When I dream and the shadow becomes too aggresive and/or horrific, I have in the last 14 years personify myself as Him (the God Emperor of Mankind) and purge the demons, saving people from it in the process.
It feels very cool. ^_^
Though when the shadow is milder, it usually turns to jing-jang symbolism and I've integrated a lot.
Photo from my trip to Jung's office in Zürich and his secret Bolingen tower.
I keep seeing the word fox, dreaming about foxes and an actual fox in real life. What does it mean as a symbol ? Is it like a transition to a different phase in my life ?
In my late twenties, I entered a challenging period of soul searching. At the time I was struggling to understand my place in the world, and the next steps in my life were not materialising. All my ideas felt sterile. Realising my need for support, I met with several therapists.
One of those therapists was memorable because he seemed unusually determined to give my stuckness a clean explanation. I told him about my insecurities, my doubts, and my desire to find congruent forms of expression in work and life. In response, he asked several questions about my parents, my childhood, and even the conditions of my birth. In the space of twenty minutes, he had the answer: my early life was to blame for my current disorientation. There was much work to be done.
I decided not to meet this therapist again. Recognising the one-sidedness of his attitude, my initial reaction was to shrug off our encounter. Yet it left a strong impression on me. While his monomaniacal focus on the past struck me as ill-advised, something in me found it oddly seductive and continues to do so.
Commenting on this seductiveness, C.G. Jung wrote that “no insight into the past and no re-experiencing of pathogenic reminiscences – however powerful it may be – is as effective in freeing man from the grip of the past as the construction of something new.”^(1)
The stalling and stuttering of life can be read as an invitation to undergo initiatory descent. We might need to revisit memories that we locked away in boxes long ago, boxes that now gather dust in the basement. This work of rediscovery can be ugly and unpleasant, but it can also be poignant and profound. As Jung cautions, we can easily get hooked on these experiences, which becomes a defence against living.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s novella The Little Prince gives us an image of this condition. The prince, in his sadness, spends most of his time watching sunsets. Because he lives on a tiny asteroid, he only has to move his chair a few steps whenever he wants to see another sunset. On a particularly sad day, the prince finds himself watching forty-four sunsets.
When we connect with our past, the full spectrum of insights and feelings we uncover might captivate us in all their beautiful complexity. We might become enamoured with our own pensiveness for weeks, months or even years at a time. Like the little prince, we want only the melancholic sunset and not the experience of a new dawn. But we have to keep in view the creative demands of this human life – Jung’s construction of “something new” – which call to us each day.
On the other hand, we must not succumb to unconscious action, the preferred mode of modern culture. This shows up when we declare that “the past is done with”, seeking only to move forward. Don’t look down or back, just up and ahead. Then our actions lack substance, based as they are on naïve ideals rather than weighty, saturnine reflection.
Speaking to this point, Jung goes on: “I am of course very well aware that, without insight into the past and without an integration of significant memories that have been lost, nothing new and viable can be created.”
Whenever I feel stuck, I sense the tension in this duality between past-oriented reflection and future-oriented action. The challenge is to sit with not only the symptoms, the mess, and the heaviness of the past, but also the need for vision, direction, and the creation of something “new and viable”.
In dancing this delicate dance, I have come to appreciate the role of soul. Our culture has made little room for soul, even with the rise of psychology, a field which conceptualises itself as the study of the mind.
Thomas Moore says that soul belongs neither to mind nor to body, but is adapted to both. He writes that without soul, “ideas would remain ideas with no connection to the human world”, and that soul “expresses itself in images, dreams, and stories” rather than abstract thought or unconscious action.^(2) Soul gives body to our ideas and spiritedness to our actions.
Moore suggests a resonance here with Janus, a favourite image used by Marsilio Ficino in relation to soul. Janus was the Roman God presiding over beginnings and endings, transitions and doorways. He is depicted with two faces looking in opposite directions. The soul, too, is Janus-faced. It beckons us into liminality and fertile ambiguity, where the old dissolves and the new is yet to form.
We might experience something of this in January, which is named after Janus. Perhaps this is why, for many, the first month of the year can be laden with heavy emotions. It is a natural pause in which we find ourselves straddling two worlds; the world of yesterday, with all its loose ends, and the world of tomorrow, that forboding blank canvas.
