individual therapy:
I entered the world of psychotherapy not knowing what to expect. How the hell could it help, just talking?
I’ve talked before…. Yet, gradually, in the privacy of this shrine for the individual soul that was the therapist’s office, in this sacred place free of malice, motives or moral judgment, I could set my soul loose.
It had been cooped up for so long, it didn’t even know it. And my soul, like anyone else’s, seemed complicated. Different layers protruded every time….
Letting it out into that attuned and understanding comfort enabled my soul to live in peace with all its parts.
Nevo contrasts her own experience of therapy with a patient in a psychiatric setting, whom she efficiently diagnoses and prescribes Prozac. She clearly finds this modern psychiatic care to be incomplete:
I could not afford to create that sacred place for the soul in which she could untangle her layers, understand the source of her depression and climb out of it. I did not have the time: It was no longer in the culture of my profession.
Does Soul Work Truly Help Depression?
I’m not suggesting that antidepressants are not necessary sometimes. But they are often not sufficient. Often people need to get in contact with their depths, and to experience acceptance and understanding.
What Helps Depression
“Just talking” is sometimes disparaged. Yet the journey of talking about the fundamental matters in personal life, and contacting the many aspects of the self is a key element of what helps depression. It can free the life locked up in the individual.
There’s a lot of truth for psychotherapy in the Greek myth of Persephone and it’s all tied up with the yearly renewal of the seasons. Persephone, a vegetation goddess, and the daughter of the harvest goddess Demeter, was kidnapped and ravished by Hades, the king of the Underworld, and taken to live in his realm.
Demeter, so distraught at her disappearance, refused to let crops or vegetation grow anymore until her daughter was returned. The gods finally prevailed on Hades, who agreed to let her go. However the all-wise Fates had decreed that anyone who consumed the food of the underworld was destined to stay there for eternity. Alas, wiley Hades had persuaded Persephone to eat 3 puny pomegranite seeds. And so Persephone must spend part of the year in the Underworld, a time of barreness, and vegetation would flourish again only when she was re-united every year with Demeter above ground.
This is quite a myth to explain the origin of the seasons. Here in Canada, after the long barren winter, we all feel a little like I imagine Persephone would, as she was released from the earth. Released back into life!
The profound truth of the Persephone myth also conveys a deep meaning for our own psychological journey.
The Persephone myth conveys a natural movement in psychological life For Persephone, it is only as she is detached from her familiar world, and descends to the Underworld that she can bring the blessing and the gift of the seasons, of new green life, and fertility.
My experience is that it is like that in the lives of my clients and in my own life, also. Sometimes the encounter with life’s circumstances and with the unconscious can seem like a sudden plunge into darkness and descent into the underworld. But the underworld has its own gifts that it brings. Only those who can accept those gifts, and “eat the food of the underworld”, can bring the gift of life and fertility back to the “surface world” of their everyday lives. In the encounter with the depths in ourselves, including our unconscious, we travel Persephone’s way, and return to our everyday life with the green lushness of renewed outlook and vitality.
In the video below, the great Brazilian jazz stylist Antonio Carlos Jobim sings his wonderful song “The Waters of March” at the 1986 Montreal Jazz Festival. Lush and full of feeling, this wonderful music captures the enormity of the renewal of Spring that we all sense at this time of year. May we find that same sense of renewal through the encounter with our own deepest selves.
A stick, a stone, it’s the end of the road
It’s the rest of a stump, it’s a little alone
It’s a sliver of glass, it is life, it’s the sun…
…It’s a beam it’s a void, it’s a hunch, it’s a hope
And the river bank talks of the waters of March
It’s the end of the strain
The joy in your heart
Finding Renewal
Both Persephone’s descent into the underworld and the renewal of spring symbolize aspects of the psychotherapeutic process. Often for renewal, it is important to enter into the depths, and to encounter the more hidden parts of our own existence, and our own experience of life. The journey may well be demanding, and it is the role of the depth psychotherapist to guide the individual toward renewal, and the deep rewards of the journey. There’s no better time to start than now.
As always, I welcome your inquiries and comments.
Wishing you the gifts of renewal on your journey to wholeness,
Brian Collinson, Psychotherapist & Jungian Analyst
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1-905-337-3946
PHOTO CREDIT: Frederic Leighton, 1st Baron Leighton (1830–1896). This work is in the public domain.
Why am I writing about psychotherapy, snow days and the self today? Because, if Environment Canada and the other weather folks are right, today will shape up to be the most significant “snow day” we’ve experienced in this part of Canada for a number of years. And even if the weather folks are wrong, there’s a huge number of school and other closures, and people just staying home in anticipation of a huge dump of snow, whether it actually comes or not. Psychotherapy would say that the snow day is a psychological and social reality, even if it turns out not to be a meteorological one.
