Awaking to your Shadow / your Unconscious - Becoming Whole / Real

  The Death of one’s Soul   A few days ago a woman came to me for a consultation. She had been a patient of mine fifteen years ago. She was a difficult case because she would not see certain things, she would not play the game, she wanted to remain a child. Certain people cannot take life seriously, as if they were born to be eternal children. If a case comes to me with diabetes and the patient will not pay attention to his symptoms or take my advice, there is nothing I can do. A few days ago I saw my old patient again. She looked awful and I was shocked. She saw it and said, "Yes, it's very bad, but I have no problem any more." She wanted me to tell her husband that she was no longer hysterical, and it was true she had no problems, no troubles; she had sucked them in, converted them into her body. In such cases the heart races for psychological reasons, and the result is a neurosis comparable to a shell-shock. One jumps at everything and has no cont...

  Symbols, thresholds and rebirth An archetypal experience of being human is the need and possibility at certain times throughout our lives to be reborn. To reinvent ourselves, to make a fresh start, to reimagine our role and place in the world, to embrace new values and discard what no longer serves us. This need and possibility of creatively crafting our identity and journey is an integral part of what in Jungian terms we refer to as individuation. The process of becoming an ever more honest and refined version of yourself. I have been reflecting on this of late. How fortunate we are to be given these frequent and regular opportunities for renewal. I have always celebrated the threshold offered by a new year and put great stock in this. I count among my blessings that I have maintained a certain naiveite and resisted cynicism in this regard. The new year has never failed to renew my spirit and commitment to be a better version of my previous self. More recently though what ha...

  The aim of individuation is nothing less than to divest the self of the false wrappings of the persona on the one hand and of the suggestive power of primordial images on the other . . . But when we turn to . . . the influence of the collective unconscious, we find we are moving in a dark interior world that is vastly more difficult to understand than the psychology of the persona, which is accessible to everyone . . . It is another thing to describe . . . those subtle inner processes which invade the conscious mind with such suggestive force. Perhaps we can best portray these influences with the help of examples of mental illness, creative inspiration, and religious conversion. In a previous passage (1971:118) Jung points out that individuation is not identification with the collective unconscious, for this leads to a naive megalomania "in the form of prophetic inspiration and desire for martyrdom." Considering all this, it is not surprising that the path of the mystic has...