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Jungian Analysis:
What
Is Jungian Analysis?
Jungian Oriented Psychotherapy
Dream/Archetype/Shadow ...
Jungian analysis is a
method of psychotherapy developed by C.G. Jung, the eminent Swiss psychiatrist
(1875-1961).
As Robert S. Wallerstein,
a Freudian analyst and former president of the International Psychoanalytic
Association, says, Jungian analysis "has endured worldwide as an
alternative therapeutic system." Today, there are approximately 2,500
Jungian analysts around the world.
Jung was an early
colleague of Sigmund Freud. After Jung and Freud parted ways, Jung founded a
distinctive school of psychotherapy. Jung is famous for such terms as
"archetype," "complex," "introvert" and
"extravert," "shadow," "anima" and
"animus," "collective unconscious,"
"synchronicity," and "individuation."
For Jungian-oriented Dream-Work, archetype identifications, analytic and deep psychotherapy, contact
Ingrid
Dresher,
psychotherapist in Toronto
Jung
and Jungian-oriented depth psychotherapy
Relationship and couples psychotherapy
Individual and personal counselling
Jungian analysis is a
"depth psychology," or psychology of the unconscious. "The
interpretation of dreams," Freud says, "is the royal road to a
knowledge of the unconscious." Perhaps even more than in contemporary
Freudian analysis, dream interpretation is integral to any Jungian analysis.
In contrast to Freud, who
asserts that all dreams are wish-fulfillments (usually sexual ones), Jung
contends that most dreams are attitude-compensations. The attitudes that dreams
compensate are those of the ego. Jung says that compensatory dreams "add to
the conscious psychological situation of the moment all those aspects which are
essential for a totally different point of view."
According to Jung, the
attitudes of the ego are invariably partial and prejudicial, even at the extreme
utterly defective. In dreams, the unconscious presents to the ego alternative
perspectives that compensate these maladaptive or dysfunctional attitudes. The
unconscious challenges the ego seriously to consider these alternative
perspectives.
Dreams offer the ego
information, advice, constructive criticism, even wisdom. If the ego is
receptive rather than defensive, it can evaluate these alternative perspectives
and decide whether to accept or reject them.
In addition to this
compensatory function, Jung says that some dreams have a prospective function.
According to Jung, prospective dreams are "an anticipation in the
unconscious" of some probable future result. They occur when the attitudes
of the ego deviate radically from the norm. In such instances, Jung says, the
compensatory function of the unconscious becomes a prospective function that
guides "the conscious attitude in a quite different direction which is much
better than the previous one."
The purpose of Jungian
analysis is to establish an effective relation between the ego and the
unconscious in order ultimately to facilitate a transformation of the psyche.
Dream interpretation is vitally important to that process.
Jungian analysts employ
three methods to engage the images that emerge from the unconscious. These are:
explication
amplification
active imagination
Explication and
amplification are techniques for interpreting the unconscious. Active
imagination is a technique for experiencing the unconscious.
Freud assumes that images
mean something else than they apparently mean. He translates them into other
terms (usually sexual ones). In contrast, Jung assumes that images mean nothing
else than they apparently mean. He explicates them in terms of what they
essentially imply.
"A man," Jung
says, "may dream of inserting a key in a lock, of wielding a heavy stick,
or of breaking down a door with a battering ram." Freud would reduce these
different images to a sexual common denominator. They would all be euphemisms
for the penis. "All elongated objects, such as sticks," Freud says,
"may stand for the male organ." He also says: "There is no need
to name explicitly the key that unlocks the room." (It evidently goes
without saying that keys, too, may stand for the male organ.) When Freud
sexualizes images, he employs what Alfred Adler calls "organ jargon."
In contrast to Freud, Jung
emphasizes that a key, stick, and battering ram are three quite specific images,
each one of them with uniquely different qualities. According to Jung, the
unconscious has the capacity to select an especially apt image from all those
available to it in order to serve a particular purpose. The task is to discover
exactly what that purpose is. Jung says that the fact that the unconscious
"for its own purposes has chosen one of these specific images — it may be
the key, the stick, or the battering ram" is of decisive importance.
"The real task is to understand why the key has been preferred to the
stick, or the stick to the ram," Jung says. "And sometimes this might
even lead one to discover that it is not the sexual act at all that is
represented, but some quite different psychological point."
In short, sometimes a key
is just a key, a stick just a stick, and a battering ram just a battering ram.
Implicit in each image is an essence ("keyness," "stickness,"
and "ramness") that requires explication.
For Freud, a lock (or the
keyhole in a lock) is a vagina, and a key is a penis. On this analogy, the
insertion of a key in a lock is an allusion to sexual intercourse. In contrast,
for Jung, a lock is essentially a device to prevent entrance, and a key is
essentially a device to gain entrance. (In addition, a "key" is,
metaphorically, the solution to a problem — for example, a riddle.) In
analytic terms, "locked" essentially implies that some content (which
might or might not be a sexual content) has been "repressed" or
"dissociated" in the unconscious.
Jung also amplifies
images. That is, he compares them to the same or similar images in other
sources. Jung would amplify a key, stick, or battering ram in a dream by
comparison to keys, sticks, or battering rams in myths, fairy tales, folktales,
art, literature, and culture. Amplification is a comparative method that
attempts to identify parallels.