So what do psychotherapy, psychology and the self, etc. have to do with a snow day? I think it’s this.
Normal Expectations — Shut Down!
With a snow day, suddenly all of our normal expectations for the day just get shut down. Normal routines and expectations of the day are put on hold. There’s no taking the kids to school, and maybe no commute and time in the office. Where we had expected an ordinary working day, filled with the usual frenetic busy-ness, we often get a much quieter day. A day with unexpected elements of “down time” and maybe with significant blocks of empty space.
What do I Notice?
What do I notice in the middle of the unexpected emptiness of a snow day? Potentially, many things. One of them may be a lot of anxiety. The sudden lack of agenda may lead us to feel an unexpected void. Alternately, we might find ourselves feeling a bit “down”. For some people, there may have been a feeling of anticipation of the snow day — “Oh, good, no work!” — which is gradually replaced by a feeling of listlessness that seems to creep in as they are confronted with inactivity. And then, for some folks, there will be a genuine feeling of relief to just have some let up from the pressure of the daily routine in this unexpected way.
Opportunity
Whatever feelings you may confront, they bring an opportunity. In this open space of time, you have the opportunity to learn something about yourself, about relationship, and about your feelings about your own real life. This day, seeming empty, may prove to be a doorway, if you take the opportunity it provides to look within.
Three Psychological Questions to Ask Yourself Today
1. What do I really feel today? Please note: this is not the same question as “What do I think?” or “What do I think I ought to feel?” It’s a question that I ask myself when I’m trying to be as honest as I can about parts of myself to which I may not usually pay attention.
2. What do I really want today? Again, this is not the same as, “What do I think I ought to want?” Without censoring myself, can I be honest about what I’d really like in my life?
3. Is the Life I’m Leading Meeting the Needs of My Inmost Self? If the answer to this question is “No”, or “I’m not sure”, this might be the moment to seek out the help of an experienced and qualified psychotherapist to do some in-depth self-exploration.
More than just “down time”, the open-ness of a snow day can be an opportunity to move into depth.
Wishing you a meaningful snow day — and a genuine encounter with your own dear self, as you move forward on your personal journey to wholeness,
Brian Collinson, Psychotherapist & Jungian Analyst
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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?
This is the third in my series of posts about resilience, and its role in the work of psychotherapy. In my last post, I wrote about personal experiences through which I was changed, and, through which the issue of resilience really came home to roost in my life. In this post, I would like to try and say something about the places in which I believe I really found some sources of resilience. As I stressed before, this is not to say that what I will describe is exactly “the answer”, for anyone other than me. The “answers” that any of us find are of necessity very individual, and if what I describe points anyone to move any further on their own individual path to being grounded in their own being, then I think that is all that I can hope to do.
Fortunately, Things Became Sufficiently Painful
When I left off my story, in my late 20s and early 30s, I was in the midst of making a lot of rash decisions, and taking a lot of risks. My anger, pain and despair were very near the surface, and I was volatile in the extreme. I do not believe that I was very easy on the people who were nearest to me at that time, and I was certainly “acting out” in some nasty ways. Fortunately, in my late 20s, things became painful and difficult enough that I realized that I needed to reach out for some highly skilled help, and I got into therapy with someone who was very highly skilled, and who got what was at stake. This was the first of a group of very good therapists, all of whom had a psychodynamic orientation, to whom I owe a very great debt, perhaps even my life.
Down Into Me
Through my 30s, much of my therapeutic work was involved with getting me out of my head, and down into my body and my emotions. A lot of the work focussed on things that had occurred in my earlier life. They also helped me to understand what it is to feel your own life, in every sense of the word. To be in your body. To really feel your own emotions. The work evolved in a more and more symbolic direction, and I was fortunate to have therapists, in particular Jungian analysts, who were able to help me come to some deep insights into my own being from my own patterns of behaviour, and from my dreams. They helped me greatly with the process of uncovering my own symbols, and my own personal myth. They knew how to work with the symbols that emerged from my dreams, and could help me to see how they eloquently express the reality of my particular selfhood and life. This is something very hard to espress in an intellectual way, but when it happens, it’s something you know.
Above All, They Really Listened
However, if I had to point to one single characteristic of this small group of therapists that helped me more than any other, it was this: they really, really knew how to listen. And in addition, they really, really knew how to ask questions. As I moved through my therapy, this intent listening — this belief of theirs that they had never heard my story from anyone before, and would never hear it from anyone again — really helped me to grasp the real nature of my own story, and to come to an ever better understanding of who and what I really am.