I’ve found that if I’m open and willing to look, soul is always trying to enter life through the cracks. The glimmers are usually subtle: half-remembered dreams, minor ailments, strange fantasies, subtle coincidences. Whatever the manifestations, I try to let them work on me rather than suffocating them with rational thought or deadening them with premature action.
We are all limited by the past and the vicissitudes of fate. Those very same limitations aim us towards our destiny, everything we must create, and the purposes for which we suffer life on earth. It may be that we can only bridge the two by allowing soul to work its magic.
References:
P.S.
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Chronic diseases seem to be on the rise, and I’m wondering if anyone has heard stories of people healing from chronic conditions or symptoms, such as chronic fatigue, allergies, or persistent pain, as a result of working with a Jungian analyst/therapist.
Our minds and bodies are connected, and stress plays a huge role in our health. Since the individuation process involves working extensively with the unconscious, I wonder whether that psychological work could also influence bodily processes that operate outside our conscious control, such as immune function or the autonomic nervous system.
I’m especially interested in concrete examples or personal stories. Has anyone experienced improvements in their health through this work, or heard of someone who has?
I feel very stuck at a certain stage. I am having a hard time describing this stage so bare with me. After 3 years of dream journals 2 weeks ago I have had a dream where I meet my little self and talk to them. A couple of days later I had a realization that lasted 48 hours. It wasn't quite a realization as it was a bit trippier than that. For 48 hours I could see society as an overlay on top of life(?). I'm having a very hard time putting it into words, but I felt like I am seeing through all the rituals and how everything is made up. Like this is the historical period we happen to find ourselves, therefore these are the habits and opinions we happen to have because of the region and history we find ourselves in. It was one thing to understand it intellectually, it was another to actually experience and really feel it. I am not depressed, I haven't engaged in any hallucinogens' for 6 years now and most likely never will again. Don't drink coffee, alcohol and have a regular sleep schedule. I'm mentioning all this to eliminate the usual culprits.
My journey has been very gradual. Even when I tried to go after a trauma from 6 years old, my brain refused to remove the safety wheels. I know that it's for my own good. right now it seems I've reached into that plane of memories and traumas from 8 years old and younger and it's making me very wide eyed to say the least. I don't feel destabilized emotionally but I do feel like I'm stepping into a whole unknown territory. Like so far in shadow work I've been working on my adaptations and shame, and now it's like I'm peaking underneath the whole architecture. Like now I'm glimpsing at some completely unscathed being. And as much as I thought everything before this was a gut punch, now I'm experiencing the most harrowing realizations. How I've been pigeonholed ridiculously young. I've had my self concept collapse, nigredo/albedo stages a thousand times over already, but this one seems the most catastrophic yet. I know I'll be fine but this next chapter feels like it's asking way more off me than these previous ones. Very silly of me but I thought I was at the citrinitas stage finally a few months back and that I would safely stay there. At that point in time no more shadow work was presenting itself and I was looking for more like a blood hound. You cant blame me for feeling very confident.
So my questions are:
Has anyone else have a similar experience?
How did you go about this stage?
Anything concrete and actionable that helped you?
Should I use the same methods as before even though the material is much more primal now? I don't even know if primal is the right word but I'm trying.
I have been doing inner work very consistently for almost 2 years. It started with only somatic therapy and TRE and once I hit a wall with that I started to engage with Internal Family Systems and CBT/Gestalt. But once I started working with Jungian methods it felt like I was introduced to a whole new side of things. I already kept a dream journal so I had a treasure trove of info to go off on. Reoccurring dream characters of people I knew in real life gave me hints of where to start with shadow work. I've yet to do active imagination as I don't quite understand it.
I've checked my progress by doing a vipassana retreat once every 6-12 months. Progressively I've stopped being full Hermit so I've engaged with friendly outings and dates and I've realized some things about my animus. Throughout the months I could see how I've become more embodied with boundaries. The concept of archetypes also really helped me understand things about myself. My warrior no longer runs the show instead of my king. Still Lover isn't that developed yet and the magician is very dominant. Although the jester/trickster isn't strictly jungian or in Robert L. Moore's 4 archetypes, it's concept also helped me alot in recognizing how as a gifted child, play time has been taken away from me leading me to not have any agency for myself outside of work and achievements. I have achieved amazing things and am confident in my field, but this rarely translates in real life or relationships. It's better now but not fully healed. Country's shadow and history also had to be disentangled and I've yet to fully comb through it.