Whereas explication
establishes what is essential in an image, amplification establishes what is
typical (or "archetypal") about an image. The images in myths, fairy
tales, folktales, art, literature, and culture are manifestations of what Jung
calls the "archetypes" of the "collective unconscious."
For example, Jung might
amplify a key and a lock in a dream by reference to the fairy tale
"Bluebeard." In that tale, it is arranged for a beautiful young woman
to be married to a man who is considered ugly because he has a blue beard (the
man has already been married several times, but no one knows what has become of
his previous wives). After the wedding, Bluebeard tells his wife that he must go
on a journey. He gives her several keys to rooms that contain rich furniture and
silver and gold plate, to strongboxes that contain gold and silver money, and to
a casket that contains jewels, as well as a master key to all the apartments in
the house. He permits her to use all of these keys. He also, however, gives her
a key to a closet. He forbids her to use that one key. After he departs, she
inserts the key in the door of the closet and enters the room. Inside, she
discovers that the floor is covered with blood and that the bodies of several
dead women are ranged against the walls. In fear, she drops the key. Then she
picks up the key, leaves the room, and locks the door. Outside, she notices
blood on the key. She wipes, washes, and rubs the key, but no sooner does she
remove the blood from one side of the key than it reappears on the other side.
When Bluebeard returns, he asks her for the keys. She gives him all of the keys
except for the key to the closet. When he demands that key, she reluctantly
gives it to him. Then he asks her how the blood came to be on the key. When she
says that she does not know, he says that he knows that she used it to enter the
closet. "Very well, Madam," he says, "you shall go in, and take
your place amongst the ladies you saw there." He will murder her and use
the key to lock her body in the closet with the bodies of all his previous wives
whom he has murdered, apparently because they, too, used the key to unlock the
closet. She is ultimately saved only because Bluebeard is killed by her
brothers.
In The Uses of
Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, Bruno Bettelheim
proposes a Freudian interpretation of "Bluebeard" that, from a Jungian
perspective, arbitrarily sexualizes the fairy tale. "The key that opens the
door to a secret room suggests associations to the male organ, particularly in
first intercourse when the hymen is broken and blood gets on it,"
Bettelheim says. "If this is one of the hidden meanings, then it makes
sense that the blood cannot be washed away: defloration is an irreversible
event." In addition, Bettelheim infers "from the indelible blood on
the key and from other details that Bluebeard's wife has committed a sexual
indiscretion." He concludes that this sexual indiscretion is marital
infidelity, which is "symbolically expressed by the blood."
Like Freud, Bettelheim
does not explicate the lock and the key in terms of what they essentially imply
but translates them into sexual terms, or organ jargon. From a Freudian
perspective, lock and key are the "manifest content" of the fairy
tale, and vagina and penis are the "latent content." Bettelheim
derives the manifest content from the latent content, reduces the former to the
latter, and sexualizes the fairy tale.
This is "free
association" indeed. In the fairy tale, it is not a man but a woman who
inserts the key in the lock, and the blood is not the result of defloration or
marital infidelity — it is quite explicitly the result of murder.
"Bluebeard" is
not about sexual intercourse, defloration, or marital infidelity. It is a
cautionary tale about curiosity — and about murder. The "moral" of
the tale is that the consequences of excessive curiosity about what is locked,
"repressed," or "dissociated" in the unconscious may be very
serious indeed — extremely dangerous, even deadly. A Jungian amplification of
a lock and a key in a dream by reference to "Bluebeard" would
emphasize the archetypal consequences of impulsive or compulsive curiosity.
"Bluebeard" is
also a cautionary tale for all analysts, whether Freudian or Jungian, for it
demonstrates that analysis can be what William James calls "a most
dangerous method." In the fairy tale, Bluebeard is an archetypal image of
homicidally psychotic contents that are "repressed" or
"dissociated." The implication is that analysts should exercise
extreme caution when interpreting (or "unlocking") the unconscious.
Certain contents may have been kept under lock-and-key for a very good reason.
"Bluebeard" is
not the only source that a Jungian analyst might cite for comparative purposes.
Locks and keys in other fairy tales - and in myths, folktales, art, literature,
and culture - might provide even more relevant parallels to a lock and a key in
a dream. Curiosity might not be the decisive issue at all in the dream.
Amplification requires of the Jungian analyst an extensive, even an
"encyclopedic" knowledge of myths, fairy tales, folktales, art,
literature, and culture in order to specify precisely which parallels are
archetypally pertinent.
Active imagination is a
technique by which an individual deliberately invokes images from the
unconscious and then engages them in conversation. The method requires active
participation with the images rather than mere passive observation of them.
The technique assumes that
the imagination is a reality just as real as any other reality (for example,
external reality). In active imagination, the images emerge from the unconscious
as figures (or "personifications"), and the individual must interact
with those figures in internal reality as if they were real persons.
It is imperative, Jung
says, that "you say what you have to say to that figure and listen to what
he or she has to say." He says that you must pose a question to the figures
and "compel the figures to give you an answer." For example, an
individual might directly address a figure in a dream and ask that figure why he
or she is inserting a key in a lock, wielding a heavy stick, or breaking down a
door with a battering ram. According to Jung, active imagination is "a
dialectical procedure, a dialogue between yourself and the unconscious
figures."
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Ingrid
Dresher is a psychotherapist, personal individual psychotherapy,
and couples/marriage/relationship counselling
Toronto, Toronto-West, Etobicoke, Mississauga, and Oakville