Acceptance
My therapeutic journey has enabled me to find a kind of acceptance of my life. An ability to feel that this life, as outwardly ordinary and unheroic as it may be, is unique, and that it is truly mine. To feel that, even in my suffering, there is a kind of rightness to my life, a rightness to being here in this time and this way, and to being alive. That my life is my life, me… and that I can accept that, and welcome it. For me, this means feeling rooted in my life, much more solid in it, than I have ever felt. Insofar as I can make any meaningful sense of psychologists’ use of the word “resilience”, this is it.
How Does All This Seem to You?
Are these experiences to which you can relate? I would really welcome any comments that you might have. Are reslience and feeling at home in your life things which concern you? If so, I would really welcome hearing from you.
Wishing you all good things on your journey to wholeness, and to your self,
Here is a video which I re-tweeted recently on Twitter. I decided to post it on my blog because I think that it gives a particularly revealing portrait of the psychiatrist CG Jung in his latter years. The video is taken from “Face to Face”, an excellent interview program hosted by John Freeman of the BBC in 1959.
In this interview, with the stage artfully set by Freeman, Jung describes something remarkable that he would later write about in his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections . This was a sudden experience that came upon him in his 11th year, when he suddenly came to a simple, but remarkable awareness: “I exist“.
…and then I found that I had been in a mist, and I stepped out of it, and I knew that Iam. I am what I am.… Before I had been in a mist, not knowing to differentiate myself from things… As far as I can tell, nothing had happened beforehand that would explain this sudden coming to consciousness….
I find this remarkable. In relating this incident, Jung describes a very fateful moment in his life. Jung would spend the rest of his life, effectively caught up in the mysteries of consciousness, self-awareness and individual identity.
There is a great mystery here, something about which we take so much for granted. What is it to exist, as a person, as an “I”? What is it to be aware? Just who is this I, who is aware, and how is this I to relate to the rest of the universe, both externally, and in our boundless inner being?
It seems to me that this little snip of video, a fine example of the art of the interviewer, does exactly what a portrait should do. It opens up a window on the mystery and intricacy of the person portrayed. And it leads us on, to reflect on the nature of the unique mystery that is our own unique identity.
I’d welcome your comments and reflections on either Carl Jung or the whole subject of being aware of our own existence. Did you ever have a similar moment yourself, when you were suddenly aware that “I exist”?
Good wishes to all of you on your own personal journey to wholeness,
As I indicated in Part 1 of this post, if we really get serious about the task of being honest with ourselves, sooner or later, we are going to run into what Jung calls the Shadow. The Shadow represents all those parts of ourselves that we do not, or do not want to, acknowledge as being parts of ourselves. As Jung himself puts it:
Unfortunately there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. If an inferiority is conscious, one always has a chance to correct it. Furthermore, it is constantly in contact with other interests, so that it is continually subjected to modifications. But if it is repressed and isolated from consciousness, it never gets corrected.
If you imagine someone who is brave enough to withdraw all his projections, then you get an individual who is conscious of a pretty thick shadow. He has become a serious problem to himself, as he is now unable to say that “they” do this or that, “they” are wrong, and “they” must be fought against. Such a man knows that whatever is wrong in the world is in himself, and if he only learns to deal with his own shadow he has done something real for the world. He has succeeded in shouldering at least an infinitesimal part of the gigantic, unsolved social problems of our day.
CG Jung, CW 11: Psychology and Religion: West and East. pp. 131 – 140
So a person’s shadow will often have a large element of moral difficulty attached to it. It may be that I have certain strong ethical standards for instance, which I not only feel that I adhere to, but which I also proclaim to the world. But it’s often the case that, underlying such a position, I in fact do not really act in a manner consistent with my conscious convictions — and, what’s more, I even hide the fact that I do so from my conscious awareness.
The above is the aspect of the shadow that preachers or moralists might easily pick up on, but there is more to the shadow than that. For the shadow also contains those aspects of our personality associated with feelings of weakness, inferiority or shame. These may be elements of our personality that we do not hide or fail to acknowledge for moral reasons, but more because we simply resist showing them to the world. These shadow contents may often concern the most vulnerable parts of ourselves, including parts of ourselves that have been deeply wounded or shamed by others, or which we simply cannot accept about ourselves. They may well have hidden themselves, not only from the view of the world, but also from my own view. Remarkably, many memories may have been repressed and split off.