I'm afraid I havent read a full Carl Jung book as I just glossed over his methods and they clicked instantly for me so I felt no need. I know that's not the best approach but as someone that always intellectualizes, this felt like a breath of fresh air. Let my intuitive intelligence carry me and it has worked out. Although at this stage I will definitely consider an IRL jungian therapist except my country has none and that is an inconvenience to say the least..but it's figure-outable.
I guess im just feeling disoriented that after so much progress, I actually feel scared of what I'll find. Alot of times I've been knocked off, but this really feels out of my league now. I do think I'm ready as why else is my unconscious presenting me the material to work with, but still. Interestingly all this is coming up a month after I've made a decision to fully incorporate myself back into the outside world again. Paying bills, working and the boring adult stuff. 3 years ago I stopped working because of an inner dissatisfaction that lead me to Jung and therapy.
If there isn't much advice please offer some words of encouragement friends. I enjoy this sub and the posts immensely!
Hello everyone! I hope everything is going well in your lives. I'd like to ask you something.
While thinking about the observing ego, I realized that it is a strong protection against inflation. It keeps some distance from archetypal contents and it is also necessary for active imagination. However, I'm not sure if it is enough on its own.
I see two possibilities. The observing ego can watch archetypal inflation happening, but it doesn't intervene, because its role is observation. Or the observer itself can become inflated by mistaking its detached position for the Self.
So is the real protection the strength of the observer, or the health of the ego-Self axis as a whole?
Thank you in advance for your answers. Have a nice day!
I’ve been thinking about individuation and how incompatible it can seem with our obsession with identity. We’re constantly trying to figure out who we are through personality types, attachment styles, archetypes, diagnoses, and labels. But at some point, those descriptions can become psychological cages.
Once I decide “this is who I am,” anything that contradicts that identity starts feeling inauthentic. But the psyche itself seems full of contradictions. The gentle person discovers aggression. The rational person encounters irrationality. The independent person discovers dependency. The moral person encounters their capacity for cruelty.
Maybe individuation isn’t about finally discovering who you are. Maybe it’s about becoming capable of meeting the parts of yourself that contradict who you thought you were.
At what point does self-knowledge become self-limitation?
This is the first book of Carl Jung that I am reading. I've only read a little portion of it and it has strongly resonated with me. However, I am slightly confused by what he means when he talks about "fulfilling the will of God". Could someone kindly elaborate that?
I had a really strange dream last night that actually made me tear up while I was still dreaming, and I woke up afterward thinking, “What the fuck was that?”
In the dream, I was observing this kind of cult of vampires inside a Catholic church. They were gathered around a statue of Jesus, but it wasn't the usual depiction of Christ. He was kneeling on the floor, apparently after being whipped by the Romans, almost as if he had collapsed under the torture.
The vampires were holding an actual Catholic Mass around him, singing hymns, worshipping, doing all the normal ritualistic stuff. But then the statue suddenly came to life. Jesus started moving and tried to stand up.
The moment he did, the entire group immediately turned on him. They started beating him back down with furniture and whatever objects they could grab, almost frantically trying to prevent him from getting up.
And for some reason, this was incredibly emotional for me. I started crying in the dream while watching it happen. I don't remember ever seeing this exact imagery anywhere, so when I woke up I was just sitting there thinking, “Where the hell did my brain get this from?”
I'm not particularly interested in a literal religious interpretation. I'm more curious about it from a Jungian or depth psychology perspective.
The combination of vampires, the church, a wounded and defeated Christ, the statue becoming alive, and then the worshippers themselves violently trying to suppress him feels like it could have some pretty obvious symbolic possibilities, but I'm curious what other people would make of it.
Especially the fact that the thing they were worshipping suddenly became alive, and their immediate reaction was to destroy it.
Any Jungians here want to take a crack at this?