And this is certainly not all that there is to be said about the shadow. There could easily be another 50 posts like this one on the subject! But it’s important to recognize that the undeveloped potentialities in my personality reside in the shadow. For instance, if I’m a fairly introverted person, in the way I present to the world, I may have a fairly extroverted shadow… or vice versa. There are very likely aspects of myself in my shadow that I find very difficult to face or acknowledge — but it may also be that a great amount of undiscovered life is there in the shadow as well, waiting to be uncovered and encountered.
Questions to Ask Yourself about Shadow
What do I have the hardest time admitting to be true about myself?
Where do I feel weakest and most vulnerable in my innermost self?
What kinds of people, or what individuals, do it have the hardest time putting up with? If I’m really honest with myself, is there anything at all about them that I envy, or even admire, however grudgingly? Is that which I envy a quality that I might find somewhere in myself?
I’d welcome your comments on this post, and your reflections on the whole subject of the shadow.
Wishing you every good thing on your personal journey to wholeness,
In Part 1 and Part 2 of this series on regret, I have tried to portray something of the nature and power of regret as it manifests in our lives. Hopefully I have succeeded in making one very central thing clear: regret is not some peripheral thing in our lives that is going to be cleared away by simply improving our thinking. It strikes deeper. It is much more fundamental. How then are we to deal with the presence of regret in our lives?
One of the first steps is to frankly acknowledge the danger to us that regret represents. Regret, truly strong regret, has the power to deprive us of a meaningful life in the present, even though it concerns events in our past.
Neither will regret be skirted. It often stands in the center of the road of our journey. The way that it holds our energy can seem hopelessly entangling.
Acknowledging the sheer pain of regret can be very hard to do. As is often the case with strong negative feelings, we try to deny their existence. Yet it is only acknowledging the pain that really makes us aware of the life that has been lost, of which the regret reminds us. And it is only in acknowledging the pain and sometimes the despair that is associated with regret that the energy that is tied up in it can begin to be freed up to move toward something else in our lives. And that something may have real life and real meaning for us.
Despair is usually the last place we want to go. The last thing we want to face in our lives. Yet, it is in our despair that our energy gets caught.
What is it about what we regret that really keeps us from wanting to release it? Can we face the hurt inherent in failed hopes? Does regret really move us more deeply into the question of what our life is about, and whether we find it meaningful or not? As the character Ivan says in the recent film Greenberg , can we really come to accept and cherish a life other than the one we planned?
Carl Jung frequently used a phrase that he took from the ancient world” amor fati . Literally translated, it means “the love of one’s fate.” This is not a phrase to be chucked around glibly, and Jung certainly did not do that. However, the idea of loving one’s fate is the mirror opposite of living a life that is consumed by regret.
When one looks at the painful, and sometimes even horrific events that can be endured by human beings, one can only conclude that it would be a grim mockery to counsel someone to somehow love these actual events. That would be the bitterest possible perversion of some idea of positive thinking. I don’t think that is what Jung means when he uses the phrase amor fati. I think what he does mean is that the person who loves his or her fate somehow lives in hope, and sees a meaning emerging in the midst of the fabric of his or her life. Such a life and such a hope offers the possibility of living passionately into life — beyond the chains of regret.
I’d welcome your comments on this post, and on the whole subject of dealing with regret.
Wishing you every good thing on your personal journey to wholeness,
Brian Collinson, Psychotherapist & Jungian Analyst
Regret is a power that can bring you to your knees. A great many of us have experienced its power. Sinatra may sing “Regrets, I’ve had a few / But then again, too few to mention.” This sounds admirable and enviable, but over the course of a lifetime, most of us have to deal with some very powerful rendez-vous with the way it might have been.
Regret can be experienced at any point in life, but often at mid-life, regret can start to take on a particular intensity. As we go through the journey of life, the awareness that we have only a finite amount of life left, a finite number of possibilities open to us, can lead us to an exquisite hyper-sensitivity to the regret we have for all the choices we could have made differently, roads we could have walked, ways that it might have turned out that it did not. In other words, the life unlived.
How can we live with this awareness? We may attempt to shrug it off, pretend it isn’t there. But very often for us it is there, often at times like 3 o’clock in the morning, when all the spirits tend to come out. Not a few of our addictive and compulsive behaviours — including workoholism — can stem from attempts to run away from regret. But how can you or I run away from something so close to ourselves?
In my next few postings, I will be examining the phenomenon of regret, and the way it impacts us. It can have a huge grip on us. It can even imprison us, and embitter us beyond words. But, let me ask a question that might seem strange: Is there health in regret? It’s clear how regret can be a poison, but, oftentimes, the cure for the poison is made from the poison itself.
Does regret play a part in your life? Do you ever find the experience of regret both inescapable and painful? I’d welcome any of your comments on this post.
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